The Decline of Pollinators in Pittsburgh: Mapping the Evolution of a Wicked Problem
Assignment #3: Mapping the Evolution of a Wicked Problem| Carnegie Mellon University, Transition Design Seminar 2023 | Team Complexity: Nikita Khanna, Matthew Huber, Joanne Chin, Ilona Altman
Pollinator Decline & Understanding Its History
Previously, on the issue of the decline of pollinators in Pittsburgh, we mapped a web of issues and a web of stakeholders relations. For the next step, before moving on to looking in the future, we first look to the past. Making an evolution map helps illustrate the large patterns of how a wicked problem accumulates over time, and why it persists. It also illustrates some of the more punctuating forces that have been able to make a dent. From these emerging patterns, hopefully we can better understand how to move forward. To accomplish this, we used the Multi-Level Perspective framework.
What is the Multi-Level Perspective Framework?
The Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) framework is a way of representing events over time and how they influence each other. The MLP has three layers: landscape, regime, and niche. The middle layer, regime, contains mid-sized events that are part of the status quo. It includes laws, standard technology of the time, etc. The highest level, landscape, holds the larger events such as social movements and war. The bottom niche level describes the punctuating forces mentioned earlier. It includes inventions, proposals, and other specific ideas that end up influencing the larger picture. It should be noted that, in reality, a large number of niche level events do not end up making it to the higher levels, but our MLP diagram only shows the ones that did.
Our Mapping of the Evolution of the Wicked Problem of Pollinator Decline in Pittsburgh
In our map, we chose to focus on a few narrative threads. Some key insights from a few key narrative threads are found below.
Geology and Evolution
Extending back millions of years, the specific coevolution of flowering plants in relation to pollinators has left some species more vulnerable than others. While mutualism, two forms evolving in perfect synchronization with one another, is celebrated as a potent, poetic example of evolutionary attunement, overspecialization can lead to vulnerability. Pollinator species that can only feed on specific plants or plants that can only be pollinated by a limited number of pollinator species are most vulnerable to extinction as one or the other is depleted by climate change, invasive species competition, disease, and habitat destruction. The sculpting of more generalist, multipartner pollinator pairings by extinction pressures over millennia has fortunately rendered many pollinator networks more resilient, advantaging species like the European Honey Bee. It is the most local and specific that is least likely to recover or be saved.
In Western Pennsylvania, an accident of geological history offers some escape from the relentless habit destruction that has marred much of the American landscape. Steep hillsides flanking ravines eroded from the Appalachian Plateau on which Pittsburgh and its surrounding hinterlands sit have often escaped development. Even as riparian ecologies have been ravaged by industrial river channelization and wide expanses of level terrain have been taken over by development, the winding patches of unbuildable, unruly terrain wriggling through the region have kept patches of habitat somewhat safe from erasure.
The Steel Industry in Pittsburgh
While there was definitely some steel production prior, the steel industry of Pittsburgh is generally said to have started in 1875, when Andrew Carnegie decided to set up his whole operation. However, let’s really set this all up with the Industrial Revolution. The birth of industry affected myriad aspects of life, but as it pertains to Pittsburgh pollinators, it created 1) industrial agriculture (discussed in next section), and 2) mass steel manufacturing. The revolution also marked a big turning point for capitalism, which is deeply embedded in lots of things, but for now it illustrates the growth mindset. Another growth mindset development that occurred a bit after the revolution was the idea of technological utopianism. The idea is that science and tech is the key to bringing about a utopia, or at least solve most of the world’s issues. Karl Marx is considered the first techno-utopian, and the idea persists today.
Now that the US had industry, and steel in Pittsburgh had recently come into higher commission from the Civil War, it was about time for Andrew Carnegie to set up shop in the city. Coming off his railroad success, Carnegie streamlined the steel process through vertical marketing, ever expanding, ever growing. Carnegie was not necessarily a techno-utopian, if he even knew what it was, but the general tech and capitalist mindset was imbued.
The combination of inventions, mindset, and affluence primed the steel industry to be huge, and the environmental consequences likewise. Steel is produced by melting iron with ‘coke’, a quality source of carbon, which comes from coking coal. It takes a lot of coal to make steel, which makes for a lot of air pollution. Other metal contaminants also leach into the ground. While the steel industry has died down, the sheer magnitude of industry made sure that the effects are still measurable today. The pollution and infrastructure that came from industry poisoned bees and stripped them of their food and habitat, then and still a bit now.
Big Agriculture
Commercialization of agricultural farms has changed pollinator’s habitats and way of living. Starting during the neolithic period, humans shifted toward farming crops over depending on hunting for their livelihood. Through the progression of time, farming transformed from a local activity to a commercial process. With the increase in demand for crops, the demand for pollinators also increased. The farmers could no longer just depend on the wild species but needed larger amounts of specific breeds to pollinate their farms. Honeybees were first imported into the United States in the early 1600s. Furthermore, inventions such as the Wax Comb foundation in 1857 made it possible to consistently produce combs of high-quality worker cells, and the development of the centrifugal honey extractor in 1865 helped in increasing the production of large-scale extracted honey. Moses Quinby was the first beekeeper in America to commercialize beekeeping.
Development of Big Agriculture and Commercialized beekeeping put stress on the current population of pollinators. The land that provided nutrients from a variety of plants now focussed only on nutrient content from one crop, affecting the bee’s diet. Furthermore, a reduction in land space occurred due to the clearance of barren forest areas. Migration of imported breeds strained the wild species as certain species pose a threat to others. Many species that were bred are not able to last the cold winters and perish due to extreme climates. Disturbing the natural environment of the pollinators led to a decline in their population.
Urban Infrastructure
During industrialization in Pittsburgh and throughout the world, cities were understood metaphorically as big machines. Because of this, the problems that arose within cities were solved through a mechanistic framework, which isolated problems and derived solutions through a technological infrastructure. This technological infrastructure, or “gray infrastructure”, proceeded to degrade the health of ecosystems and reduced the habitat for native beings, including bees and other pollinators, which were never considered in their design.
As an example of traditional “gray infrastructure” let’s look at Pittsburgh’s sewage infrastructure. As the population boomed in the early 20th century, illness began to spread rampantly. This illness was poorly understood and attributed to “bad water”, thus leading to the development of many cities’ sewage systems. In Pittsburgh, it led to development of a combined sewage system. Pipes were placed under the city, and made to carry both polluted sewage and rainwater into the rivers, so that hazardous waste was washed away by the rain and swept elsewhere. This infrastructure is still used today in most parts of Pittsburgh.
Today, there is an emergence of a new way of designing cities which seek to understand cities within the metaphor of living systems, and seeks to work with natural systems. This development appears in the concepts of “green infrastructure”, “nature-based solutions”, and “biophilic design” which currently exist on the niche level. This new tide of rethinking the traditional approach to public infrastructure holds great promise to other wild beings of all kinds, including pollinators. In Pittsburgh, we can see this idea manifest through the redevelopment of Nine Mile Run, which transformed a sewage outlet system into a beautiful wetland. This wetland filters human waste, provides habitat for native beings (like pollinators) and the feeling of connection to land to those who walk by it as its located in Frick Park.
The Lawn
Diversity is synonymous with vibrancy and resilience in the world of pollinators. Diverse ecological niches, diverse meadow grasses, diverse pathways of pollination. Yet not only have recent centuries seen a loss of habitat to urban, infrastructural, and industrial development, they’ve seen a dramatic loss of diversity. Even outside of agricultural production where monocultures mean profit, landscapes of pleasure, aesthetics, utility, and recreation have also seen devastating reductions in complexity. Short turf grass came to dominate much of Europe first through grazing lands managed and fertilized by livestock. Though often appearing lush, these lands represent ecological deserts. Even so, consistent green ground cover came to be adopted outside of grazing areas as wealthy landowners wanted to signal a dominance over nature, a celebration of machinic rationality, and the wealth necessary to maintain costly green carpets. The vast lawns at Versailles served as the iconic prototypes before the image migrated to Washington’s Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s Monticello where they became the very image of the American suburban ideal. Initially, the human labor needed to maintain lawns was uneconomical for the overwhelming majority of Americans, but niche innovations, such as the lawnmower, sprinkler, and eventually synthetic fertilizer, engineered grass seed, and pesticides made lawns accessible. A culture of “keeping up with the Joneses” and popular inclusion of regulations in Home Owners’ Associations brought the lawn to the level of landscape hegemony in the postwar period. It is only in the last ten or so years that niche experiments in DIY pollinator gardening and educational campaigns have begun to bubble up and suggest that a tectonic shift in the landscape of landscape tastes might be coming.
Understanding breeds the hope to change
Buzzing about in seeming solitude, the life and fortitude of even the smallest pollinator is enmeshed within a network of temporal events spanning millennia. Forces as diverse as the forking paths of Darwinian processes, accidents of geological formation, local medieval gardening tactics, enlightenment curricula, early jurisprudence, or post-war American lifestyle magazines all shape the crisis of pollinator decline across the landscapes of Western Pennsylvania. The emergence of an unshakable American faith in industrial capitalism and its concomitant technological solutionism has perhaps most strained the hopes for pollinator survival; a propensity to see the natural world as resources to be extracted and externalities not to be included in legal rights, an unquenchable hunger for ever expanding economic growth, and aesthetic sensibilities that seek to tame nature have all also contributed. While individual events have often made the regimes of pollinator depletion more efficient — mowers, pesticides, new seeds, the happenstance hitching of rides by invasive species — it is the landscape defining events of early modern Europe that prove most insidious. The schism of nature and culture, the preference for reductivist science, the privileging of individual human property rights above all else, these drum beats of Western rationality are the rhythm of the armies of events working against pollinators.
Yet there is hope. Certain events, the publishing of Silent Spring, the passing of legislation, the forming of the EPA, drive little cracks in the massive cliff face of the landscape of Western colonizer sciences and politics. It is in these cracks that we will continue to drive our wedges.
