It's a Two-Way Street

We need rules, new rules for how humankind is to share this planet with other species. Emphasis on "share." We need to figure out what share other species require and, from that, what share we can take and still live in harmony with our planet. We need to do this before the whole thing comes crashing down on us and that is the course we are on right now.

The world is in the grip of a pandemic that is said to have been transmitted from bats to humans via a Chinese "wet market." We're used to this idea that living in immediate proximity to other creatures can create a gateway for the transmission of diseases from animals to humans. Think avian flu. Think swine flu. As I recall it, HIV was transmitted from primates or monkeys that bit a human.

Now we're finding out that this is a two-way street. Antibiotic-resistant human pathogens are now being found in wildlife. 

For 13 years now, scientist Michelle Power has been grabbing samples of human waste and animal poop from Antarctica to Australia to try and answer a vital question. 

Has the bacteria in humans that has grown resistant to antibiotics – an issue considered to be one of the world’s greatest health challenges – made its way into wildlife? 

The answer, it seems, is a resounding yes.

“I don’t think there’s been an animal where we haven’t found it,” says Power, an associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. 

The sorts of animals Power has chosen to look at most live close to humans or are urbanised – like possums – or animals that spend time with humans either in wildlife care facilities or in conservation breeding programs.

Power traveled to Antarctica and, sure enough, human pathogens were found  in the poop of penguins and seals.

According to the World Health Organisation, the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics is one of the world’s greatest health challenges facing humans, making treatment of dangerous diseases ever more challenging.

So far, Power says she has found evidence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in about a dozen animals, including bats, penguins, sea lions and wallabies.

This is not the greatest problem of the day, not even close. It is, however, more proof that humanity has gone too far. We've grown too large, too numerous, and, with every extra billion people we're forced to look further afield for land and resources to support our burgeoning numbers. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are metastasizing.

Most of us get up every morning and go about our normal routine whether that's heading to work or getting kids off to school. Day in, day out. The same old, same old. A source of great boredom. Except between yesterday morning and this morning a great deal has changed even if you don't notice it. This is called the Great Acceleration.  If you open the link you'll find chart after chart tracing the path of human activity since the 1950s. There's an eerie similarity to them. Sort of like a rocket launching from Cape Canaveral.  The Great Acceleration is also a theme of the 2018 Living Planet Report.  If you're not interested in reports and data, here's a nice video.



That video is six years out of date and much has occurred since it was produced.

I first stumbled across the bi-annual Living Planet Report in 2012. Many of the findings were/are eye-opening.

"Swelling population, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring carbon dioxide emissions mean humanity is putting a greater squeeze on the planet's resources then ever before. Particularly hard hit is the diversity of animals and plants, upon which many natural resources such as clean water are based. 

"The latest Living Planet report, published on Tuesday, estimates that global demand for natural resources has doubled since 1996 and that it now takes 1.5 years to regenerate the renewable resources used in one year by humans. By 2030, the report predicts it will take the equivalent of two planets to meet the current demand for resources. 

"Most alarming, says the report, is that many of these changes have accelerated in the past decade, despite the plethora of international conventions signed since the initial Rio Summit in 1992. Climate-warming carbon emissions have increased 40% in the past 20 years, but two-thirds of that rise occurred in the past decade."

The 2012 report indicated that, were the world to live at the consumption rate of Canadians, we would already need three Planet Earths to survive. That's strictly human consumption. No accommodation is factored in for other species. Let that sink in.

The 2014 Living Planet Report addressed the choke hold humanity was applying to other terrestrial species. 

The central theme is that, not only are humans consuming renewable resources at more than 1.5 times the Earth's ability to replenish them but animal and plant species are falling extinct because of it. We're not only eating our seed corn, we're eating their share too. To put this in context, over the past 40-years, the Earth has lost 50% of its wildlife.

"It is no coincidence that our Ecological Footprint has climbed while biodiversity has plummeted. Overshoot is a core pressure on biodiversity, and WWF is the leading conservation organization recognizing and addressing this link," said Mathis Wackernagel, President and Co-founder of Global Footprint Network. "Humanity must learn to live within the budget of nature, not just for our own welfare and resilience but also for the well-being of countless other species on our planet." 

Global Footprint Network provides the Living Planet Report’s measure of humanity's Ecological Footprint, which calculates the amount of biologically productive land and sea required to produce all the resources a population consumes and to absorb its waste, with prevailing technology. 

According to the report, it would take 1.5 Earths to produce the resources necessary to support humanity’s current Ecological Footprint. This global overshoot means, for example, that we are cutting timber more quickly than trees regrow, pumping freshwater faster than groundwater restocks, and releasing CO2 faster than nature can sequester it. 

"Nearly three-quarters of the world's population lives in countries struggling with both ecological deficits and low incomes," noted Dr. Wackernagel. "Growing ecological constraints demand that we focus on how to improve human welfare by a means other than sheer expansion." 

And thus the argument is made for the urgent need to transition from neoclassical, GDP growth based economics into a Steady State economy in which the economy is maintained within the capacity of the environment. That sounds so obvious and yet the very idea is heretical in the boardrooms and legislatures of the Western world.

Did you get that 50 per cent reference? In the remarkably brief interval of four decades prior to the 2014 report the populations of terrestrial species (other than our own) had declined by half. There were half as many of these mammals and birds and reptiles as there had been 40 years earlier. We had suppressed them out of existence.

I won't go into it at any length except to note that the next Living Planet Report, 2016, inventoried the populations of marine life - fish, mammals and sea birds - and found their raw numbers had also been halved over the previous half century.

The 2018 Living Planet Report primarily addresses unsustainable,yet still growing, levels of human consumption. It also speaks to soils degradation, loss of wilderness and species extinction as human needs overwhelm nature. It's important to bear in mind these conditions are accelerating, worsening and, unless we develop some new rules to ensure that mankind can once again live in harmony with nature, this can only end abruptly and not well.

The most notable aspects of these reports, at least to me, is how rapidly they're flushed down the Memory Hole, one by one. They've got a shelf life of about three days and then they're gone, like some dirty family secret, never to be spoken of again.

Here's something to mull over. The LPR 2014 announced that mankind had reduced other forms of terrestrial life by half since 1970. Fifty per cent.  By 2018 that 50 per cent had grown to 60 per cent. And the band played on.

Yes, I'm  pushing the idea of the need for new rules whereby mankind lives in harmony with nature, Planet Earth, our one and only biosphere. Rules that will demark humanity's share of space and resources and what we must leave to allow other species to live sustainably.

We know what's happening. We know what needs to change. We know what will befall us, every species, if we don't change course. And we don't have the slightest inclination to do a damn thing about it. We can't even tackle the climate crisis. If we can't do that, there's about zero chance that we'll collectively agree to rein in our population and our footprint on the planet.

Nature is showing us a series of signs that the way humanity chooses to live cannot continue. Nature can't carry us much longer.  And it's not even up for discussion.