The following is an article from
The Tyee, thanks
Loam for the link. I print the article in full, as don't think there is a more pressing problem than the survival of our species. We live in an infinitely varied and precarious environment that depends on balance for its survival, we ride roughshod over that finely balanced structure at our peril. The situation described in detail in the article is an indictment of the economic system under which we live. We have developed a system of perpetual economic growth, aimed at profit, with no thought to sustainability or the needs of our people. As humans we seem to have virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, and a cavalier attitude to self destruction. The rapid depletion of the planet's finite resources, both living and material, is having, and will continue to have, a disastrous effect on that delicate balance of the ecosystems of our planet, that is all the life that depends on that planet. Sadly, I believe that we will not address these problems as long as we cling to the economic system that is responsible for this impending disaster, namely capitalism. Until we understand that problem, the other problems will only be exacerbated by that greed driven exploitative economic system of capitalism. We would do well to remember, spaceship Earth has no escape capsule.
A curious thing about H.
sapiens is that we are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail —
various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet
not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced
predicament.
This was underscored once again in October when
scientists reported that flying insect populations in Germany have
declined by an alarming 75 per cent in the past three decades
accompanied, in the past dozen years, by a 15 per cent drop in bird populations.
Trends are similar in other parts of Europe where data are available.
Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal
scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile,
domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall.
Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across
the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and
fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and
bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?
Too bad. Biodiversity loss may turn out to be the sleeper issue of the
century. It is caused by many individual but interacting factors —
habitat loss, climate change, intensive pesticide use and various forms
of industrial pollution, for example, suppress both insect and bird
populations. But the overall driver is what an ecologist might call the
“competitive displacement” of non-human life by the inexorable growth of
the human enterprise.
On a finite planet where millions of
species share the same space and depend on the same finite products of
photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species necessarily
drives the contraction and extinction of others. (Politicians take note —
there is always a conflict between human population/economic expansion
and “protection of the environment.”)
Remember the 40 to 60
million bison that used to roam the great plains of North America? They —
along with the millions of deer, pronghorns, wolves and lesser beasts
that once animated prairie ecosystems — have been “competitively
displaced,” their habitats taken over by a much greater biomass of
humans, cattle, pigs and sheep. And not just North Americans — Great
Plains sunshine also supports millions of other people-with-livestock
around world who depend, in part on North American grain, oil-seed,
pulse and meat exports.
Competitive displacement has been
going on for a long time. Scientists estimate that at the dawn of
agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapiens comprised less than one per
cent of the total weight of mammals on the planet. (There were probably
only two to four million people on Earth at the time.) Since then,
humans have grown to represent 35 per cent of a much larger total
biomass; toss in domestic pets and livestock, and human domination of
the world’s mammalian biomass rises to 98.5 per cent!
One needs look no further to explain why wildlife populations globally have plunged by nearly 60 per cent in the past half century.
Wild tigers have been driven from 93 per cent of their historic range
and are down to fewer than 4,000 individuals globally; the population of
African elephants has imploded by as much as 95 per cent to only
500,000 today; poaching drove black rhino numbers from an already much
reduced 70,000 in 1960 to only 2,500 individuals in the early 1990s.
(With intense conservation effort, they have since rebounded to about
5,000). And those who still think Canada is still a mostly pristine and
under-populated wilderness should think again — half the wildlife
species regularly monitored in this country are in decline, with an
average population drop of 83 per cent since 1970. Did I mention that
B.C.’s southern resident killer whale population is down to only 76 animals?
That’s in part because human fishers have displaced the orcas from
their favoured food, Chinook salmon, even as we simultaneously displace
the salmon from their spawning streams through hydro dams, pollution and urbanization.
The story is similar for familiar species everywhere and likely
worse for non-charismatic fauna. Scientists estimate that the “modern”
species extinction rate is 1,000 to as much as 10,000 times the natural background rate.
The global economy is busily converting living nature into human bodies
and domestic livestock largely unnoticed by our increasingly urban
populations. Urbanization distances people psychologically as well as
spatially from the ecosystems that support them.
The human
band-wagon may really have started rolling 10 millennia ago but the past
two centuries of exponential growth greatly have accelerated the pace
of change. It took all of human history — let’s say 200,000 years — for
our population to reach one billion in the early 1800s, but only 200
years, 1/1000th as much time, to hit today’s 7.6 billion! Meanwhile,
material demand on the planet has ballooned even more — global GDP has
increased by over 100-fold since 1800; average per capita incomes by a
factor of 13. (rising to 25-fold in the richest countries).
Consumption has exploded accordingly — half the fossil fuels and many
other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past
40 years. (See graphs in: Steffen, W et al. 2015. The trajectory of the
Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review, Volume: 2
Issue: 1, page(s): 81-98.)
Why does any of this matter,
even to those who don’t really give a damn about nature per se? Apart
from the moral stain associated with extinguishing thousands of other
life-forms, there are purely selfish reasons to be concerned. For
example, depending on climate zone, 78 per cent to 94 per cent of
flowering plants, including many human food species, are pollinated by
insects, birds and even bats.
(Bats — also in trouble in many places — are the major or exclusive
pollinators of 500 species in at least 67 families of plants.) As much
as 35 per cent of the world’s crop production is more or less dependent
on animal pollination, which ensures or increases the production of 87
leading food crops worldwide.
But there is a deeper reason to
fear the depletion and depopulation of nature. Absent life, planet
earth is just an inconsequential wet rock with a poisonous atmosphere
revolving pointlessly around an ordinary star on the outer fringes of an
undistinguished galaxy. It is life itself, beginning with countless
species of microbes, that gradually created the “environment” suitable
for life on Earth as we know it. Biological processes are responsible
for the life-friendly chemical balance of the oceans; photosynthetic
bacteria and green plants have stocked and maintain Earth’s atmosphere
with the oxygen necessary for the evolution of animals; the same
photosynthesis gradually extracted billions of tonnes of carbon from the
atmosphere, storing it in chalk, limestone and fossil fuel deposits, so
that Earth’s average temperature (currently about 15 C) has remained
for geological ages in the narrow range that makes water-based life
possible, even as the sun has been warming (i.e. stable climate is
partially a biological phenomenon.); countless species of bacteria,
fungi and a veritable menagerie of micro-fauna continuously regenerate
the soils that grow our food. (Unfortunately, depletion-by-agriculture
is even faster — by some accounts we have only just over a
half-century’s worth of arable soils left).
In short, H. sapiens depends utterly on a rich diversity of life-forms
to provide various life-support functions essential to the existence and
continued survival of human civilization. With an unprecedented
human-induced great global die-off well under way, what are the chances
the functional integrity of the ecosphere will survive the next doubling
of material consumption that everyone expects before mid-century?
Here’s the thing: climate change is not the only shadow darkening
humanity’s doorstep. While you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream
media, biodiversity loss arguably poses an equivalent existential threat
to civilized existence. While we’re at it, let’s toss soil/landscape
degradation, potential food or energy shortages and other resource
limits into the mix. And if you think we’ll probably be able to “handle”
four out of five such environmental problems, it doesn’t matter. The
relevant version of Liebig’s Law
states that any complex system dependent on several essential inputs
can be taken down by that single factor in least supply (and we haven’t
yet touched upon the additional risks posed by the geopolitical turmoil
that would inevitably follow ecological destabilization). read more
Which raises questions of more than mere academic interest. Why are we
not collectively terrified or at least alarmed? If our best science
suggests we are en route to systems collapse, why are collapse — and
collapse avoidance — not the primary subjects of international political
discourse? Why is the world community not engaged in vigorous debate of
available initiatives and trans-national institutional mechanisms that
could help restore equilibrium to the relationship between humans and
the rest of nature?
There are many policy options, from simple
full-cost pricing and consumption taxes; through population initiatives
and comprehensive planning for a steady-state economy; to general
education for voluntary (and beneficial) lifestyle changes, all of which
would enhance global society’s prospects for long-term survival. Unique
human qualities, from high intelligence (e.g., reasoning from the
evidence), through the capacity to plan ahead to moral consciousness,
may well be equal to the task but lie dormant — there is little hint of
political willingness to acknowledge the problem let alone elaborate
genuine solutions (which the Paris climate accord is not).
Bottom line? The world seems in denial of looming disaster; the “C” word
remains unvoiced. Governments everywhere dismissed the 1992 scientists’
Warning to Humanity
that “...a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on
it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided” and will
similarly ignore the scientists’ “second notice."
(Published on Nov. 13, this warning states that most negative trends
identified 25 years earlier “are getting far worse.”) Despite cascading
evidence and detailed analysis to the contrary, the world community
trumpets “growth-is-us” as its contemporary holy grail. Even the United
Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are fixed on economic expansion
as the only hammer for every problematic nail. Meanwhile, greenhouse
gases reach to at an all-time high, marine dead-zones proliferate,
tropical forests fall and extinctions accelerate.
Just what is going on here? The full explanation of this potentially fatal human enigma is no doubt complicated,
but Herman Melville summed it up well enough in Moby Dick: “There is no
folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the
madness of men.”
