The Wrecking Crew - We're All Part of It

While the world wrings its collective hands over how little we must do to thwart climate change, two other sinister threats lurk in the wings - overpopulation and our rapacious excessive consumption of very finite resources, renewable and non-renewable. Any one of those three, on its own, is more than enough to bring humanity crashing down. Let's talk about over-consumption, the existential threat standing in the corner that is usually overlooked entirely.

What better way to begin than to herald a new record. For the first time ever, humanity has consumed 100 Billion tonnes of materials in a single year. And the cherry on the sundae is that recycling rates are falling at the very same time.

The climate and wildlife emergencies are driven by the unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels, metals, building materials and trees. The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. 

The materials used by the global economy have quadrupled since 1970, far faster than the population, which has doubled. In the last two years, consumption has jumped by more than 8% but the reuse of resources has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6%.

You see, we're not only taking "our" share but we're now pillaging "their" share - the resources every other species needs to survive. That's why, whether it be marine or terrestrial, the overall numbers of our fellow creatures are in a lethal nosedive. In just 30 years we cut their total numbers by more than half, a number of species reduced to extinction. Yeah baby, that was us. We showed them a thing or two, eh?

What's our response to this? I know - veggie burgers. Hell, we'll eat insects if it comes to that. Anything to keep this bacchanal rolling.

Climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption - they're all tightly interwoven. So tightly, in fact, that you can't solve even one of them if you don't solve them all. And we can't even succeed at one - our current preoccupation, climate change.

Anyway, here's the report, released just in time for Davos. In typical form, it's jam packed with bollocks about how "we can still do this," ignoring all the squishiness inherent in our human nature, the "I've got mine buddy. You get yours the best way you know how." syndrome that has played such an instrumental role in the collapse of so many societies over the ages.

And, if you're thinking maybe we can clean this up by going back to "meatless Fridays," think again. Think the "Great Acceleration." Go ahead, open the link. Check it out. Watch the videos, look at the charts (about 49 of them). Then draw your own conclusions.

And Nobody Listened

It was Kurt Vonnegut. The year was 1988.

Vonnegut wrote a letter to the citizens of Earth in 2088. He wrote of future perils that, in some ways, have already come to pass. It was advice that almost no one heeded.

Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do. 

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms: 

1. Reduce and stabilize your population. 

2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil. 

3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems. 

4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it. 

5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars. 

6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid. 

7. And so on. Or else.

Vonnegut's letter was published in Time magazine and has been recently recycled. Like so many things, KV did "see it coming." And, yes, we are still choosing "abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership," people skilled in just one thing - telling us what we want to hear.

h/t Danneau

The Global Economy Is a "Pyramid Scheme" - Nobel Laureate

Former Obama-administration energy secretary and Nobel laureate, Steven Chu, says the global economy is dysfunctional because it depends on constant population growth.

"The world needs a new model of how to generate a rising standard of living that’s not dependent on a pyramid scheme," Chu said at the University of Chicago.

"Increased economic prosperity and all economic models supported by governments and global competitors are based on having more young people, workers, than older people," Chu said.  

For example, healthy young workers pay the health care costs for aging workers and retirees, the former energy secretary said, a scheme that requires increasing numbers of young workers. And economic growth requires more and more people to buy more and more stuff, with dire environmental consequences.

...Chu, the man who solved the Gulf Oil spill with a doodle on a napkin, then offered two painless solutions to population growth:
"Education of women and wealth creation. Across all cultures. You go negative. You go negative birth. 

"In many countries around the world, developed countries, Japan, Spain Italy, we’re talking about 1.3 (children per couple), 1.2 going below 1, where 2 is steady state."

When it comes to anthropogenic global warming and climate change, Chu says we're blinding ourselves by thinking in terms of this century and where we'll be by 2100.

"Once it’s carbon dioxide, some of the models are saying that circulates with a half life of about 10,000 years. So don’t think 2100, think 12100. Let that sink in. We never talk about beyond 2100. So the longevity of this is going to be much longer than the next century or the next millennium," Chu said. "I want to point out that three quarters of the greenhouse gas emissions have occurred over the last 65 years, so it’s a recent phenomenon, since about 1950."

To put it bluntly, humans have done something since 1950 that is going to change the climate until 12100, and we're only beginning to feel that change. 

"What we’ve already done won’t be really visible for 50-100 years. That’s actually easy to understand but no one explains it."

Dying On the Edges

Neoliberalism is not conducive to our health or to our survival.

Neoliberalism has brought us to a place where we have to choose to either step back or accept the butcher's bill to keep it going. We're running out of room, we're running out of stuff, somebody - a lot of somebodies - are going to have to die to keep this party going, to keep us in our big trucks, to keep us in our McMansions. There's simply not enough to go around.

We cannot pretend to bend the Earth to conform to our politics any more. We must now reconcile our politics to the imperatives of our planet. We are going to have to harness consciousness to conscience.

Even in generally affluent Europe there's a movement of people who say, "we can't see a future." These people, from across Europe, are suing the EU for failing to protect their fundamental rights to life, health, occupation and property. They are acting in their own right and on behalf of their children and generations to follow. They are saying that all governments have responsibilities now and to the future. Nobody gets to wreck the future. No government has that right. Not even yours. Implicit in that is that governments must heed "should" as much as "can." Yes they can do things, especially vote-winning things today, but should they do them if the immediate benefit is outweighed by future consequences.

Imagine you're in a lifeboat (which, as I'll explain you now are) and you're in command (you've got the pistol).  All of the survivors, a dozen in all, haven't eaten for a while and they're getting hungry and thirsty. You've got enough water to slake everyone's thirst and enough food to fill their tummies. They get angry and tell you they want that water and they want that food and you had damn well better deliver. You know if you go along they're not going to be happy by Day 3, the days following will be worse and by Day 6 they may be turning on each other. So are you going to ration that food, make it last, or will you let everything go all to Hell? Or, Option 3, you've got six rounds in that revolver. You could shoot the six people you like least, toss them over the side, and relieve the pressure - for a while.

We live on a very finite planet, Earth. It's our one and only biosphere. It operates much like a space ship hurtling through the universe at astonishing speed. (When you combine the speed Earth turns on its axis, the speed of Earth's orbit around the sun, the speed of our solar system's transit through our galaxy and the speed of our galaxy's travel through the universe, it's mind-boggling.) The point is, Earth is still our one and only. Earth - not Elon Musk, not Jeff Bezos, not the Koch Brothers - provides everything you own, everything you use, everything that keeps you alive and happy - the lot. The point is that you, me, all life plant or animal, have to live within the limit of what Earth provides. Go beyond that limit and your chances are about the same as an astronaut going on a spacewalk and removing her helmet. Not good - at all.

Here's the problem. We want everything Earth provides, all of it. We want all of it and more. We have found ways to get more. We now use the Earth's resources far beyond what the planet can sustainably provide. We do this by pillaging the Earth's resource reserves. You can't really argue with that because the evidence is tangible, calculable, some of it is even visible to the naked eye from space. It's visible in deforestation, the clearing of vast tracts of forests. It's visible in desertification, the exhaustion of once fertile farmland and its transformation into barren desert. It's visible in dried up lakes and rivers that no longer flow to the sea. NASA's Grace satellites record it in the subsidence of surface levels caused by the draining of freshwater from aquifers below. We see it in global fisheries that are being collapsed, one by one, as the industrial fishing fleet "fishes down the food chain." It's visible in the algae blooms that now regularly appear in our lakes and along our coasts. It is manifest in the global collapse of biodiversity of both terrestrial and marine species.

The signs are everywhere. They're inescapable, irrefutable. There ain't no getting around it. This is a planet in peril. We're now using the Earth's resources in excess of the planet's carrying capacity by a factor of 1.7.

The neoliberal model of political/economic governance holds that if you can still stock the store shelves it's okay, don't stop. The neoliberal model of governance cares little if at all for the future. That's what has those "we can't see a future" folks in Europe up in arms. They can't see a future. The difference between those brave few and the neoliberals who govern them is that those few have bothered to look to the future. Neoliberals don't look up. Neoliberals look down. Neoliberals can't look up because they know what they'll see utterly contradicts their ethos. It puts the lie to their mode of governance. They won't have that. They're already in too deep to worry about the future.

Look at what's happened during the era of neoliberalism (in addition to all that business about desertification, deforestation, fisheries collapse, etc.). We have doubled in population. We have significantly extended human lifespans. We have substantially increased our per capita consumption. So, more people, living longer, consuming more. As an equation that's more people X living longer X consuming more = the mess we're in today. It has exhausted Earth's resources and caused other life, terrestrial and marine, to plummet in numbers by 50%, half. The bottom is now falling out. The 2016 LivingPlanet Report found that we're on track to lose 67 per cent of wildlife by 2020. This has all happened since the era of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney.

Over that interval, China's population has grown from 982 million (1980) to nearly 1.4 billion. India has gone from 696 million to 1.324 billion. The US grew from 226 million to 323 million. Consider this. It took all but 200 years of the 12,000 year history of human civilization to grow our entire global population to one billion. It took the past 200 years to grow that to 7.5 billion and we're expected to hit 9 billion in just another two or three decades.

China's GDP grew from 192 billion (1980) to 11.2 trillion. India grew from 36 billion to nearly 2.4 trillion. The US grew from 543 billion to 18.6 trillion. India today has almost five times the total GDP of the US in 1980.

In 1980, GWP, Gross World Production, was about 18.8 trillion. In 2000, GWP was 41 trillion. By 2014 it had grown to 77.8 trillion dollars. By way of perspective, in 1900 GWP hit a blistering, all time record 1.1 trillion dollars.

Do you see a trend there?

Those figures - population, GDP, GWP - they're exponential. That's the course neoliberalism has us on, exponential growth. Not for nothing is it called "The Great Acceleration."  And that's the biggest problem with neoliberalism - it only comes with a gas pedal, the steering is shite and there ain't no brake. But even the most powerful locomotive, the greatest ship will stop - when it runs into something.

When I began this post I started with the title "Living On the Edges." Only we're not really living on the edges any more. We're dying on the edges. We don't notice it because we're killing off the rest of nature first. Those other species are dying so that we might live this way a little longer, but only a little. It caused George Monbiot to ask why mankind has chosen to go to war on our living world.

...In a society bombarded by advertising and driven by the growth imperative, pleasure is reduced to hedonism and hedonism is reduced to consumption. We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created. 

We care ever less for the possessions we buy, and dispose of them ever more quickly. Yet the extraction of the raw materials required to produce them, the pollution commissioned in their manufacturing, the infrastructure and noise and burning of fuel needed to transport them are trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce. The loss of wildlife is a loss of wonder and enchantment, of the magic with which the living world infects our lives. 

...A system that makes us less happy, less secure, that narrows and impoverishes our lives, is presented as the only possible answer to our problems. There is no alternative – we must keep marching over the cliff. Anyone who challenges it is either ignored or excoriated.
And the beneficiaries? Well they are also the biggest consumers, using their spectacular wealth to exert impacts thousands of times greater than most people achieve. Much of the natural world is destroyed so that the very rich can fit their yachts with mahogany, eat bluefin tuna sushi, scatter ground rhino horn over their food, land their private jets on airfields carved from rare grasslands, burn in one day as much fossil fuel as the average global citizen uses in a year. 

Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture.

We are dying on the edges and we're killing off everything in our way to cling to our suicidal lifestyle for just as long as we can.

...farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals. 

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

The important question isn't how did we do this but rather why are we still doing this? If this neoliberal trap leads to our possible extinction, why don't we stop and find other ways of organization - political, economic, industrial, social - that can bring humanity back into harmony with our planet, our one and only biosphere?

We have a shared responsibility for our predicament and some bear more responsibility than others. It stops when we say it stops. It stops when enough of us say, no more. There's a lot to undo and it won't be painless or free of sacrifice. But when you're in a lifeboat, your ultimate survival depends entirely on sacrifice.

The Boot on That Neck? The Boot is Us. The Neck is Earth.

The human race is just 0.01% of all life on our planet but a study finds our tiny, infinitesimal presence has been responsible for eradicating most other living things. The results can be jarring:

farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.

...The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years. 

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

What does this mean? To me, it corroborates what I've been arguing for years, namely that climate change, existential as it is, is not the disease but just one symptom of a greater and far more dangerous problem that has a variety of urgent symptoms including overpopulation and rapacious overconsumption of our planet's finite resources. That means the only viable solution lies in shrinking humanity's ecological footprint and all of our economic activity safely within the limits of our global environment.

Here's the thing. It's hard to imagine how we, as a species, will ever again live in sustainable harmony with our ecosystem, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. There are some difficult facts we have to face and they're brutal. One of them is that mankind hasn't lived within the boundaries of our global ecology since the early 70s when our population hit 3 billion.

We're now at 7.5 billion heading, according to the UN, for 10 billion by 2050. Over the course of the last half-century we have also changed as individuals. We live longer now and, on a per capita basis, our individual consumption which defines our per capita footprint, has increased substantially. Humanity has become the "triple threat" to its own survival and that of every other species as well.

We are now so far into "overshoot" that we would need 1.7 planet Earths to meet human consumption. That multiple is increasing fairly rapidly, year upon year.

The other, even more problematic aspect of overshoot, is that the worse it becomes the more rapidly it degrades the planet's ecological carrying capacity. In the early 70s the planet could support a population of 3 billion. In the meantime we've degraded Earth's systems and resources. The latest research I've come across suggests that, today, our planet might be able to sustain a maximum of 2 billion people, far less than the combined population of China and India.

So, our challenge is to decarbonize our societies and economies, virtually overnight; slash our per capita and overall consumption by more than half, probably much more; and get our overall numbers well below 2 billion and in short order.

How do we tell people they're going to have to make do with about a third as much stuff as they've come to enjoy and expect? How do we tell them to surrender their gas guzzlers? How do we convince them that vacations are now stay-cations? Even if we were somehow brilliant enough to do all of those things, how are we going to trim the roster by almost three out of four people currently on Earth? How do we orchestrate this mass die-off? Who decides who gets a ticket on the lifeboat and who doesn't?

When I see humpback whales cavorting in the Salish Sea or mega pods of white sided dolphins in our harbours, I'm looking at creatures that have fled en masse from an unsustainable world. They're the harbingers of what is coming our way and not in the distant future either.

Meanwhile we have a prime minister whose overarching priority is to pimp high-carbon, toxin-laden bitumen onto the world energy market. Brilliant.

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?

Faint Hope

These days good news on climate change is hard to find.  Yet recent progress by major emitters, specifically China, give hope that the world might just meet the Paris Climate Summit goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Over the past half-century, growth in the global economy and carbon pollution have been tied together. When the global economy has been strong, we’ve consumed more energy, which has translated into burning more fossil fuels and releasing more carbon pollution. But over the past four years, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions have been decoupled. The global economy has continued to grow, while data from the EU Joint Research Centre shows carbon pollution has held fairly steady.

China’s shift away from coal to clean energy has been largely responsible for this decoupling. Due to its large population (1.4 billion) – more than four times that of the USA (323 million) and nearly triple the EU (510 million) – and rapid growth in its economy and coal power supply, China has become the world’s largest net carbon polluter (though still less than half America’s per-person carbon emissions, and on par with those of Europeans). But as with the global total, China’s carbon pollution has flattened out since 2013.

The good news of a slowing in the growth of man-made carbon dioxide emissions is tempered by the warning that we still face the Herculean chore of rapidly abandoning fossil fuels after 2020. We have a chance, if we're prepared to decarbonize our economies and our societies within the very near future. And the way that can be done isn't easy. It requires what Potsdam Institute's Hans Joachim Schellnhuber told delegates at Paris in 2015 is essential, the "induced implosion" of the fossil fuel industry.  That means governments intervening to force the closure and abandonment of the oil and gas wells and the fossil fuels mines.

We pride ourselves on being a really progressive country that wants only the best for the world. Can you think of a Canadian leader, not only Justin Trudeau but his predecessors and his rivals today, who would padlock Athabasca or force the closure of the gas and oil wells of western Canada?

Let's not kid ourselves. In order to decarbonize we're probably going to have to endure an economic collapse. That's because the fossil energy giants have us by the - cojones. They have an estimated $27 Trillion dollars of proven fossil fuel reserves subscribed on every stock exchange and bourse around the world. 27,000,000,000 dollars from banks, institutional investors, pension funds and ma and pa punters are floating around in today's Carbon Bubble. That's an enormous amount of wealth to simply wipe off the books of the global economy. Bursting that bubble is going to leave lasting scars.

Freedom from fossil energy will take a concerted global effort. We've been lucky so far. Renewable energy costs have been falling to the point where they're sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. What will fossil fuels cost when that Carbon Bubble bursts?  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Especially if we revert to pre-globalization, slave labour rates in the Third World.

My point is that getting off carbon energy is going to cause enormous economic upheaval of the sort that can readily destabilize vulnerable nations, even entire regions. How do you maintain that concerted global effort to decarbonize in the midst of that sort of dystopian-lite upheaval? Are we prepared for a global sharing economy in which wealth is voluntarily transferred from the haves to the have nots for the sake of global stability? The developed world's record of dealing with growing inequality within their own economies doesn't offer much cause for optimism.

And then there's the real stumbling block, the synergy of climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of very finite resources. Jared Diamond illustrates in his book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," drives home the point that, when you have these interwoven, synergistic, existential threats you either resolve them all or you'll solve none of them.

Am I suggesting we simply throw in the towel, give up, wait to die off? Of course not. We have to resolve our entirely man-made predicaments.  The overpopulated have to slash their populations. The over-consumptive have to slash their consumption. Everyone, but particularly the big emitters, have to slash their emissions and move off carbon energy. We have to build a new, post-carbon economy first nationally, then regionally and finally globally.

We must give up our illusions that carbon taxes and solar panels will solve our problems. That horse left the barn sometime in the early 1970s.

We have to revert to the past when we lived within the bounds of our environment. We're simply too big for our planet, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. It's time we had a serious discussion about sustainable retreat.

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.

The Perspective is Jarring.

Let's see, 9 billion tonnes of plastic divided by 7.5 billion human beings. That's 1.2 tonnes of plastic per person or 2,640 pounds.

More than 9 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since 1950, and almost all of it is still around.

A new study that tracked the global manufacture and distribution of plastics since they became widespread after World War II found that only two billion tonnes of that plastic is still in use.

That sounds like a lot, and it is, but consider the "technosphere" which is mankind's overall footprint on the Earth. That's you and me and all of our stuff and every building, road, airport and bridge. Everything man made. That now comes in at 30-trillion tons. Your per capita share of that is a staggering 4 thousand tons, just over 3.6 thousand metric tonnes.

Brazil's Christ the Redeemer statue comes in at just 635 tons. Your share of the technosphere is almost six of those.  The Statue of Liberty comes in at a paltry 225 tons. 

These should be sobering numbers to any who doubt humankind's imprint on our planet especially when you consider that most of the technosphere was built with some sort of fossil fuel energy. That includes you and me for most of the food we have consumed was produced with fossil energy for everything from the machinery involved in planting, harvesting and transportation to the chemical fertilizers used to bolster crop yields.

At Last, An Intelligent Discussion About Overpopulation.

The May edition of Foreign Policy magazine is their climate change issue.

As a keen follower of climate science for the past 15 years or more, the shortcomings in the treatment of this potentially existential threat to human civilization has been the fractured and shallow coverage it has received. This has led some to see climate change as something to do with global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. That has encouraged many to see it as resolvable by measures such as geo-engineering. These are facile responses.

Even many climate scientists treat climate change as some stand alone issue that can be approached in isolation. It's a blinkered outlook that goes a long way to ensuring that answers will elude us.

Many years ago I began to assemble a list of the major problems confronting mankind this century. It was an extensive list. I no longer have it memorized but I'll do my best here:

Climate change and associated, largely anthropogenic or man-made challenges including severe storm events of increasing intensity, frequency and duration; a broken hydrological cycle contributing to severe flooding and drought, both cyclical and recurrent; a shift in jet stream circulation carrying warm air into the Arctic and cold polar air deep into southern regions; the heating of the Arctic manifesting in the loss of Arctic sea ice (the albedo), the thawing of Arctic permafrost, the drying out of the tundra leading to uncontrollable wild fires producing black soot; disease and pest migration; species (terrestrial, marine, plant and animal) extinction and migration; the loss of ice caps and glaciers; sea level rise, coastal flooding and the saltwater inundation of coastal freshwater resources; the rapidly spreading freshwater crisis; severe heat events including situations nearing "wet bulb 35" conditions; the collapse of global fisheries from rapacious overfishing; massive deforestation, particularly in South America and Asia Pacific; pollution and contamination of all forms including algae blooms from industrial and agricultural runoff, coastal dead zones; resource exhaustion and depletion; desertification and the rapid loss of arable farmland through soil degradation caused by excessively intensive agriculture; and a host of security challenges including overpopulation and population migration, famine, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, various regional arms races and the onset of resource wars.

I don't claim the list to be exhaustive, merely the best my memory can muster in the moment. I spent a few years looking at this list trying to discern whether and, if so, how these looming calamities were connected. Were there common threads that ran through them?

It turns out they are all, in varying degrees, connected. Each falls into one or more of three basic categories - anthropogenic global warming, overconsumption of resources and overpopulation.  Those common threads, all of them, run straight back to us, how we're constituted as societies and a global civilization, and how we're organized politically, socially, economically and industrially. It was then that I realized that Jared Diamond is right - we don't have much chance of solving any of them unless we're willing and able to solve them all.

I was pleased in skimming through the digital version of the latest Foreign Policy to discover a genuinely thoughtful, well-reasoned and in depth discussion of the overpopulation challenge from and center in their climate change edition. The article asks "Is there a case to be made against baby making?" before unpacking the social, cultural and environmental pros and cons that bedevil the issue.

FP editor, David Rothkopf, has an essay dealing with the scourge of denialism, "The Wages of Sin Is the Death of the World; the biggest threat to a fragile world is human frailty." He looks at how the most climate change hostile government, Trump's, came to power thanks to a deviant sexting a minor.

Rothkopf cites Nate Silverman's conclusion that Comey's decision, just days prior to the election, to announce a new investigation into Hillary's emails discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop while the FBI pursued the sexting crime was enough to swing three states to Trump that gave him the Electoral College win.

The FBI was hunting down a perv. They seized his computer. On the hard drive were Huma Abedin emails. That caused the FBI to re-open the investigation. Comey made his announcement. Trump won the electoral college.  Now Trump is dismantling the EPA and threatening to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate change accord.

It looks like a good issue. Mine's in the mailbox but you may want to check it out on a newsstand or in your library.

As I Stare at My Smoke-Clouded Sky, a Thought or Two About Tipping Points

A tipping point isn't that instant when water begins pouring over the canoe's gunwale.  The tipping point is actually before that, when the canoe is heeling over and can't be stopped.  It's summer time. Get in a canoe and try it.  There's a brief moment, perhaps not more than a second or two, when the outcome is both obvious and inescapable - the center of gravity has shifted and your momentum is going to carry you over.  At that point you're just along for a rather wet ride.

Climate change, anthropogenic global warming tipping points are very similar to what happens in a canoe.  The environment begins to heel over until it reaches a critical point at which there's no turning back.

The international community has set 2 degrees Celsius as the point at which we still have a reasonable chance of not rolling over.  No guarantees, just a reasonable chance.  That's based on a best guess from what we knew of climate change many years ago.  Many scientists are now telling us that 2C target is way, way too high.  That's discouraging because we've already loaded the atmosphere with enough greenhouse gases that we have locked in at least 1.5C of warming over the course of this century.

We need to remember, very clearly, what these targets are all about.  They're an attempt to reach a goal for arresting warming before all those emissions from our smoke stacks and our tail pipes and our cow farts trip natural feedback mechanisms that we cannot control and that will drive runaway global warming.

What do these natural feedback mechanisms look like?  We have a pretty good idea, a list, but it's not necessarily exhaustive.  One example is the pine beetle infestation that has devastated hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest across the west, turning those once verdant pine forests into rust-coloured, high-resin kindling, all dried out and waiting for a careless hiker or a lightning strike. When it comes to wildfire fuel, it just doesn't come any better than that.

In case you haven't heard, the West is on fire from northern Alaska all the way down into Mexico.  Step outside and you can't see the CO2 emissions but you sure can see and smell the heat absorbing soot in the air. It builds up on your window sills, it gets all over your furniture and your floors. Suddenly forests that, while alive, were powerful carbon sinks sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere for photosynthesis have now become carbon bombs. There's a natural feedback mechanism for you right there. Come out this way, you can't miss it. Although, from what I've read this is one time the West has come to you.  Sort of like that Mount St. Helen's thing.

Arctic sea ice is vanishing and quite rapidly to boot.  The ice cover that once reflected solar radiation, heat, back into space has walked off the job. No brilliant white ice means dark green ocean that is a heat sink.  That warming Arctic ocean warms the atmosphere that causes the tundra to dry out and catch fire.  As the tundra burns it creates black soot that winds up turning the Greenland Ice Sheet a dirty colour and that accelerates the melting of the ice sheet and sea level rise.

The thawing, burning tundra also exposes the permafrost underneath that, as it thaws, releases massive amounts of once safely sequestered, formerly frozen methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas.  As the Arctic ocean warms it also triggers the thawing of ancient, frozen seabed methane clathrates - methane ice if you like - that bubbles to the surface and then onward to the atmosphere.

From rampaging wildfires to tundra fires to ice caps covered in black soot to the release of ancient stores of methane from the permafrost and seabed clathrates these are all the feedback mechanisms your mother those scientists warned you about.  They're happening now, not forty years from now, not even twenty years from now.

Have we passed the point of no return.  The good news is that's a conversation we're not really having right now.  We're still proceeding - although not very quickly and not very well - with talks that assume we're not there yet and can, if we just try hard enough dammit, avoid the worst - maybe.

Today we're at just 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  We're not at the 1.5C mark yet because that persistent atmospheric greenhouse gas needs time to work its magic.  It will and as it does our children and grandchildren will experience the changes in creates.

There are two things that we must understand, and that includes you.

First off. That 1.5C is something we've already bequeathed our kids and theirs. What we need to realize is that emissions are cumulative which means our greenhouse gas emissions from today onward add to that 1.5C.  Every tonne of CO2 we emit goes on top of that 1.5C pile.  We're experiencing the impacts of barely 0.8C of warming (and it's a real bitch). As today's warming keeps getting hotter, those who follow us will endure a variety of impacts that are even greater, more dangerous, and demanding of new adaptation responses.

Second.  These numbers don't include the natural feedback mechanisms we already seem to have triggered.  The greenhouse gas emissions they create - CO2 from forest fires, methane released from the permafrost and seabed clathrates - also go atop that 1.5C we have already locked in.

What more incentive do we need to rapidly decarbonize our economies and our societies?  What conceivable justification do we have to continue to dither and squabble? This is a moral imperative, a fundamental obligation we owe not just our kids and theirs but to the very future of our country. It's time to sweep denialism and those behind it out of our path for they are immensely more dangerous than any terrorist group or tinpot tyrant that has ever beset our world.

Oh yeah, one other thing.  While we're decarbonizing and sorting out the climate change business, we have to realize that any real solution also must address two related challenges without which we don't stand a chance - over-consumption and overpopulation.  They're all tied up together and you have to solve them all if you're to solve any of them.  Bear in mind that if we don't come up with solutions that address all three of these existential challenges, they'll come up with their own solutions and we won't be very happy when they arrive.

And the Band Played On

It's generally accepted in the scientific community that it takes one to several centuries, on average, for species to truly adapt to a 1 degree Celsius shift in temperature, up or down.

Look around today and you'll see species "running" for their lives, continually migrating ever further away from the equatorial zone.  Some species, particularly those that swim or fly, have a big advantage when it comes to migration.  Plants aren't quite so lucky yet it's calculated that, in totality, they too are migrating at about 8-inches every year.

From my perch out here on the Pacific we see lots of signs of this migration out of the south.  Humpbacks have returned to our waters in big numbers.  Large schools of white sided dolphins have arrived bringing pods of transient orca with them.  California has lost its once abundant anchovies which might be the same populations that have recently shown up here.  Victoria now even has a resident flock of brown pelicans that have taken up residence between the provincial capital and Race Rocks.

This may be a case where the race goes to the swiftest in which event there'll be plenty of losers.

One of the most prominent experts in this area is the University of Hawaii's Camilo Mora, whose specialties include biogeography, geology and climate data modeling.  Mora and his fellow researchers made headlines a couple of years ago when they produced a study that forecasts 2047 as the year by which every year that follows - every year - will be hotter than the hottest year that area has experienced over the previous century and a half, a phenomenon called "climate departure."  Some places will reach that point long before then:

Mora forecasts that the unprecedented heat starts in 2020 with Manokwari, Indonesia. Then Kingston, Jamaica. Within the next two decades, 59 cities will be living in what is essentially a new climate, including Singapore, Havana, Kuala Lumpur and Mexico City.

In an interview last year with Yale University's e360 Project, Mora touched on the frustration caused researchers by the public's and their leaders' reluctance to respond to the plain science.

You don’t see any action on these things. And the problem is that these things die away pretty quickly. The press coverage of this paper lasted two days. We were in the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN. And next week, people were talking about something else. So as scientists, we are struggling to figure out how we can increase public awareness on this issue.

Pope Francis stirred up a lot of reaction last week to his papal encyclical on climate change in which he focused on climate change and over-consumption, especially by the advantaged countries, that were wrecking the environment. The pope, however, disingenuously gave overpopulation a pass.  Mora disagrees.  To him our population loading is already excessive.

Well, it’s paramount because people need food. And the planet is limited in the amount of resources that it can produce. We already have calculated that the planet has on the order of 11 billion hectares that can be harvested in a sustainable manner. Of course we can increase the number by increasing technology, but that’s been happening for the last three decades. The worldwide population is 7 billion people, and we know that to sustain a human being you need on the order of two hectares per person. That means that the world human population every year consumes on the order of 14 billion hectares. The planet only has eleven to give to us.

This doesn't take into account the more recent research about global soil degradation and the mounting threat to food security.  In March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a report on the ongoing degradation of our stocks of arable land, warning that a lot of our topsoil over the next 60-years will be ruined by intensive agriculture and the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.  Like Mora's research and the Living Planet Report, 2014 finding that we have lost half our wildlife over the past 30 years, the UNFAO study was almost immediately flushed straight down the memory hole, completely forgotten.

Much of Mora's claims about overpopulation is borne out by research conducted by the NGO, Global Footprint Network, which tracks the biomass deficit that has set in around the world (only a handful of countries, Canada being one, remain in a biomass surplus).  From this the GFN issues an annual release to mark "Earth Overshoot Day," the date on which we exhaust a full year's supply of the planet's renewable resources.  Just a few years ago, Overshoot fell in mid October.  Now it has advanced to August.  For the balance of the year we deplete Earth's resource reserves and the rate at which our over-consumption is accelerating is a warning that we're depleting those reserves rapidly too.

In 2014, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 19.  This year it will arrive on August 15.  For more on that and GFN's take on the papal encyclical, you can go here.  

Professor Mora faults the environmental community, including the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for deliberately ducking the overpopulation issue.

Mora: It’s pure fear. It seems amazing, but friends of mine recommended to me not to publish that paper. They said, “This paper is going to be damaging to you. You don’t get it. You don’t need it.” What is remarkable, though, is that after the paper got published, I had multiple people calling me to endorse it.

e360: Did they endorse it publicly?

Mora: No, just to me. This is really the problem. But why we don’t take it on? I have no clue. Because the data are very clear. I guess the problem is that it can backfire. We have seen, historically, situations in which a scientist has taken on an issue and there are people who have been fired, or attacked by interest groups. So I guess the problem is fear of retaliation.

If he's right, if the scientific community is already too intimidated to address the issue of overpopulation, then we're genuinely screwed.  The pope hit two of three - climate change and over-consumption - but if you can't address overpopulation, you have almost completely undermined your chances of effective action on the other two.

We're already seeing the impacts of climate change but doing little to prepare for what those early impacts tell us is coming.  For now we're forestalling the consequences of ever increasing over-consumption by raiding the Earth's diminishing resource reserves. We have no collective will to even begin tackling overpopulation. 

We comfort ourselves by talking in terms of what might happen by 2100.  Oh hell, we'll all be gone by then anyway so, no big deal.  But, if Mora's research is accurate, "climate departure" begins to set in by 2020 and then spreads across the world until every country is hit by 2047.   

Connecting the Dots on Climate Change

One of the biggest failures in climate change reporting is the tendency to focus on particular aspects without considering the bigger picture.  What does sea level rise have to do with droughts or floods?  What is the role of changing ocean circulation patterns?  How do these impacts all factor into our rapidly changing jet stream?

When we look at individual aspects we usually wind up with charts that reveal a linear pattern.  Sure, there may be dramatic increases on the curve, but nothing that appears wild or unpredictable.

Yet we're nearing the point where climate change impacts will be wild and unpredictable, totally non-linear.  A big part of this results from the "cascade effect" in which a number of seemingly unrelated impacts begin operating together, even harnessing man-made change with natural feedback mechanisms that will be much harder to control and nearly impossible to reverse.  We can expect to be overtaken by fast-developing events and very possibly without adaptation strategies or preparations.  In the scope of climate change, it's like we've all but given up.

An online course being presented by Germany's prestigious Potsdam Institute provides the missing link.  It begins to connect all the dots to reveal how changes already underway that will continue to accelerate and worsen even if we miraculously decarbonize today to make our world a far more difficult place for almost all forms of life.

One example is the Greenland ice sheet.  As it melts, the cold freshwater released to the sea has a direct impact on the thermohalene circulation (Gulf Stream) which, in turn, speeds up the decline in the Arctic sea ice and the thawing of high latitude permafrost and the loss of Alpine glaciers.

As the Arctic warms the temperature differential between the Arctic and temperate latitudes narrows,  weakening the jet stream and giving rise to Rossby waves, blocking events that can stall weather fronts in a particular location for upwards of four weeks.  These Rossby waves are responsible for Atlanta, Georgia falling into a February deep freeze while a village in Alaska hits temps. in the 60s.  These Rossby waves created the conditions for the Calgary flood and triggered the recent drought in Russia that ruined the wheat harvest there.

The Amazon rainforest governs precipitation patterns in much of South America. A warming beyond 2C carries the risk of transforming the Amazon into savannah grasslands, upending essential rainfall needed for many millions of Brazilians and their neighbours.

The hydrologic cycle is the climate change cycle.  Our civilization is utterly dependent on the steady and predictable supply of precipitation for human needs (drinking, cooking, sanitation), for agricultural production and for industry. When precipitation falters and becomes unreliable or sporadic, there goes your economy and, with it, your civilization.   This is nothing new.  We have a rich history of this sort of societal collapse.

Already billions lack adequate access to safe water.  Billions do not have access to basic sanitation.  Even as we experience growing water scarcity many of the most vulnerable countries also heavily contaminate their freshwater resources. This is compounded by deteriorating ecosystems and by failing infrastructure and lack of investment.  Water is something we're all too ready to fight over when scarcity sets in and there are few coherent international policies to deal with conflict.

Two areas expected to be among the hardest hit are Africa and Asia.  They're also experiencing explosive population growth.  They're going to be especially vulnerable to droughts, floods and sea level rise.  It's estimated the world will need to up food production by 50-70% by 2050 to keep up with the growing population yet these climate change impacts, taken cumulatively, will cause a sharp decline in food production in the most needy areas.  Draw your own conclusions as to how that will play out especially in the Hindu Kush.

Our ecosystems are in a migratory transition.  Plants and animals alike are responding to climate change by steadily moving away from the equator. Although you may think otherwise in central and eastern Canada, Spring is now arriving two weeks earlier globally.  Pests and disease are also migrating.  West Nile virus is one example.  Above 2C be prepared for a spread of malaria and a sharp increase in infections.  As it warms the incubation period for malaria plummets and mosquitoes bite a lot more.  Water-related diseases from cholera to typhus to dysentery also increase.

It's critical to consider the effect this warming already underway will have on biodiversity.  Many species are incapable of evolving to survive the current, early onset, rate of change.  If we fail to arrest global warming at 2C (now considered highly unlikely) and instead allow it to reach 4C, the number of species lost will skyrocket. 2C simply gives many species a window to survive through adaptation, evolution migration.

This week it was announced that, in March, we set another record when every part of the planet experienced GHG concentrations about 400 ppm. Everywhere. To put that in perspective, our coral reefs cannot survive long beyond 350 ppm. of atmospheric CO2.  It's calculated that 1.5C of warming will kill off all but 10% of the world's corals.  Here's the thing.  It was recently reported that our existing emissions, what we've already put into the atmosphere, will "lock in" 1.5C of warming by 2100.  We've already pulled the Celsius trigger.  Now we've pulled the acidification trigger.  Sea level rise stresses corals.  So do severe storm events such as the cyclones savaging the central western Pacific.

As I went through the lectures from these top world scientists, leaders in their own disciplines, in looking to what awaits in a 4C world each said the same thing - "all bets are off."  Each of them described their field in the context of a climate change impacts "cascade" but noted that these combined impacts and they synergies are beyond anything in the experience of human and other life forms. Most also pointed out that, by the time we get to understand the cascade fallout, it'll be too late to do anything about it.

To sum up, we've got two choices - just the two.  Either decarbonize now, just as quickly as humanly possible, or "don't worry, be happy."  

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.

21st Century Assyrians

Overpopulation + Drought = Collapse.  Just ask any Assyrian.  Of course they've been gone since the 7th century so that's not very practical.

Historians have long wondered how the Assyrians, the military powerhouse of their region, were taken down by Babylonian forces at Nineveh in 612.   New research shows the Assyrians were already down and on their way out.  The Babylonians just finished the job.

Experts from UC San Diego and Koc University, Istanbul, have discovered that overpopulation and sustained drought caused the empire to collapse, leading the neighbours to move in.

Analysis of the area's weather patterns from paleoclimatic records found that this drought was part of a long period of drought that lasted for several years.

Adam Schneider, from the University of California, said: "As far as we know, ours is the first study to put forward the hypothesis that climate change - specifically drought - helped to destroy the Assyrian Empire."

At the same time, the Assyrian Empire was suffering from overpopulation. Society had grown unsustainably large during the reign of King Sennacherib and the Empire was "fatally weakened".

Within five years, Assyria was ravaged by civil wars. "We're not saying that the Assyrians suddenly starved to death or were forced to wander off into the desert en masse, abandoning their cities," Schneider said. "Rather, we're saying that drought and overpopulation affected the economy and destabilised the political system to a point where the empire couldn't withstand unrest and the onslaught of other peoples."

The researchers said the collapse of the Assyrian Empire is comparable with the current political situation in the Syria and northern Iraq. They also draw parallels with cities like San Diego and Los Angeles, where areas grow too large for their environments.

"The Assyrians can be 'excused' to some extent for focusing on short-term economic or political goals which increased their risk of being negatively impacted by climate change, given their technological capacity and their level of scientific understanding about how the natural world works," the authors wrote.

"We, however, have no such excuses, and we also possess the additional benefit of hindsight, which allows us to piece together from the past what can go wrong if we choose not to enact policies that promote longer-term sustainability."

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.