[A-List] The Human Impact

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We need a paradigm shift in which economists, politicians and ecologists
alike recognise that humans are more than mere producers or consumers.

by Sir Crispin Tickell

Resurgence No 243 (July / August 2007)



THE EARTH'S SURFACE is wafer-thin yet everything in and on it connects
and cannot be understood except as part of an integrated system. This
unity has been recognised from the earliest days of human observation.

Indeed, it was the stuff of religion. Gods and goddesses were seen to
embody specific elements, ranging from the sky to the most local spring.
The notion that the Earth itself was alive was part of Greek philosophy.
Leonardo da Vinci saw the human body as the microcosm of the Earth, and
the Earth as the macrocosm of the human body. Giordano Bruno was burnt
at the stake just over 400 years ago for maintaining that the Earth was
indeed alive, and that other planets could be as well. The geologist
James Hutton saw the Earth as a self-regulating system in 1785, and T H
Huxley saw it likewise in 1877. Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) saw the
functioning of the biosphere as a geological force, moving, processing
and recycling billions of tons of surface material every year.

But it was James Lovelock who brought this together into the Gaia theory
which challenges current reductionism. Most of us are better at looking
at the constituent elements of problems than seeing the connections
between them and understanding how the resulting system works. But Gaia
theory compels us to look at the life on Earth as a composite system.

Over the 3.8 billion years of life on Earth, Gaia has survived great
extinctions and catastrophes. This has required a remarkable resilience
whereby physical and biological mechanisms have adapted to new
circumstances. Gaia has no particular tenderness for humans. We are no
more than a small, albeit immodest, part of Gaia. Only in the last tick
of the clock of geological time did humans make their appearance, and
only in the last fraction of it did they make any impact on the Earth
system as a whole. But that impact has been enormous. There has been a
greater human impact in the last 200 years than in the preceding 2,000,
and more change in the last twenty years than in the preceding 200.


THERE HAS BEEN an enormous increase in the number of one animal species:
our own. There were around a billion of us at the time of Thomas Malthus
at the end of the 18th century and two billion in 1930, and there are
now over six billion. The world population is increasing by over eighty
million people each year. More than half our species now lives in
cities, which are themselves like organisms drawing in resources and
emitting wastes.

This has profoundly affected the condition of the land surface. More
people need more space and more resources. Soil degradation is currently
estimated to affect some ten percent of the world's current agricultural
area. Although more and more land, whatever its quality, is used for
human purposes, increase in food supplies has not kept pace with
increase in population. Today many of the problems are of distribution,
but even countries generating food surpluses can see limits ahead. The
application of biotechnology, itself with some dubious aspects, can
never hope to meet likely shortfalls.

Industrial contamination of various kinds has also greatly increased. To
run our complex societies we need copious amounts of energy, at present
derived from dwindling resources of fossil fuels laid down hundreds of
millions of years ago. It took around 200 million years to lay down the
coal, oil and gas deposits on which our society depends, yet we have
consumed the bulk of them over a period of around 200 years. Thus each
single year we consume a million years of fossil-fuel deposits.

There has also been increasing pollution of water, both salt and fresh.
No resource is in greater demand than fresh water. At present such
demand doubles every twenty-one years and seems to be accelerating. Yet
supply in a world of over six billion people is the same as at the time
of the Roman Empire in a world of little more than 300 million people.

Human activity has been a prime driver in changes to the chemistry of
the atmosphere. According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, we could be altering the global climate at a rate far
greater than would have occurred naturally over the last 10,000 years,
with unforeseeable consequences. Carbon levels in the atmosphere are now
the highest in the last 650,000 years, and are rising fast.

Humans are causing extinction of other organisms at many times the
normal background rate. Indeed, current rates of species extinction are
reminiscent of the dinosaur extinctions of 65 million years ago. The
consequent damage to the natural services on which we, like all species,
depend, is immeasurable. We face the prospect of creeping impoverishment
of the biosphere.

Then come the still uncertain consequences of technology. Recently Lord
Rees, President of the Royal Society, looked at the possible result of
inadvertence, criminality, use of exotic weapons, nanotechnology and
excessive dependence on technology, and concluded that the chances of
our civilisation surviving this century are no more than fifty-fifty.

Change rarely proceeds in curves. It goes in steps and thresholds. We
tend to believe that what we know will only change within narrow limits,
but unfortunately history gives no foundation for this belief. I repeat
that Gaia has no special tenderness for our species, but we certainly
need to have more tenderness for Gaia.


A SHIFT IN VALUES

If we are to reshape the future of humanity, we have to look more
radically at our current value system. There is a school of thought that
wants to attach monetary value to everything. But how can anyone give a
monetary value to pollution of the atmosphere, acidification of the
oceans, loss of a species, or supply of such natural services as the
microbial disposal of wastes? Somehow we have to bring in the factor of
costs. Markets are superb at setting prices but incapable of recognising
costs.

It should be remembered that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of
the environment: therefore, governments should take particular
responsibility to determine not only what is in the public interest, but
what is in the global environmental interest, and use fiscal instruments
to promote it. Yet governmental values seem to lie in the excesses of
what has been called feral capitalism; in short, under pressure from
vested interests. Democratic governments also suffer from electoral
timetables that promote the short term above the long term. Few seem
able to look far enough ahead.

There is an accompanying spread of rising cultural expectations,
nourished by worldwide use of information technology. One consequence is
a drive towards industrialisation as a synonym for development, and the
catch-all answer to the world's manifest ills. With it have come
globalisation and an increasing homogenisation of human culture. This at
least has led to governments becoming more transparent in their actions,
and feeling more accountable to their citizens.

Damage to the current life systems of the planet is not yet irreparable.
Most of the solutions to the problems we have created are already well
known. Take the human population problem: we know it can be solved
through improvement in the status of women, better provision for old
age, wider availability of contraception, and better education,
especially for young women. Take degradation of land and water: we know
that reforestation and introduction of greater biological diversity in
agricultural systems can help restore the health of the land. Take the
atmosphere: we know we have to change to systems of sustainable energy
generation and reduce our levels of energy consumption. Take human
relationships: we know we have to find ways to reduce the gaps between
rich and poor. Take the way in which we conduct most scientific enquiry:
we know we cannot continue to break down issues into compartments, and
so miss the internal dynamics of life systems as a whole.

Our descendants may regard this as a disastrous epoch in the history of
the Earth - or they may see it as a time when humans pulled themselves
together, changed direction, and took advantage of the immense
opportunities open to them.

Those opportunities are partly technical, relating to use of information
technology, and partly personal, relating to the thousands of minuscule
ways in which we run our daily lives. At the most basic level we have to
reconsider how we feed ourselves; how we warm and cool ourselves - in
short, how we receive and use energy; how we use and look after water;
where we live and work; how we transport ourselves; how we use, save and
recycle materials; how we work with others across the world; how we
treat the other animals and plants with which we share the planet; and
above all how we think: not just as producers or as consumers, but as
real, creative, imaginative, resourceful people.

_____

Sir Crispin Tickell is Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the
James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation at the University of
Oxford and President of Tree Aid.

http://www.resurgence.org/contents/243.htm



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