Another Sign? I Sure Hope Not.

Something has changed over the past two years.  My home is bordered along the back by a row of large cedar trees.  When I moved here some 15 years ago one of the delights I discovered was being awakened in the mornings by the chirps and songs of a seemingly massive variety of small birds that nested in those cedars.

Last year that stopped. This year it's been the same.  My neighbour has several feeders in her yard and she says the usual birds haven't been coming to her place either, not even to eat.

Something seems to be happening, but what?

Then I came across an article in The Guardian about a severe and massive decline in flying insect populations in Germany.  A 75 per cent decline. That's pretty drastic.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

Could something akin to that be underway out here on the island? It's hard to imagine. We don't have any industrial agriculture in the vicinity, just rocks and Christmas trees.

That said, the World Wildlife Fund in conjunction with the London Zoological Society and other agencies has been warning us over the last several years how severely human activity is pummeling other forms of life on Earth. The Living Planet Report of 2014 took an inventory of terrestrial animal life on the planet and found we had collapsed the total numbers by 50 per cent since the 1970s, the neoliberal era.  The Living Planet Report of 2015 inventoried marine species over the same time frame and, again, found a loss of 50 per cent.  The Living Planet Report of 2016 updated the loss figures for terrestrial and marine life at 58 per cent since 1970.

There is a confluence of events that occurred in the early 70s. That was when mankind drove the world into "overshoot." That's when our population passed the 3 billion mark and our consumption of the Earth's renewable resources - water, air, biomass - exceeded the planet's carrying capacity. We exceeded the world's capacity to cleanse our pollution and waste output. We began drawing more surface and groundwater than the Earth could replenish. We began exploiting more of the planet than was needed for the survival of other species and their numbers began to plummet.

This research connected the dots, linking climate change to two other existential threats, overpopulation and over-consumption/depletion of natural resources.  From 3 billion in the early 70s, we've grown to 7.5 billion today en route to at least 9 billion, possibly by 2030-2040.  And, while we've done that, our per capita consumption and our per capita environmental footprint has continued to expand rapidly with the emergence of new, massively populated emerging economies in India and China.

And yet, even as these events of the past forty years - just forty years - have unfolded; even as the research has come in revealing how severely we're overtaxing the planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere; even as the early onset impacts of our excesses begin to send us reeling; our politicians, including Canada's, still pursue perpetual, exponential growth. They believe their policies are constructive, positive when they're actually nihilistic. And you and me, we're just along for the ride.

Living Planet Report 2014 - Biodiversity Body Blow

Forty years and counting.  That's how long mankind has been outpacing nature's replenishment rate of essential natural resources - water, biomass, the atmosphere.  For 40-years we've been running ecological deficits at a steadily increasing rate.  Not only are we consuming more than the Earth can provide, our shortfall is getting worse year by year. 

Just out, the biennial Living Planet Report for 2014, produced by the World Wildlife Fund in collaboration with the Global Footprint Network and the Zoological Society of London.

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. 

An eye-opening fact sheet about what our species has become and what it means to the Earth and everything living on or in it is available here.  To see an analysis of ecological deficit or surplus by country, go here.  The good news, for Canadians, is that our country remains in a healthy ecological surplus - a function of the massive size of our landmass and our relatively small population.  The less than happy news is that the sole country with which we share a border, the United States of America, is running a serious ecological deficit.  How this disparity will play out between our two nations and our peoples is worrisome, the more so because this is a looming problem we're not even beginning to discuss. 

If there's one key thing to take away from this, perhaps it's that climate change, while a clearly existential threat to all life on Earth, is not our only inescapable and potentially existential challenge.  Whether it's greenhouse gas emissions or over-consumption or overpopulation, the answer is the same - we have to live well within the finite capacity of our environment and leave enough left over for everything else that lives.

We have to keep in mind that our own survival depends on our ability to share the environment with all other life forms and, if we can't do that, we too perish. Our species is already consuming renewable resources at 1.5 times the Earth's replenishment rate.  What does that leave for other life on this planet?  Nothing. Actually less than nothing.  We're already dipping deeply into our planet's reserves.  Essentially, from August onward, we're living off those reserves.  As these resource reserves reach critical levels we will trigger the collapse of other species that, in turn, will rapidly hasten our own.

Good News, Not So Good News

The WWF's Living Planet Report, 2010 has just been released and it really is enough to make you wonder if mankind has taken leave of its collective senses.

The good news is that the extinction of animals seems to have stabilized.    The not so good news is just about everything else.  By the WWF's assessment, we're now consuming resources at 1.5 times the rate our planet can replenish them.   Think about that. 

We're drawing down resources, particularly freshwater, far faster than Spaceship Earth is capable of generating more.  In fact we've created societies dependent on resources we simply don't have.  How have we managed so well so far?   By raiding nature's reserves.

You know those fancy fountains and artificial lakes in Las Vegas?   Where does all that rapidly-evaporating water come from?  Here's a hint, it's not rainwater.   No, it's ancient water pumped out of aquifers deep underground.   But where is the water going to come from to refill ("recharge") those aquifers?   Here's another hint, nowhere.  Desert resorts and shopping centres actually mist the air along the sidewalks to keep the public comfortable.   So what happens when those aquifers run empty?   Here's your third hint, don't invest all your money in real estate in Nevada, Arizona or New Mexico.  Bad idea.

The LPI reveals a stark distinction between southern and northern hemisphere countries.  Between 1970 and 2007, animal and marine life populations actually rebounded in the north but suffered devastating declines in the southern hemisphere.   The southern hemisphere losses resulted in a global decline of 29% in animal and marine life since 1970.

The Index was compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).  From The Guardian:'

"Healthy ecosystems form the basis of all we have - lose them and we destroy our life support system," said Jonathan Baillie, ZSL's conservation programme director.

"This is like spending the savings: we're spending the natural capital we have on this planet," said Jim Leape, WWF's director, at the launch of the report in Bristol. "That's an economic crisis in the making."

Measurements of the "ecological footprint" of different countries – the area required to provide the resources consumed by the population or average person in a year, compiled by the Global Footprint Network, shows the richest countries consume, on average, five times the quantity of natural resources as the poorest countries. At the extremes are the United Arab Emirates, with an average footprint of more than 10 hectares, and Timor-Leste at less than one hectare. The global average is about three hectares, and the UK figure is around five.

Just in case you're curious, Canada scored an even seven on the global footprint index.  This truly is a truly global economic, humanitarian, environmental and security crisis in the making.  Nobody is immune from the fallout from this, even us.  Why then does this looming, multi-faceted crisis not even appear on our leaders' radar screens?