USA

New study provides guidance for reconsidering harmful place names in national parks

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

In a new study examining the origins of more than 2,000 place names in 16 U.S. national parks, researchers have developed a tool for evaluating and changing names that may be harmful or rooted in white supremacy.

Oregon State University associate professor Natchee Barnd is a co-author of “Words Are Monuments,” published last week in the journal People and Nature. The intent of the paper is to open a conversation about place names, rather than defaulting to the assumption that those names are neutral, he said.

“There’s a process by which those names are chosen,” said Barnd, whose work focuses partly on Indigenous geography. “And if we’re operating within a system that has been grounded in white supremacy, it’s probably going to reflect that — some really explicitly and vehemently, and some by default or accidentally, such as the fact that a name is in English.”

That doesn’t mean all names need to be immediately changed, he said, but researchers sought to provide a tool people can use to think about how those names came to be.  

While the work focused on national parks, the authors expect the categorization tool they developed to be applicable for people or institutions in any location seeking to improve naming practices.

For the study, researchers analyzed 2,241 place names in 16 national parks across the U.S., from Acadia in Maine to Hawai’i Volcanoes in Hawai’i. They created “decision trees” to classify name meanings into different categories, which allowed them to group together place names with similar origins so they could find and describe patterns in naming across parks in a consistent way.

Classifications included language origin; derogatory (involving use of a racial slur); erasure (such as replacement of Indigenous names); and dimensions of racism and colonialism.

All 16 parks contained at least one place or feature named after people who supported racist ideologies, capitalized on Indigenous colonization and/or participated in acts of genocide, the study said.

Researchers found 107 natural features with traditional Indigenous place names. They classified 214 names as appropriation, where Indigenous or Indigenous-sounding names were used incorrectly and without Indigenous input or consent; and 254 names that memorialize settler colonialism, such as Cadillac Mountain in Acadia, named for a French colonizer.

They found 21 names that commemorate individuals who espoused racist ideas, including Hayden Valley in Yellowstone, named for Ferdinand Hayden, a geologist who wrote that unless Native Americans were forcefully assimilated, “they must ultimately be exterminated.”

More nuanced were the 364 names that researchers classified as European (non-Indigenous) in origin with no record of their meaning, including descriptive names like Clear Creek and Long Pond.

“One goal is to open up the conversation and getting to the place of saying that these names are not neutral; they are values being represented in some way,” Barnd said. “Maybe we find out that the name has this whole history we don’t know about. It’s about trying to find intention, to trace a lineage. But you have to use a scientific process to sort through these names.”

This undertaking should be a collaborative process, he said. For example, in Oregon, a coalition of local agencies led by the Marys Peak Alliance recently worked with the Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes to pick names for some unnamed creeks on Marys Peak, just west of Corvallis.

The next step, after reconsidering place names and potentially replacing them with traditional Indigenous history in mind, will be returning ownership to the tribes as well, Barnd said.

National parks provide a perfect starting point for this process, he said. The parks have a long history of co-management with tribes, including deferring to tribal knowledge for how best to manage the land and resources, and substantial numbers of tribal members working in national parks.

“There are places where we can do things differently,” Barnd said. “Names are part of how we create the world we live in and believe in and understand. They’re not just there; we’re creating that meaning, which is also creating the meaning of ourselves.”

Co-authors on the study were Bonnie McGill, Stephanie Borelle, Grace Wu, Kurt Ingeman and Jonathan Uhuad Koch from the Society for Conservation Biology in Washington, D.C.

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JOURNAL

People and Nature

DOI

10.1002/pan3.10302 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Content analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Words are monuments: Patterns in US national park place names perpetuate settler colonial mythologies including white supremacy

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

6-Apr-2022

Lead toxicity risk factors in Philadelphia

Two studies led by the University of Pennsylvania identify factors that correlate with high blood-lead levels in children, pointing to environmental justice issues that disproportionately fall on children of color and poorer communities in the city.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Philadelphia is the poorest large city in the United States. It’s also unusual in having a high proportion of homeowners compared to renters. Taken together, this means that poorer homeowners may lack the funds to maintain and make needed repairs to their homes, leaving them at risk of a variety of related health issues, including exposure to lead.

Two papers led by a group at the University of Pennsylvania explore how factors such as household income, building age, building code violations, proximity to former lead smelters, and other factors align with lead-toxicity risk, as evidenced by elevated blood-lead levels in children 6 years old and younger and lead content in soil samples from around the city.

In the first study, published in 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, the researchers used geospatial tools to develop a lead-toxicity-risk index that identified eight ZIP codes, mainly in North and West Philadelphia, as the most burdened by lead toxicity. The second study, published earlier this year in GeoHealth, took a finer-scale look at some of those at-risk communities, using census tract data. That analysis underscored the link between housing code violations and demolition of older homes to higher lead-exposure risks.

“More than 80% of the housing stock in Philadelphia was built before 1980, meaning that they likely contain lead paint,” says Reto Gieré, senior author on both papers and a professor in Penn’s Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences. The United States banned lead paint for residential use in 1978.

“Also, the city has had special policies to build affordable homes for low-income residents, so the rate of private homeownership is much higher than in most other cities,” he says. “While that is beneficial in some regards, we also found a correlation between the percentage of children with high blood-lead levels and homeownership.”

The findings underscore the role of economic and racial disparities when it comes to lead toxicity. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes that communities of color and low-income populations are at a higher risk of lead poisoning.

“Our data clearly show that lead exposure and poisoning are not only an environmental health problem but also an environmental-justice issue,” Gieré says.

Lead risks, from the ground up

Not only are children more susceptible than adults to lead’s toxic effects, they are also more likely to get exposed, playing outside in soil that may contain lead, or on the floor inside near lead-containing dust. In addition, young children often put objects or their hands in their mouths, increasing the likelihood of ingesting lead.

In Philadelphia, the percentage of children with elevated blood-lead levels (a concentration above 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood) appears to be on the decline, with rates falling by half or more since 2008. Yet the lasting harm of lead poisoning to children’s cognitive capacities and other aspects of their development, as well as the unequal racial impact—Black children are more likely to have elevated blood-lead levels than other children—make it an issue that demands action, the researchers say.

For years, Richard Pepino, an instructor at Penn and coauthor on the recent studies, has taught an Academically Based Community Service course on lead in Philadelphia. His students have visited schools and other sites in the city, collecting soil samples and testing them for lead content. In addition, Penn’s Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology has led soil sample collection and testing across the city, mapping the results.

Combining these 1,300-plus samples with more than 1,270 soil samples from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) soil library, Penn researchers and a team from Haverford College analyzed them with respect to other publicly available data such as household median income, percentage of homes built before 1980, and rates of elevated blood-lead levels in children age 6 and younger. The group investigated the datasets for possible correlations and created a series of thematic maps of Philadelphia to highlight areas with highest risks of lead exposure.

A major outcome of the first paper, led by Michael O’Shea, Gieré’s former graduate student who now works for the EPA, was the clear connection between demographic factors like household income and race with elevated blood-lead levels. According to the lead index, newly developed during this research, the highest-risk ZIP codes were 19121, 19132, 19133, 19134, 19140, 19141, 19143, and 19144 in North and West/Southwest Philadelphia.

The study also revealed certain limitations of the researchers’ dataset of soil samples, including unevenness in terms of numbers: Some ZIP codes had nearly 200 samples each, whereas others had fewer than five.

“What came out very clearly was that we need to do more testing,” says Gieré. “Some areas, like the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, had fairly few soil datapoints but are high-risk zones.”

Unequal burdens

Building on those results, the GeoHealth paper focused on the high-risk ZIP codes, this time using census tract data to see whether new patterns would turn up on this finer-scale view. Led by Haverford undergraduate Hasibe Caballero-Gómez, the study found that high rates of housing code violations and demolitions were strongly correlated with elevated blood-lead levels.

“Demolition is an interesting risk factor that has not previously been carefully considered,” says Marilyn Howarth, a study co-author and director of community engagement at the Center foir Excellence in Environmental Toxicology. “Demolition liberates all kinds of particulates from the contents of building materials, and in this case those building materials include many layers of lead paint, and that lead paint may already be in disrepair or fragmented. That gives the material a head start, allowing it to travel to adjacent properties, to streets and sidewalks, to people’s backyards and front porches, and it has the ability to be tracked into homes.”

Gieré describes this as a vicious circle: Poverty prevents residents from completing necessary home maintenance, which leads to housing code violations and exposed lead paint, in some cases triggering demolitions that increase the amount of lead dust in the local environment. 

Both studies also examined the influence of a historic network of smelters, known sources of lead, but lacked the sampling strength to tie their impact to current public health metrics and soil-lead levels. Future effort will go into collecting samples from currently undersampled but high-risk areas of the city. But for now, the researchers say their findings point to specific and localized communities in Philadelphia that require support and intervention to reduce exposure to lead.

Pepino is proud of what Penn has accomplished working with citywide collaborators to address the dangers of lead exposure. But, as he reminds his students, “childhood lead poisoning is a life-long burden that leaves a permanent mark on vulnerable children of color and society at large.”

The team believe their reports should inspire action.

"My hope is that the city will read this article and then specifically direct resources to the identified high-risk areas, which should be the priority of future lead-poisoning prevention intiatives,” says Gieré.

Reto Gieré is a professor in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Science.

Marilyn Howarth is a physician and an adjunct associate professor of systems pharmacology and translational therapeutics. She is also director of community engagement at the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET) and deputy director of the Philadelphia Regional Center for Children’s Environmental Health, both in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

Richard Pepino is deputy director of the community engagement core of CEET and coordinator of the Academically Based Community Service courses in the School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Penn.

Gieré, Pepino, and Howarth’s co-authors on the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health paper were Penn’s Michael O’Shea, Jonas Toupal, and Thomas McKeon, and Haverford College’s Hasibe Caballero-Gómez. O’Shea, now with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who was first author on the work.

That study was supported, in part, by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) (Grant ES013508), Penn’s Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, and the Greg and Susan Walker Foundation.

Gieré, Pepino, and Howarth’s co-authors on the GeoHealth article were O’Shea and Haverford College’s Caballero-Gómez and Helen White. Caballero-Gómez was first author.

That study was supported, in part, by the NIEHS (Grant ES013508)

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JOURNAL

GeoHealth

DOI

10.1029/2021GH000519 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Spatial analysis and lead-risk assessment of Philadelphia, USA

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Feb-2022

Disclaimer: AAAS and Eur

Ultrasonic tech to develop safer railway track lubrication measurement system

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

 

IMAGE: IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NETWORK RAIL AND FUNDED THROUGH ITS COMMITMENT TO THE EU HORIZON 2020 SHIFT2RAIL RESEARCH PROGRAMME, THE ADVANCED SENSOR SOLUTION WILL UTILISE ULTRASONIC TECHNOLOGY, WHICH IS RELATIVELY NEW TO THE RAILWAY INDUSTRY, AS THE BASIS OF THE DETECTION METHOD. view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

THE University of Huddersfield has forged a partnership with an innovative technology business to work with Network Rail on developing a safer and more reliable track lubrication measurement system.

The collaboration will allow the University’s award-winning Institute of Railway Research (IRR) to work with Sheffield-based small and medium enterprise (SME) Tribosonics Ltd to develop a novel solution to the problem of detecting whether a critical form of lubrication is present between a railway wheel and the track.

In partnership with Network Rail and funded through its commitment to the EU Horizon 2020 Shift2Rail research programme, the advanced sensor solution will utilise ultrasonic technology, which is relatively new to the railway industry, as the basis of the detection method.

Professor Paul Allen, the University’s IRR Assistant Director who developed the concept, outlined the need for such technology.

“This measurement technology will provide an automated vehicle-mounted system that will communicate to Network Rail the presence of lubrication, and critically, locations where it is absent, thereby reducing maintenance costs and improving railway safety,” Professor Allen explained.

“It is not commonly known outside railway circles,” he continued, “that in curved track, a special type of grease is applied between the wheel and rail.  This lubrication is applied to reduce wear but also the risk of derailment, whereby in some circumstances the wheel can climb up and over the railhead.

“Network Rail currently uses manual inspection techniques to determine whether lubrication is present. This approach requires maintenance staff to conduct on-track working and is a scenario Network Rail is looking to reduce,” he said.

According to Matthew Harmon from Tribosonics, the use of ultrasonic technology for detection of lubrication films is new to the railway industry but is widely used in other industries and a perfect fit for this application.

“Embedding ultrasonic sensors into the wheel provides the opportunity for continuous monitoring of lubrication effectiveness and allows preventative measures to be applied before problems arise,” he said.

“Processing the data outputs to ensure the key, relevant metric is obtained and presented in an accessible way forms a large part of this development.

”The detection system and related hardware will be developed by Tribosonics Ltd, with testing and sensor development carried out using the IRR’s HAROLD full-scale bogie test facility. Experimental trials will be conducted under real-world conditions, with axle loads of up to 25 tons and a target operating of 200kph.Network Rail project lead James Lineton says the proposed sensor solution has the potential to not only transform how Network Rail manages its rail lubrication programme but also rail infrastructure managers around the world.

“By reducing downtime for maintenance activities, we can increase capacity, ultimately improving train availability for passengers,” he said.

CAPTION

Diagram showing how utilising ultrasonic tech will advance sensor solution

CREDIT

University of Huddersfield

Urgent action required to protect world’s coral reefs from disappearing within three decades, warn experts

An international team of environmental scientists have published a series of significant recommendations to protect, conserve and study the world’s coral reefs – the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of climate change

Reports and Proceedings

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER

 

IMAGE: TOM VIERUS © WCS view more 

CREDIT: TOM VIERUS © WCS

An international team of environmental scientists have published a series of significant recommendations to protect, conserve and study the world’s coral reefs – the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of climate change.

The Vibrant Oceans Initiative presented their white paper on the future of the delicate and crucial habitats at the Our Oceans Conference held in Palau on Thursday.

Drawing on expertise from universities and wildlife conservation groups from across the world, including the University of Leicester, the group provide six key recommendations intended to promote the ‘persistence and survival’ of coral reefs.

Forecasts show that coral reef ecosystems around the globe – key to huge numbers of marine species and a source of food, livelihoods, and cultural heritage for half a billion people – are likely to become functionally degraded by 2050, if the goals of the Paris Agreement are not met.

Even with drastic emission reductions to ensure global warming is kept within 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, up to 90% of the world’s corals could still vanish in the next three decades, leaving behind a reef structure that will lose many of its functions.

Jens Zinke is a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester, whose research examines large coral habitats to track environmental and climate change over the last three centuries into the modern day. Speaking about the report, of which he is a co-author, Professor Zinke said:

“Coral reefs are the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ when it comes to sensing ecosystems under stress from ocean warming due to climate change. Corals can sense when ocean temperatures exceed a dangerous threshold and warn us when we need to take measures.

“Our research has shown that coral reefs have been severely impacted by ocean warming in the past three to four decades, yet some reef locations show lower rates of warming or benefit from mitigating circumstances due to local oceanography.

“Some reefs have the ability to resist or recover from thermal stress faster than others, and these reefs may serve as sanctuaries under future warming. This is a major new research direction – to find those locations and protect them before they are gone.”

In 2018 the Vibrant Oceans group identified 50 reefs that are most likely to resist and survive climate change. The habitats are located largely in the Pacific and Indian oceans, with further reefs in the Caribbean and east of Africa.

Previously the 50 reefs were mainly chosen at sites that escaped climate change. Now, the scientists call for a wider portfolio of reefs that should include resistant and fast-recovering reefs.

The group’s latest recommendations, presented in the white paper ‘Forecasting Climate Sanctuaries for Securing the Future of Coral Reefs’, include:

• Continuation of the 50 Reefs approach as ‘climate change avoidance sanctuaries’ as a priority for investment in coral reef conservation.
• Expansion of the 50 Reefs conservation portfolio for climate change to include coral resistance and recovery sanctuaries.
• Increase in support for regional evaluations of the health of the 50 Reefs portfolio, and sustainable financing initiatives to support the implementation of regional portfolios.
• Catalysing large-scale, data-driven coral reef monitoring efforts to test and develop new models and predictions of climate sanctuaries.
• Use of the latest climate coral reef science to guide investments, especially as the impacts of climate change accelerate and produce novel environmental stresses and responses among reefs.
• Embracing a far-reaching approach to the management of 50 Reefs sites, including connections to broader seascapes, fisheries and water quality management, mitigation of other pressures (for example, industrial development), so that effective and equitable management has measurable benefits for coral reefs and coastal communities.

‘Forecasting Climate Sanctuaries for Securing the Future of Coral Reefs’ is available in full from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

Funding partners for the initial Vibrant Oceans study include Bloomberg Philanthropies, while ongoing conservation work partners include Oceans 5, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

Conservation partners include the WCS, Rare, The Nature Conservancy, Blue Ventures, and Conservation Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

Brazilian study finds COVID-19 cases and deaths higher in areas with electoral support for President Bolsonaro

Study of 853 counties in Minas Gerais state finds counties that voted for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 election are more likely to have higher incidence and death rates from COVID-19

Reports and Proceedings

EUROPEAN SOCIETY OF CLINICAL MICROBIOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES

In a study to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal (23-26 April), researchers from Sociedade Mineira de Infectologia and Associação Mineira de Epidemiologia e Controle de Infecções show a correlation between the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s denialist attitude to COVID-19 and higher COVID-19 incidence and mortality.

The study, involving 853 counties in Minas Gerais (the second most populous state located in southeastern Brazil), finds that in Bolsonaro voting counties, COVID-19 cases and deaths were substantially higher than in counties where Bolsonaro lost the 2018 presidential election vote.

“The role of politics had a critical impact on COVID-19 responses to the pandemic in Brazil from the outset”, say Dr Carlos Starling from Sociedade Mineira de Infectologia. “President Jair Bolsonaro has denied COVID-19 severity, promoted treatments without evidence of efficacy, and discouraged social distancing, the use of masks, local lockdowns and other protective measures, which has likely resulted in higher infection rates and deaths from COVID-19 among his supporters.”
The death toll from Covid-19 in Brazil has passed 659,000, the third highest reported toll of any country in the world [1].

In this study, researchers investigated the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in reducing virus transmission and deaths from COVID-19 in 853 counties in Minas Gerais. They also explored the impact of the President’s denialist attitude to COVID-19 on vaccine uptake and COVID-19 cases and deaths, based on whether Bolsonaro had won or lost the 2018 presidential election in these counties.

Using data on confirmed cases of COVID-19 and deaths, vaccination rates, and 2018 election results from official government websites, the researchers calculated the COVID-19 incidence rate (new cases per 100,000 residents in the last 14 days) and mortality rate (deaths per 1,000,000 residents in the last 14 days) for each county between 21st January, 2021 (when vaccination started in Brazil), and 10th November, 2021.

Results showed that by 10th November 2021, over half the population (more than 55%) in most counties (682/853) had been fully vaccinated with either Astrazeneca (41%), Pfizer (32%), or Coronavac (28%; see figure 1 in notes to editors).

Overall, the analyses found that the vaccination rate between January and November was similar between counties (see table 1 in notes to editors). As the percentage of the population fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 increased over time, COVID-19 incidence and mortality rates consistently declined (see figure 2).

However, in counties where Bolsonaro won the electoral vote, the COVID-19 incidence rate was 30% higher (7.6%; 1,284,454 cases/16,961,800 residents of 445 counties) than in counties where he lost the vote (5.6%; 249,704 cases/4,450,502 residents of 408 counties; see table 2).

Moreover, the COVID-19 death rate was 60% higher in counties with the highest electoral support for Bolsonaro compared to those with the least support  (212 deaths by COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants vs 132 deaths by COVID-19 per 100,000 inhabitants; see table 3).

Researchers also performed a more detailed evaluation comparing the impact of vaccination on COVID-19 incidence and death rates in 33 counties with more than 100,000 residents, and discovered a negative correlation between vaccination and COVID-19 cases and deaths in all 33 counties (ie, counties with the lowest vaccination rates had the highest case incidence and mortality rates), except for five cities where there was a negative, but nonsignificant correlation between the full vaccination rate and the death rate.

“It’s likely that thousands of lives have been lost unnecessarily because President Bolsonaro dismissed COVID-19 as ‘a little flu’ and rallied against lockdowns, school closures and other protective measures”, say Dr Braulio Couto Associação Mineira de Epidemiologia e Controle de Infecções. “However, our results indicate that the Brazilian people have great trust in vaccines, and Bolsonaro's falsehoods and doubts about COVID-19 vaccines did not prevent mass vaccination, with the increasing vaccination rate over time consistently reducing COVID-19 cases and deaths.”

The authors note that this is an ecological observational study and cannot prove that Bolsonaro's denialist stance caused extra cases or deaths from COVID-19, but only suggest the possibility of such an effect. The authors point to several limitations, including the ecological fallacy—that relationships which exist for groups are assumed to also be true for individuals—and they cannot rule out the possibility that other unmeasured factors like education levels and household income may have affected the results.

For interviews with the report authors, please contact:

Dr Carlos Starling, Sociedade Mineira de Infectologia, Brazil E) carlosstarling1@me.com
T) +55 31 98791-3777  

Dr Braulio Couto, Associação Mineira de Epidemiologia e Controle de Infecções, Brazil
E) coutobraulio@hotmail.com T) +55 31 98896-6098 

Alternative contact in the ECCMID Press Room: Tony Kirby T) + 44(0)7834 385827 E) tony@tonykirby.com
 

Notes to editors:

The study did not receive any funding.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

This press release is based on poster abstract 690 at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID). All accepted abstracts have been extensively peer reviewed by the congress selection committee. There is no full paper at this stage, but the authors are happy to answer your questions. The research has not yet been submitted to a medical journal for publication. As this is an oral presentation there is no poster.

 

Twitter (for when embargo lifts): @escmid #ECCMID2022

[1] - Brazil Coronavirus Map and Case Count - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

BOURGEOIS ECONOMICS

Paper on the geography of innovation awarded prize from the royal economic society

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

 

IMAGE: RUBEN GAETANI IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MISSISSAUGA AND THE ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT. HIS RESEARCH INTERESTS LIE AT THE INTERSECTION OF ECONOMIC GROWTH, INNOVATION AND URBAN ECONOMICS. view more 

CREDIT: ROTMAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Toronto – A paper co-authored by Prof. Ruben Gaetani of the University of Toronto is the recipient of the 2021 Austin Robinson Memorial Prize from the Royal Economic Society. The prize is awarded annually for the best paper published in The Economic Journal by authors who are within five years of receiving their PhDs.’

Gaetani is an assistant professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Rotman School of Management. The paper, ‘The Geography of Unconventional Innovation,’ appeared in the May 2021 issue of the Economic Journal and was co-authored with Enrico Berkes, a post-doctoral researcher at Ohio State University.

The paper shows that innovation activity is less concentrated in high-density locations than commonly believed. Yet, inventions based on atypical combinations of knowledge are indeed more prevalent in high-density urban centres. The managing editors of the Economic Journal said that the paper creates a better understanding of where innovation and modern growth comes from as a key part of economics and society in general and demonstrated a combination of new, interesting facts with a rigorous spatial model.  The paper is available online.

“This award highlights that there are great opportunities to work at the intersection of innovation and urban economics. I hope to contribute more to this area in my future research,” says Prof. Gaetani.

Bringing together high-impact faculty research and thought leadership on one searchable platform, the new Rotman Insights Hub offers articles, podcasts, opinions, books and videos representing the latest in management thinking and providing insights into the key issues facing business and society. Visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/insightshub.

The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.

-30-

For more information:

Ken McGuffin

Manager, Media Relations

Rotman School of Management

University of Toronto

E-mail:mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca

Inside an Italian Police Chase to Stop the Theft of Ugly Sea Creatures

Agostino Petroni and Sandali Handagama, Bloomberg News

(Bloomberg) -- At dusk, a man pulled a jam-packed net from the Ionian Sea into a speed boat headed for Taranto, a city in Puglia, Italy. He’d make a few hundred euros off the catch if he could get it into the right hands without being spotted. His cargo was about 110 pounds of wiggly, slimy sea cucumbers, or—as they are locally called in Italy—“poop of the sea.”  

Arturo Casale, 65, got word of the man’s fishing expedition later that day in the form of a photo. It was too late to catch the thief. As the founder of an environmental nonprofit called Mare Per Sempre (“Sea Forever”), Casale is known locally as the area’s premiere defender of sea cucumbers, which are important in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems and combating effects of climate change.   

News of the illegal harvest reached him in early November last year, just a month before the local government was set to deliberate whether gathering sea cucumbers would continue to be a crime. “It felt like we fell from the clouds,” says Casale. “We were infuriated.”

While most Italians may shiver at the thought of eating sea cucumber, some East Asian countries highly value it in their cuisine and traditional medicine. In 2020, China and Hong Kong were the world’s largest sea cucumber buyers, importing more than 70% of a global supply worth around $270 million. China’s love for sea cucumbers—driven by texture, look, and significance in local medical practices—fuels a complex and unsustainable supply chains that originates in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the Mediterranean. A kilogram of sea cucumbers can sell for up to $3,000 to Chinese buyers.

In the past decade, local Italian thieves, aided by Turkish and Greek smugglers, have capitalized on the new business opportunity and started plundering the coast of southern Italy.

In Taranto, located in Puglia on the heel of Italy’s boot, Casale’s small team of volunteer “sea sentinels” has been monitoring the coastline for marine poachers. The team’s work was instrumental in orchestrating a nationwide ban on sea cucumber harvesting in 2018. The three-year effort by activists, police, prosecutors, and scientists resulted in Italy becoming the first country in Europe to completely prohibit the extraction and commercialization of the sea cucumber.

However, the ban on sea cucumber harvesting isn’t permanent. It’s a moratorium set to expire in December.

“[Regulators] haven’t issued a definitive one, and every year it’s a battle till the last day,” says Rosalba Giugni, founder of environmental nonprofit association Marevivo, who pushed for the sea cucumber ban back in 2016 and lobbies to continue it.

The fisherman captured on film in November is far from the only one breaking the law: A few days after the incident, Taranto’s financial police arrested 17 people accused of participating in illegal trafficking. Attempts by local criminals to recapture that market haven’t ceased, and seizures keep happening around southern Italy: On March 15, 2021, three tons of live sea cucumber (in 144 plastic buckets) bound for Greece were seized by Brindisi’s port authorities.

In September, a vendor who claimed to be from Taranto advertised on 21food.com, a Chinese food-trading website, that it could process 1,000 kilograms per month of Holothuria tubulosa, a sea cucumber species common to the Mediterranean.

The protection of these mild sea creatures hangs by a thread. It depends on complex and collective efforts by environmentalists, law enforcement agencies, scientists, and lobbyists. Sometimes it’s hard to convince people that sea cucumbers are worth protecting.

“Do you know what [Italians] call sea cucumbers? Dicks of the sea,” says Silvestro Greco, a marine biologist at the Anton Dornh Italian National Institute of Marine Biology. “Who gives a damn about the dicks of the sea, right?”

The sea cucumber is not particularly loved. Slug-like, it lacks the personality of an octopus, the Pixar-fication of the clownfish, or the delight of the starfish, to which it is related. Sea cucumbers don’t attempt to escape their captors, and the ones most popular on the Asian market are smaller than the palm of one’s hand. Only within the past 15 years has it become clear how essential they are to the ocean.

“They have a similar role to an earthworm in that they eat sand and process any of the organic matter and decaying plant matter that's in the sand, and they poop out clean sand,” says Steven Purcell, a professor of marine ecology at Australia’s Southern Cross University who wrote a book on sea cucumbers. In doing so, he adds, the sea cucumber helps clean and oxygenate sediments in marine habitats. Smaller animals like worms, crab and even small fish may live on or around adult sea cucumbers to take advantage of their defensive toxins. 

An abundance of some large species of sea cucumber can help counter ocean acidification, a nasty side effect of climate change that occurs when too much carbon dioxide dissolves in the water. Ocean acidification slows the growth of coral reefs, which host a multitude of marine life. Sea cucumbers, thanks to their mineral-rich poop, can provide corals the calcium needed to help grow their skeletons

“Through their digestion, they actually enhance the alkalinity of the seawater around them. … And so, where you have dense populations of these large sea cucumbers, that might help to buffer some systems from ocean acidification at local scales,” Purcell says.  

For all their importance, stirring interest in conserving sea cucumbers has been somewhat challenging around the world. In the mid 1990s, only about 35 countries harvested sea cucumbers. Today, more than 70 countries are involved in the harvest and trading.  

“They're easy to collect by hand. They don't turn away. They're just sitting there. And if you can dive to the depths where they occur, you just need to pick them up,” says Purcell.

Born and raised in Taranto, Casale made ends meet for 40 years working in auto body repair. In 2014, he closed up shop and decided to dedicate his life to protecting the sea.

“If I spend two days in the city and I do not touch the sea—if I don’t dip my hands in it—I feel sick,” he says.

In early 2015, Casale and fellow Sea Sentinel Sergio Passarelli stood on the Discesa Vasto pier in Taranto, marveling at the scene unfolding before them. In a frenzy, fishermen and townspeople alike were dumping buckets of sea cucumber onto growing mounds stacked along the pier. Boats that had been docked for years were out at sea, busily fetching more.

“We’re talking boats overloaded with sea cucumbers,” says Passarelli, a 39-year-old firefighter and active member of Mare per Sempre. 

At the beginning, there was a mad rush to clean out all the areas in Taranto colonized by sea cucumbers, Passarelli says.

“Kids were involved, too. In about half an hour, they would fill up a bucket with sea cucumber, take it to the fish store or to unauthorized vendors, who would give them €5 [$5.41] or €6, and they would be happy,” Passarelli said.

The rate of harvesting was so intense that Casale and Passarelli feared Taranto’s entire coastal stretch would be wiped clean within six months.

“It was an ugly dream. A nightmare,” Casale says.

At the time, no regulations prohibited or protected the harvest because there had been no need for any. The activists wondered where the mountains of sea cucumber were headed.

Casale and Passarelli sought help from Vincenzo Casaregola, a captain in the Naval Operations Section in Taranto of Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police. Casaregola sent a team led by his deputy, Vincenzo Piccininno, to the scene. Piccininno recalls being confronted with “an astonishing amount” of sea cucumbers.

“But we didn’t know what to do with them,” Piccininno says. “We didn’t understand what all this was about.”

Nonetheless, Taranto’s financial police got to work. A few months later, on July 9, 2015, Casaregola’s team raided a storage unit in Taranto and found 39 people, side by side, cleaning 1,000 kilograms of sea cucumbers. Since the harvesting of sea cucumbers was not illegal then, the police went in under the guise of checking whether the workers had been hired legally. On finding some discrepancies, they seized the sea cucumbers.

That operation set things in motion. A few days later, legislators in Puglia published a notice clarifying that sea cucumbers could not be sold for consumption.

The increased interest from lawmakers allowed the financial police to employ such additional investigative powers as phone tapping, which in turn helped them trace the frenzied harvest to two local criminal organizations. Court records reveal that the groups had fueled the fishing and commercialization of sea cucumbers in Puglia; cargo ships carried $2.7 million worth of cucumbers out of the region that year.

According to the financial police, masses of illegal fishers were selling their harvest at $1 to $3 per kilogram to the criminal organizations in Taranto, which then sold it to intermediaries at about $7 per kilogram for shipment to China and other Southeast Asian countries.

The authorities were able to seize about 40 tons of sea cucumbers of 600 tons that had been harvested. At least 2 million animals were stripped from the Italian coast in only a year.

“To many people, this issue was a joke, but to our working group it wasn’t,” says Piccininno, the police deputy.

Removing 2 million of anything from an ecosystem is likely to permanently alter it, as Italian scientists soon confirmed. Giovanni Fanelli, a researcher and diver at Taranto’s Istituto di Ricerca sulle Acque, witnessed the sudden depletion of sea cucumbers in the Puglian coastal waters.

It’s hard to quantify the damage done, because there are no previous studies on sea cucumber populations in local waters to use in gauging the full impact of harvesting on wild stocks. It was not until 2019 that the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) finally approved the addition of three species of international traded sea cucumber to its list of threatened animals. Still, a majority of sea cucumber species are classified as data deficient, Purcell explains, meaning there isn’t enough biological data on them to decide whether they are threatened.

Starting in 2018, Italy’s Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies began publishing a yearly decree that banned sea cucumber fishing in Italy. The decree has merely been renewed annually since its first approval, and Giugni says the national government is using a lack of research on sea cucumbers as an excuse not to permanently ban their exploitation.

Nonetheless, the harvest and sale of sea cucumbers is an environmental crime, a felony punishable with up to 15 years in prison. According to the financial police, more than $9 million in personal property and assets were seized from the two criminal organizations involved in the harvest, and leaders await trial for environmental crimes.

Despite the felony designation, demand for Italian sea cucumbers has not been curbed. In July 2019, a woman was arrested at Rome’s international airport for attempting to roll a suitcase stuffed with dried sea cucumbers past security. Piccininno, the police deputy responsible for the 2015 investigation, says the dried sea cucumbers were stored as carefully as if they were diamonds.

Italy’s efforts to curb overexploitation of sea cucumber stocks in its waters stand as a testament to what can be accomplished through the effective enforcement of environmental legislation to protect wildlife. But Casale and Passarelli say Italian authorities are understaffed, lack enough boats, and are unable to maintain the oversight needed to stop illegal extraction. Still, they credit the authorities for trying.

“The hope is that a definitive law, no longer annual, will be issued. It will be easier to work with; otherwise, we risk losing valuable time,” says Francesco Sancineto, commander of the financial police Naval Operations Section in Bari.

For Casale and his team, whose lives revolve around swimming, fishing, and diving in the Mediterranean, the fight is all about protecting the sea’s beauty and biodiversity.

“I won’t compromise. Do not touch the sea. If you do, you are done,” Casale says. “The sea is everything to us.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.