Good Statement About E-Mail-Gate

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Bruce

This column from the respected Matt Iglesias, a commentator at Vox.com is the way the whole e-mail thing seems to me, based on my pretty extensive experience with internet tools over the past 20 years, to be about the way things go . . . .

from <http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit>

The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign

If you agree with her on policy, vote with a clear conscience about the server.

Updated by matt Nov 4, 2016, 9:35am EDT

Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this, and it showed in her early efforts to address it. Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest.

It did not. Instead, email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.

Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.

This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.

Why Hillary Clinton used a personal email account

When Hillary Clinton took office as secretary of state, she, like most people, already had a personal email account. Like most people who started a federal job in 2009, she was also disheartened to learn that the then-current state of federal IT departments was such that she could not connect her personal smartphone to a State Department email address. If she wanted ready access to both her email accounts, she would need to carry twosmartphones.

As any reporter in Washington knows, this indignity was in fact visited upon a huge number of DC denizens for many years. Everyone working in government felt that this was kinda bullshit, but nobody could really do anything about it. (Meanwhile, Chief Justice John Roberts has opined that carrying two phones could be reasonable grounds to suspect someone is a drug dealer.)

Clinton decided to do something about it. Namely, she told her top aides to just email her at her personal address so she could keep using whichever devices she wanted. This violated an internal State Department policy directive, known as a Foreign Affairs Manual, which stated that while it was okay to use personal digital devices to do work occasionally, “normal day-to-day operations” should be conducted on standard State Department equipment. Clinton chose to ignore this guideline and because she was the boss nobody could stop her. Career foreign service officers and other State personnel have every right to be peeved that Clinton opted out of an annoying policy rather than fixing the underlying issue, but it’s hardly a matter of overwhelming public concern.

And, indeed, it turns out Colin Powell also used a private email address for routine work. Condoleezza Rice and Madel e ine Albright didn’t use email, and back before Albright only weird nerds even knew what email was. So at the time Clinton took office, only one previous secretary of state had ever faced the question of what email account to use, and he reached the exact same conclusion Clinton did — just use your personal email address.

Why Hillary used a private email server

When Hillary tried the eminently sensible “I was following precedent” defense, Politifact dinged her answer as “mostly false” on the grounds that while Powell did use a personal email account, he didn’t use a private email server.

This distinction has attracted a lot of attention. And it’s proven politically damaging — because while lots of people maintain two email addresses and sometimes do work stuff on their personal email, very few Americans use a private email server as opposed to relying on a commercial email service. But legally speaking, this is completely irrelevant. As the State Department i nspector g eneral concluded in its report on Clinton’s conduct, the guideline Clinton violated was a principle that “normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System.”

Using a private server violates that rule, but so would using a Gmail address or simply checking your State.gov email address from your personal laptop rather than a Department-issue one.

But while the use of a private server is legally irrelevant, it’s certainly unusual. And it leaves people wondering: Why did Clinton go out of her way to set up a private server?

Clinton, as you may have heard, is married to former president Bill Clinton, who stepped down from office in January of 2001. Clinton was in the White House throughout the 1990s when the rest of us were being bombarded with AOL signup CD-ROMs, so he didn’t have a personal email when he left. Gmail didn’t exist back then, and his new job was, in effect, running a Bill Clinton startup. He launched a charitable foundation, he established his presidential library, and he made big bucks on speaking tours. He had a staff and he needed IT infrastructure and support. So he paid a guy to set up an email server that he could use.

Hillary Clinton — who is, again, his wife — also set herself up with an account on the same server. This is a bit unusual, but a lot about being married to a former president is unusual. What it’s not is suspicious.

The private server was not a transparency dodge

It’s become a bit of an article of faith among journalists frustrated with public officials’ constant FOIA-dodging that this is all obviously dissimulation and Clinton was really trying to evade the Freedom of Information Act.

Many people, for example, point to the fact that Clinton would routinely travel with multipledigital devices as debunking her supposed convenience argument. But this is silly. I’ve been known to travel with an iPhone, an iPad, a Kindle, and a laptop all at once. That doesn’t mean needing to carry two separate iPhones (one to check my work email and one to check my personal email) wouldn’t be inconvenient. After all, what if I was replying to a work email while a text came in to my personal phone and I wanted to check it.

I’d be left juggling phones and looking like an idiot, exactly how federal employees tended to look in the heyday of the double-fisting phones era.

I would not want to do that. Colin Powell did not want to do that. Hillary Clinton did not want to do that. Because that would be terrible.

By contrast, it’s a terrible solution to a desire to avoid having your emails disclosed to the public via FOIA. One way you can tell it’s a terrible solution is that Hillary Clinton’s work emails have been disclosed to the public. You can read them right here.

The specific timeline is that the House Select Committee on Benghazi requested Clinton’s emails in the summer of 2014, at which point the relevant State Department personnel realized they did not have the emails because Clinton had been using her personal address. State asked Clinton for the emails, and she handed them over later that year. It was only in March of 2015 that the New York Times broke the story of Clinton’s private server in a scoop by Michael Schmidt, which reported that the emails had been handed over to the State Department “two months ago.”

This is fairly clearly not an optimal approach to government record-keeping, as Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University told Schmidt at the time:

It’s a shame it didn’t take place automatically when she was secretary of state as it should have. Someone in the State Department deserves credit for taking the initiative to ask for the records back. Most of the time it takes the threat of litigation and embarrassment.

According to the Inspector General’s report, Clinton “should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary.”

There are two possible interpretations here. One is that Clinton hatched the private email account plan as an elaborate dodge of federal record-keeping laws, but then months before the public became aware of the server’s existence complied with requests to turn them over. The other is that the federal records rule on the book was antiquated and a bit absurd, requiring officials to turn over paper copies of emails for no good reason, and simply got ignored out of sloppiness.

But she deleted 33,000 emails!

Suspicion at this point is then supposed to focus on the fact that she had her lawyers delete more than 30,000 emails from her server.

After Hillary left office, the State Department told her she had to turn all her work-related emails over to them, so she tasked a legal team with determining which emails were work emails and which were not. She turned the work emails over because that’s what she was legally required to do. She deleted the others, presumably because she did not want Trey Gowdy and Jason Chaffetz to rummage through her inbox leaking whatever they happened to find amusing to area journalists.

Now, is it possible that Clinton’s legal team simply decided to entirely disregard the law and delete work-related emails?

In some sense, sure. But there’s no evidence that this happened. Generally speaking, in life we assume it would be moderately difficult to hire a well-known law firm to destroy evidence for you without someone deciding to do the right thing and squeal.

Besides which, it would be almost comically easy to catch Clinton in the act of systematically destroying relevant emails. The vast majority of the work-related email correspondence of an incumbent secretary of state, after all, is going to be correspondence with other government employees. Maybe she shoots a note to the Pentagon about Benghazi, or circulates ideas for a speech draft with her communications team. Any message like that, by definition, would exist on a government server as well as on her private one. This means it would be fully accessible via FOIA and also means that if Clinton’s copy were found to not be in the pile of emails she turned over, she’d be caught red handed.

The available FOIA workarounds are available to everyone

Now what’s true is that Clinton could, in theory, have conducted work-related email conversations using another person’s personal email address.

She could, for instance, have emailed Jake Sullivan on his Gmail address then deleted the email from her private server. We’d be in the dark and she’d get away with it.

The key thing to note here, however, is that the availability of this option has nothing to do with Clinton’s decision to use a personal account as her exclusive account and also has nothing to do with her decision to host her personal email on a private server.

At any given time, any federal employee can use her personal account to email any other federal employee at his personal account. If they receive a Freedom of Information Act request, they are legally obligated to hand that correspondence over. But in a practical sense, if they want to break the law they can probably get away with it. And as Ezra Klein has noted, there are a lot of workarounds here:

As every reporter knows, when official sources want to tell you something particularly delicate, they email you from a personal account — or, much more often, they call.

A lot of my reporting happens by email. But virtually none of my reporting with the White House happens by email. There, emails for clarification, or comment, quickly lead to phone calls. The reason — unsaid but obvious — is that phone calls don’t leave an official record. White House officials can talk freely on the phone in a way they can’t over email.

Similarly, the White House keeps a visitor’s log. If you make an appointment to meet with someone, your entrance and point of contact are recorded for posterity and searchable online. When someone who shouldn’t be meeting with you wants to meet with you, they tend to suggest an off-site location: a restaurant downtown, or a nearby coffee shop. Peet’s Coffee doesn’t keep a list of everyone who walks in or out.

We do not, however, generally treat all federal employees as having a massive ethical cloud over their heads just because they could probably use this workaround to break the law. There is zero reason to apply heightened scrutiny to Clinton just because she also couldbreak the law.

Besides which, when you are secretary of state there is a much simpler and easier way to mask your correspondence: classification.

Here, for example, is an email Sullivan sent to Clinton on June 4, 2011, that was duly handed over to the State Department and made available by the FOIA office:

I’m not saying the contents of that message don’t deserve to be redacted for security purposes. The fact is that I have no idea. But the reality is the American national security state is really, really good at using official channels to avoid disclosure of information. Nobody needs a private email server to pull that off.

Indeed, the allegation that the server setup was an elaborate con to evade transparency law is doubly ridiculous. On the one hand, a private server would not be necessary to carry it out. (All you need is to have a private email address on the side, which everyone does.) While on the other hand, the exclusive use of a personal email account means that Clinton’s personal account has come under an exceptional level of security.

The classification thing is a red herring

It’s precisely because nothing about the basic setup of the email account was in any way wrong that the investigation ended up focusing on the question of mishandling classified information.

The key point here is that using a State.gov email account would not have changed anything. When US government officials have conversations about classified matters, they are not supposed to use email. They are supposed to use special secure channels.

Nonetheless, mistakes happen in part because classification standards are vague and ever-changing. Technically speaking, forwarding a Washington Post article detailing things revealed by Edward Snowden could constitute an improper discussion of classified matters.

As FBI Director James Comey concluded, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against Clinton over this matter. Almost all of the relevant statutes require an intent to mishandle classified information in order to bring a prosecution, a standard that Clinton’s conduct clearly does not meet. Critics have thus chosen to focus on 18 USC § 793, a statute that sets a lower “gross negligence” standard.

However, as Jack Goldsmith, one of the top lawyers in George W . Bush’s administration explains, such a prosecution “would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind.”

Ben Wittes, a veteran legal journalist and Brookings fellow who has spent the past several years specializing in national security law, wrote that Comey’s characterization was clearly correct:

For the last several months, people have been asking me what I thought the chances of an indictment were. I have said each time that there is no chance without evidence of bad faith action of some kind. People simply don’t get indicted for accidental, non-malicious mishandling of classified material. I have followed leak cases for a very long time, both at the Washington Post and since starting Lawfare. I have never seen a criminal matter proceed without even an allegation of something more than mere mishandling of sensitive information. Hillary Clinton is not above the law, but to indict her on these facts, she’d have to be significantly below the law.

It’s true that too a layman the Espionage Act’s reference to “gross negligence” sounds similar to Comey’s characterization of Clinton’s actions as “extremely careless.” But as Philip Zelikow, a counselor to Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration and currently the Director of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia explains they only sound alike “unless you do a tiny bit of homework” on the history and caselaw of the Statute.

As the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez writes, attempting a prosecution for non-malicious mishandling would likely result in the statute being held unconstitutional: “the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gorin v. United States (1941), which suggests that the Espionage Act’s intent requirements are an important feature that save it from unconstitutional vagueness.”

This legal analysis is important because it makes it clear that even if the Weiner laptop emails aren’t simply client-side copies of the exact emails the FBI already has, there is essentially no chance it will change the ultimate verdict. The reason Clinton isn’t getting locked up is that there was no malign intent. Finding another email with classified information on it won’t change that conclusion.

A bullshit scandal amidst a serious election

Network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

Cable news has been, if anything, worse, and many prestige outlets have joined the pileup. One malign result of obsessive email coverage is that the public is left totally unaware of the policy stakes in the election. Another is that the constant vague recitations of the phrase ‘‘Clinton email scandal’’ have firmly implanted the notion that there is something scandalous about anything involving Hillary Clinton an email, including her campaign manager getting hacked or the revelation that one of her aides sometimes checked mail on her husband’s computer.

But none of this is true. Clinton broke no laws according to the FBI itself. Her setup gave her no power to evade federal transparency laws beyond what anyone who has a personal email account of any kind has. Her stated explanation for her conduct is entirely believable, fits the facts perfectly, and is entirely plausible to anyone who doesn’t simply start with the assumption that she’s guilty of something.

Given Powell’s conduct, Clinton wasn’t even breaking with an informal precedent. The very worst you can say is that, faced with an annoying government IT policy, she used her stature to find a personal workaround rather than a systemic fix that would work for everyone. To spend so much time on such a trivial matter would be absurd in a city council race, much less a presidential election. To do so in circumstances when it advances the electoral prospects of a rival who has shattered all precedents in terms of lacking transparency or basic honesty is infinity more scandalous than anything related to the server itself.

Posted in Governance, Information | Leave a comment

Story About Reef Restoration in San Andres (Colombia) After Hurricane Matthew

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Bruce

from El Isleño <http://www.elisleño.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12195:acciones-de-choque-y-sanadoras-en-little-reef&catid=41:ambiental&Itemid=83>

Acciones de choque y sanadoras en Little Reef

Miércoles, 19 de Octubre de 2016 04:19 Jorge Sánchez

Un grupo de buzos compuesto por personal de la corporación Coralina, jóvenes buzos de colegios de la isla, empresa privada y la ONG Help 2 Oceans hicieron presencia en la zona norte de la isla llamada ‘Little Reef’ respondiendo al daño causado efectos del Huracán Matthew que perjudicó en buena parte la vida en dicha formación arrecifal.

Las acciones combinadas se presentaron a raíz de la evaluación preliminar de la zona ordenada por el ingeniero Durcey Stephens Lever director de Coralina realizada la semana pasada y dirigida desde la Subdirección de Mares y Costas de esa misma entidad.

En efecto, como lo informó EL ISLEÑO en su portal web, la importante barrera secundaria sufrió daños y “la tarea es mitigar los efectos por medio de la replantación de fragmentos encontrados”, explicó Nacor Bolaños, biólogo que dirige las acciones.

La labores no se hicieron esperar y con un tiempo de inmersión cercano a las dos horas sumadas en tres inmersiones, estos buzos han cubierto gran parte de la barrera. Se actuó a tiempo y se espera aprovechar la ocasión ‘, además, para implantar algunas ‘semillas’ en La Pirámide, otro lugar que ha sufrido gran deterioro.

Los logros obtenidos durante las labores adelantadas han sido signifcativos. “Es maravilloso observar la resistencia en los pólipos marinos de los (corales) ‘cuerno de alce’ que aún se conservan en buen estado salud ya que no presentan signos de blanqueamiento, a pesar de las fracturas de la estructura de carbonato de calcio”, explicó Daniel Florio, operador de buceo local.

Se aguarda que las acciones conjuntas se mantengan guiadas e impulsadas por iniciativas similares.

El célebre buzo ambientalista Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997) afirmó alguna vez que frente a las consecuencias de los fenómenos de la naturaleza, “estamos capacitados para reducir de forma drástica su gravedad y consecuencias actuando con celeridad, conocimiento y con unidad de criterio”. Manos a la obra.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Eastern Caribbean Whales: Conservation as Cultural Preservation

Posted on October 9, 2016 by Bruce

[An extraordinary essay by Shane Gero, the co-founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, about the cultures of whales, specifically those in the Eastern Caribbean Clan. This essay and the background research more extensively reported in PLOS One, are powerful arguments against the maintenance of the ceremonial Windward Island whale hunting. Read it and share. bp ]

… from the Sunday New York Times Sunday Review section <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/the-lost-cultures-of-whales.html?ref=opinion>

SundayReview | OPINION

The Lost Cultures of Whales

By SHANE GEROOCT. 8, 2016

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CreditPing Zhu

Aboard the Balaena, Caribbean — I am alone on deck, my headphones filled with the sounds of the deep ocean. I have been tracking the sperm whales since 4 a.m. Now the island of Dominica imposes its dark shape in front of the rising sun.

“We have whales!” I shout down to Hal Whitehead, who founded the Dominica Sperm Whale Project with me a decade ago. He puts the kettle on and asks who it is as he comes on deck.

I tell him it’s Pinchy and her calf, Tweak. Tweak is making small suckling dives alongside his mother. Then Pinchy dives, and we move the boat into the calm spot she left behind — the “flukeprint.” We are collecting the whales’ skin and fecal samples and recording the sounds they make on a hydrophone, an underwater microphone. Soon after Pinchy dives, we hear the clicks of her codas — whale social calls; she is talking with Tweak. Then the echolocation starts as she hunts for squid. Tweak slides below the surface in search of his babysitter, Fingers, who is Pinchy’s aunt. Hal and I have breakfast, then wake the crew.

Audio
Play

A Whale’s Coda 0:25

A recording of the 1+1+3 coda that is made only by sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean Clan. Dominica Sperm Whale Project

The whale families we work with, members of the Eastern Caribbean Clan, are shrinking. Their population is declining by as much as 4 percent a year, as we reported last week in the journal PLOS One, largely a result of climate change and the increasing human presence in these waters. (Whales can be hit by ships or become entangled in fishing gear.) We are not just losing specific whales that we have come to know as individuals; we are losing a way of life, a culture — the accumulated wisdom of generations on how to survive in the deep waters of the Caribbean Sea. They may have lived here for longer than we have walked upright.

Sperm whales live rich and complex lives in a part of the world we find difficult to even explore. And many aspects of their lives appear remarkably similar to our own. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters babysit, defend and raise calves together. Family is critical to surviving in the open ocean, and each has its own way of doing things. The whales live in communities of neighboring families in a multicultural oceanic society.

Behavior is what you do, culture is how you do it. All sperm whales do the same things — feed, swim, babysit, defend, socialize — but how they do them is different around the world. Just as humans use forks or chopsticks, they, too, differ in how they eat, what species of squid they eat, how fast they travel and where they roam, their social behavior, and probably many other ways we still do not understand.

They seem to mark these cultural differences with different dialects — or distinct sets of codas. Families that share the same dialect we call a clan. The whale families in the Eastern Caribbean Clan use 22 different coda patterns. When two sperm whale families meet at sea, they need a way to recognize one another; those from a similar culture are more likely to cooperate. It turns out that sperm whale families in the same clan will spend time together, while families that speak different dialects, from different clans, will never interact.

Audio
Play

Sounds From a Gathering 0:28

When a family of whales from the Eastern Caribbean socializes they make up to 22 different types of codas, some of which can be heard in this recording of several whales. Dominica Sperm Whale Project

Whales’ codas appear to broadcast their identities. One coda pattern distinguishes individuals, a set of others identifies their families, and a special one marks the cultural clan. The 1+1+3 coda (click pause click pause click click click) is unique to the Eastern Caribbean, is made by all the whales in the Eastern Caribbean Clan, and has remained identical for at least 30 years. Calves spend at least two years learning to make it correctly. And they learn to produce it with great fidelity, which most likely ensures that their clan membership is recognizable over their large geographic ranges and across the diversity of other whales they encounter.

The whales in the Caribbean are distinct, and they appear to identify themselves as distinct. Unfortunately, as a result of a changing climate and human impacts, these urban whales, who live in nearshore waters, are at risk. One in three baby whales born off Dominica will not survive to its first birthday. Tweak’s cousin, Digit, had just begun hunting on her own when she got rope from a fishing net tangled around her tail; now she can no longer dive as well, and is struggling to survive.

Losing a large number of individuals is a tragedy, but what happens when we lose an entire whale culture? What do we lose when we lose a way of life?

Every culture, whale or otherwise, is its own solution to the problems of the environment in which it lives. With its extirpation, we lose the traditional knowledge of what it means to be a Caribbean whale and how to exploit the deep sea riches around the islands efficiently. And that cannot be recovered, not even if the global population of sperm whales was robust enough to support remigration into the Caribbean. These would be different whales, from elsewhere, who do things differently. This region would be profoundly impoverished for the new whales, who would be more vulnerable here. The species as a whole would lose some of its repertoire on how to survive.

Interactive Feature: A Conversation With Whales

Species conservation should not be just about numbers. The definition of biodiversity needs to include cultural diversity. All sperm whales around the world are similar genetically. In fact, recent research suggests that all sperm whales may have descended from a single whale some 80,000 years ago. But genetics may not be particularly helpful when conserving populations of cultural whales. “Genetic stocks,” which we have traditionally used to manage and protect much of the world’s wildlife, simply cannot preserve the diversity of life. Diverse systems are more resilient, and the most important diversity in sperm whales, as in humans, is in their cultural traditions.

I could point to many reasons to protect whales, like the way they mitigate the effects of climate change by cycling nutrients that enable the ocean to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, or how top predators regulate marine food chains. But if we are to preserve life, ours and theirs, we must find ways to succeed together, and value diversity in our societies and in our ecosystems.

Shane Gero, a behavioral ecologist, is a founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 9, 2016, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: The Lost Cultures of Whales. Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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How to Increase the Integration of Cuban Science and Technology with the Global Community

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Bruce

[In my experience both working with Cuba in UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook program, and during birding trips to the island, I’ve been greatly impressed by the depth of Cuban expertise in many science and technology fields. There is a major challenge, crucially involving civil society networks (like CIVIC) both inside and outside of Cuba, to find ways to translate some of this expertise, developed in relative isolation for the past half century, to contexts and language that is understood and appreciated in the wider Caribbean and global science and technology communities. [Not to ignore the several outreach efforts made by the Cuban university scholarships provided for most Caribbean residents, and the many professionals (especially in medicine and engineering) that the Cuban government has provided for technical assistance to Caribbean island states for decades. bp]

from a post by Yacine Khelladi <yacine at yacine dot net>, moderator of the CIVIC [Caribbean ICT stakeholders Virtual Community <https://dgroups.org/_/84ydpl2j>] :

Can Cuban science go global?
http://www.nature.com/news/can-cuban-science-go-global-1.20694

Tensions between Cuba and the United States are easing. But researchers still struggle to join the scientific world.

Sara Reardon 28 September 2016

Image caption: Students collaborate on a physics experiment at the University of Havana.
The western edge of Havana hides a side of Cuban society that tourists rarely see. High fences and thick vegetation wall off the grand estates and embassies where the elites congregate. And amid these enclaves of privilege lies a cluster of concrete buildings belonging to the Polo Científico del Oeste — the ‘scientific pole’ of Cuba’s capital city. Here, a cluster of biotechnology research institutions are protected from the chaos and poverty of a city in transition.

For a country whose entire gross domestic product (GDP) is just half of what the US government spends on research, Cuba punches above its weight in some areas of science. Fuelled by relatively generous government support, biomedical researchers have managed to excel at creating low-cost vaccines, developing cancer treatments and screening infants for disorders. Other areas of science get more meagre funding, but Cuba still boasts some bright spots. As the largest and most populous island in the Caribbean, it is a key node in international networks monitoring hurricanes and infectious-disease outbreaks. And because there is so little trade and tourism, the country has nearly pristine coral reefs and mangroves, which attract attention from researchers worldwide.

The productivity and quality of some research in Cuba surprises those from other countries. “We had the same thought about Cuban science as everyone else did: that it was stuck back in I Love Lucy days,” says Kelvin Lee, invoking the 1950s TV show. Lee, an immunologist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, is organizing the first US clinical trial of a Cuban vaccine.

Yet the success stories don’t outweigh the profound challenges facing scientists in Cuba. Research jobs pay poorly, and the number of students getting science doctorates has not risen in the past decade. Internet access is scarce, and those who have it find the service so sluggish that it can be next-to-impossible to e-mail a scientific paper. An energy shortage this summer forced government buildings to shut off their electricity for large portions of the week. During a temporary ban on air conditioning, scientists at the University of Havana sweltered over their laptops in 35 °C temperatures.

Image: Desmond Boylan for Nature
caption: Inside a laboratory at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana.
Another problem looms above all others: the US trade embargo. For the past half-century, the embargo has severely restricted the ability of Cuban researchers to buy scientific equipment, win international grants and travel in the United States.

But in December 2014, US President Barack Obama announced his intention to restore full relations between the two countries and began lifting travel restrictions. On 31 August 2016, a JetBlue Airways plane flew directly from Florida to Cuba — the first commercially scheduled flight between the two countries in five decades. This softening of relations has led to an era of evolution: it has opened up opportunities for researchers, such as easier travel to international meetings, and raises the prospect of many future benefits through collaborations and purchases. Yet the pace of progress has been much slower than many had hoped, and the future of US–Cuba relations remains uncertain. A decision to lift the embargo entirely requires action from a hostile Congress and lies in the hands of the next US president.

And in the meantime, Cuban researchers are stuck with many of the same problems as their counterparts in other developing nations: an exodus of young scientists, difficulty finding collaborators and an inability to afford increasingly specialized scientific equipment. This sets Cuba back years from where it could be, says Sergio Jorge Pastrana, executive director of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba. “The changes are coming but they change too slowly.”

Old School
In the heart of Havana’s Old Town, the academy is a cool, marble respite from the humidity. It is in the midst of remodelling: librarians sort century-old books of its proceedings, and Pastrana says that he plans to install solar panels. Outside, people pick their way along streets strewn with construction rubble while shops hawk Che Guevara shirts, cheap cigars and mass-produced paintings of cars.

Like the colourful, iron-railed buildings that surround it, the science academy is a grand institution, the first of its kind established outside Europe. In its 155 years, it has hosted greats such as Albert Einstein and one of Cuba’s most famous scientists, epidemiologist Carlos Finlay, who discovered that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever in the late 1800s. Until the revolution, the Cuban academy shared close ties with the US National Academy of Sciences and with its European counterparts. Even under the embargo restrictions, the organization has forged ties with US scientists at institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Pastrana says that science got lucky when Fidel Castro took over (see ‘How Cuban science stacks up’). Cuba could have ended up with “a very bad leader for science”, he says. Instead, one of Castro’s first acts was to create and enforce a universal-literacy requirement, and he prioritized knowledge building and discovery. “The future of our country has to be necessarily a future of men of science,” Castro said in a 1960 speech. The now-famous quote is engraved in Spanish on the wall of the science academy’s lecture hall.

__________

Posted in Civil Society, Development, Information, Media, Science, Small Island | Tagged Cuba | Leave a comment

ARE BIOFUELS WORSE FOR THE CLIMATE THAN PETROLEUM?

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Bruce

from Conservation Magazine

September 8, 2016

Conservation This Week

Biofuels have for years divided energy experts and environmentalists. Critics say that they displace farmland and cause deforestation. Proponents argue they are a green, low-carbon alternative to petroleum-based fuels.

A new analysis adds fuel to the incendiary topic. Researchers report in the journal Climatic Change that biofuels might harm the climate more than petroleum. Substituting petroleum fuels with biofuels in American vehicles has led to an increase in net carbon dioxide emissions over the eight years covered by their study, they calculate.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuel Standard has set an annual production target of 36 billion gallons of biofuel in 2022. The push for biofuels is based on life-cycle analyses, which assume that fuel crops absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, and this carbon negation effect adds up over time.

For the new study, researchers at the University of Michigan Energy Institute analyzed real-world data from 2005–2013 on crop production, biofuel production, gasoline production, and vehicle emissions. They analyzed how much carbon dioxide corn and soy plants pull from the air while growing, and how much of it they release when burned.

The result? Growing fuel crops only absorb 37 percent of the carbon dioxide that burning biofuel releases. “This shows that biofuel use fell well short of being carbon neutral even before considering process emissions,” said lead researcher John DeCicco.

The research, funded by the American Petroleum Institute, has garnered both criticism and praise. Praise came from researchers who say traditional life-cycle calculations of biofuels’ climate impact have been flawed, and that biofuels don’t need national growth targets and subsidies. Critics, meanwhile, pointed out that the study does not take into account the long timescale it takes for crops to soak up carbon emissions.

Plus, as a news story in Wired pointed out, the researchers only looked at corn ethanol and soy biodiesel. Fuels made from cellulosic sources such as grasses, stems, and leaves are widely accepted to be less carbon intensive in addition to not competing with farmland. —Prachi Patel | 8 September 2016

Source: John M. DeCicco et al. Carbon balance effects of U.S. biofuel production and use. Climatic Change. 2016.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in Biodiversity, energy | Leave a comment

HUMAN HEALTH RISKS OF EATING SEA TURTLE EGGS

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Bruce

from a notice from the Sea Turtle list based on this Smithsonian blog . . .

http://insider.si.edu/2016/09/human-health-risks-of-eating-sea-turtle-eggs-could-benefit-species/

HUMAN HEALTH RISKS OF EATING SEA TURTLE EGGS COULD BENEFIT SPECIES

BY, KIMBRA CUTLIP 9/2/16, SMITHSONIAN BLOG

According to a new study, eating sea turtle eggs increases the health risk of heavy metal exposure in local communities in Panama and may provide a new strategy for conservation.

Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and McGill University collected eggs from green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) and olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) from the Pacific coast of Panama, and measured the heavy metal amounts—known to cause adverse health effects in humans—the eggs contained. The study was published in June in the Journal of Environmental Science and Health.

They found the eggs contained elevated levels of a number of heavy metals, particularly cadmium at a level that could be toxic to young children who eat 20 eggs per week or more. That consumption figure may sound high, but during egg laying season, when the turtle eggs are an easy source of protein, it is consistent with the eating habits in isolated coastal communities.

Throughout the year, thousands of female sea turtles crawl onto beaches on both sides of the Isthmus of Panama (Pacific and Caribbean) and lay eggs in the sand. The eggs are easily dug up, collected, eaten or sold by locals. Because one nest can contain as many as 100 eggs, families living near laying beaches with no refrigeration can easily exceed the safe weekly consumption of a few eggs per individual per day.

“When you are in these local communities along the coast, when it’s the season, the people eat them all the time,” says Hector M. Guzman, a marine biologist at the Tropical Research Institute. “You can buy a dozen right on the street everywhere in the countryside, and there are plenty in the market. Kids and pregnant women eat them, and people put them in their drinks at bars.”

The most damaging effects of eating so many eggs may be cumulative, Guzman explains. “It might not be that something is going to happen in one or two weeks, or in one season,” he adds. “But if you do that every year of your life, you are bio-accumulating these metals into your tissues.”

Heavy metals tend to stay in a person’s body, accumulating in fatty tissues over a lifetime. Heavy metals consumed in turtle eggs are added to the normal daily intake of these toxins from fish, seafood and other environmental sources. Sea turtle eggs may contribute a significant amount of these toxins. In the case of cadmium, average consumption rates can account for more than 30 percent of safe intake levels set by the World Health Organization, especially in young people from the age of five through young adulthood

Long-term exposure to cadmium can cause kidney and skeletal problems in humans. The researchers also found elevated levels of mercury, arsenic, manganese, iron, copper and zinc in the turtle eggs. The effects of these heavy metals on humans range from neurological damage, reproductive health problems and various forms of cancer.

The effect of these toxins on the turtles remains unknown, although it is presumed to be just as detrimental. The presence of toxins in the marine environment has grown dramatically in recent decades from mining runoff, industrial emissions and batteries and paints. Sea turtles the world over have been found to have elevated levels of heavy metals in their bodies, which could be having a negative impact on their health and reproductive rates.

A more immediate threat to the turtles, however, comes from direct human activity such as hunting, entanglement in fishing gear and the raiding of sea turtle nests.

Although collecting turtle eggs is mostly prohibited throughout the tropical eastern Pacific, including Panama, poaching is rampant and contributes to the dwindling numbers of many sea turtle species. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, olive ridley turtles are listed as vulnerable and green turtles as endangered.

Conservation efforts have increased awareness of the problem, but among rural coastal communities, these campaigns have made limited progress. “Back in the ’70s, when I was a student in Costa Rica, the practice of conservation campaigns was to produce coloring books to teach the kids to conserve, or to teach about beautiful turtles in danger,” Guzman says. “Now, four decades later and after a huge international effort, honestly, I don’t think we have succeeded in protecting the turtles.”

He hopes this study will open a dialogue about public health that might be more effective at conserving sea turtles by reducing demand for their eggs. “We need more data of course; this is just preliminary while we continue working in the Caribbean, but it is suggesting that we should be careful about eating the eggs,” he says. “I am a scientist, not a conservationist, but to me, it says talking about public health might be an ideal approach to the conservation of sea turtles.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Makes Me Feel Dumb(er)

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Bruce

This one short article has more words that are totally foreign to me than I usually encounter in a week:

Wordnik Word of the Day for August 29, 2016

vaticinate

To prophesy; to foretell; to practice prediction; to utter prophecies.

Paul, I vaticinate that the mansuetude of your response will bring out the best of my muliebrity.
Save the language! « Write Anything

You may see my attitude as defensive and oppugnant, but I vaticinate further derogation of our incomparable tongue should such complots be permitted to unfold without denunciation.
Archive 2008-10-01

Semblably Titus Livius writeth that, in the solemnization time of the Bacchanalian holidays at Rome, both men and women seemed to prophetize and vaticinate, because of an affected kind of wagging of the head, shrugging of the shoulders, and jectigation of the whole body, which they used then most punctually.
Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel

I am reassured, however, by the reflection that I am not expected to look into the future and vaticinate.
A Royalist Fiasco

But Gwyneth and I are not uncomfortably provided for, and I no longer contribute paragraphs of gossip to the Pimlico Postboy, nor yet do I vaticinate in the columns of the Tipster.
In the Wrong Paradise

The word ‘vaticinate’ comes from the Latin ‘vāticinātus’, from ‘vāticinor’ (“foretell, prophesy”).

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A Favorite Theme: They’re Killing the Non-Profits

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Bruce

from the Stanford Social Innovation Review <http://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle>

Philanthropy

The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle

A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.

By Ann Goggins Gregory & Don Howard Fall 2009

Organizations that build robust infrastructure—which includes sturdy information technology systems, financial systems, skills training, fundraising processes, and other essential overhead—are more likely to succeed than those that do not. This is not news, and nonprofits are no exception to the rule.

Yet it is also not news that most nonprofits do not spend enough money on overhead. In our consulting work at the Bridgespan Group, we frequently find that our clients agree with the idea of improving infrastructure and augmenting their management capacity, yet they are loath to actually make these changes because they do not want to increase their overhead spending. But underfunding overhead can have disastrous effects, finds the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study, a five year research project conducted by the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. The researchers examined more than 220,000 IRS Form 990s and conducted 1,500 in-depth surveys of organizations with revenues of more than $100,000. Among their many dismaying findings: nonfunctioning computers, staff members who lacked the training needed for their positions, and, in one instance, furniture so old and beaten down that the movers refused to move it. The effects of such limited overhead investment are felt far beyond the office: nonfunctioning computers cannot track program outcomes and show what is working and what is not; poorly trained staff cannot deliver quality services to beneficiaries.

Despite findings such as these, many nonprofits continue to skimp on overhead. And they plan to cut even more overhead spending to weather the current recession, finds a recent Bridgespan study. Surveying more than 100 executive directors of organizations across the country, we found that 56 percent of respondents planned to reduce overhead spending. Yet decreasing already austere overhead spending (also called indirect expenses) may jeopardize organizations’ very existence—not to mention their ability to fulfill their missions. And although the Obama administration’s stimulus package may fuel rapid growth among some nonprofits, many will lack the infrastructure to manage the windfall and may well be crushed under the weight of all those well-intended funds.

Why do nonprofits and funders alike continue to shortchange overhead? To answer this question, we studied four national nonprofits that serve youth. Each organization has a mix of funding, including monies from government, foundation, and individual sources. We also interviewed the leaders and managers of a range of nonprofit organizations and funders, as well as synthesized existing research on overhead costs in the nonprofit sector.

Our research reveals that a vicious cycle fuels the persistent underfunding of overhead.¹ The first step in the cycle is funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much it costs to run a nonprofit. At the second step, nonprofits feel pressure to conform to funders’ unrealistic expectations. At the third step, nonprofits respond to this pressure in two ways: They spend too little on overhead, and they underreport their expenditures on tax forms and in fundraising materials. This underspending and underreporting in turn perpetuates funders’ unrealistic expectations. Over time, funders expect grantees to do more and more with less and less—a cycle that slowly starves nonprofits.

Although several factors drive the cycle of nonprofit starvation, our research suggests that taking action at the first stage—funders’ unrealistic expectations—could be the best way to slow or even stop the cycle. Changing funders’ expectations, however, will require a coordinated, sector-wide effort. At a time when people need nonprofit services more than ever and when government is increasingly turning to nonprofits to solve social problems, this effort is necessary to keep nonprofits healthy and functioning.

Funders’ Unrealistic Expectations

The nonprofit starvation cycle is the result of deeply ingrained behaviors, with a chicken-and-egg-like quality that makes it hard to determine where the dysfunction really begins. Our sense, however, is that the most useful place to start analyzing this cycle is with funders’ unrealistic expectations. The power dynamics between funders and their grantees make it difficult, if not impossible, for nonprofits to stand up and address the cycle head-on; the downside to doing so could be catastrophic for the organization, especially if other organizations do not follow suit. Particularly in these tough economic times, an organization that decides—on its own—to buck the trend and report its true overhead costs could risk losing major funding. The organization’s reputation could also suffer. Resetting funder expectations would help pave the way for honest discussions with grantees.

Many funders know that nonprofit organizations report artificially low overhead figures, and that the donor literature often reflects grossly inaccurate program ratios (the proportion of program-related expenses to indirect expenses). Without accurate data, funders do not know what overhead rates should be. Although for-profit analogies are not perfect for nonprofits, they do provide some context for thinking about how realistic—or not—average overhead rates in the nonprofit sector are. Overhead rates across for-profit industries vary, with the average rate falling around 25 percent of total expenses. And among service industries— a closer analog to nonprofits—none report average overhead rates below 20 percent.

In the absence of clear, accurate data, funders must rely on the numbers their grantees report. But as we will later discuss, these data are riddled with errors. As a result, funders routinely require nonprofits to spend unhealthily small amounts on overhead. For instance, all four of the youth service organizations that we studied were managing government contracts from local, state, and federal sources, and none of the contracts allowed grantees to use more than 15 percent of the grant for indirect expenses (which include operations, finances, human resources, and fundraising).

Some foundations allot more money for indirect costs than do government agencies. Yet foundations are quite variable in their indirect cost allowances, with the average ranging from 10 percent to 15 percent of each grant. These rates hold true even for some of the largest, most influential U.S. foundations. And foundations can be just as rigid with their indirect cost policies as government funders.

Many times, the indirect allowances that grants do fund don’t even cover the costs of administering the grants themselves. For example, when one Bridgespan client added up the hours that staff members spent on reporting requirements for a particular government grant, the organization found that it was spending about 31 percent of the value of the grant on its administration. Yet the funder had specified that the nonprofit spend only 13 percent of the grant on indirect costs.

Most funders are aware that their indirect cost rates are indeed too low, finds a recent Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) study. In this national survey of 820 grantmaking foundations, only 20 percent of the respondents said that their grants include enough overhead allocation to cover the time that grantees spend on reporting.²

Individual donors’ expectations are also skewed. A 2001 survey conducted by the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance found that more than half of American adults felt that nonprofit organizations should have overhead rates of 20 percent or less, and nearly four out of five felt that overhead spending should be held at less than 30 percent. In fact, those surveyed ranked overhead ratio and financial transparency to be more important attributes in determining their willingness to give to an organization than the success of the organization’s programs.

Not only do funders and donors have unrealistic expectations, but the nonprofit sector itself also promotes unhealthy overhead levels. “The 20 percent norm is perpetuated by funders, individuals, and nonprofits themselves,” says the CFO of one of the organizations we studied. “When we benchmarked our reported financials, we looked at others, [and] we realized that others misreport as well. One of our peer organizations allocates 70 percent of its finance director’s time to programs. That’s preposterous!”

In this context, nonprofits are reluctant to break ranks and be honest in their fundraising literature, even if they know that they are fueling unrealistic expectations. They find it difficult to justify spending on infrastructure when nonprofits commonly tout their low overhead costs. For example, Smile Train, an organization that treats children born with cleft lip and palate conditions, has claimed that “100 percent of your donation will go toward programs … zero percent goes to overhead.” Nevertheless, the fine print goes on to say that this is not because the organization has no overhead; rather, it is because Smile Train uses contributions from “founding supporters” to cover its nonprogram costs.

This constellation of causes feeds the second stage in the nonprofit starvation cycle: pressure on nonprofits to conform to unrealistic expectations. This pressure comes from a variety of sources, finds the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study. The survey found that 36 percent of respondents felt pressure from government agencies, 30 percent felt pressure from donors, and 24 percent felt pressure from foundations.³

Underfed Overhead

In response to pressure from funders, nonprofits settle into a “low pay, make do, and do without” culture, as the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study calls it. Every aspect of an organization feels the pinch of this culture. In our consulting work with nonprofits, for example, we often see clients who are unable to pay competitive salaries for qualified specialists, and so instead make do with hires who lack the necessary experience or expertise. Similarly, many organizations that limit their investment in staff training find it difficult to develop a strong pipeline of senior leaders.

These deficits can be especially damaging to youth-serving organizations, notes Ben Paul, president and CEO of After-School All-Stars, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization that provides after-school and summer camp programs for at-risk youth nationwide. “It is clear to anyone who has led an organization that the most important capital in a company is the human capital,” says Paul. “In after-school we have a saying: Kids come for the program, but stay for the staff. If we don’t hire the right people, we might as well not run after-school programs.”

Meanwhile, without strong tracking systems, nonprofits have a hard time diagnosing which actions truly drive their desired outcomes. “The catch-22 is that, while organizations need capacity-building funding in order to invest in solid performance tracking, many funders want to see strong program outcome data before they will provide such general operating support,” says Jamie McAuliffe, a portfolio manager at the New York-based Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Take the case of a well-respected network of youth development programs. To protect the identity of this organization, we will call it the Learning Goes On Network (LGON). Poised for a huge growth spurt, LGON realized that its data systems would be hopelessly inadequate to accommodate more clients. An analysis showed that program staff spent 25 percent of their time collecting data manually. One staff member spent 50 percent of her time typing results into an antiquated Microsoft Access database.

Staff members can become so accustomed to their strained circumstances that they have trouble justifying even much-needed investments in overhead, our interviews revealed. “We [had] known for a long time that a COO was vital to our growth but [hadn’t] been able to fund one,” relates the CEO of one of the four youth development organizations that we studied. But when his organization’s board finally created the COO position, the rest of the staff resisted. “They had lived so long in a starved organization that the idea of hiring a COO was shocking to them.”

Misleading Reporting

The final driver of the cycle that starves nonprofit infrastructure is nonprofits’ routine misrepresentation of how much they actually spend on overhead. The numbers that nonprofits report on their financial statements “[defy] plausibility,” finds the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study. Upon examination of more than 220,000 nonprofit organizations, researchers found that more than a third of the organizations reported no fundraising costs whatsoever, while one in eight reported no management and general expenses. Further scrutiny found that 75 percent to 85 percent of these organizations were incorrectly reporting the costs associated with grants.

Our study of the four youth-serving nonprofits likewise reported discrepancies between what nonprofits spent on overhead and what they reported spending. Although they reported overhead rates ranging from 13 percent to 22 percent, their actual overhead rates ranged from 17 percent to 35 percent.

Many factors support this underreporting of nonprofit costs. According to a survey conducted by The Chronicle of Philanthropy in 2000, a majority of nonprofits say that their accountants advised them to report zero in the fundraising section of Form 990.⁴ Limited surveillance of nonprofits’ Form 990 tax reports only exacerbates the problem: The IRS rarely levies the $50,000 penalty for an incomplete or inaccurate return, and generally applies it only when an organization deliberately fails to file the form altogether. According to the Chronicle study, “Improperly reporting these expenses is likely to have few, if any, consequences.”

The IRS’ ambiguous instructions likewise lead to error, report several sources. For example, nowhere does the IRS explicitly address how to account for nonprofit marketing and communications. As a result, many organizations allocate all marketing and communications expenses to programs when, in most cases, these expenses should be reported as administrative or fundraising overhead.

Government agencies likewise have varying and ambiguous definitions of indirect costs. The White House Office of Management and Budget, for example, defines indirect costs as “those that have been incurred for common or joint objectives and cannot be readily identified with a particular final cost objective.” It then goes on to say that “because of the diverse characteristics and accounting practices of nonprofit organizations, it is not possible to specify the types of cost that may be classified as indirect cost in all situations.”⁵

There is some good news. Currently, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is conducting a study of various federal grantors’ definitions of indirect costs. As Stan Czerwinski, the director of strategic issues for GAO, explains, “The goal is to achieve consistency, so that when nonprofits go in for funding, they have clarity (as do funders) about what they’re actually going to get reimbursed for.” The study is in the early stages, but as Czerwinski notes, the need is clear: “We don’t find anybody telling us that we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Proper Care and Feeding

Although the vicious cycle of nonprofit starvation has many entry points and drivers, we believe that the best place to end it is where it starts: Funders’ unrealistic expectations. Foundations and government funders must take the lead because they have an enormous power advantage over their grantees. When funders change their expectations, nonprofits will feel less need to underreport their overhead. They will also feel empowered to invest in infrastructure.

The first step that funders should take is to shift their focus from costs to outcomes. In the nonprofit world, organizations are so diverse that they do not share a common indicator of program effectiveness. In the absence of this indicator, many funders try to understand an organization’s efficiency by monitoring overhead and other easily obtained yet faulty indicators. Funders need to refocus their attention on impact by asking “What are we trying to achieve?” and “What would define success?” In so doing, they will signal to their grantees that impact matters more than anything else. Even focusing on approximate or crude indicators (for example, “Are we getting an A or a C on our impact goals?”) is better than looking at cost efficiencies, as focusing on the latter may lead to narrow decisions that undermine program results.

Funders must also clearly communicate their program goals to their grantees. Having established that funder and grantee share the same goals, funders should then insist on honest answers to the question “What will it take to deliver these outcomes consistently, or to deliver these outcomes at an even higher level of quality or quantity?”

One of our study participants, for instance, worked closely with its major funder to think through this question, and ultimately determined it needed a sizable investment in technology to support its projected growth. The funder agreed that only by making such an investment would the organization be able to track outcomes uniformly and to make program improvements quickly.

When feasible, funders should help meet grantees’ identified infrastructure needs by making general operating support grants. Grantmakers and nonprofits agree that more operating support is very likely to improve an organization’s ability to achieve results, finds the 2008 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations study. And a 2006 CompassPoint Nonprofit Services study of nearly 2,000 nonprofit executives in eight metropolitan areas reveals that receiving general operating support played a major role in reducing burnout and stress among executive directors.⁶ Yet although 80 percent of the foundations in this study made some general operating grants, they dedicated a median of only 20 percent of their grant dollars to this kind of support.

Regardless of the type of support they provide, funders should encourage open, candid discussions with their grantees about what the latter need to be effective. Many funders’ grantmaking processes are not set up to consider the full scope of what grantees do, and why. As a result, their grants are not as flexible as they need to be. Yet when funders fully understand their grantees’ operations, they are more likely to meet their grantees’ needs.

Although changing their expectations will have the greatest impact on the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders can also intervene in other useful ways. When making use-restricted grants, funders should commit to paying a greater share of administrative and fundraising costs. Indeed, in 2004, the board of the Independent Sector encouraged funders to pay “the fair proportion of administrative and fundraising costs necessary to manage and sustain whatever is required by the organization to run that particular project.”

Likewise, rather than prescribing an indirect expense rate for all grants, government funders should allow nonprofits to define their true overhead needs in grant applications and, so long as these needs are justifiable, pay for them. For example, some federal funding contracts allow a nonprofit to justify an indirect cost rate (within guidelines), which the organization can then use for all its federal grant applications. Extending such a policy to all federal, state, and local government contracts would go a long way toward helping nonprofits deliver better programs while being able to pay for their grants’ management.

Finally, to foster transparent and accurate reporting, funders should encourage the development of a standard definition of the term overhead. Currently, organizations have to report their overhead differently for nearly every grant that they receive. Standardization would allow funders to compare apples with apples, as well as allow grantees to understand better their own overhead investments—or lack thereof. Having a dialogue about real overhead rates could also help shift the focus to the real target: outcomes.

What Grantees Can Do

The burden of breaking the cycle of nonprofit starvation does not rest solely with funders. Nonprofit leaders also play a role. As a baseline task, they should commit to understanding their real overhead costs and their real infrastructure needs. At LGON, for instance, senior managers spent several months digging into their costs, analyzing their current systems—including the organization’s subpar tracking process—and identifying gaps in capacity. After this strategic planning process, the organization could articulate a clear plan for a new tracking system and a 150 percent increase in nonprogram staff over three years.

Nonprofits must then speak truth to power, sharing their real numbers with their boards and then engaging their boards’ support in communicating with funders. Case studies of organizations that have successfully invested in their own infrastructure have repeatedly noted the need for a shared agenda between the leadership team and the board. The executive director of LGON, for example, communicated early and often with her board members throughout the strategic planning process. She also facilitated several meetings to address infrastructure needs.

For their part, board members should ask the tough questions before funders do, namely: “What does this organization really need to succeed?” “Where are we underinvesting?” and “What are the risks we’re taking by underinvesting in these areas?” Board members should encourage nonprofit leaders to develop strategies that explicitly recognize infrastructure needs. In developing plans for infrastructure, board members can help, notes Chris Brahm, chairman of the board of directors at Larkin Street Youth Services, a San Francisco nonprofit that serves homeless and runaway youth: “The people running agencies are often consumed with programs and raising money. Board members, whether businesspeople or otherwise, can bring external perspective on overhead services.”

At LGON, for example, the executive director identified a handful of board members who were fervent supporters of the emerging strategic vision. These board members then communicated to their colleagues how much overhead this vision would require.

During these discussions, both board members and managers should focus on how investments in infrastructure will benefit the organization’s beneficiaries, rather than reduce costs. Even within the confines of a “cost conversation,” they should emphasize how infrastructure investments may actually reduce the costs of serving beneficiaries over time. One organization in our study, for instance, determined that an investment in technological infrastructure yielded $350,000 per year by freeing up staff time and consolidating “scrappy” systems.

Finally, organizations must attempt to educate their donors. “Donors don’t want to pay for an organization’s rent, or phone bill, or stamps,” notes Paul, “but those are essential components of everyday work. You can’t run a high-performing organization from your car. And there are many ways to explain these types of expenses to donors.”

Both funders and grantees are feeling the sting of the current recession. But this economic downturn is no excuse to cut overhead funding. “If a nonprofit’s leaders are feeling as if they cannot raise money to support overhead, I think they’re confusing the issue,” says Brahm. “The real issue is that they can’t raise enough money, period. Either they do not have, or they have not been able to communicate, a results story that is compelling to funders.”

Rather than being the reason to reduce overhead spending, the recession is an excellent opportunity to redress decades-long underinvestment in nonprofit infrastructure. “There is real potential for change if all of the major stakeholders—government, private funders, and the nonprofits themselves—take steps to acknowledge that capacity building is critical to the health of an organization,” says McAuliffe. And although the forces that fuel the nonprofit starvation cycle are strong, the opportunity to achieve more for beneficiaries in the long term should compel funders and grantees alike to stop the cycle.

Former Bridgespan Group manager William Bedsworth contributed to this article.

Notes

See also Kennard Wing, Tom Pollak, and Patrick Rooney, How Not to Empower the Nonprofit Sector: Under-Resourcing and Misreporting Spending on Organizational Infrastructure, Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Nonprofit Management, 2004. Wing, Pollak, and Rooney are three of the lead researchers on the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Study.
William H. Woodwell Jr. and Lori Bartczak, Is Grantmaking Getting Smarter? A National Study of Philanthropic Practice, Washington, D.C.: Grantmakers for Eff ective Organizations, 2008.
Kennard Wing and Mark Hager, Who Feels Pressure to Contain Overhead Costs?, Paper presented at the ARNOVA Annual Conference, 2004.
Holly Hall, Harvy Lipman, and Martha Voelz, “Charities’ Zero-Sum Filing Game,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, May 18, 2000.
White House Office of Management and Budget, Circular A-122 (Revised): Cost Principles for Nonprofit Organizations.
Jeanne Bell, Richard Moyers, and Timothy Wolfred, Daring to Lead 2006: A National Study of Nonprofit Executive Leadership, San Francisco: CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, 2006.

Ann Goggins Gregory is the director of knowledge management at the Bridgespan Group and a former consultant in Bridgespan’s strategy area. In her consulting work, Ann’s clients included education and youth development organizations, as well as foundations.

Don Howard is a partner at the Bridgespan Group, where he leads the San Francisco office. His clients have included foundations and nonprofits working to alleviate poverty, end homelessness, revitalize neighborhoods, end inequities in education, and improve the environment.

Posted in Civil Society, Finance Services | Tagged Stanford | Leave a comment

Scary Account of Unknown Plague Affecting East Flower Garden Bank, offshore Texas.

Posted on July 29, 2016 by Bruce

Passed along by Wendy Ann Lee, based on this account in the NOAA Sanctuaries web site. . .

<http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/news/jul16/noaa-scientists-report-mass-die-off-of-invertebrates-at-east-flower-garden-bank.html>

NOAA scientists report mass die-off of invertebrates at East Flower Garden Bank in Gulf of Mexico

Sanctuary recommends public avoid diving, fishing, boating activities in affected area

By Dr. Steve Gittings, steve.gittings
Chief Scientist, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries

July 2016

A white mat of unknown material coats a dying sponge at the East Flower Garden Bank during a large-scale mortality event. Image: FGBNMS/G.P. Schmahl

On Monday, sport divers on the M/V Fling, diving in the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles offshore of Texas and Louisiana, were stunned to find green, hazy water, huge patches of ugly white mats coating corals and sponges, and dead animals littering the bottom on the East Flower Garden Bank, a reef normally filled with color and marine life. The reef, which is part of Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, is considered one of the healthiest anywhere in the region.

The charter captain alerted scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), who were doing annual monitoring work a few hundred yards away on the same reef. The scientists are now reporting that a large-scale mortality event of unknown cause is underway on this bank.

Coats of white mats covering dying star corals during a large-scale mortality event at the East Flower Garden Bank. Image credit: FGBNMS/G.P. SchmahlThe divers and researchers found unprecedented numbers of dying corals, sponges, sea urchins, brittle stars, clams and other invertebrates on large but separate patches of the reef. Sanctuary Research Coordinator Emma Hickerson reported extensive white mats covering corals and sponges, and estimates the mortality of corals to be nearly 50 percent in some of the affected areas. The spatial extent of the event is still being determined, but Hickerson says the die-off has so far been seen at three dive sites that charter boats typically use when they visit the bank.

Oddly, there was no evidence of the mass die-off at the site used for long-term monitoring of the bank since the late 1980s, where the scientists had been working when they first heard the news. Annual monitoring at the sanctuary is co-funded by NOAA, BOEM and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. Twelve miles away, the reefs of the West Flower Garden Bank remain vibrant, bathed in clear, blue water and free of the problem for now.

A massive star coral impacted by a large-scale mortality event at the East Flower Garden Bank. These corals are hundreds and hundreds of years old, and can be lost in a matter of days. Image credit: FGBNMS/G.P. SchmahlUntil the problem is sorted out, NOAA is recommending the public avoid diving, fishing, and boating activities on the East Flower Garden Bank. This is primarily to prevent the transmission of whatever is causing the mass mortality to unaffected locations, but also could protect divers from ingesting what could be harmful pathogens or toxins.

“At present, we are not aware of any specific risks to humans, but we are recommending this action as a precaution until more is known about the cause,” said G.P. Schmahl, Sanctuary Superintendent.

The remains of a sea urchin recently dead from a large-scale mortality event at the East Flower Garden Banks laying atop dying star coral colonies – these are coated with a white mat of unknown material. Image credit: FGBNMS/G.P. Schmahl Several potential causes of the outbreak will be investigated, including poor water quality, disease pathogens and chemical spills. Each alone could cause mortality in coral reef organisms, but more likely, a combination of stressors is at work.

“We know of no spills that have recently occurred near the Flower Garden Banks,” said Schmahl, “but water temperature over the banks is quite high, at 86 degrees.” In addition, large plumes of low-salinity coastal water have moved offshore following months of extreme rainfall in the region. That water is rich with plankton, nutrients and chemicals that arrive to the Gulf through runoff and river discharges. As the plumes decay, oxygen levels in the water can decrease.

Tissue sloughing off a recently dead brain coral succumbing to a large-scale mortality event at the East Flower Garden Bank. Image credit: FGBNMS/G.P. SchmahlCombined, these stressors could make coral reefs animals and plants more prone to disease outbreaks, or simply fuel the growth of bacterial or algae mats that smother the reefs. Scientists from around the world are offering advice and assistance in trying to help discover the cause.

Isolated bleaching events and unconfirmed cases of diseases have been reported at the Flower Garden Banks in the past. Overall, however, the health and stability of the sanctuary’s invertebrate and fish populations have been in stark contrast to coral reefs around the world that have degraded over the last four decades.

A deadly white mat coats a sponge between star and brain coral at the East Flower Garden Banks. Image credit: FGBNMS/G.P. Schmahl.Concern now is that the isolation of the banks, which many believe has been shielding them from human impacts, may not be enough to fully protect them anymore. But from what? The sanctuary and the science community are desperately trying to figure that out.

To learn more:
Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
http://flowergarden.noaa.gov/

BOEM Science Notes – Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary
http://www.boem.gov/2014-03-Science-Notes/

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Carib Journal Op Ed: Marine Pollution in the Caribbean

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Bruce

from the Carib Journal <http://www.caribjournal.com/2016/07/21/op-ed-marine-pollution-caribbean/?utm_source=Caribbean+Journal&utm_campaign=59065adaf4-Caribbean+Journal&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ea4e1e4090-59065adaf4-188909129>

[Ship-borne waste may be a contributor to marine pollution in the Caribbean, but I question whether it’s a major source, and whether addressing ship-borne waste issues (with their high capital costs as outlined in this discussion) are the most cost-effective tactics for reducing marine and coastal ecosystem impairments. My own bet would be that on-island investments in a variety of strategies to reduce forms of land-based run-off would do more to increase the productivity of the coastal and marine environment on a dollar-for-dollar basis than any ship-borne waste program. Furthermore, the capital-intensive nature of ship-borne waste management activities described here require a much higher proportion of imported products and technologies than increasing the competence and changing the land management activities of local farmers, developers and residents. bp]

Op-Ed: Marine Pollution in the Caribbean

July 21st, 2016 | 9:35 pm

Exploring Marine Pollution and the Caribbean Maritime Transport Industry

By George Nicholson and Rachael Robinson
Op-Ed Contributors

Pollution of the world’s oceans is globally recognized as one of our highest environmental concerns. The oceans are regarded as the transportation highways for shipping, tourism and commerce, and with this abundance of ships, there is a significant amount of ship-generated waste that needs disposal. International conventions guide both states and masters of vessels on handling ship generated wastes and, depending on the nature of the waste, these regulations determine whether it may be discharged into the ocean or disposed of on land once the ships come into port. Given the scope and intensity of shipping in the Greater Caribbean, as well as the sensitive nature the Caribbean Sea itself, ship-generated waste presents a significant threat to regions’ marine ecosystems.

In light of this sensitivity and given that the region serves as a major hub for the global shipping industry, the capacity of ports or states to handle and dispose of ship-generated waste itself is a complex issue.

It is well recognised that marine pollution, including oil, chemicals, garbage, sewage, and food waste, which are all being dumped into the ocean, negatively affects industries related to the ocean such as fishing and tourism. In light of this recognition the international community developed the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, otherwise known as the MARPOL Convention, as the principal international treaty governing ship-generated waste.

The Convention, written in 1973 and modified in 1978 focuses on the regulation of ship-generated waste.

Under the provisions of MARPOL, waste is categorized into six annexes, allowing restrictions to be placed on groups of materials rather than on specific substances, and further defines separate requirements for the disposal of each. Annex I and II which cover the prevention of pollution by oil, and noxious liquids carried in bulk respectively, are subject to compulsory ratification by all parties while Annexes III to VI, which introduces requirements to control pollution of the sea by noxious substances and sewage from ships, are optional and must be ratified separately. Of all the annexes, oil (Annex I) and garbage (Annex V) are the most common and make up the majority of waste tonnage. Annex V which focuses on Prevention of Pollution by Garbage from Ships sets restrictions on the handling of garbage, including all food, domestic, and operational waste and completely prohibits the dumping of plastics at sea.

Due to its heavy maritime traffic, sensitive and fragile marine ecosystem, and the nature of the currents through the region, the Caribbean Sea was designated a Special Area with restrictions under MARPOL Annex V in 2011. This is of key importance to the region as special areas are provided with a higher level of protection than other areas, and strict rules apply for the disposal of garbage from ships. Within the Wider Caribbean Region, vessels operating are prohibited from discharging any garbage, with the exception of food waste which may be discharged subject to certain conditions, if the vessel is at least 12 nautical miles from the nearest land. Implementation of this special area status however is not without its own challenges.

The designation recognizes the ecological sensitivity of the region, but puts additional strain on the region’s port waste collection infrastructure. This is especially problematic in the context of the region’s Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which rely heavily on ships coming into their ports, but may lack the means to dispose of the additional waste they bring. Cruise ships, for instance, are critical to the economies of many SIDS, but they also produce significantly more waste than container ships. Although vessel traffic in the region is one of the primary contributors to the tourist-driven economy, limited financial resources curtail the ability of small states to construct appropriate facilities.

Given that ships must now offload all of their waste in ports, since the volume that was once dumped into the sea must now be processed at ports, there is the risk that region’s ports may become overburdened as they lack the infrastructure or reception facilities necessary to handle this increase. Whilst the majority of ports in the region have reported to have adequate port reception facilities, high costs of disposal, and other factors may lead some mariners to illegally discharge of their ship’s waste in the Caribbean’s waters.

With an average of five million barrels of crude oil being transported daily throughout the Wider Caribbean Region, together with an annual total of 70 million tons passing through the Panama Canal, it is estimated that approximately 250 major and minor oil spills will occur each year in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

However, studies show that of the sixty-plus Caribbean ports that handle oil and oil derivatives, oil/slop or ballast reception facilities are lacking. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) Global Integrated Shipping Information System further reveals a great need for the availability of data regarding port reception facilities (discharge restrictions, charges, availability of facilities, etc.), particularly in the Small Island Developing States (IMO, 2016). Port State Control inspectors in the territories are responsible for determining if vessels are adhering to international agreements, and have committed to inspecting a minimum of 15% of international ships calling at their ports, but given the vastness of the Caribbean Sea, and the lack of capacity of some member states, there is a significant probability that illegal dumping may go undetected.

Pollution already affects the marine environment and will continue to do so in the Special Area unless territories are able to provide ports with inexpensive and efficient waste disposal systems, either on the port itself or through offsite facilities. Unless disposal is desirable from the mariners’ point of view, pollution will continue in the face of such challenges; consequently compliance with the provisions of MARPOL may not be universal.

In spite of these challenges, through effective enforcement, Caribbean countries have a significant opportunity to improve the region’s marine ecological footprint. Ideally, there must be either an improvement to port infrastructure or other means of improving waste management in the Caribbean on a regional basis and given the difficulties in enforcement, any solution proposed must be both convenient and cost-effective to incentivise compliance.

While there have been improvements, the enactment of the relevant instruments into national legislation to further support the international regulatory framework would also assist the region in meeting its obligations. A successful solution will allow shipping and commerce to continue with minimal hindrance but also result in a significant reduction in the area’s marine pollution.

George Nicholson is the Director of Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction and Rachael Robinson is the Transport and Disaster Risk Reduction Research Assistant of the Association of Caribbean States. Any comments or feedback should be submitted to feedback

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