Category: Ecology

By Gail Zawacki: The Waste Land

My new favorite piece by Gail Zawacki.

A few ideas that stood out for me:

  • Much of what we view as nature is not natural.
  • Humans are an invasive species and we deny this reality.
  • Ozone pollution continues to be a huge problem that we deny.
  • Drought is not killing trees. Human air pollution is killing trees, and dead trees are contributing to drought.
Most often, writing on a blog feels to have no more effect than idly dropping a pebble in the ocean, and watching the tiny ripples disappear; lately it seems that climate heating has gone exponential, and in my imagination I anticipate the moment I will hear an official NASA announcement on the radio – that it’s too late to do anything about climate change because irreversible amplifying feedbacks have taken over and there’s nothing left but to listen to the orchestra play on the deck.

“There ought to be a word that expresses in a few syllables the totality of ecocide – not just the horror in recognizing the physical manifestations of looming extinction, but the ensuing pain upon realizing the futility and meaninglessness that has been wrought by human folly, hubris, stupidity and blindness.  But I don’t know what it is.”

https://witsendnj.blogspot.ca/2016/09/the-waste-land.html

By USFS: Forest Service survey finds record 66 million dead trees in southern Sierra Nevada

http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2016/06/video-forest-service-survey-finds.html

VALLEJO, California, 22 June 2016 (USFS) – The U.S. Forest Service today announced that it has identified an additional 26 million trees dead in California since October 2015. These trees are located in six counties across 760,000 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada region of the state, and are in addition to the 40 million trees that died statewide from 2010 to October 2015, bringing the total to at least 66 million dead trees. Four consecutive years of severe drought in California, a dramatic rise in bark beetle infestation and warmer temperatures are leading to historic levels of tree die-off.

“Tree dies-offs of this magnitude are unprecedented and increase the risk of catastrophic wildfires that puts property and lives at risk,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “While the fire risk is currently the most extreme in California because of the tree mortality, forests across the country are at risk of wildfire and urgently need restoration requiring a massive effort to remove this tinder and improve their health.

Between 2010 and late 2015, Forest Service aerial detection surveys found that 40 million trees died across California – with nearly three quarters of that total succumbing to drought and insect mortality from September 2014 to October 2015 alone. The survey identified approximately 26 million additional dead trees since the last inventory in October, 2015.

Forest Service scientists expect to see continued elevated levels of tree mortality during 2016 in dense forest stands, stands impacted by root diseases or other stress agents and in areas with higher levels of bark beetle activity. Additional surveys across the state will be conducted throughout the summer and fall.

With the increasing size and costs of suppressing wildfires due to climate change and other factors, the very efforts that would protect watersheds and restore forests to make them more resilient to fire in the future are being squeezed out of the budget. Last year fire management alone consumed 56 percent of the Forest Service’s budget.

A Deadly Recipe: One Part Ignorance, One Part Denial

I’ve been paying a little more attention these days to what the main stream media thinks is going on.

They report on government data that says the economy has recovered from the 2008 crisis. They also report on the rise of Trump that indicates many citizens are struggling and angry.

They know that incomes have stagnated while life’s expenses continue to rise but they have no clue what is causing this.

They don’t even have an intelligent theory.

On other important matters obvious to anyone that cares to look such as the climate spiraling out of control, the 6th great extinction of species, and human overshoot starting to bite in some of the weaker countries, they say nothing.

It’s quite amazing.

It seems likely we will collapse with most people having no idea what is causing their pain.

One part ignorance and one part genetic denial is a deadly recipe for war and civil unrest.

By Mark Williams et al.: The Anthropocene (Human Impact by the Numbers)

Produced energy and the pattern of human population growth from 1750. Utilization of these energy sources, together with the energy used by humans from net primary production, is now approaching the entire energy available to the global ecosystem before human intervention [Barnosky, [1]]. Key to colours: dark blue = coal; dark brown = oil; green = natural gas; purple = nuclear; light blue = hydro; orange brown = biomass (e.g. plants, trees). Data source from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8936

Humans now consume between 25 and 38% of net primary production of the planet. Human modification and appropriation of NPP, and the production of energy over and above NPP, has been developing over thousands of years, but accelerated markedly from the mid-20th century onward (Figure 1).

Professor Zalasiewicz at the University of Lecister said the last times such huge effects were seen happened 2.5 billion years ago when photosynthesis appeared, and again half a billion years ago when the food web grew more complex.  Although the 5 major extinction events were also huge, “ even measured against these events, human-driven changes to production and consumption are distinctly new.”

Co-author Dr Carys Bennett added: “It is without precedent to have a single species appropriating something like one quarter of the net primary biological production of the planet and to become effectively the top predator both on land and at sea.”

Some of the massive effects humans are having on the planet include mining phosphorus and fixing nitrogen to make fertilizer, burning hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels, and directing this increased productivity that is well beyond natural levels towards animals re-engineered for our consumption.

Commentary by Alice Friedemann…

http://energyskeptic.com/2016/a-strong-case-for-the-anthropocene-no-other-species-has-ever-consumed-as-much-of-earths-resources-so-quickly/

Original paper…

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015EF000339/full

By Dahr Jamail: Global Fisheries Are Collapsing — What Happens When There Are No Fish Left?

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35574-global-fisheries-are-collapsing-what-happens-when-there-are-no-fish-left

Overfishing and the imminent collapse of global fisheries is an excellent example of how we have used non-renewable energy to over exploit and destroy a renewable resource that will be needed when non-renewable energy is gone.

It’s a similar story for soil, and trees, and wildlife, and fresh water.

There are no villains in this story. Just hard working people trying to provide for their families.

The problem is too many people.

I don’t see any solution that will help except population reduction.

Commercial overexploitation of the world’s fish stocks is severe,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said back in 2012. “Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted, and a further third are depleted.”

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 85 percent of global fish stocks are “overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion.”

Fisheries for the most sought-after species of fish have already collapsed.

The populations of all large predator fish in the oceans have declined by 90 percent in the 50 years since modern industrial fishing became widespread around the world, according to a shocking paper by scientists with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, published in Nature in 2003.

Three years after the paper’s publication, the same scientists, along with colleagues from across the world, published an even more startling paper that predicted a total collapse of all fish that are currently caught commercially by 2048.

Many scientists, like Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, have estimated that the total fish catch for the planet peaked back in the mid-1980s, and has been declining ever since.

“The big problem is that we are overfishing,” Boxall told Truthout. “The [fisheries] management isn’t working, and is in fact causing just as much destruction [as] if there was no management in the first place.”

Ocean Acidification in My Front Yard

 

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This report by Charles Mandel titled “Global emissions triggering “permanent and alarming changes” in West Coast waters” explains that the ocean in front of my house is in serious trouble.

I’ve been frequenting this beach since 1960 and I can see the decline with my own eyes. What was once a diverse and abundant ecosystem is now almost a desert.

I’m sure acidification is just one of many negative pressures at play, but it is no doubt a very powerful force we should worry about.

What I found interesting in this report was its subtext of denial.

It starts out strong…

Changes to the ocean chemistry along the North American West Coast – including along coastal British Columbia – will have “devastating ecological consequences” in the coming decades if immediate action isn’t taken.

The panel said global carbon dioxide emissions are triggering “permanent and alarming” changes.

Then immediately shifts focus to economic harm, because of course the most important thing is lost jobs…

If unchecked, ocean acidification could “set off a domino effect of job losses throughout coastal communities, particularly in places where the fishing industry and coastal tourism provide the economic base,” the report noted.

Then subtly shifts blame for the problem to the Asians…

The acidification of West Coast waters originates with oceanic currents that transport the waters across the northern Pacific Ocean from Asia.

Without mentioning that we produce much more CO2 per capita than the Asians, doubly so if you count the coal the Asians use to generate the electricity they need to produce the goods that fill our Walmart’s.

Then they conclude with actions that should be taken…

Among other things the panel urges ocean management and natural resource agencies to exploring approaches that involve the use of seagrass to remove carbon dioxide from seawater; and identify strategies to reduce the amount of land-based pollution entering coastal waters.

These actions are sadly lame because seagrass was abundant and has mostly disappeared, presumably due to human pressures. And land based pollution is no doubt a problem, but a different problem. To reduce acidification we need to reduce the CO2 level.

Despite 20 years of good intentions CO2 is still rising because CO2 is proportional to human wealth, the population is rising, and everyone wants more wealth.

As usual, they fail to mention the only thing that might help, reducing our consumption and shrinking the global economy.

By Nate Hagens: A Guide to Being Human in the 21st Century: Resource Depletion, Behavior and the Environment

Nate Hagens gives the best big picture talks on how fortunate we are to be alive at this point in history, and on the challenges we face.

Here is his latest talk given this week at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point.

If you search this site you will find other work by Nate.

By Gail Zawacki: Earth Embalmed

A nice article by Gail Zawacki in which she summarizes some of the recent news on the damage we are doing to our home.

http://witsendnj.blogspot.ca/2016/04/earth-embalmed.html

There are so many calamities – fish kills in Florida and birds falling out of the skies, epic floods and droughts, the slowing of the ocean currents – that when I prepared the 26th Dispatch From The Endocene I left out a major incident I had intended to include – the abrupt and near total coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.  The fact that it is just one item on the roster of grotesque environmental disasters that will catalyze NO change whatsoever in the engine of human civilization – even though it has to be the most egregious, most atrocious, most stunningly heinous example of anthropogenic ecocide – is astonishing.

It is proof, were any to be needed, that nothing – nothing, not an ice free Arctic, not a huge ice shelf breaking off Antarctica raising sea levels a foot in a week, not thousands of deaths in a heat wave, not storms so violent they lift boulders from the bottom of the sea – NOTHING will stop people from availing themselves blindly and greedily to the bounteous largess of Earth…until it is all gone, and there is none left.

The debacle in the reef is the latest example of humanity ceaselessly rendering the biosphere into a morgue.  It’s as awful as though all the forests were dying, and we managed to ignore it.

Oh, wait.

By Richard Smith: Green Capitalism: The God That Failed

Richard Smith is a rare voice that speaks to the ineffectiveness of environmental organizations. Green growth is not and cannot be green.

Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when environmentalists began to turn to the market, “green growth” theorists and proponents have argued au contraire that “jobs and environment are not opposed,” that economic growth is compatible with emissions reduction, that carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade schemes could suppress GHG emissions while “green jobs” in new tech, especially renewable energy, would offset lost jobs in fossil fuel industries. Their strategy has failed completely, yet this remains the dominant view of leading climate scientists, including James Hansen, and of most environmental organizations.

All such market-based efforts are doomed to fail, and a sustainable economy is inconceivable without sweeping systemic economic change.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21060-green-capitalism-the-god-that-failed

Unfortunately Smith studied economics and apparently did not study physics or biology and therefore incorrectly believes that a different economic or political system can solve our overshoot problems.

It is true that Capitalism has proven to be the most effective system for growth however every other economic and political system has also proven to be destructive to the environment.

The problem is not our economic or political system.

The problem is that humans are consuming a lot of non-renewable energy and materials, and too large a share of renewable resources. Full stop.

And another similar article by Richard Smith…

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19872-capitalism-and-the-destruction-of-life-on-earth-six-theses-on-saving-the-humans

If we want a sustainable economy, one that “meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs,” then we would have to do at least some or all of the following:

  1. Put the brakes on out-of-control growth in the global North – retrench or shut down unnecessary, resource-hogging, wasteful, polluting industries like fossil fuels, autos, aircraft and airlines, shipping, chemicals, bottled water, processed foods, unnecessary pharmaceuticals and so on. Abolish luxury-goods production, the fashions, jewelry, handbags, mansions, Bentleys, yachts, private jets etc. Abolish the manufacture of disposable, throw-away and “repetitive consumption” products. All these consume resources we’re running out of, resources that other people on the planet desperately need and that our children and theirs will need.
  2. Discontinue harmful industrial processes like industrial agriculture, industrial fishing, logging, mining and so on.
  3. Close many services – the banking industry, Wall Street, the credit card, retail, PR and advertising “industries” built to underwrite and promote all this overconsumption. I’m sure most of the people working in these so-called industries would rather be doing something else, something useful, creative and interesting and personally rewarding with their lives. They deserve that chance.
  4. Abolish the military-surveillance-police state industrial complex, and all its manufactures because this is just a total waste whose only purpose is global domination, terrorism and destruction abroad and repression at home. We can’t build decent societies anywhere when so much of social surplus is squandered on such waste.
  5. Reorganize, restructure, reprioritize production and build the products we do need to be as durable and shareable as possible.
  6. Steer investments into things society does need, like renewable energy, organic farming, public transportation, public water systems, ecological remediation, public health, quality schools and other currently unmet needs.
  7. Deglobalize trade to produce what can be produced locally; trade what can’t be produced locally, to reduce transportation pollution and revive local producers.
  8. Equalize development the world over by shifting resources out of useless and harmful production in the North and into developing the South, building basic infrastructure, sanitation systems, public schools, health care, and so on.
  9. Devise a rational approach to eliminate or control waste and toxins as much as possible.
  10. Provide equivalent jobs for workers displaced by the retrenchment or closure of unnecessary or harmful industries, not just the unemployment line, not just because workers cannot support the industry we and they need to save ourselves.

Nowhere in Smith’s 10 possible solutions does he clearly state the most important thing: Restoration of the planet’s health requires poorer people and/or fewer people.

It seems Smith has fallen into the same trap as the greens he criticizes.

The only possible solution is to reduce total consumption. We can do this by reducing consumption per person and/or reducing the number of people.

Achieving this will be difficult and maybe impossible because it requires an override of evolved behaviors.

Nevertheless, if we fail to voluntarily reduce total consumption, nature will do it for us, soon.

Hat tip Bodhi Paul Chefurka.