What Would It Really Take?

We all know the injunction - cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 and entirely by 2050.

To some that conjures up visions of the end of fossil fuels, a switch to alternative green energy, electric cars instead of gas guzzlers, baseboard heaters instead of oil or gas furnaces, simple stuff like that.  Easy-peasy.

Only it's not so simple. It would require wholesale change to our economies, what we produce, how we trade. There would be a focus on curbing inequality, not just within national societies but on a global scale.

The UN official in charge of this September's climate summit in New York, recently hinted at what's in store if we're to avoid runaway climate change.

On Friday, Luis Alfonso de Alba, the top UN envoy entrusted with preparing September's [climate change] summit, called for a "drastic" rethink of the global economic model. 

Required was a "transformation of the way we consume, the way we produce," de Alba said. "This is not a process in which we can aim at a gradual increase of ambitions."

We have to rethink the global economic model. That's a reference to neoliberal globalism. What would a drastic rethink of hyper-capitalism look like? How do our leaders sit down and formulate neoliberalism's successor?

de Alba rejects any "gradual increase of ambitions." That sounds to me like a warning that we have to find better, more sustainable goals than the pursuit of perpetual exponential growth in GDP that has been the hallmark of the postwar era.

We seem to have reached a point where theories of classical economics, already slammed by some as a "mental illness," crash into the concrete wall of environmental reality. It was bound to happen. Infinite growth is not compatible with a finite ecosystem and Earth is sublimely finite.

Think of this Earth as the source of almost all our resources (other than solar energy) which is very much what it is. Earth provides all our soils that sustain life and support modern agriculture. Pretty much everything we do from basic hygiene to our morning coffee to industrial manufacturing requires clean water, enormous volumes of clean water. Again, that is provided by Earth.  Minerals that we use for fossil fuels, metals and other products - that's also Earth. The atmosphere, that's Earth.

Earth, then, is life. It is wildlife and it is human life. Yet it's finite. There's only so much Earth and, because Earth is finite, the planet's carrying capacity, its ability to support life is limited.  It can go only so far and no further. It is our host and we are obliged to respect our host's boundaries, its limits, or we will pay dearly for abusing the environment. And that is where we are today.

We have grown too large for our host. This manifests in several ways. Climate change is one - but only one - of them.

Earth is regenerative. It has cycles. Two of the most critical are the carbon cycle and the hydrologic or water cycle. Here's a depiction of the Carbon Cycle -

And here's the hydrologic or Water Cycle -

Humans have messed up both cycles. We have skewed the carbon cycle by digging up once safely sequestered fossil fuels that, when burned, have significantly increased atmospheric carbon loading causing changes including global warming, the capture and retention of additional solar energy.

The increased retention of solar energy has likewise altered the water cycle through atmospheric warming.  Hotter surface temperatures result in increased evaporation and hotter atmospheric temperatures increase the atmosphere's ability to hold greater volumes of water vapor. Hotter atmospheric temperatures also change how the atmosphere moves, jet streams and circulation patterns influencing floods and droughts. Hotter, moister air also generates more powerful severe weather events - hurricanes, tornadoes.

Both of these now significantly modified cycles are not only caused by man-made activities but have a powerful effect on how the Earth, our host, responds to us. They degrade the Earth's environmental carrying capacity, the very essence of life. It's wildly beyond counter-intuitive for us to imagine that we can continue our pursuit of perpetual exponential growth, increasing our perpetual exponential burden on Earth in the process.

We're running amok. We've grown like a malignancy. The recent UN report on biodiversity loss and extinction is an indictment of the neoliberal obsession with unrestrained endless growth. A million species are in serious risk of extinction, among them many "keystone" species whose loss will have knock-on effects on other species.  In forty years, the rough lifespan of neoliberalism, we have depleted the numbers of both terrestrial and marine life by more than half through direct predation or habitat loss.

When you follow these worrisome developments long enough, the manner and depth of their interconnection is inescapable. There are no "stand alone" existential threats even if we do prefer to treat them as such.  Climate change and biodiversity are linked and, together, they produce knock-on effects in other areas that can demonstrate both the robustness and the fragility of our natural world and its systems.

And so I hope that I have at least imperfectly explained how, when we're debating greenhouse gas emissions or biodiversity loss or a new economic model for the Anthropocene, all of these things are related. Common threads run through them all. When you step far enough back and look on these threats one thing emerges from them all - humans urgently need to find ways to live in harmony with Earth's ecology. We have to live within the safety bounds of our environment and we're way past that today. If we can't or won't get back inside, we're done.

de Alba is right. It's time for a "drastic rethink."

"A Globe-Spanning Murder-Suicide" I Guess That Sums It Up.

If you're planning on being around for another two or three decades you'll be witness to a world like you've never known it. What's in store for you is a darker, more dangerous and, ultimately, dystopian world as nature re-calibrates the biosphere. Talk about death by natural causes only on a civilizational scale.

We know there's still time, just barely, to avert the worst impacts of climate change and biodiversity collapse. We know what must be done, that's been clearly spelled out for us. We know what we must do but we're not going to do it.

Recently Bloomberg has reported that the Trudeau government is expected to give the go-ahead for the three-fold expansion of the Trans-Mountain pipeline next month. In a lovely companion piece yesterday, Bloomberg observed that "Even Trudeau's Canada Won't Rid Itself of Coal."

"Even Trudeau's Canada" what is that implying? That Justin Trudeau isn't totally in the bag for the fossil fuel industries - gas, oil, bitumen, coal. He's in it up to his eyeballs. That carbon tax nonsense, that's to make the rubes happy.

Petro-states are notorious liars and Canada is no exception whether it's ruled by Conservatives or Liberals. They're both profoundly dishonest. Both will sacrifice the future, perhaps irreparably, for the present. I'm sorry Liberals but that's true.

A recent article in New York Magazine spoke of a "globe-spanning murder-suicide" now underway.

Human beings are more prosperous and numerous than we’ve ever been, while the Earth’s other species are dying off faster than at any time in human history. 

These two conditions are related. But if the second one persists long enough, we will be following our fellow organisms into the dustbin of geological history.

...Climate change is a major driver of all this death, but burning fossil fuels is far from our species’ only method of mass ecocide. We are also harvesting fish populations faster than they can reproduce themselves, annually dumping upward of 300 million tons of heavy metals and toxic sludge into the oceans, introducing devastating diseases and invasive species into vulnerable environments as we send people and goods hurtling across the globe, and simply taking up too much space — about 75 percent of the Earth’s land, and 85 percent of its wetlands, have been severely altered or destroyed by human development.

Some day you may see prime ministers such as Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau for what are - monsters. By then it will be much too late to do anything about our collapsed ecosystems and the ravages of climate change. The windows of opportunity for dealing with these existential threats are fast closing and, if we were determined to act you would already know about it.

Some hyper-zealous Liberals are fond of extolling fine "Canadian values." Really, what values? We gave up on that decades ago when we succumbed to the embrace of the neoliberal order, something perpetuated today by Mr. Trudeau and almost certain to be continued by the winner of our general elections in October.  If life is not our priority, if the fate being dealt to future generations doesn't guide our planning and policy, our "Canadian values" are, in a word, shite.

A globe-spanning murder-suicide it will be then.  We had a choice. We made a choice. 

I'm Glad This Week is About Over

This has been an unusually stressful week on the climate/environment front. Don't worry, it'll be back at full bore on Monday morning but at least there's the weekend (I hope) to chill out.

The week began with anxious wondering if Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party would table a motion for a declaration that the UK is in a climate change national emergency and how Parliament would respond.

On Monday came news of a poll of 100,000 Europeans that found climate change as their first priority, outdistancing the economy, migration, and everything else.

That same day, news of a report from the US EPA advising communities how best to cope with worsening destruction from climate change - everything from "debris streams" from ruined buildings, to how to recycle building materials and how to dispose of hazmat stuff such as asbestos.

On Tuesday there was encouraging news that two-thirds of Britons realized they were already in a climate emergency and three-quarters said they would vote for whatever party was best positioned to "protect the planet."

Canadian Press quoted the prime minister, responding to the flooding in Ottawa and Quebec, by saying "we will have to have significant reflections and conversations on how we move forward," a perfect WTF?? moment.

In Britain again, a Labour MP asked the thorny question "Why are taxpayers subsidising the oil and gas companies that are jeopardizing our future?" Too bad that question is taboo in our House of Commons.

The Weather Network released the second of its three part series, "2X Faster: Canada's Weather Future in a Changing Climate." It even features a bleating commentary from our EnviroMin, Dame Cathy McKenna.

On Wednesday, a NASA-Columbia University study discovered, through examining tree rings, that global warming has been ushering in an era of sustained drought since the turn of the 20th century.  This was disrupted from 1950 to 1975 thanks to a beneficial side effect of ozone-layer destroying aerosols but now it's back at full bore. The petro-provinces - tomorrow's barren wastelands.

The biggest news on Wednesday came from the House of Commons in Westminster where MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Labour's motion for a declaration that the UK was in a national climate emergency. Meanwhile, in Canada, Morneau was crowing about fracked gas and how the latest LNG venture shows that, when it comes to climate destroying carbon fuels, Canada can and will deliver.  Trudeau, meanwhile, begged Jason Kenney, offering to look the other way on certain Tar Sands emissions if Kenney would pretend to uphold Notley's deal on a carbon cap. 

And then the hammer dropped today with a sneak preview at a report to be released on Monday warning that a million species, our own very much included, are at risk of imminent extinction due to our carbon crisis and rapacious over-consumption of natural resources. What distinguishes this report from so many others is its scope. This isn't something that future generations will have to endure. It's your generation too. You. This is mass extinction and it's not decades off. It could be just a matter of years, possibly one decade. 

Finally I closed the week out with an op-ed written by David Suzuki a few days back warning that, when your life is at stake, don't count on your federal government to protect you.  If there's going to be any heavy lifting required, we'll have to see to it ourselves. 

I don't remember a week as simultaneously tumultuous, inspiring, dispiriting and terrifying as this one. We've had highs and we've had terrible lows. What will next week bring?

ONE MILLION Species at Imminent Risk and That Includes You.

Yeah, you. Not the grandkids. Not some generation in the future. You. Your generation. In your lifetime, however that should be measured. You.  This time you've got skin in the game, your own hide.

A UN scientific panel is about to release a jarring report. We are heading for extinction.

The world’s leading scientists will warn the planet’s life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken. 

Up to 1m species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN’s leading research body on nature. 

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate. 

The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear, according to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The report appears to bolster arguments calling for a fast end to the neoliberal order so popular among western governments including Canada's. We are attacking our host, this planet, our one and only biosphere, Spaceship Earth. There is no other and when we abuse it, it will exterminate us. It's that simple. There is no easy fix. There is no, "oh they'll think of something."

It all comes down to the same problem. We have to learn to live within the very finite bounds of our planet's ecology. At the moment we're consuming Earth's resources far beyond the planet's carrying capacity. We are gutting our own life support systems.

Because it's so important, I will repeat this once more. The evidence of our predations is everywhere. It is visible to the naked eye from the International Space Station where crew members can see from the viewing cupola the clearing of vast swathes of forests, farmland transformed into barren desert, the rapid spread of wildfires, rivers that no longer reach the sea, algae blooms in our rivers, lakes and coastal zones. We can see it at our docks as we "fish down the food chain" eliminating one species after another. NASA's Grace satellites measure surface subsidence caused by the emptying of our ancient aquifers, nearly irreplaceable groundwater siphoned off for irrigation, often without a second thought.

We can see what we're doing in what should be the alarming loss of other life forms. In the 40-year history of the neoliberal order ushered in by Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney mankind has so monopolized Earth's territory and resources that we have seen a loss of more than 50 per cent in the numbers of creatures, both terrestrial and marine. We're squeezing them out of their habitat or rendering it uninhabitable.

This has to stop or it will stop us.

...the report is a compilation of reams of academic studies, in this case on subjects ranging from ocean plankton and subterranean bacteria to honey bees and Amazonian botany. Following previous findings on the decimation of wildlife, the overview of the state of the world’s nature is expected to provide evidence that the world is facing a sixth wave of extinction. Unlike the past five, this one is human-driven. 

Mike Barrett, WWF’s executive director of conservation and science, said: “All of our ecosystems are in trouble. This is the most comprehensive report on the state of the environment. It irrefutably confirms that nature is in steep decline.” 

Barrett said this posed an environmental emergency for humanity, which is threatened by a triple challenge of climate, nature and food production. “There is no time to despair,” he said. “We should be hopeful that we have a window of opportunity to do something about it over these two years.”

This time it's not just your grandkids who will pay. This is also coming for you. It's time to wake up.

Watson, a British professor who has headed both of the UN’s leading scientific panels, said the forthcoming report will delve more deeply than anything before into the causes of nature collapse, chief among which is the conversion of forests, wetlands and other wild landscapes into ploughed fields, dam reservoirs and concrete cities. Three-quarters of the world’s land surface has been severely altered, according to the leaked draft. Humanity is also decimating the living systems on which we depend by emitting carbon dioxide and spreading invasive species.

We've had plenty of warnings and they've all been ignored. The Living Planet Reports of 2014 and 2015 documented the loss of terrestrial and marine life across the planet. Each was flushed down the Memory Hole within days.  If you want to refresh your memory, you can read more about them here, here, here and here.

Morneau, Trudeau, Scheer - the lot of them - are disciples of perpetual exponential growth. They measure their success by whether we achieve at least a three per cent annual increase in Gross Domestic Product. Nothing else much matters to them. It should matter even more to you because it, as much as anything else, is driving us ever faster to extinction. There is no way to sugar coat this.

It's our choice. We either choose to live in harmony with this world and its finite ecosystem or we perish along with so many other species upon which our own survival depends. We are already outside our ecosystem by a factor of 1.7. It's called "overshoot" and, in graphic depiction, it looks like this:

We're on our way down and, as you'll see, the path becomes increasingly steep. Odd that we haven't heard much about any of this from our leaders as they instead spend their time mud wrestling over meaningless carbon taxes.

This isn't a theory. This is as real as concrete. Why are we letting these people drive us off the cliff?

A Win/Win Story

The polar bear population of Labrador is thriving and the credit goes to the collapse of the region's harp seal hunt.

Despite vanishing sea ice and shorter, milder winters, Labrador’s polar bear population is actually growing – which means a bigger harvesting quota for Inuit hunters. 

There are more than 2,500 polar bears in the vast coastal area that includes Labrador and northern Quebec, according to Environment Canada – far more than was expected earlier in the millennium – and further signs the bears continue to rebound despite the impacts of climate change. 

Indeed, although scientists and Inuit sometimes clash over the estimates, the polar bear population of coastal Labrador is among the healthiest in the world.

The reason, biologists suspect, is the boom in the harp seal population. As Newfoundland’s seal fishery has collapsed under international pressure, the harp seals of the north-west Atlantic have proliferated. They now number about 7.4 million animals – more then seven times the population in the 1970s. 

That has created a veritable feast for Labrador’s polar bears, who have shifted their diet from ring seals to their more southerly, promiscuous cousins. 

“They jumped on the harp seal boom,” Goudie said. “They appear to have adapted for this moment in time … We’re seeing them further south than in the past.”

This sounds like an isolated situation but it's not. Humans are going to have to give up or restrict some of our practices that may impede the survival of wildlife.

There are many on the west coast who question BC's annual herring roe harvest. Now, with new species coming into our waters from the warming south, it might be time to consider what these whales, dolphins and fish will have to eat. They will probably need more herring, a lot more, and perhaps we should curb our harvesting of this essential marine feed stock.

All of us, in every country, must also begin relinquishing habitat needed for the survival of other forms of life, the building blocks of diversity. We have reached the point that we have to accept that, if they don't make it, we don't make it.

Is It Fear?

After digesting yesterday's essay by UBC prof William Rees about how humanity is suffocating other forms of life on our planet, I was left wondering what they're afraid of, why aren't they talking to us about what is happening, right now, beneath our own feet?

As Rees pointed out, "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." 

For a decade, perhaps a bit more, I've been covering one major report after another on research documenting the alarming collapse of non-human life - insect, mammals, birds, sea mammals, fish, the lot. Some species have fallen extinct but the worrisome problem is that virtually all species are in severe decline, often upwards of 66% of their numbers over the past 40 years which, of course, coincides with the advent of neoliberalism.

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?

...

Scientists estimate that at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapienscomprised 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!

...

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.

As the Bonn climate summit wraps up it reveals how ineffectual our nations have become and why they'll never succeed in bringing climate change under control. They're still treating climate change as a standalone crisis. They imagine they're dealing with a disease but it's really just one of several symptoms of the greater threat that confronts us - ourselves.

You cannot take climate change in isolation of its companion threats that are also existential. Climate change cannot be separated from over-population and over-consumption of our planet's finite resources.  Rees pointed it out beautifully. It took our species 200,000 years to reach one billion and just another 200 years to increase that more than seven fold and, in the course of those same 200 years, GDP has swelled about a hundred fold. That's hundreds of times more production, more consumption, more waste, more pollution and contamination of every form imaginable. And what are our politicians doing? With their corporate partners they're obsessively pursuing perpetual, exponential growth. Every foot is on the gas pedal but nobody's hands are on the wheel.

That's not democratic leadership. That's nihilism.

They can't even respond to climate change beyond purely gestural proposals - carbon taxes. What exactly is that going to do? Nothing, it's a sop.

Rees didn't write an op-ed. He penned an essay. He wasn't expressing an opinion. He was writing from fact, scientific knowledge documented in "exquisite detail." His was not some dodgy belief-based construct. That's the crap peddled to us by our political caste, the nihilists.

Surely we have reached a point where you have to ask yourself why you're supporting and empowering nihilists. Why? The science has been pouring in for more than a decade. There's a mountain of research and analysis and it's compelling. 

What's your problem? Is it simply too much to take in? Can you not get your mind around the enormity of the change that has set in over just the past forty years? Do you, like our leaders, need to pretend this isn't happening or that it's not immediate or a mortal threat to our civilization?

The Unholy Trinity

The Unholy Trinity, the Three O's - Overpopulation, Overconsumption and Overshoot - are mankind's plague on the Earth.

Surf's Up, Indonesia

Despite claims that, with just a bit more efficiency, we can grow our species to nine, perhaps even twelve billion, there are already far too many of us attacking, devouring and contaminating our biosphere.  It is unsurvivable.

The Slums of Mexico City

Even as our numbers have soared three-fold in less than a century, so has the average amount of stuff each of us consumes.  Since WWII, the populations of both China and India have added a billion mouths.  It's hard to believe that, at the end of that war, their populations were smaller than that of the USA today.  First they grew to gigantic proportions and then they became emerging economic superpowers, both stimulating their own huge "consumer class" that wanted bigger and better this and that - cars, housing, food, travel - pretty much the same things we've enjoyed all along and pretty much all of it based on ever greater consumption of fossil fuels.  A car in every garage and a prime rib roast on every table.

A Valley of Greenhouses, Spain

Which triggers the final O, Overshoot.  This is where mankind begins to run into walls.  Overshoot is a condition where consumption has outstripped our planet's ability to support demand.  It causes us to do some incredibly stupid things and it leads to a variety of outcomes including collapse.  That is the course our leaders have charted for our children and grandchildren - collapse.  It's not just Harper who is devoted to this outcome.  So too are Justin Trudeau and Tommy Mulcair. They have no interest in abandoning perpetual, exponential growth.

One example of Overshoot is the rapacious destruction of our very finite groundwater resources, our aquifers, mainly for agricultural irrigation.  To grow our population and meet its soaring demands for ever more of everything, we became hopelessly dependent, mortally dependent, on using far more than nature can provide which is why around the world these underground reservoirs are approaching empty and no one has a clue how we'll cope when they're gone.

Other visible telltale signs of overshoot are spreading deforestation, desertification (the exhaustion of once arable land through excessive production using unsustainable amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides), and the collapse of global fisheries as the industrial fleets fish "down the food chain."

Most of that Oil Still Lurks in the Gulf of Mexico

Another aspect of Overshoot manifests in our growing pollution problem. Nature does a terrific job of absorbing and cleansing our waste but that capacity is also finite.  We've passed it and so the excess simply backs up.  There's plenty of that going on and we don't seem to care.

It's so typically human of me to discuss the Three O's in the context of the lethal threat to mankind.  That overlooks what we have done to nature, wildlife, our ecosystems.

China.  No space for nature, no room for life.

The same resources mankind is over-exploiting are also essential to every other form of life on our planet.  They're supposed to have their share too in a viable, sustainable environment.  Only we have decided to take their share and our share and then a good deal more all in service to ever more mouths with ever larger appetites.

The 2014 Living Planet Report revealed that in the 40-years since Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney ushered in the Age of Neoliberalism, we have eliminated half - that's right, half - of the wild life on our planet.  It came out, made a bit of a stir and, within a week, was straight down the Memory Hole.  We're now experiencing rates of extinction several hundreds of times greater than normal and we simply will not recognize the threat to our own survival.  We don't understand that those seemingly insignificant life forms, those minor species, are integral to our own continuation.  We don't get it and we don't care.

The photos used here are from a terrific photo-essay in The Guardian.  Do check it out.  Many thanks to Ray Smith for sending me the link.

Think of It as the "Noah's Ark" of Climate Change

What would Noah do?  WWND?

Let's pretend there was a Noah and he built an ark within which he accommodated species, two by two, so that life on Earth would not be wiped out in God's incredibly vindictive Great Flood.

First thing we know, from the biblical description, is that Noah's ark would not possibly have housed two of everything for 40-days and 40-nights even if Noah and family did have enough shovels to dung the place out.  Simply not enough room.  Not nearly enough.

So, what would Noah have done?  What would he take aboard and what would have left outside to meet its watery fate? 

Why do I ask?  Well we may have to do something along the same lines before long.  We might have to decide what species we need to help survive climate change, species we'll need for our own survival. 

We learned this week that, over the past 40-years, an era that began shortly before Reagan took the White House, we've eliminated about half the wildlife on earth.  We're destroying the habitat and consuming the renewable resources that wildlife need to share with us for their survival.  We take, they don't get, they die off.  Easy peasy. 

Now that we're starting to work on the remaining half, it behooves us to evaluate what species should go and what species we need to keep for our own good.  It's an entirely selfish exercise, the sort we do so well these days.

...it's the creatures that provide the most "natural capital" or "ecosystem services" that are getting many scientists really worried. Three quarters of the world's food production is thought to depend on bees and other pollinators such as hoverflies. Never mind how cute a panda is or how stunning a tiger, it's worms that are grinding up our waste and taking it deep into the soil to turn into nutrients, bats that are catching mosquitoes and keeping malaria rates down. A study in North America has valued the loss of pest control from ongoing bat declines at more than $22bn in lost agricultural productivity.

"It's the loss of the common species that will impact on people. Not so much the rarer creatures, because by the very nature of their rarity we're not reliant on them in such an obvious way," said Dr Nick Isaac, a macroecologist at the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Oxfordshire. He says that recent work he and colleagues have been doing suggests that Britain's insects and other invertebrates are declining just as fast as vertebrates, with "serious consequences for humanity". 

...The blame, most agree, sits with unsustainable human consumption damaging ecosystems, creating climate change and destroying habitats at a far faster rate than previously thought. But this time it's not just the "big cuddly mammals" we have to worry about losing but the smaller, less visible creatures upon which we depend – insects, creepy-crawlies and even worms. They might not be facing immediate extinction, but a decline in their numbers will affect us all. "There are some direct impacts from the indicators, we are going to feel the impact of those losses because the pattern is much the same with the UK species, with invertebrates as it is with vertebrates. It's not just the simplistic – fish die and people starve – but more complex," said Isaac.

...WWF claims there is still time to stop the rot. Its UK chief executive David Nussbaum said: "The scale of the destruction highlighted in this report should act as a wake-up call for us all. We all – politicians, business and people – have an interest, and a responsibility, to act to ensure we protect what we all value: a healthy future for people and nature.

"Humans are cutting down trees more quickly than they can regrow, harvesting more fish than the oceans can restock, pumping water from our rivers and aquifers faster than rainfall can replenish them, and emitting more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb," he said.

There it is, easy as can be.  All we have to do is - stop.  We've got to stop cutting down trees faster than they can regrow.  We have to stop catching more fish than the oceans can replenish.  We have to stop draining our rivers and aquifers faster than rainfall can refill them.  We have to stop emitting more carbon than the oceans and forest can absorb. 

All we have to do is stop.  How do you like our chances?

Well, if you don't like our chances of stopping, we had probably better get busy figuring out what species we need to invest in keeping around so that we can have a somewhat better chance of staying around ourselves.

It's the End of the Line - Act Immediately or Face Mass Extinctions

Many people "get" the reality of global warming and the associated host of other ecological threats.  But, of those, there are many who either think it's hopeless or are "wait and seers" and don't necessarily support prompt and potentially disruptive action.

Well the word from the United Nations "Convention on Biological Diversity" has opened its 12-day summit with a plain warning - we must take immediate action to stop the accelerating loss of animal and plant species and their habitat or face near-term, man-made mass extinctions.

"The time to act is now and the place to act is here,"  CBD executive secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf said, describing the summit as a  ""defining moment" in the history of mankind, reports the Agence France Presse.

Scientists say climate change and human population pressures are destroying ecosystems such as tropical forests and coral reefs as well as animal and plant species. A recent report by WWF warned that the world's 6.8 billion humans were living 50% beyond its sustainable means in 2007 and that, at current rates, a second Earth will be needed by 2030 to meet the planet's needs.

The indifference of our political leadership from every party is bewildering.   Can they not see what's happening or grasp what that means?   Do they really think Canadians will be immune to the fallout from this?

We're nearing the end of the line.   It's even visible to our satellites.   Take deforestation, a key destroyer of animal and plant habitat.   Some places are logging off valuable lumber where it really shouldn't be taken at all.   In other places the forests are being cleared for space to farm biofuels.   Still other places, like Western Canada, are seeing forests ravaged by climate-change induced infestations of pests like the Lodge Pole Pine beetle.


You don't need to grasp the intricacies of climate change science to understand the widespread destruction of coral reefs and the vital role those reefs play in sustaining marine biodiversity.   You don't need a university degree to understand that we're steadily collapsing our fish stocks, one after another.

Unless you're one of these weird shits that believes the earth is 6,000  years old and embraces apocalyptic visions of the Rapture (oops, I really didn't mean to slag the Conservative government), the need to act is obvious.   It's not a matter of throwing ten or twenty million dollars to research programmes or eco-organizations.   It's a matter of resolving to do whatever it takes to arrest the devastation of our planet's biodiversity.

“Biodiversity underpins the health of the planet and has a direct impact on all our lives. Put simply, reduced biodiversity means millions of people face a future where food supplies are more vulnerable to pests and disease and where water is in irregular or short supply,” said James Leape, WWF International’s Director General.

“No one can escape the impact of biodiversity loss because reduced global diversity translates quite clearly into fewer new medicines, greater vulnerability to natural disasters and greater effects from global warming.”

So, what are the chances of meaningful action resulting from the Nagoya summit?  According to Der Spiegel, the odds are pretty lousy.   Once again the world is looking to the U.S. for leadership and, once again, America appears utterly indifferent.

UN - Biodiversity Loss Worse Than Global Warming

One of the most dangerous aspects of the 21st century, one we may pay dearly for, is our stubborn dependence on 19th century politics and economics. This isn't your great, great grandfather's world, so why would you choose to sail the 21st century's stormy seas in his leaky old boat?

We've got a whole mess of things to fix up if we're going to see mankind through into the 22nd century in some viable form. There's the obvious one, global warming, and the spinoff impacts we collectively call "climate change." Then there's overpopulation; desertification from soil exhaustion; air, water and land contamination; resource depletion; species extinction; disease and species migration; deforestation; protracted drought, floods and severe storm events, on and on and on. That's some pressure cooker of grief that we're going to have to sort out and, as we've seen from the Kyoto experience, our existing political and economic structures can't cope with it.

As these problems pile up on our doorstep, we're either going to have to shut down - batten the hatches and await what's coming - or we'll have to change.

The United Nations will release a major report on biodiversity this summer calling for just that - radical change. From The Guardian:

"The Stern Report on climate change, which was prepared for the UK Treasury and published in 2007, famously claimed that the cost of limiting climate change would be around 1%-2% of annual global wealth, but the longer-term economic benefits would be 5-20 times that figure.

The UN's biodiversity report – dubbed the Stern for Nature – is expected to say that the value of saving "natural goods and services", such as pollination, medicines, fertile soils, clean air and water, will be even higher – between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the habitats and species which provide them.

...The UN report's authors go further with their warning on biodiversity, by saying if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.


"We need a sea-change in human thinking and attitudes towards nature: not as something to be vanquished, conquered, but rather something to be cherished and lived within," said the report's author, the economist Pavan Sukhdev.


The changes will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume, and think about their lives, Sukhdev, told The Guardian. He referred to the damage currently being inflicted on the natural world as "a landscape of market failures".

...The report follows a series of recent studies showing that the world is in the grip of a mass extinction event as pollution, climate change, development and hunting destroys habitats of all types, from rainforests and wetlands to coastal mangroves and open heathland. However, only two of the world's 100 biggest companies believe reducing biodiversity is a strategic threat to their business, according to another report released tomorrow by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is advising the team compiling the UN report.


"Sometimes people describe Earth's economy as a spaceship economy because we are basically isolated, we do have limits to how much we can extract, and why and where," said Sukhdev..."

The fatal limitations in our traditional but obsolete economic and political structures is evident in how the world community has struggled with global warming. There is no sustaining community of interest on which to found effective action. Instead, we're divided into camps that are eerily Dickensian. That we're stuck on global warming as an isolated problem, rather than as an integral component in a much broader environmental threat, reveals the inadequacy of our atrophied institutions and those who lead them without ever looking ahead.

For Canada, it is beyond idiocy to assume that our country will coast through the 21st century on the tarry wealth of Athabasca. That sort of thinking reflects a political and social complacency that, if anything, will ensure that our country, our people, are overtaken by events possibly in a manner akin to being run over by a bus.

Sucks To Be a Have Not!

Forget the rich, the poor just keep getting poorer. Now the world's poorest people are facing another kick in their collective ass - a major drop in their already meagre living standards caused by the ongoing collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity. From BBC News:

Damage to forests, rivers, marine life and other aspects of nature could halve living standards for the world's poor, a major report has concluded.

Current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by about 7% by 2050.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) review is modelled on the Stern Review of climate change.

"You come up with answers like 6% or 8% of global GDP when you think about the benefits of intact ecosystems, for example in controlling water, controlling floods and droughts, the flow of nutrients from forest to field," said the project's leader Pavan Sukhdev.

"But then you realise that the major beneficiaries [of nature] are the billion and a half of the world's poor; these natural systems account for as much as 40%-50% of what we define as the 'GDP of the poor'," he told BBC News.

The TEEB review was set up by the German government and the European Commission during the German G8 presidency.

The two institutions selected Mr Sukhdev, a managing director in the global markets division at Deutsche Bank, to lead it.

The trends are understood well enough - a 50% shrinkage of wetlands over the past 100 years, a rate of species loss between 100 and 1,000 times the rate that would occur without 6.5 billion humans on the planet, a sharp decline in ocean fish stocks and one third of coral reefs damaged.

However, putting a monetary value on them is probably much more difficult, the team acknowledges, than putting a cost on climate change.

The report highlights some of the planet's ecologically damaged zones such as Haiti, where heavy deforestation - largely caused by the poor as they cut wood to sell for cash - means soil is washed away and the ground much less productive.

An early draft of the TEEB review, seen by BBC News, concluded: "Lessons from the last 100 years demonstrate that mankind has usually acted too little and too late in the face of similar threats - asbestos, CFCs, acid rain, declining fisheries, BSE and - most recently - climate change".