Warnings, Warnings, Warnings

It was possibly one of the biggest yawners in recent years when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that, globally, mankind had about 60 years of soil fertility remaining. 60 years and most of the productive farmland on our planet would be useless, infertile, incapable of producing crops. And what happened? Sweet Fanny Adams, that's what happened. Within a week the warning was straight down the memory hole.

Let's try that again. This time the warning is coming from Britain's Tory government, environment minister Michael Gove to be exact. He's warning the UK is just thirty to forty years away from "the fundamental eradication of soil fertility" in its farming regions.

“We have encouraged a type of farming which has damaged the earth,” Gove told the parliamentary launch of the Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA). “Countries can withstand coups d’état, wars and conflict, even leaving the EU, but no country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility.

“If you have heavy machines churning the soil and impacting it, if you drench it in chemicals that improve yields but in the long term undercut the future fertility of that soil, you can increase yields year on year but ultimately you really are cutting the ground away from beneath your own feet. Farmers know that.”

Of course in Canada we don't discuss such things. Wouldn't be polite. The environment, climate change and all that, why that's for other people.

Maybe you imagine we're not drenching our fields in agri-chemicals - fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides - that cut the ground away from beneath our own feet.  The smoking gun is seen in the algae blooms that beset Lake Winnipeg and Lake Erie and the dead zones along our coasts.

The collapse of farmland is a crisis and it's global. However to frame it as a crisis on its own is to miss the point, a very important point that we fail to comprehend at our certain peril. This is a crisis but it's also a symptom of a far greater problem. We are pushing our planet beyond its limits. We are pushing our planet to its breaking point.

Only yesterday I posted about the existential threat of ocean acidification now underway and nearing the point of no return.  Consider the steadily degrading state of our essential renewable resources: air, water and biomass.  Close to 800 million people lack access to clean water. 2.5 billion don't have access to basic sanitation, toilets.  The air Londoners breathe can now rival that of Beijing's.  We've killed off half of the animal life on Earth, terrestrial and aquatic, in just 40-years.  Insect populations are collapsing.

We turn to on our planet's basic stocks. We fell our forests. We collapse our fisheries. We drain our aquifers. We exhaust our farmland, transforming it into sterile desert. We've put the Earth store into a giant "going out of business" sale. You know it's true. It's visible to the naked eye from space. And, as stocks of so many things run low, we respond with new technologies and systems to make our depredations even more efficient, ever more rapacious.

We know that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to humanity as great as opioids to an addict and yet we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels when alternatives exist. In Canada we pimp the world's highest-carbon, toxin-laced ersatz petroleum and we do it with pride.

Visit your legislature or, better yet, our parliament. Look down from the visitors' gallery during Question Period and all you will see are legislators dedicated to pushing our planet beyond its limits because they can't envision anything else.  They don't know that beside that gas pedal is a brake or that they can turn that steering wheel. And they're taking you for a ride.

The Big Question Now is When?

Several years ago a non-governmental organization, the Global Footprint Network, came to my attention.  GFN's purpose was to monitor the state of the biomass around the world on global, regional and national levels.

GFN publishes an annual report marking what they call "World Overshoot Day." This is the date each year by which mankind is calculated to have consumed an entire year's worth of renewable resources.

As the GFN graphic shows, mankind is now consuming renewable resources at roughly 1.5 times the natural replenishment rate.  Some like to say that we're using one and a half Earths resources.  If we keep on our current growth path, by 2050 we're on course to be consuming almost 3 times our planet's renewable resources.

It's almost too much to believe.  How can we, just one out of hundreds of thousands of species, be consuming far more than the total renewable resources of the planet?  Easy, we're diving into the planet's reserves, mining our children's future, eating our seed corn.

The proof is everywhere.  It's observable, it's tangible, it's precisely measurable. It's visible to the naked eye from space.  It comes in many forms.  One is desertification, the exhaustion of once viable farmland and its transformation into barren desert through a variety of bad agricultural practices and the accumulated effects of excessive amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Another is the resumption of mass deforestation - cutting down forests faster than they can renew.  Again, visible to the naked eye from the International Space Station.

And then there's water, the key to all life on Earth.  ISS crew members can also see rivers that no longer flow to the sea and inland lakes, such as the Aral Sea, that are now drying out.  But the loss of surface water is just part of the story of our hydrological overshoot.  It also takes the form of blue-green algae contamination of our lakes, coastal dead zones and surface subsidence caused by draining our groundwater resources, our aquifers.  Subsidence is not apparent to the naked eye but it is measurable by various satellite systems that can determine not only how quickly the surface is sinking but, from that, the volume of groundwater being extracted.

Overshoot comprises not only resources that we consume, either directly or in the production of products, but also the resources we contaminate, pollute, with the waste from our activities.  We rarely, if ever, think of it but our ecosystem does a terrific job of cleaning up after us.  If it didn't you wouldn't be sitting there reading this.  It is an absolutely life-sustaining function.  The atmosphere absorbs greenhouse gases. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as do oceans.  Rivers cleanse contaminants as they flow to the sea. Microbes in the soil likewise eat waste. Let's not forget earthworms either.

Just as the planet is finite so too is the capacity of the planet's ecosystem to process our waste.  Exceed that limit and we wind up with accumulated waste - pollution.  An excess of agricultural runoff can lead to the destruction of aquatic habitats from blue-green algae blooms.  Freshwater resources can become unfit for human consumption.  The acidification of our oceans is another example. There are several others.



When I first became aware of the Global Footprint Network, World Overshoot Day fell in late October.  That meant we were in overshoot for just over two months per year.  With each passing year, overshoot came earlier and earlier. This year we hit overshoot on August 19th.  What that signifies is that, for about four and a half months out of twelve, we're dipping into our planet's reserves and generating more contamination than the ecosystem can cleanse.

As the graphic above illustrates, as we enter overshoot, exceeding the planet's ecological limits, it results in a steadily degraded carrying capacity.  The Earth becomes steadily less able to meet our needs and clean our waste.  The red consumption line begins to plummet which leads us to yet another term, "collapse."  Our march toward collapse is measured in the steady progression of World Overshoot Day.

Most of what you've read so far I've written before.  I'm rehashing it now because of a recent report issued by the WWF, GFN and Zoological Society of London. The Living Planet Report, 2014, is an eye-opener.  You might prefer to begin with the ecological fact sheet.

LPR 2014 contains a wealth of information but the aspect everyone seized upon was the revelation that, over the past forty years, the Earth - our ecosystem or biosphere - has lost half of the planet's wild life.  Half, in just forty years, the blink of an eye in the history of mankind.

The critical point is not that we've lost half the planet's wild life so much as it is that we're now working our way through the remaining half.  Yet we maintain our slavish obsession with perpetual, exponential economic growth.  We keep questing for more and ever more - more resources, more production, more consumption, more waste.  At the same time mankind's overall numbers continue to burgeon even as our per capita consumption also rises.

Now go back to the first chart.  Find the 1.0 point on the left margin, the y-axis. Carry that across to the red line and then down.  You'll be at somewhere in the early 70s. Keep that in mind.

When I first found the Global Footprint Network several years ago I spent some time reviewing their considerable research and findings.  Back then I was a bit troubled to read that mankind actually reached the Earth's ecological carrying capacity around 1970 when our population stood at about 3.7-billion. Thereafter, as our population grew and our individual consumption also grew, we entered Overshoot or ecological deficit.

The dates line up.  Since we ventured into Overshoot, global wild life has declined by half.  Current species extinction rates are said to be a thousand times normal.  From 3.7-billion in 1970, we've almost doubled our numbers to 7+ billion already and we're said to be heading to 9-billion, perhaps as early as mid-century and upwards of 11-billion by 2100.

As part of a recent course in global food security I read a report by three Chinese experts dealing with what their country faced in the decades ahead.  For me, it wasn't their discussion of food that was telling so much as their projections of Chinese GDP.  They foresaw a China which, in 2000, had a per capita GDP of about $1,800 that would see that figure grow to $16,000 by 2030.  In fact the Chinese are just shy of $7,000 already but to more than double that yet again by 2030?

Where would China find the resources to ramp up its production so enormously in such a brief interval?  How would China cope with the contamination or its already distressed environment and degraded water resources?  Take that exponential growth in GDP and multiply it by the 1.5-billion population China is expected to reach by mid-century and then inject it into a world already deeply immersed in Overshoot and you have a formula for global economic and environmental disaster within just a couple of decades.

As demand for resources skyrockets while supply diminishes, we're bound to experience spikes in inequality both domestically and globally.  It's useful to recall the NASA report last March that found that sudden civilizational collapse was and will be triggered by the combination of two factors, over-consumption and inequality, both of which are with us today in spades.

Going back to the second chart, the Living Planet Report, 2014, reveals, simply from the fact of massive wild life loss alone, that we've already entered the point of significantly degraded ecological carrying capacity.  Spreading deforestation, desertification, the collapse of global fisheries, ocean acidification, etc. merely corroborate this.  Yet, as our biosphere's carrying capacity quite rapidly erodes, we're still increasing our production, consumption and waste, driving our global civilization ever faster toward chaos.

I think I've got a reasonable idea of how this ends.  The far more troubling question is when.

Global Warming, check. Freshwater Crisis, check. Desertification? Really?

Apparently desertification, the degradation of arable, productive farmland into barren desert, is the "greatest environmental challenge of our time."  At least that's how the UN's  top drylands official, Luc Gnacadja, sees it.

Today kicks off the UN decade for the fight against desertification.   Gnacadja, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, warns, "The top 20cm of soil is all that stands between us and extinction."

Land conflicts in Somalia, dust storms in Asia and the food price crises of recent years all stem from the degradation of land, he said, due to overuse by humans and the impacts of global warming. Since the early 1980s, a quarter of the planet's land has been despoiled and 1% a year continues to be lost.

The better known issues of climate change and loss of biodiversity are both rooted in the global loss of fertile soil, said Gnacadja, as the soil harbours a huge stock of carbon and the health of creatures living in the soil underpins global food production and forest growth. The reason desertification has not been a priority is because 90% of the 2.1 billion people who live in drylands live in developing countries, he said.

" Even in their own countries, they are the poorest among the poor and live in remote areas,"  said Gnacadja. "  The world is driven by city dwellers: political leaders are setting agendas to satisfy people who live in the cities, we therefore tend to perceive soil as just dust, or mud, or a dumping place. But if we don't preserve that first 20cm of soil, where will we get our food and water from?"   Half the world's livestock are raised on drylands and a third of crops, especially wheat.

Gnacadja is pushing for carbon credits to be earned by drylands people for preserving their land.   I don't know how well that's going to go over.  Paying people to not harm themselves, for not destroying their own property perhaps isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

Desertification leads to starvation and that leads to wars of subsistence and other perils.  It is intertwined with a gaggle of environmental challenges beginning with the big two - global warming and freshwater exhaustion - and includes deforestation, species extinction and migration, resource depletion, disease and pest migration, air/soil/water contamination, the collapse of fisheries, drought and the increasing frequency of severe storm events and, underlying them all, overpopulation and global security threats.

Here's the thing.  You can't fight any one of these successfully unless you fight them all.  They're all interconnected.   They all share some common causes and they all require some similar solutions.  Gnacadja is right.   That top 20 cms. of soil is all that stands between civilization and extinction but so does that onion-skin of atmosphere that wraps our planet and so does the distribution and recycling of the earth's freshwater resources.   Without them life becomes a matter of weeks, days or even minutes.

What I find frustrating in the annual climate change summits is that world leaders take global warming in isolation and then try to apply skewed mechanisms that ultimately block effective solutions.  At the end of the day the only thing that can block carbon emissions is carbon rationing enforced through effective carbon pricing - the very policy that Harper and Layton used to destroy the Dion Liberals.

These challenges need responses that measure the problems and calibrate the responses according to what is required to rectify them, not a haze of negotiations, dubious "targets" and offsets.   These are organic, living problems and that means they're moving targets which defy convoluted solutions based on out of date data.   All you can do with the current approach is to chase your tail.

This isn't about saving the earth.  The earth will be fine.   It isn't about saving the trees.   They'll be fine too.   It is entirely about saving mankind and preserving our civilization but in a form that can live in harmony with the very finite limits of our biosphere.  Even if you believe that biblical claptrap about god promising never to destroy earth again this has nothing to do with a god destroying anything.   It is solely mankind that's destroying, not the planet, but man's and a lot of other animals' ability to keep living on earth.   Your god has nothing to do with this.  This one's on you.

I feel badly for Stephane Dion.   He had the vision we need in our leaders but he utterly failed to lead the Canadian public to his vision or to defend his vision against the unscrupulous attacks of Stephen Harper and Jack Layton.