Missing Baselines
I've recently had the privilege of following the Alaska Commission on Science and Engineering through a series of public meetings in Southeastern. I earned the privilege chiefly by throwing myself across my commissioner-spouse's luggage and sniveling loudly until he agreed to buy me a ticket. Even as a mere tagalong, I learned a lot on the trip.
Southeastern Alaska covers a lot of territory, and people have many different concerns. Yet one theme kept reappearing in different connections everywhere: from atmospheric chemistry to zoology, Alaska is short of baseline data.
"Baseline" is something of a buzzword. It emerged from scientific publications into popular consciousness at about the time the Environmental Protection Agency hit the headlines. Originally borrowed from engineering, where the baseline is the primary line, the one from which others are measured, it has come to mean something akin to a definition of the natural state of a system.
If baseline data aren't available, problems are inevitable. Sitka had a painful lesson in that recently. The town was a center for a thriving new fishery in which divers collected sea cucumbers. (Despite the name, sea cucumbers are animals. These marine invertebrates do look something like oversized cucumbers, but rather old and moldy ones.) Though not popular for American menus, probably because they look intrinsically inedible, sea cucumbers are a delicacy in the Orient. They are not hard to catch--they just lie on the bottom, looking inedible--and suitable waters in Southeastern harbor great numbers of them. Some three hundred people were involved in the new fishery, until state authorities brought it to an abrupt close.
They had to. Naive communities had protested that this natural resource was being dangerously exploited--maybe. No one could be sure. No one has any idea how much harvesting the population can stand; there are no statistics on recruitment or population profiles; nobody is certain even about the reproductive cycle of Alaska sea cucumbers. So no one knew if the fishery was based on animals five years or five decades old. Given that level of ignorance, stringent regulation is the only prudent course.
The underemployed divers who spoke to the commission were not blaming anyone in particular for this lack of knowledge. They understood that gathering baseline data is not really the business of the university, and that it certainly hadn't been the business of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That agency has to hustle to keep up with the need for knowledge on the already-established fisheries. And the divers had certainly heard politicians baying about cutting yet more stringently in every agency budget. If some foresighted researchers had proposed ten years back that a thorough study of sea cucumbers was economically necessary, they'd have been met with laughter if not terminations notices. Yet ten years is pretty short for establishing a reliable baseline; natural systems show a great deal of variability.
I was reminded of that in Ketchikan, where one local chemist reported--almost in passing--that he'd been taking informal measurements of the acidity of rainfall at his home. Over ten years, the pH had gone from about 6.4 to 5.4; Ketchikan's copious precipitation has become considerably more acid. Or so he says, but he's the first to admit the measurements are no part of any agency program. Do his results reflect a real change or merely an increasing output of the nearby pulp mill, and hence a purely local effect? Nobody knows; his work is as close to a baseline as anyone has.
Those are only two examples of many. From the nature of soil bacteria communities in a healthy rain forest to the population dynamics of horse clams, the missing baseline is plaguing Southeasterners. It's unusual for a collection of scientists to hear citizens calling for more basic research, but the Alaskans speaking up before the commission had a keen sense of the direct economic impact caused by holes in the data base. Without baselines, we can't decide what's foul and what's fair.
