MIA > Archive > Kidron > Presence of Future
Unbridled economic growth leads to the depletion and degradation of natural resources, the disruption of natural services, a deterioration of human health. The technical fixes, government regulations and market incentives proffered as solutions are unlikely to significantly alleviate the environmental stress. The outlook is grim.
Market society’s savage material growth coupled with its assumptions that natural resources are essentially inexhaustible, and that there are bottomless sinks for its refuse, set it apart from all others in its relation to nature – with far-reaching consequences ......
...... Depletion affects renewables as well as fixed resources. There is a threshold beyond which harvesting of seafood or wood or fresh water can be maintained only by consuming the resource base itself.
Forests are a key example: since 3000 BC some 4,000 square kilometres a year on average have been lost; since 1800 the toll has been 105,000 square kilometres a year, and since the early 1980s up to 200,000 a year. Tropical forests, home to most of the world’s species, have disappeared even faster: between 1979 and 1989 the annual loss nearly doubled. The broad picture today is of 0.2 percent a year in overall forest cover disappearing and 1 percent per year of tropical forests. Countries that were exporters of timber, Thailand and the Philippines for example, have become net importers, and others – Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria – are on the brink of the transition. At current rates of destruction there will be no tropical forest left in fifty years.
Closely linked to deforestation is the extinction of species.
There are no dodos left. The last one was seen on Mauritius in 1662. There are also no Silver Bears (last seen in Mexico in 1964), no Dawson’s caribou (last seen in 1908 on Queen Charlotte Islands, British Colombia, no Jamaican Long-Tongued Bats (last seen in 1900). More than 29,000 species of animals and higher plants were at risk of extinction at the turn of the millennium.
Seven hundred animal species, including tigers, jaguars, cougars, cheetahs, 23 types of whale, four types of rhinoceros, 10 bear and two panda species, the mountain gorilla and the African elephant, are threatened with extinction.
The same is true of birds (107 species listed as extinct since 1600, and 1107, one-tenth of the current total, as endangered); of reptiles (20 extinct and 1253, 3 percent of the total, endangered); of fish (172 extinct and 734, 3 percent of the estimated total, threatened); of amphibians (5 extinct, 124 threatened, 3 percent); and of higher plants (more than 400 extinct since 1600, and 30,827, a ninth of the estimated total, endangered.
Exterminations have multiplied in market society. Whereas one species of bird or mammal died out every 5.7 years on average between 1600 and 1800, the rate of extinction almost doubled in the first half of the nineteenth century, and then doubled again in the second half. In the first half of last century, a bird or mammal species became extinct every 1.1 years on average. Four-to-six thousand species are currently disappearing each year, some 10,000 times the naturally-occurring extinction rate prior to the appearance of human beings. A fifth of all the species living at the beginning of last century had disappeared by its end.
Particularly significant in this regard is the decline in fish stocks on which a billion people depend for more than a third of their animal proteins. The world catch peaked in 1989 and has been falling steadily since. It looks to continue its downward path reducing average consumption per head by a quarter to a half by the middle of this century.
Hunting – for food, sport or trade – is only part of the story, accounting for perhaps a third of extinctions. The destruction and fragmentation of habitats is the larger part: Africa and Asia have lost two-thirds of their original wildlife habitats, and what remains is often broken up by roads, urban and industrial development, dams, mining and quarrying operations, forest clearances and drainage of wetlands, which undermine the balance and viability of biota.
You might think that the millions or billions of bits of information carried in the genes of every micro-organism, plant or animal formed as the outcome of astronomic numbers of mutations and episodes of natural selection over thousands or millions of years are an irreplaceable treasure-trove; that we can do better than depend on 30 varieties of plant for 95 percent of our diet, and explore the 7,000 or so plants that have nourished people in the past.
You might think that the webs of interdependence between predator and prey, between host and parasite beget ecological stability; that the wider the array of plant and animal species in an ecosystem, the more dynamic and resilient it will be; that it is simply irresponsible to lose sight of the ‘genetic pharmacopoeia’, an essential aid in the race against the parasites and pests which afflict us and our living supports. On this view it is simply mad to have lost three-quarters of the varieties in the world’s top twenty crops since the Second World War; or to depend on only one variety of cow – the Holstein – for the commercial production of milk, as is the case in Canada, or on five apple varieties in British Columbia where there were once fifty; or on six varieties of potato or wheat, and two of pea. It is just as mad, although understandable, for East German farmers to have switched, after unification, from growing a blend of barleys, which reduced fungal infestation, to growing, a ‘pure’ barley, with identical properties of seed size, nitrogen content and germinating time, demanded by West German maltsters, seed and chemical companies. Eliminating landraces in this way is like taking stones from the foundation to repair the roof.
You also might think that we have hardly sensed the unimaginably rich tapestry of relationships we might weave with other species; or that our spiritual and imaginative lives can only be impoverished, and our sensory world dulled by the loss of other ways of being, ungoverned by our own. In other words, you might think that every extinction diminishes humanity, incalculably and irreversibly.
On the other hand, you might regret the loss of species and the Disneyfication of nature but consider biodiversity to be less important than the immediate well-being of the people engaged in its abridgement. You might adopt a fatalistic stance and conclude that the hecatomb currently taking place is merely one of a series that has affected life on earth from time immemorial – at the close of the Ordovician period some 440 million years ago when 85 percent of species disappeared, and then at the close of the Devonian, 365 million years ago when 80 percent disappeared, the Permian (250 million years ago, 95 percent), the Triassic (205 million years ago, 80 percent) and the Cretaceous (66 million years ago, 75 percent of all species) – and that Nature will recover as it always has.
This time Nature might not. What distinguishes the current mass extinctions from its predecessors is the loss of key environments not because of some external event (the impact of an asteroid, unusual geothermal activity, changes in sunspot activity), but arising from human agency. We seem destined to destroy most, if not virtually all, of the tropical forest that has been the hot-house of evolution, generating more species than other environments and furthering diversification and species change faster than any other. If, in the past, tropical forests shrank to a small fraction of their previous extent – one-tenth during the drier phases of the late Pleistocene for example – they nonetheless survived with a sufficient stock of biota to recolonize suitable territory when moist conditions returned. In particular, the plant species on which the evolutionary rebound rested survived more or less intact. Death did not mean the end of birth. Today it might: the present extinction looks likely to eliminate a fifth to a quarter of terrestrial plant species within the next 40-50 years and a good many more in the following half-century, denying a continuing source of food and shelter to the replacement animal species generated by subsequent evolutionary processes ......
...... The effect of environmental dilapidation goes beyond the direct impact on individual health. It causes the eco-flight which every year turns tens of millions of people into economic refugees when their life supports slip below what is needed to sustain a customary, or even a subsistence, way of life.
What has brought about these increasingly painful encounters between us and our natural limits? One simple answer is that there are too many of us. If, as seems likely, it took 4 million years for the few tens of thousands proto-humans to multiply into the 6 million or so humans who lived in Neolithic times, the rate of increase accelerated ever since. Two thousand years ago, world population might have numbered 250 million. It reached some 771 million by 1750; climbed to a little over a billion by 1850 and is over 6 billion today. It is currently expanding at a rate never attained before – 1.85 percent a year, doubling every 38 years, in some places, Kenya for example, every 17 years. I find it daunting to think that I was born into a world inhabited by only one third of its present number.
Population has clearly overshot the earth’s ability to sustain it at prevailing levels and with prevailing techniques. A study of 117 countries prepared by three United Nations agencies in the mid-1970s concluded that, even if they fully modernized their agriculture, and allowing the continued depletion of non-renewable resources and continued environmental damage,19 of them would not be able to feed the 47 million of their combined populations by the year 2000. If they modernized partially, 36 countries would fall short with an ‘excess population’ of 136 million. With low inputs and little modernization, 65 states would fall short, and contain a surplus population of 441 million. That year has passed, and it appears that 47 countries cannot fully feed their 860 million people.
Relax the assumptions further. Allow for the free flow of foodstuffs from surplus to deficit areas. Even then it would require a rare streak of luck for the world to support its increasing population for much longer. At prevailing rates of expansion (2 percent per year) and of soil loss (one tenth of one percent a year) land under cultivation will increase by about a fifth to 1.2 billion hectares by 2200, enough to feed under 5 billion people at current yields and current patterns of consumption, compared with an expected, cautiously estimated, population double that.
Food production is the most obvious measure of the planet’s carrying capacity. There are others, as important if less noticeable, such as temperature which ties in with agriculture in many ways, or the ability of the ecosystem to absorb human waste, or the efficiency of photosynthesis and the degree to which it can be appropriated by humans. All of them can be swamped by numbers.
But numbers are not everything. What matters is weighted numbers. In the poorest countries the average person consumes an amount of traditional fuel (biomass) equivalent to 1 or 2 barrels of oil a year, compared to 10-30 barrels in Europe or Japan and more than 40 in the US. The average German emits ten times the greenhouse gases emitted by the average Egyptian, three times the volume of ozone-depleting substances than the average Filipino, and produces three-and-a-half times the amount of solid waste and 95 times the hazardous waste produced by the average person in poor countries generally. The typical North American consumes 50 times more resources than a typical Indian, and the total of resources used by the North American population is equivalent to what twelve-and-a-quarter Indian populations would use in current circumstances. They use 30–36 times as much energy as an average Indian; twice as much as an average European. They consume 7,200 litres of water a day on average compared with an average Indian’s 25 litres and use 60 times the resources used by the average Chinese or Indian. (The average American cat eats more beef than the average Costa Rican person.) In sum, the effective US population is not 250 million but 5.75 billion, just short of the world’s current actual total, Britain’s effective population is not the 57 million enumerated in the census but 855 million, slightly more than India’s (853 million).
From where the average person stands, the average American, European or Japanese makes outrageous claims on the world’s resources, and lives a life of preposterous self-indulgence. And that is only the average. At the top of the scale, the richest tenth in the US emitted eleven times as much as the poorest fifth. At the very summit there are 250 or so dollar-billionaires in receipt of some 2.5 percent of world income (as much as the populations of China and Indonesia combined) whose claim on the world’s resources is positively grotesque. Level out these 250’s environmental impact and there would be room for 1.5 billion more Indians and the like. Reduce 250 million average Americans to average human proportions and as many as six billions more could be accommodated. Can Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates be as valuable as 600,000 Indians in any conceivable valuation?
Think of what would happen if the rest of the world attained American standards of consumption, of beef for example. The cattle population, 1.34 billion (in 1999), and with a mass greater than that of the human population, would increase by over a fifth to 2 billion. Tropical forests would be felled for grazing on an even larger scale than now as more hamburgers, each claiming six square yards of land, are produced. Emissions of methane, the most potent of the greenhouse gases, would rise by 3–4 percent. Mountains of manure around feedlots and factory farms, would contaminate rivers, lakes, underground waters and seas, and add their own quota of methane to the atmosphere. As it is, France, Belgium and the Netherlands (‘manure-surplus’ countries) are unable to absorb the quantities they produce. Erosion – for which cattle and feed-crop production are heavily responsible – would proceed faster than now, as would the pressure on species that compete with cattle for food and water.
But even weighted numbers do not explain everything. The incentives and the competition which govern behaviour are crucial to understanding peoples’ environmental impact. In the most general terms, the degradation of land and the attendant loss in the world’s carrying capacity are inevitable when what is extracted from the cultivators – in rent, taxes, low product prices, interest on loans, by landlords, governments, or the World Bank – is more than they can deliver without jeopardizing their subsistence, and they are driven to extract more from the soil by mining its fertility, its trees or other biological assets. In this way social exploitation is converted into environmental damage.
Some of the incentives derive from the exercise of sectional power, some simply from misguided policies, the sort that under-prices irrigation water and the electricity used for pumping it in many regions; or taxes wetlands more than irrigated cornfields; or encourages drainage; or subsidises fishing or rain-forest ranching, or agriculture in general; or sells logging rights at a fraction of replacement costs; or promotes population transfers; or promotes eco-tourism; or implements clearance in the name of reform – almost anything, it seems, that government touches.
Most of our pollution problems made a first appearance or became significantly worse after the Second World War, when synthetic detergents displaced soap powder; synthetic fibres displaced natural ones; aluminium, plastics and concrete displaced steel and wood; rail transport gave way to trucks; returnable bottles to throwaways; low-powered motor vehicles to high-powered ones; land was replaced by fertilizer; cultivators by herbicides; physical control of insect pests by chemical pesticides, range feeding by feedlots and factory farming. The technology of production changed more than the volume of output and was responsible in the US for 80–85 percent of the increase in pollutants in the 25 years following World War II (compared with 12–20 percent attributable to the increase in population and 1–5 percent attributable to increased affluence, except for passenger travel where it accounted for 40 percent).
Technological displacement is easily institutionalized. War and the preparation for it, for example. contribute to ecological stress both in their direct impact – via the destruction of habitats by defoliation, sowing of mines, explosions, firestorms, radioactive fallout etc. etc. – and indirectly through their prodigal use of polluting resources – one-quarter of aviation fuel finds its way into military aircraft. Altogether, the military could be held responsible for as much as a third of environmental degradation worldwide.
War and the preparations for it exemplify a larger cause of environmental mayhem: the distance that commonly exists between the movers and shakers in the market economy and those who live with the consequences – call it a lack of effective economic and political democracy, the lack of a shared moral universe, or whatever ......
...... How far we still are from taking the measures needed to halt activities we suspect of damaging the environment can be seen from the low development of ‘green consciousness’. Leave aside the abiding, long-lived traditional green consciousness, part of the prevailing culture amongst tribals, forest people, subsistence farmers on the margins of the modern market system, that is being destroyed as fast as these people and their societies are being extinguished.
Replacing it is a modern green consciousness, an outcome of ecological crisis, of choice of attitude, of distance from the rest of nature and of perspective – an abstract view, a political one, formulated as well as felt. This green consciousness flourishes at the heart of the market system and covers a wide spectrum. At one of its extremes are the ‘deep ecologists’ some of whom use the defence of nature to cover a deep misanthropy and aggression against their own species. At the other extreme are the revolutionary ecologists, the ‘red greens’, exemplified by the writer of this book, who attempt to see the full social, political and psychological implications of reintegrating humans with the rest of nature ......
These are edited extracts from Chapter 2 Nature.
Last updated on 13 November 2019