by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 11, 2013 | Agriculture, Climate Change, Listening to the Land
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
In June 1988, climatologist and NASA scientist James Hansen stood before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the United States Senate. The temperature was a sweltering 98 degrees.
“The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements,” Hansen said. “The global warming now is large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect… Our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.”
Hansen has authored some of the most influential scientific literature around climate change, and like the vast majority of climate scientists, has focused his work on the last 150 to 200 years – the period since the industrial revolution.
This period has been characterized by the widespread release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), and by the clearing of land on a massive scale – the plowing of grasslands and felling of forests for cities and agricultural crops.
Now, the world is on the brink of catastrophic climate change. Hansen and other scientists warn us that if civilization continues to burn fossil fuels and clear landscapes, natural cycles may be disrupted to the point of complete ecosystem breakdown – a condition in which the planet is too hot to support life. Hansen calls this the Venus Syndrome, named after the boiling planet enshrouded in clouds of greenhouse gases.
“If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale [low grade, high carbon fossil fuels], I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty,” Hansen has said.
If humanity wishes to have a chance of avoiding this fate, it is important that we understand global warming in detail. Why is it happening? When did it start? What fuels it? And, most importantly, what can stop it?
How old is global warming?
New studies are showing that the current episode of global warming may be a great deal older than previously believed – which may entirely change our strategy to stop it.
While fossil fuels have only been burned on a large scale for 200 years, land clearance has been a defining characteristic of civilizations – cultures based around cities and agriculture – since they first emerged around 8,000 years ago.
This land clearance has impacts on global climate. When a forest ecosystem is converted to agriculture, more than two thirds of the carbon that was stored in that forest is lost, and additional carbon stored in soils rich in organic materials will continue to be lost to the atmosphere as erosion accelerates.
Modern science may give us an idea of the magnitude of the climate impact of this pre-industrial land clearance. Over the past several decades of climate research, there has been an increasing focus on the impact of land clearance on modern global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in it’s 2004 report, attributed 17% of global emissions to cutting forests and destroying grasslands – a number which does not include the loss of future carbon storage or emissions directly related to this land clearance, such as methane released from rice paddies or fossil fuels burnt for heavy equipment.
Some studies show that 50% of the global warming in the United States can be attributed to land clearance – a number that reflects the inordinate impact that changes in land use can have on temperatures, primarily by reducing shade cover and evapotranspiration (the process whereby a good-sized tree puts out thousands of gallons of water into the atmosphere on a hot summer day – their equivalent to our sweating).
So if intensive land clearance has been going on for thousands of years, has it contributed to global warming? Is there a record of the impacts of civilization in the global climate itself?
10,000 years of Climate Change
According to author Lierre Keith, the answer is a resounding yes. Around 10,000 years ago, humans began to cultivate crops. This is the period referred to as the beginning of civilization, and, according to the Keith and other scholars such as David Montgomery, a soil scientist at the University of Washington, it marked the beginning of land clearance and soil erosion on a scale never before seen – and led to massive carbon emissions.
“In Lebanon (and then Greece, and then Italy) the story of civilization is laid bare as the rocky hills,” Keith writes. “Agriculture, hierarchy, deforestation, topsoil loss, militarism, and imperialism became an intensifying feedback loop that ended with the collapse of a bioregion [the Mediterranean basin] that will most likely not recover until after the next ice age.”
Montgomery writes, in his excellent book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, that the agriculture that followed logging and land clearance led to those rocky hills noted by Keith.
“It is my contention that the invention of [agriculture] fundamentally altered the balance between soil production and soil erosion – dramatically increasing soil erosion.
Other researchers, like Jed Kaplan and his team from the Avre Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, have affirmed that preindustrial land clearance has had a massive impact on the landscape.
“It is certain that the forests of many European countries were substantially cleared before the Industrial Revolution,” they write in a 2009 study.
Their data shows that forest cover declined from 35% to 0% in Ireland over the 2800 years before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The situation was similar in Norway, Finland, Iceland, where 100% of the arable land was cleared before 1850.
Similarly, the world’s grasslands have been largely destroyed: plowed under for fields of wheat and corn, or buried under spreading pavement. The grain belt, which stretches across the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, and across much of Eastern Europe, southern Russia, and northern China, has decimated the endless fields of constantly shifting native grasses.
The same process is moving inexorably towards its conclusion in the south, in the pampas of Argentina and in the Sahel in Africa. Thousands of species, each uniquely adapted to the grasslands that they call home, are being driven to extinction.
“Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable,” writes permaculture expert Toby Hemenway. “We can pass laws to stop some of the harm agriculture does, but these rules will reduce harvests. As soon as food gets tight, the laws will be repealed. There are no structural constraints on agriculture’s ecologically damaging tendencies.”
As Hemenway notes, the massive global population is essentially dependent on agriculture for survival, which makes political change a difficult proposition at best. The seriousness of this problem is not to be underestimated. Seven billion people are dependent on a food system – agricultural civilization – that is killing the planet.
The primary proponent of the hypothesis – that human impacts on climate are as old as civilization – has been Dr. William Ruddiman, a retired professor at the University of Virginia. The theory is often called Ruddiman’s Hypothesis, or, alternately, the Early Anthropocene Hypothesis.
Ruddiman’s research, which relies heavily on atmospheric data from gases trapped in thick ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, shows that around 11,000 years ago carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere began to decline as part of a natural cycle related to the end of the last Ice Age. This reflected a natural pattern that has been seen after previous ice ages.
This decline continued until around 8000 years ago, when the natural trend of declining carbon dioxide turned around, and greenhouse gases began to rise. This coincides with the spread of civilization across more territory in China, India, North Africa, the Middle East, and certain other regions.
Ruddiman’s data shows that deforestation over the next several thousand years released 350 Gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, an amount nearly equal to what has been released since the Industrial Revolution. The figure is corroborated by the research of Kaplan and his team.
Around 5000 years ago, cultures in East and Southeast Asia began to cultivate rice in paddies – irrigated fields constantly submerged in water. Like an artificial wetland, rice patties create an anaerobic environment, where bacteria metabolizing carbon-based substances (like dead plants) release methane instead of carbon dioxide and the byproduct of their consumption. Ruddiman points to a spike in atmospheric methane preserved in ice cores around 5000 years ago as further evidence of warming due to agriculture.
Some other researchers, like R. Max Holmes from the Woods Hole Research Institute and Andrew Bunn, a climate scientist from Western Washington University, believe that evidence is simply not conclusive. Data around the length of interglacial periods and the exact details of carbon dioxide and methane trends is not detailed enough to make a firm conclusion, they assert. Regardless, it is certain that the pre-industrial impact of civilized humans on the planet was substantial.
“Our data show very substantial amounts of human impact on the environment over thousands of years,” Kaplan said. “That impact really needs to be taken into account when we think about the carbon cycle and greenhouse gases.”
Restoring Grasslands: a strategy for survival
If the destruction of grasslands and forests signals the beginning of the end for the planet’s climate, some believe that the restoration of these natural communities could mean salvation.
Beyond their beauty and inherent worth, intact grasslands supply a great deal to humankind. Many pastoral cultures subsist entirely on the animal protein that is so abundant in healthy grasslands. In North America, the rangelands that once sustained more than 60 million Bison (and at least as many pronghorn antelope, along with large populations of elk, bear, deer, and many others) now support fewer than 45 million cattle – animals ill-adapted to the ecosystem, who damage their surroundings instead of contributing to them.
Healthy populations of herbivores also contribute to carbon sequestration in grassland soils by increasing nutrient recycling, a powerful effect that allows these natural communities to regulate world climate. They also encourage root growth, which sequesters more carbon in the soil.
Just as herbivores cannot survive without grass, grass cannot thrive without herbivores.
Grasslands are so potent in their ability to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that some believe restoring natural grasslands could be one of the most effective tools in the fight against runaway global warming.
“Grass is so good at building [carbon rich] soil that repairing 75 percent of the planet’s rangelands would bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in 15 years or less,” Lierre Keith writes.
The implications of this are immense. It means, quite simply, that one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is to move away from agriculture, which is based upon the destruction of forests and grasslands, and towards other means of subsistence. It means moving away from a way of life 10,000 years old. It means rethinking the entire structure of our food system – in some ways, the entire structure of our culture.
Some ambitious, visionary individuals are working in parallel with this strategy, racing against time to restore grasslands and to stabilize Earth’s climate.
In Russia, in the remote northeastern Siberian state of Yakutia, a scientist named Sergei Zimov has an ambitious plan to recreate a vast grassland – a landscape upon whom millions of herbivores such as mammoths, wild horses, reindeer, bison, and musk oxen fed and roamed until the end of the last ice age.
“In future, to preserve the permafrost, we only need to bring herbivores,” says Zimov. “Why is this useful? For one, the possibility to reconstruct a beautiful [grassland] ecosystem. It is important for climate stability. If the permafrost melts, a lot of greenhouse gases will be emitted from these soils.”
Zimov’s project is nicknamed “Pleistocene Park,” and stretches across a vast region of shrubs and mosses, low productivity communities called ‘Taiga’. But until 12,000 years ago, this landscape was highly productive pastures for a span of 35,000 years, hosting vast herds of grazers and their predators.
“Most small bones don’t survive because of the permafrost,” says Sergei Zimov. “[But] the density of skeletons in this sediment, here and all across these lowlands: 1,000 skeletons of mammoth, 20,000 skeletons of bison, 30,000 skeletons of horses, and about 85,000 skeletons of reindeer, 200 skeletons of musk-ox, and also tigers [per square kilometer].”
These herds of grazers not only supported predators, but also preserved the permafrost beneath their feet, soils that now contain 5 times as much carbon as all the rainforests of Earth. According to Zimov, the winter foraging behavior of these herbivores was the mechanism of preservation.
“In winter, everything is covered in snow,” Zimov says. “If there are 30 horses per square kilometer, they will trample the snow, which is a very good thermal insulator. If they trample in the snow, the permafrost will be much colder in wintertime. The introduction of herbivores can reduce the temperatures in the permafrost and slow down the thawing.”
In the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, a similar plan to restore the landscape and rewild the countryside has emerged. The brainchild of Deborah and Frank Popper, the plan calls for the gradual acquisition of rangelands and agricultural lands across the West and Midwest, with the eventual goal of creating a vast nature preserve called the Buffalo Commons, 10-20 million acres of wilderness, an area 10 times the size of the largest National Park in the United States (Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska).
In this proposed park, the Poppers envision a vast native grassland, with predators following wandering herds of American Bison and other grazers who follow the shifting grasses who follow the fickle rains. The shifting nature of the terrain in the Great Plains requires space, and this project would provide it in tracts not seen for hundreds of years.
In parts of Montana, the work has already begun. Many landowners have sold their farms to private conservation groups to fill in the gaps between isolated sections of large public lands. Many Indian tribes across the United States and Southern Canada are also working to restore Bison, who not only provide high quality, healthy, traditional food but also contribute to biodiversity and restore the health of the grasslands through behavior such a wallowing, which creates small wetlands.
Grasslands have the power to not only restore biodiversity and serve as a rich, nutrient-dense source of food, but also to stabilize global climate. The soils of the world cannot survive agricultural civilizations for much longer. If the plows continue their incessant work, this culture will eventually go the way of the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Greeks, the Macedonians, the Harrapans, or the Roman Empire – blowing in the wind, clouding the rivers. Our air is thick with the remnants of ancient soils, getting long overdue revenge for their past mistreatment.
The land does not want fields. It wants Bison back. It wants grasslands, forests, wetlands, birds. It wants humans back, humans who know how to live in a good way, in relationship with the soil and the land and all the others. The land wants balance, and we can help. We can tend the wild and move towards other means of feeding ourselves, as our old ancestors have done for long years. It is the only strategy that takes into account the needs of the natural world, the needs for a land free of plows and tractor-combines.
In time, with luck and hard work, that ancient carbon will be pulled from the atmosphere – slowly at first, but then with gathering speed. The metrics of success are clear: a calmed climate, rivers running free, biodiversity rebounding. The task of achieving that success is a great challenge, but guided by those who believe in restoring the soil, we can undo 8,000 years of mistakes, and finally begin to live again as a species like any other, nestled in our home, at peace and in balance, freed at last from the burdens of our ancestors’ mistakes.
Bibliography
Climate meddling dates back 8,000 years. By Alexandra Witze. April 23rd, 2011. Science News. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/71932/title/Climate_meddling_dates_back_8%2C000_years#video
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Global Emissions. Accessed June 23rd, 2012. http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe. By Kaplan et al. Avre Group, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009) 3016-3034.
‘Land Use as Climate Change Mitigation.’ Stone, Brian Jr. Environmental Science and Technology 43, 9052-9056. 11/2009.
‘Functional Aspects of Soil Animal Diversity in Agricultural Grasslands’ by Bardgett et al. Applied Soil Ecology, 10 (1998) 263-276.
Zimov, Sergei. Personal Interviews, June/July 2010.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Indigenous Autonomy
By Derrick Jensen
The term Anthropocene not only doesn’t help us stop this culture from killing the planet – it contributes directly to the problems it purports to address.
First, it’s grossly misleading. Humans aren’t the ones “transforming” – read, killing – the planet. Civilized humans are. There’s a difference. It’s the difference between old growth forests and New York City, the difference between 60 million bison on a vast plain and pesticide- and herbicide-laden fields of genetically modified corn. It’s the difference between rivers full of salmon and rivers killed by hydroelectric dams. It’s the difference between cultures whose members recognize themselves as one among many and members of this culture, who convert everything to their own use.
To be clear, the Tolowa Indians lived where I now live for at least 12,500 years, and when the first of the civilized arrived the place was a paradise. Now, 170 years later, the salmon are being driven extinct, redwoods have been reduced to 2 percent of their range, and the fields (formerly forests) are full of toxins.
To be even more clear: Humans don’t destroy landbases. Civilized humans destroy landbases, and they have been doing so since the beginning of civilization. One of the first written myths is of Gilgamesh deforesting what is now Iraq – cutting down cedar forests so thick the sunlight never touched the ground, all so he could make a great city and, more to the point, so he could make a great name for himself.
All of this is crucial, because perpetrators of atrocity so often attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that what they’re doing is natural or right. The word “Anthropocene” attempts to naturalize the murder of the planet by pretending the problem is “man,” and not a specific type of man connected to this particular culture.
The name also manifests the supreme narcissism that has characterized this culture from the beginning. Of course members of this culture would present their behavior as representing “man” as a whole. The other cultures have never really existed anyway, except as lesser breeds who are simply in the way of getting access to resources.
Using the term Anthropocene feeds into that narcissism. Gilgamesh destroyed a forest and made a name for himself. This culture destroys a planet and names a geologic age after itself. What a surprise.
They say one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. Well, members of this culture must not be very smart. We’ve had 6,000 years to recognize the pattern of genocide and ecocide fueled by this culture’s narcissism and sociopathy, and the behavior is simply getting worse. Members of this culture have had 6,000 years to recognize that the cultures they’re conquering have often been sustainable. And still they come up with this name that attempts to include all humanity in their own despicable behavior.
The narcissism extends beyond disbelieving that other cultures exist. It includes believing that nothing else on the planet fully exists, either. It’s like the bumper sticker says: “We’re not the only species on Earth: We just act like it.” I recently heard an astronomer trying to explain why it’s important to explore Mars. The exploration will, he said, “answer that most important question of all: Are we all alone?” On a planet brimming with beautiful life (for now), he asks this question? I have a more important question. Is he insane? The answer is yes. He’s a narcissist, and a sociopath.
Of course members of this culture, who have named themselves with no shred of irony or humility Homo sapiens, would, as they murder the planet, declare this the age of man.
The Anthropocene gives no hint of the horrors this culture is inflicting. “The Age of Man”? Oh, that’s nice. We’re number one, right? Instead, the name must be horrific, it must produce shock and shame and outrage commensurate with this atrocity of killing the planet. It must call us to differentiate ourselves from this culture, to show that this label and this behavior do not belong to us. It must call us to show that we do not deserve it. It must call us to say and mean, “Not one more Indigenous culture driven from its land, and not one more species driven extinct!”
If we’re going to name this age, let’s at least be honest and accurate. Can I suggest, “The Age of the Sociopath”?
From Earth Island Journal: http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/age_of_the_sociopath/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 8, 2012 | Agriculture
By Rachel / Deep Green Resistance Florida
Industrial civilization is systematically destroying everything on the planet that life requires in order to exist. Since civilization demands infinitely increasing resources on a finite planet, its eventual end is unavoidable. It follows that the faster it can be brought down, the more likely it is that any chance at survival will remain for those who inhabit the Earth after the crash.
My friend listens attentively as I speak the words, but she’s smiling the way she always smiles when she thinks I’m at the end of my rhetorical rope. It’s lucky for our friendship that we like to argue on certain subjects, since our views don’t tend to overlap. Our favorite topics of discussion are the ones we’re pretty sure we’ll never agree on. We lived together for a year and never fought once over who last took the trash out, the setting of the thermostat, or the dishes left in the sink. We saved our fighting spirit for health care reform (I wanted a single-payer system, she thought any regulation was obstructing the free market), the relative merits of capitalism (the only fair system said she, the root of all evil said I), and the relationship of religion to morality (inseparable if you asked her, at odds if you asked me).
Our intense discussions at the kitchen table generally lasted long enough to bore our other friends to tears and often got loud enough to wake our other roommates from deep slumber, but today amidst the lunch rush of our favorite restaurant, no one is bothered by our fervor. She and I have prodded each other’s political sensibilities from so many angles that few of her arguments can surprise me anymore, but this time I’m leaning forward across the table in anticipation of her point.
In some ways, it would be a relief to be proven wrong this time. See, new information has been leading me to some unsettling conclusions as of late. Being right about them means that the world I’m used to cannot continue, will not continue, on its current trajectory. Being right means that the situation is a lot more urgent and intractable than I’ve previously been able to appreciate. Being right means that we have a lot of work to do, and not much time in which to do it. Today at lunch I tell some of these conclusions to my friend, more than half hoping that she can talk me back over to the more familiar side of the line.
“Doesn’t that sound a little extreme, and kind of alarmist, Rach?” she asks. If you’d asked me that as recently as two years ago when I first became heavily involved in activism of any sort, I probably would have told you it sounded both alarmist and extreme. I would have argued then, just like my friend proceeds to argue now, that civilization doesn’t destroy the things we need, it provides them for us. It’s a word to describe the highly advanced state of human society that we’ve achieved.
Civilization means progress through scientific prowess, global connection and trade, a longer lifespan through modern medicine, more comfort and leisure time due to mechanization, and a million thoughtless comforts and distractions to improve our lives. The main problem with these definitions is the fact that they are written by the civilized, for the civilized. For me, the word civilization used to connote an almost holy weight, and to bring civilization to a place was synonymous with bringing hope, progress, and power. Here’s a more accurate definition:
Civilization is the phenomenon of people living in cities, more or less permanently at a high enough density to require the routine importation of resources into the city center; the culture of institutions, stories, and artifacts that arises from such an arrangement.
On its face, that definition sounded pretty innocuous to me on a first reading. More than just innocuous, to me that definition sounded absurd. Of course people live in cities, I thought, where else? People have always lived in close proximity to each other because we’re social animals desirous of community and relationship. Of course, I thought, people in cities need to import food and other essentials, but what’s wrong with that? Importation is necessary because without industrial production and agriculture, we couldn’t make enough food and other necessities for everyone, and industrial agriculture needs the empty space outside the city to grow our food. What else would our culture and mythology arise from, if not civilization? How could anyone want anything different?
To even approach beginning to answer these questions, it was necessary to gain a basic understanding of how privilege works within individuals and institutions. When you are the one being privileged, that privilege is usually invisible to you. Most men do not consciously acknowledge that the dominant construction of masculinity is based on hatred and erasure of women, and even fewer can address the ways that hating and erasing women grants them privilege within the system of patriarchy.
During a speech at Occupy Oakland, activist Lierre Keith articulated patriarchy, capitalism, and civilization as the three main frameworks that direct our culture’s interactions with power and oppression. Just like the violence of patriarchy is invisible to those it benefits, the violence of capitalism is either rationalized or outright denied by those middle to upper class individuals that are benefitting from legions of wage slaves below them.
You’ve heard them do it, maybe you’ve even engaged in some rationalization yourself. It sounds like, “anyone can get above their circumstances if they work hard,” or “people get what they deserve.” In a perfect world, that may be true, but in a capitalist world, people get whatever those with more power deign to give them. A privilege can be the power to oppress or use others, or it can be insulation from the violence that permeates and enforces the system. I’ve been sensing the blinders of privilege in my periphery, like a dog senses a cone around its neck. The occasional glimpse of the outside world is illuminating, but there’s no getting the cone off, and so the scene will always be incomplete.
The violence of patriarchy and capitalism did not become visible to me overnight – I’m a white, middle class American, a social position that carries enough privilege to blind most to the inherent flaws in these two systems, which means that even once the basic systems are visible to me, most of the effects of those systems are still invisible to me. Still, these systems were relatively easier to identify as oppressive than the third system, civilization.
The first person to suggest to me that civilization itself is inherently destructive and unsustainable was my roommate, Sam, shortly after she moved in with me. The first time she mentioned it, I rejected the idea out of hand. Humans have always lived in close-knit communities, I said, and our need for community is one of the most intrinsic attributes of humanity. To reject civilization seemed equivalent to rejecting the whole spectrum of human social behavior as inherently destructive. I recognized much of human activity as destructive, but labeling our every activity as inherently destructive seemed a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If humans themselves are irredeemable, then what can we possibly be working toward?
My understanding changed when I read a different definition of civilization – people living in cities. To me, cities once seemed eternal and inevitable. As a young child, I learned that the first cities appeared less than ten millennia ago in the Middle East. On the same day, I learned that humans are evidenced in the fossil record for two hundred thousand years.
For the bulk of human existence, we lived outside the bounds of civilization, and without the framework of privilege and oppression that civilization necessitates and enforces through violence. At the time, my still-developing brain had no conception of the width of one year, much less the scope of change that stretches between ten and two hundred millennia. To my child’s perception, that day’s history lesson were not facts, they were a familiar story. We each know the trope by heart: regardless of whether they exist by design or by chance, humans gained intelligence surpassing that of all other species. Over time, we used our superior faculties to improve life for ourselves. The changes we have created are inherently good as well as ultimately inevitable, and working toward the spread and advancement of these changes is both noble and necessary.
We all know this story, and to call it a story gets much closer to the point than calling it history. Someone wrote down the facts in our history, if they are indeed facts at all, and that person or group of people had to decide what to include or omit, which words to use, and how to arrange those words. There is no objective account, no hard historical fact. Even when solid empirical evidence can be produced for a historical “fact,” each kernel of physical reality comes to us swaddled in a story, a fabric of accrued belief to which is added a final and significant layer – the gloss of supposed objectivity is a tool of erasure based on privilege. Those who benefit from a system are likely to protect it and speak well of it. Those who have to live the violent cost of our culture don’t tend to get jobs writing curricula.
What cost? Well, I’m glad you asked, but I probably would have told you even if you hadn’t. I’ve observed fear and violence from the security of a suburban bubble, seen the desperation of lack and then returned home to stocked shelves, and glimpsed the reality of civilization’s true nature only from the window of a moving car. If, as I hope, I’ve managed to learn anything about how the real world works, I need to acknowledge that my charmed life has afforded me an education from a safe distance.
More each day, I know that the comfort and safety I call home are wrung from the pain and violation of others, and if the guilt you feel at this knowledge doesn’t tear at the pit of your gut, you may as well be a fucking corpse. The nagging suspicion that the certainty and urgency I feel in this moment will subside with my youth and naiveté offers little relief. The picture of reality that’s taking shape behind my eyes doesn’t fit with the story I once knew best, and there isn’t room for them to coexist. Increasingly, I’ll relay the conflict to anyone who’ll listen, as though my frenetic speech was an incantation to exorcise the myth from my mind.
I still haven’t answered the question – what cost? The answer can and does fill volumes, and this paragraph should be proof enough for no one, but here is what I’ve been coming to understand. Today, let’s take only our source of food as an example. A given ecosystem can only support a certain number of organisms living on it at one time. If the population surpasses its carrying capacity of organisms, members of the species consume too much of whatever it is they need to eat, and the population’s numbers plummet as resources inevitably become scarce.
Not only do members of the species die, but the carrying capacity of that land is lowered lastingly. If there are too many deer on an island, the deer food on the island is unable to replenish itself fast enough to support them. The upward motion on the population graph comes down hard, and can never rise as high again. That island will likely never hold as many deer as it once did.
Now, when humans began living in high concentrations in cities, these physical laws were an immediate obstacle. If a square mile of land can only produce enough resources for one person to survive, placing fifty people in that square mile means that the resources need to come from somewhere else. Every industrialized city in existence exceeds the carrying capacity of the land its built on, so where does the sustenance come from?
In the case of food, the answer is agriculture. We grow food outside of the bounds of the city and ship it in to the people living in the center – these people could not grow enough food for themselves if they wanted to, because in most cases, the environment that yields nutrients has been replaced by concrete. Are we on the same page so far? Good. Here’s where things get dicey. This arrangement appears to work well to the people in the city, since the food (usually) arrives consistently from beyond its borders, but the less copasetic effects of agriculture are two pronged.
First, the only way that monocrop agriculture (the most controllable method in the short term and, predictably, far and away the most profitable for some) can successfully produce food is by waging a war against all other parts of nature. A monocrop means killing everything on a piece of land, all the way down to the bacteria in the soul, so that nothing interferes with the growth on the desired plant. The clearing of the land is only the first wave of death that agriculture sets in motion.
There are reasons that monocrops don’t exist in nature. The only way to maintain the biotically sterile environment necessary to grow anything with a monocrop is the use of pesticides, and the gut-wrenching realities of even the most mild of these are demonstrated best by the scars they’ve left on our land, lives, and limbs. In addition, plants overshoot the carrying capacity of soil just as organisms do their habitats – too many in one place, and the necessary nutrients run out. Soil takes thousands of years to regenerate, and we don’t have thousands of years – most of the soil on the planet is already dust. If you’ve followed my explanation, which I hope you have, you can guess what happens next.
Here’s a hint: the exact same thing that would happen to any other species. The human population graph stays steady until the start of civilized societies with agriculture, and then the line climbs straight for the heavens. It hasn’t been stopped yet, but it will be. What will be left when we get there? Agriculture also necessitates backbreaking labor to actively maintain its war against biodiversity. We commonly refer to technologies as “labor saving,” but in most cases, we just saving the labor for someone else. More specifically, we’re saving it for someone who we can justify exploiting.
Fewer people buy their slaves nowadays, but renting them is all the rage. When wringing labor value from someone else’s body and time doesn’t work, we wring it from the Earth itself. All the unpaid labor in the world cannot change what monocrops do to soil, but fossil fuels are buying us time. The fertilizer used in industrial agriculture is derived from oil. When we inevitable use up this nonrenewable resource, we won’t be able to ask any more of our dead and desiccated soil – it will have blown away for good. We’ve only looked at food in the last couple paragraphs, but different examples yield similar results. The basic organization and priorities of our society as it exists are fundamentally dissociated from the reality of how life works on this planet. If we want to live, it all has to stop, and soon.
To put it simply, circumstances are a lot more dire than I previously realized. When two conflicting ideas coexist in the same brain, the result is cognitive dissonance. She who experiences the conflict can choose to preserve her existing framework by ignoring or rationalizing one idea at the expense of the other. Alternatively, she can choose to critically examine both in light of the available evidence and hopefully construct a more realistic and effective framework for action. The framework of industrial civilization is not redeemable, because it conflict on the most basic levels with the continuation of life on the planet.
When the first bit of doubt lodged itself between the lines of the familiar story, I ignored it. When it grew, distorting the consistency of the only plot I could follow, I rationalized it. I’m not going to do either one anymore. Some things are obvious – we need food, water, and air, and we need them without poison, thank you very much. The fundamental illogic and insanity of our current system, the need to dismantle it without delay – when food, water, and air are our priorities, these facts become obvious too.
At lunch with my friend, I finish the last sentence of this argument, and we’re both silent for a moment. I gulp some water, and she picks at the remnants of her food and bites her lip contemplatively. For a moment, perhaps a longer moment than I’d like to admit, I hope that she can talk me out of this. If any of what I’ve just said is true, then the future will look very different than what I’ve expected. If it’s true, my very existence within this system is predicated on the exploitation of other life, including other humans. If it’s true, then my actions need to reflect the urgency of the situation, and we’re out of time for vacillation.
“You make some good points,” she says. “Well, if it’s true, what do we do about it?” Now it’s my turn to contemplate silently, because the truth is that I’m not sure. These problems span the planet, and even if my answer wasn’t stunted by the lies that insulate my privileges, it can’t be universally true. Resistance needs to look different in different places, act different according to context, and I definitely don’t have very much of that answer yet. Luckily, I’m not asking the question in a vacuum. There are others, here and across the world, asking the same questions right now and throughout history. Resistance to hierarchy and the abuse that comes with it has a story as long and diverse as the story of humans themselves. Knowing the story is the only way to change the ending in a meaningful way, and I have a lot of work to do toward both those ends.
A specific analysis has lately been guiding my actions and explorations, called Deep Green Resistance. The book by that name was written by Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen (authors whose work informed much of this article), and since its release last year, actions groups have sprung up across the country and internationally in accordance with the strategy the book lays out. A detailed description of the group’s basic premises, organization, and methods will have to be saved for a later article, but we are hardly the first to point out the depravity of the current arrangement of power. The soil, air, and water are running out, and so is our time. Whatever happens next, we cannot afford the luxury of relying on symbolic action alone. Whatever happens next, the death knell for real change is compromise with a system that “creates value” from death, destruction, and misery. Whatever happens next, I’m siding with the real world. How about you?
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Strategy & Analysis
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Lester Brown’s exhaustively researched book, Plan B 4.0 – Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is a bold and impressive effort to chart a course to ecological sustainability, one of very few books that attempts this worthwhile goal. Brown lists 4 steps that Plan B 4.0 focuses on to achieve sustainability:
- Stabilize climate by cutting emissions by at least 80% by 2020
- Stabilize population at 8 billion or lower
- Eradicate poverty
- Restore natural earth systems (soil, aquifers, forests, grasslands, oceans)
These are excellent goals to begin with, and show that Brown is extremely serious about his mission, and is truly concerned about justice and the welfare of the human population. They also show that he understands one of the fundamental obstacles to true change – the interlocking relationship between environmental destruction and human exploitation. For example, Brown calls for debt relief for poor nations – an admirable position against the interests of international financiers and for the interests of poor and exploited people. Few analysts truly understand this relationship at both a theoretical and real-world level, and Brown moves beyond the average call for sustainability by acknowledging the seriousness of this issue.
Plan B lays out a compelling and comprehensive vision of the converging crises that are threatening life on earth – from oceanic collapse and peak oil to soil erosion and food instability. Brown understands that the collapse of global civilization is likely if business-as-usual continues. The undermining of the biological life-support systems of the earth has left life as we know it teetering on the brink. For many species and communities around the world, it is already too late.
The fundamental basis of Brown’s approach is that it is a social change approach. Brown understands that social problems require social solutions. While personal lifestyle changes (to transport, diet, and other consumption) are an important and moral way to address these problems, they are not sufficient to solve ecological and social injustice by themselves. This is an important step – a foundation for serious political work. From here, we can analyze each of the goals of Plan B 4.0 for strategic soundness, moral rigor, and good scholarship.
Step 1: Stabilize Climate
Brown’s approach to solving the climate problem relies on several strategies. First, he advocates massive adoption of alternative energy. Second, he calls for replanting of billions of trees to sequester carbon and rehabilitate habitat. Third, he describes an efficiency revolution centering on recycling, reusing, and refining urban planning and architecture and material flows throughout global society.
The focus on replanting of forests and restoring habitat around the world is extremely important and is an admirable goal, as is the elimination of coal and gasoline as energy sources. However, the fundamental failure of Brown’s approach to solving climate change is the insistence on maintaining an industrial way of life. Efficiency in cooking, housing, and production is doubtlessly important, but too many of Brown’s solutions call for centralized industrial production instead of local self-sufficiency – the maintenance of privileged lifestyles.
In short, while Brown’s plan is truly radical, he does not go far enough. In advocating massive production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and trains, a “smart grid,” and other industrial technologies, Plan B 4.0 does not question the fundamental system of resource extraction and industrial production. It does not question global capitalism, which will continue to get rich by feeding on human and non-human communities.
The industrial products sold within the capitalist economy are created through a complex global system of mining, refining, production, distribution, and trashing/recycling. In each stage of this process, natural communities of humans and non-humans are exploited, poisoned, and destroyed for the sake of luxury goods like cars and electricity.
Electric cars and alternative energy do not address this fundamental destruction that is required for industrial technology to exist. Wind turbines, to use one example, still require mining for bauxite, the ore refined into aluminum. In central India (and other regions around the world) mountains containing bauxite are blown up and strip-mined to extract bauxite. About six tons of bauxite and a thousand tons of water a required to produce one ton of aluminum. There is no sustainable way to do this – most rich countries have exported this process to poor nations. The pollution is hidden.
This process not only destroys or displaces the non-human life on these mountains, but leads to runoff, pollution, and extirpation of indigenous communities. Smelting bauxite requires extremely high temperatures – usually provided by big dams – and leads to vast amounts of carbon emissions and other air pollution. And the entire system of distribution depends on vast ocean-going ships that burn bunker fuel, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. It is estimated that one container ship releases as much carbon dioxide as 50 million cars.
Another example: the Toyota Prius, widely praised by environmentalists (including Brown), requires 5 times as much energy to produce as an average car due to the complex process of creating electric motors, circuitry, and batteries. Accounting for production energy and transportation fuel and average over the lifetime of the car, a Prius actually uses 1.4x as much energy per mile as the average American car.
Solar panels provide another example. The average solar cell requires the mining of about 2,000lbs of earth material for Silicon. The production process is extremely dangerous – in China, workers at a solar panel factory went on strike in 2011 because of the pollution released by the plant had toxified a lake nearby that was causing respiratory problems and cancers in the community.
This is just touching the surface of the devastation that is wrought by these “environmentally friendly” technologies. These technologies also require rare earth minerals like cadmium and tellurium, which simply do not exist in sufficient quantities to allow mass adoption of alternative energy.
This reliance on technological solutions is one the major failings of Plan B 4.0. Brown has bought into the hype surrounding these alternative technologies, when in reality they only represent more of the same – more resources extracted from poor nations, more money flowing to corporations and rich nations, more pollution, more destroyed communities. While the standards of research and scholarship in Plan B 4.0 are generally very high, Brown does not apply the same rigorous research methods to the technological solutions he advocates.
A better model for halting global warming would revolve around the creation of land-based communities that are able to take their sustenance from within healthy, flourishing ecosystems that they coexist with. This model is the way of life practiced by humans for 99% of our existence, so it is clearly not impossible, but it would require addressing the serious issue of population, to which Brown turns next.
Step 2: Stabilize Population
In addressing overpopulation Brown is facing an issue before which many have balked, with good reason. There is a history of racism, eugenics, and forced sterilization that makes population reduction a touchy issue to deal with directly. But Plan B 4.0 takes the right tact. Brown’s plan calls for massive programs of education and empowerment of women, combined with government incentives for small families, widespread family planning programs, and universal birth control availability. This humane and effective model has been used around the world in places like Iran with great success.
While this approach is laudable, Plan B 4.0 could use a slightly more radical feminist analysis. While Brown does call for the education of women, he does not explicitly state that empowered women rarely chose to have large numbers of children. High birth rates usually occur in patriarchal arrangements where women have few rights and little power of their own. Acknowledging this fact and working to dismantle patriarchal social forms will be a much more difficult task than the more straightforward path that Brown presents, but will lead to more lasting and fundamental change in birth rates and the overall direction of society.
Step 3: Eradicate Poverty
By acknowledging the fundamental connections between global poverty and environmental degradation, Brown goes further towards truth than many of his contemporaries. He advocates for debt relief for poor nations, which would go a long way towards relieving the pressures on “developing” nations. He calls for an increase in small gardens and other simple techniques that reduce burdens on poor people around the world, planting forests and allowing degraded lands to fallow.
However, without access to land, poor people have no chance for survival. The critique of contemporary land grabs is an important part of Plan B 4.0. Here Brown details how food importers, nations that cannot grow enough food to support their population, are purchasing and leasing arable land in poor nations to grow food for export. Many times these poor nations cannot even feed their own population, so these vast foreign-held farms must employ armed guards to ensure that the food is not taken back.
Brown understands that agriculture, logging, and overgrazing are devastating much of the land around the world through salinization, soil erosion, and desertification, and that this process is destabilizing populations and leading to poverty and social breakdown.
However, Brown is lacking a fundamental critique of industrial agriculture as a practice. He advocates the use of pesticides and fertilizers, which are overwhelmingly toxic and derived from fossil fuels. He advocates for increased efficiency in irrigation, while acknowledging the fact that 70% of the fresh water used worldwide is used for irrigation. And he advocates for the use of genetically modified and high-yield varieties, which is a gamble with the genetic code. This is also leading to a narrow range of varieties, which are more vulnerable to future disease of plague. The result has been an arms-race between GMO and pesticide companies and the constantly evolving creatures that feed on monocropped fields.
Even more fundamentally, Brown does not appreciate the fact that annual monocrop agriculture is the practice that has enabled rampant overpopulation. Population tracks food supply, and it has been well documented is recent years that many creatures (including humans) regulate their own population based on the food available. When humans began farming the land and stopped getting their food from within biodiverse, perennial ecosystems, they stopped paying attention to these natural limits. They were not sharing their food anymore.
This lack of sharing is also the foundation of modern ecological devastation. After all, agriculture is the practice of clearing natural ecosystems and replanting them for human use. The forests and grasslands that have fallen before the plow are the primary location for species loss worldwide. Ninety-eight percent of old-growth forests and 99% of native grasslands are gone. Human population has grown in direct proportion to the decline in non-human populations worldwide, because they have been consumed by civilization, by agriculture.
Brown’s failure here is the same as above – he has no fundamental critique of capitalism (the dominant economic system) and civilization (the dominant form of social organization – a way of life based on annual monocrops and life in cities). These systems are a major reason why people are poor.
By extracting resources in destructive ways and exploiting workers for less than the full value of their labor, capitalism impoverishes people around the world. A large class of poor people is required for the functioning of the global economy – it is structurally mandated. And civilization is a social form that inevitably leads to overshoot of natural limits, colonial expansion, wars of conquest, further environmental damage, and finally collapse (for a further explanation of these ideas, see Sources). Any efforts to address poverty will have to first deal with the stifling influence of capitalism and civilization.
Step 4: Restoring Earth
The final goal of Plan B 4.0 is to restore natural ecosystems around the world – oceans, grasslands, soils, and forests. In order to protect biodiversity and the range or natural services provided by these ecosystems, Brown advocates massive replanting of forests (as previously mentioned), soil conservation measures, and the creation of protected marine zones in the ocean, as well as a program of parks and other measures to protect biodiversity.
Replanting forests is an important way to restore the life-support systems of the planet, and Brown is the right advocate for it. However, he also advocates for an increase in plantation style forests to be grown for timber and pulp products. While the US Forest Service is a division of the Department of Agriculture, forests are not fields, and few soils can sustain more than three consecutive harvests of timber before soils are too depleted to continue. An imposition of human standards upon a natural system decreases the health of the system, and as such, plantations are not a long-term solution.
Restoring soils is perhaps the most critical task in this section. Terrestrial life as we know it is only possible because of a thin layer of topsoil – without it, plants cannot grow. Brown’s tactic of allowing steeper slopes and other marginal farmland to fallow and return to forest is a good one, but he still lacks a full critique of agriculture as a practice. Annual monocropped fields lead to erosion and loss of soil fertility – this type of agriculture kills the soil. This is true around the world, except in small river valley regions where alluvial soils are constantly replenished.
However, these natural wetlands are also biodiversity hotspots, which means the one place where agriculture can be practiced somewhat sustainably is also the place where it will lead to the biggest loss of habitat for other creatures. Brown’s plan for protecting biodiversity is not elaborate – there are almost no details in the book. But any course of action that does not challenge the human appropriation, destruction, and toxification of land, water, and atmosphere will not lead to substantial progress in the conservation of biodiversity.
Conclusion
Plan B 4.0 is a unflinching attempt to chart a course for sanity, but Lester Brown and his researchers fail to apply the same rigor to human society and proposed solutions that they apply to environmental problems. Brown states that in 1950 the world economy was based on “sustainable yield, the interest of natural systems.” This is simply not true. Europe was deforested before industrialization. So was the Middle East. The forests and soils of North Africa fueled the Roman war machine until they were exhausted, and now support only goats and olives – ecological poverty food that can survive on desiccated, impoverished soils. The forests of the United States were felled largely before the mechanical saw. While industrialism greatly accelerated in the 1950’s, the problem goes much deeper than that.
Brown’s approach, along with the approach of many other environmentalists, is fundamentally anthropocentric and short sighted. He does not account for the experience of prehistory, that span of 99.7% of human existence when the natural world flourished alongside us. He does not even mention indigenous people, the only communities that have truly lived in a sustainable manner. Any understanding of environmental sustainability must advance from the basic position that humans have the ability to coexist with the natural world. These model societies exist, but they are being destroyed by the very industrialism that Brown supports with his calls for alternative technology (for example, the Dongriah Kondh of the central Indian foothills).
Instead of exploring how human societies may better conform themselves to the needs of the land, Brown falls into the trap of reform – how can we adapt nature to better fit our needs? How can we maintain the energy grid, industrial production, a high population, and the conveniences of globalized capitalist civilization while simultaneously addressing environmental problems? The fundamental answer to this question is that such a solution is not possible. In failing to see this point, Plan B 4.0 stumbles and falls along with the vast majority of the environmental movement.
by deepgreenresistance | Nov 29, 2011 | Agriculture
ROME — The United Nations has completed the first-ever global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources, finding in a report Monday that a quarter of all land is highly degraded and warning the trend must be reversed if the world’s growing population is to be fed.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that farmers will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world’s expected 9 billion-strong population. That amounts to 1 billion tons more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200 million more tons of beef and other livestock.
But as it is, most available land is already being farmed, and in ways that often decrease its productivity through practices that lead to soil erosion and wasting of water.
That means that to meet the world’s future food needs, a major “sustainable intensification” of agricultural productivity on existing farmland will be necessary, the FAO said in “State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.”
FAO’s director-general Jacques Diouf said increased competition over land for growing biofuels, coupled with climate change and poor farming practices, had left key food-producing systems at risk of being unable to meet human needs in 2050.
“The consequences in terms of hunger and poverty are unacceptable,” he told reporters at FAO’s Rome headquarters. “Remedial actions need to be taken now. We simply cannot continue on a course of business as usual.”
The report was released Monday, as delegates from around the world meet in Durban, South Africa, for a two-week U.N. climate change conference aimed at breaking the deadlock on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.
The report found that climate change coupled with poor farming practices had contributed to a decrease in productivity of the world’s farmland following the boon years of the Green Revolution, when crop yields soared thanks to new technologies, pesticides and the introduction of high-yield crops.
Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world’s cropland grew by just 12 percent between 1961 and 2009, but food productivity increased by 150 percent.
But the U.N. report found that rates of growth have been slowing down in many areas and today are only half of what they were at the peak of the Green Revolution.
It found that 25 percent of the world’s land is now “highly degraded,” with soil erosion, water degradation and biodiversity loss. Another 8 percent is moderately degraded, while 36 percent is stable or slightly degraded and 10 percent is ranked as “improving.”
The rest of the Earth’s surface is either bare or covered by inland water bodies.
Some examples of areas at risk: Western Europe, where highly intensive agriculture has led to pollution of soil and aquifers and a resulting loss of biodiversity; In the highlands of the Himalayas, the Andes, the Ethiopian plateau and southern Africa, soil erosion has been coupled with an increased intensity of floods; In southeast and eastern Asia’s rice-based food systems, land has been abandoned thanks in part to a loss of the cultural value of it.
The report found that water around the world is becoming ever more scarce and salinated, while groundwater is becoming more polluted by agricultural runoff and other toxins.
In order to meet the world’s water needs in 2050, more efficient irrigation will be necessary since currently most irrigation systems perform well below their capacity, FAO said.
The agency called for new farming practices like integrated irrigation and fish-farm systems to meet those demands, as well as overall investment in agricultural development.
The price tag deemed necessary for investments through 2050: $1 trillion in irrigation water management alone for developing countries, with another $160 billion for soil conservation and flood control.
From the Huffington Post
