Southeast Asia is home to roughly half of the world’s tropical mountain forests, which support massive carbon stores and tremendous biodiversity, including a host of species that occur nowhere else on the planet.
A new study reveals that mountain forest loss in Southeast Asia is accelerating at an unprecedented rate throughout the region: approximately 189,000 square kilometers (73,000 square miles) of highland forest was converted to cropland during the first two decades of this century.
Mountain forest loss has far-reaching implications for people who depend directly on forest resources and downstream communities.
Since higher-elevation forests also store comparatively more carbon than lowland forests, their loss will make it much harder to meet international climate objectives.
Southeast Asia is home to roughly half of the world’s tropical mountain forests. These highland ecosystems support massive carbon stores and tremendous biodiversity, including a host of species that occur nowhere else on the planet. But new evidence suggests these havens are in grave danger. Conversion of higher-elevation forest to cropland is accelerating at an unprecedented rate throughout the region, according to findings published June 28 in Nature Sustainability.
By analyzing high-resolution satellite data sets of forest loss and state-of-the-art maps of carbon density and terrain, an international team of researchers quantified patterns of forest loss in Southeast Asia during the first two decades of this century. They found that during the 2000s, forest loss was mainly concentrated in the lowlands; but by the 2010s, it had shifted significantly to higher ground.
Between 2001 and 2019, the researchers calculated that Southeast Asia had lost 610,000 square kilometers (235,500 square miles) of forest — an area larger than Thailand. Of this loss, 31% occurred in mountainous regions, equivalent to 189,100 km2 (73,000 mi2) of highland forest converted to cropland and plantation in less than two decades.
Moreover, the study reveals an accelerating trend. By 2019, 42% of total annual forest loss occurred at higher elevations, with the frontier of forest loss migrating upslope at a rate of roughly 15 meters (49 feet) per year.
Particularly prominent shifts to mountain forest loss were found in north Laos, northeast Myanmar, and east Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia — the country that experienced the most overall forest loss.
Terraces are cleared on a hillside in Malaysian Borneo to make way for an oil palm plantation. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay
Decades of widespread clearing of lowland forests to make way for rice, oil palm and rubber plantations has led the conservation community to perceive forest loss as an issue only affecting the lowlands, said Paul Elsen, climate adaptation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and co-author of the study.
“To see through this study that forest loss is increasing and accelerating in mountainous areas throughout the whole of Southeast Asia was pretty surprising,” he told Mongabay.
The expansion of agriculture into higher elevation areas, despite sub-optimal growing conditions due to lower temperatures and steep slopes, spotlights just how scarce undeveloped land now is in lowland Southeast Asia.
“Just because we found that there’s a lot of increasing forest loss in the mountains does not mean that we’re not still seeing forest loss in the lowlands … we still have to worry about lowland forest loss,” Elsen said. “It is just shocking that [forest loss] is continuing to move up into places that we felt were safe by virtue of being rugged and remote and isolated.”
Natural hazards
Worldwide, more than 1 billion people live in mountainous regions. Forest loss in these areas has far-reaching implications for people who depend directly on forest resources and downstream communities.
Clearing forests in steep headwaters where rivers originate can increase the risk of catastrophic landslips and flooding in lower areas. It also exacerbates soil erosion and runoff, causing rivers to clog with silt and agricultural pollutants, reducing downstream water quality and availability. In 2018, many people blamed the devastating floods that struck southeast Sulawesi in Indonesia, displacing thousands of people from their villages, on upstream forest clearing.
“These impacts can kill people, of course, but they also disrupt roads and transportation access so goods and services can’t reach communities,” Elsen said. “That’s hugely impactful when you have increased soil erosion and instability following the removal of trees.”
Elsen said communities dependent on mountain forests are hit with a “double whammy” when trees are cleared, since they lose the safety net the forest provides against diminished crop yields, which also suffer from diminished water availability and quality. “Now that the forest has been removed, you have fewer products available for communities to rely on, so it also reduces their adaptation potential,” he said. “If left unchecked, this could be a really big environmental problem for the communities living both in the mountains and in the lowlands.”
Furthermore, a 2021 study showed that deforestation in the tropics can increase local warming by up to 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit). “Local communities living in these frontier zones will suffer much stronger climate warming due to the biogeophysical feedbacks driven by tree loss further compounding the effects of global warming,” Zhenzhong Zeng, associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China and co-author of the new study told Mongabay.
A landslip in Indonesia caused by the removal of trees which has destabilized the steep slope. Image by Rhett Butler/Mongabay
Nowhere to go
If the forest loss continues to march upslope, the consequences for wildlife could be equally devastating. Recent studies suggest many species are shifting their ranges to higher altitudes in response to warming temperatures.
“The mountains of Southeast Asia are one of the most biologically rich regions of the planet and it’s incredible how many species of mammals, of birds, of amphibians are living only in the mountains and rely on forested ecosystems for their survival,” Elsen said. “So the removal of any of those forests will most likely reduce their abundances at a minimum and could potentially cause local extinctions because species that live in mountains often are very isolated in particular spots.”
“While it’s not surprising, unfortunately, that forest loss rates are moving up elevation in Southeast Asia, this study importantly quantifies this upwards acceleration,” Tim Bonebrake, a conservation biologist at Hong Kong University who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay in an email. He said the rate of upslope shift in the frontier of forest loss is very concerning and might hamper species’ ability to adapt to climate change.
“Not only do these losses of forest cover amount to losses in habitat for species, but the incursion of this forest loss up elevation will also impair biodiversity resilience to climate change,” Bonebrake said. “Forest species that may have otherwise been able to shift their distributions in response to warming will have less space to do so.”
White-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar) are among the many species that may have to shift their ranges further up into mountain forests in response to climate change. Image by JJ Harrison via Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Global carbon budget
As part of the study, the researchers investigated how forest loss is affecting carbon budgets by overlaying forest loss datasets on high-resolution carbon density maps. They found that carbon stocks in steeper, higher-elevation forests are much greater than in lowland forests. This contrasts with patterns in Africa and South America where lowland forests account for more carbon sequestration. The Southeast Asia pattern is most likely due to greater levels of primary production and organic soil content in the region’s highland forests, say the researchers.
The team calculated that the total annual forest carbon loss across Southeast Asia was 424 million metric tons of carbon per year, which is equivalent to one-sixth of all the carbon absorbed by the world’s oceans each year. Mountain areas accounted for nearly one-third of that loss.
Their findings suggest that assumptions used in global climate change models, which consider all forest carbon emissions as equal, could be inaccurate. Moreover, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate models incorporate predictions that tree-dominated land cover will persist in Southeast Asian mountains. Not only are those mountains losing their forest cover, but the fact that the region’s mountain forests store comparatively more carbon than lowland forests means that their loss will disproportionately affect climate predictions.
The authors calculate that if the patterns of forest loss continue, annual forest carbon loss in the mountains will exceed that of the lowlands as soon as 2022. They also suggest that the continued loss of carbon-rich forests at higher elevations could eventually tip the scales, shifting Southeast Asia’s forests from being a neutral actor in the global carbon cycle to a net carbon emitter.
Ultimately, the loss of higher-elevation forest will make it much harder to meet international climate objectives to limit global warming to below 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. This is, according to Elsen, “A very simple message that we need practitioners and policymakers to understand.”
Citation:
Feng, Y., Ziegler, A. D., Elsen, P. R., Liu, Y., He, X., Spracklen D. V., … Zeng, Z. (2021). Upward expansion and acceleration of forest clearance in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Nature Sustainability. doi:10.1038/s41893-021-00738-y
Editor’s note: The Brexit gives the UK the chance to become independent from the very destructive EU agricultural policy. This is the time for UK activists to step up for rewilding.
Featured image: Forest in Somerset, UK. Photo by Deb Barnes
By Lisa Malm, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Umeå University, and Darren Evans, Professor of Ecology and Conservation, Newcastle University
After a particularly long week of computer based work on my PhD, all I wanted was to hike somewhere exciting with a rich wildlife. A friend commiserated with me – I was based at Newcastle University at the time, and this particular friend wasn’t keen on the UK’s wilderness, its moorlands and bare uplands, compared to the large tracts of woodland and tropical forests that can be found more readily abroad.
Luckily, I count myself among many who are charmed by the rolling heather moorlands and sheep grazed uplands, whose colours change beautifully with the seasons. But my friend had a point – there is something very different about many of the UK’s national parks compared to those found in much of the rest of the world: the British uplands are hardly the natural wilderness that many perceive.
These upland habitats are in fact far from what they would have been had they remained unaffected by human activity. In particular, grazing by livestock has been carried out for centuries. In the long run, this stops new trees from establishing, and in turn reduces the depth of soil layers, making the conditions for new vegetation to establish even more difficult. Instead of the woodlands that would once have covered large areas of the uplands, Britain is largely characterised by rolling hills of open grass and moorlands.
Government policy has long been to keep these rolling hills looking largely as they do now. But the future of the British uplands is uncertain. Regulations and government policy strongly influences land management, and the biodiversity associated with it. In fact, the management required to maintain British upland landscapes as they are now – management that largely involves grazing by sheep – is only possible through large subsidies. And due to Brexit, this may change. A new agricultural policy will soon replace the often-criticised Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
What this will look like remains unclear. There are a range of competing interests in the uplands. Some wish to rewild vast swathes of the land, while others want to intensify farming, forestry and other commercial interests. The rewilders tap into the increased interest in restoring natural woodland due to its potential in carbon uptake, increased biodiversity and reintroduction of extinct species such as wolves and lynxes, while some farmers argue that this will be bad for the economy. The UK stands at a crossroads, and interests are rapidly diverging.
Whatever path is taken will obviously have an impact on the unique assemblages of upland plants and animals, many of which are internationally important. But upland birds and biodiversity have for a long time been on the decline. Whether rewilding is the answer to this or not has long been debated: some claim that we need to stop grazing animals to allow the natural habitat to reassert itself, while others claim that some species, such as curlews, rely on such grazing practises for their survival.
But our new research, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, provides the first experimental evidence to our knowledge, that stopping livestock grazing can increase the number of breeding upland bird species in the long term, including birds of high conservation importance, such as black grouse and cuckoo. This is interesting, as it is often argued that land abandonment can result in lower biodiversity and that livestock grazing is essential for maintaining it.
Our research shows that, depending on how the uplands are managed, there will be bird “winners” and “losers”, but overall when sheep have gone the number of bird species returning increases.
A subsidised landscape
Before going into the research itself, it’s important to consider the history of British upland land management. Truly “natural” habitats in the UK are few and relatively small. Deciduous woodland, and to a lesser extent coniferous forests, used to cover most of the British uplands below the treeline. For example, only about 1% of the native pine forests that once covered 1.5 million hectares (15,000km²) of the Scottish Highlands remain today.
These woodlands provided homes for charismatic species such as pine marten, red squirrel and osprey, together with now extinct species such as lynx and bears. But centuries of farming has shaped most of the upland landscape to what it is today: a predominantly bare landscape dominated by moorlands, rough grasslands, peatlands and other low vegetation.
These marginal areas tend to have low financial profitability for those who farm the land. And so a range of other activities, such as grouse shooting and commercial forestry, exist to boost rural community incomes.
Despite their low profitability, however, many grazed areas are considered to represent “high nature value” farming. This seems paradoxical, but basically means they are considered important as habitats to protected species benefiting from open upland landscapes. One such species is the iconic curlew.
Because farming is tough in the uplands and it’s a struggle to make a profit, landowners receive, and often rely on, subsidies to maintain their farms. The form of these subsidies has changed over time, in line with the current perception of appropriate land management for food production. At the moment, the scale of these subsidies are based on the size of the farm, but they also require that the farmer maintains the land in a good agricultural state. This leaves little room for shrubs or trees, except along field edges, especially in England where there is no financial support for agroforestry (where trees are integrated in agricultural land).
But these subsidies will soon no longer be allocated through the EU – and so it’s time to reconsider what kind of land management should be supported. It seems sensible to consider introducing financial support for other land management types, such as reforestation, natural regeneration or wildflower meadows. Such habitats have other public and nature conservation benefits.
It’s not just farming and aesthetics that are at stake here. Challenges such as climate change and air pollution should also inform how financial support for appropriate land management is managed. For example, floods are predicted to become more common as the climate gets warmer. Reforestation can help to diminish floods, the roots channelling water down through the soil instead of letting it run off the land. Re-establishment of woodlands can also improve air quality: the leaves absorb harmful gases such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
But rewilding, or any form of restructuring land management, can be costly. It therefore needs to be based on the best scientific evidence, preferably from well-designed experimental research studies. In controlled experimental studies, the cause for any effects found can more easily be determined, as opposed to observational studies, which risk being biased by other, confounding, factors. But due to the cost and complexity of maintaining them, long-term, experimentally manipulated land use studies are rare, and with it the necessary evidence base for long-term management decisions.
Experimental grazing
I’ve been lucky to be involved in one such long-term experiment. The Glen Finglas experiment, managed by the James Hutton Institute, was set up in 2002 in Scotland’s Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park. The experiment examines the long-term ecological impacts of different livestock grazing intensity levels on plants, arthropods (insects and spiders), birds and mammals. These grazing levels reflect the conventional stocking rate in the region at the start of the experiment (about three ewes per ha), low intensity grazing at a third of the conventional stocking rate (with sheep only or both sheep and cattle), or no grazing at all.
The experiment has six replicates of four grazing treatments and covers around 0.75km² of land, with 12km of fencing. This may not seem large, but in experimental terms, it is. According to Robin Pakeman, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute who manages the project, the experiment constitutes “an unrivalled resource to understand how grazing impacts on a whole range of organisms”.
Since the start, the Glen Finglas experiment has shown that grazing intensity affects plants and the amount of insects and spiders. The highest amount of plants, insects and spiders were found in the ungrazed areas. This was not too surprising as grazing livestock removes vegetation, which results in reduced habitat conditions for insects and spiders overall (although some species benefit from grazing).
There have also been studies on carbon storage, vole abundances and fox activity within the experiment. These have shown higher carbon storage and higher fox activity in the ungrazed areas.
Meanwhile, the research on birds within this experiment has, from the start, focused on meadow pipits. These small, brown birds are the “house sparrows of the uplands”, yet often go unnoticed. But they are the most common upland bird and an important part of upland food webs, forming key prey for birds of prey such as hen harriers and a common host for cuckoos. The experiment has provided unique insights into the ecology of this fascinating little bird, and a much clearer understanding of how it is affected by grazing.
In just the first two to three years, it became clear that meadow pipits could be affected by grazing intensity. My PhD supervisor, Darren Evans, found that the breeding density and egg size were both positively affected by low intensity mixed cattle and sheep grazing. But there were no differences in how many meadow pipit chicks were produced and fledged between the grazing treatments, at least not in the very early phase of the experiment.
I wanted to test whether these results changed in the longer term. Together with colleagues from Newcastle University, the British Trust for Ornithology, The James Hutton Institute and The University of Aberdeen, we looked at whether 12 years of continuous experimental grazing management had affected the breeding success of meadow pipits.
We assumed that low intensity grazing, compared to high intensity or no grazing, was most beneficial for pipit breeding productivity. We found the low intensity grazed areas did indeed seem to be better for meadow pipits, but the effects were not clear enough to be statistically significant. And there seemed to be potentially more important factors, such as predation, affecting their breeding outcome.
But although we did not initially set out to test it, we found other, more significant, effects on the wider bird community.
When the experiment started, there were almost no bird species other than meadow pipits in and around the treatment areas, hence the focus on them. But in 2015, while looking for meadow pipit nests, we came across a few other beautiful nests in the low intensity grazed areas. These nests had colourful blue eggs or eggs that appeared to have been painted with dark brown watercolour paint. These turned out to be stonechat and reed bunting eggs, two bird species that had not previously been seen in the experiment.
Later on, we saw that they had fledged successfully: the parents would call them to warn about human intruders. If we didn’t get too close, the newly fledged young would curiously nudge their heads up through the vegetation. By this stage of the experiment – 12 years in – the vegetation had actually become quite dense and high in the ungrazed and some of the low intensity grazed areas.
We also detected several black grouse nests, mainly in the ungrazed areas. Most of them were already hatched, but one had a female who bravely stayed put on her eggs every time we visited this area until they hatched.
Another great discovery was when we found a meadow pipit nest with one egg that seemed oddly big in comparison to the rest of the clutch. We were really excited to realise that it had been visited by a cuckoo that had laid an egg there, which hadn’t happened during the early years of nest monitoring in the experiment. This egg had a brown spotted pattern which was fascinatingly similar to the meadow pipit eggs. (As exciting as this all may seem, nest searching should only be carried out under permit. I also had a bird ringing permit covering my research activities).
Thanks to all these encounters, we decided to test how the different grazing treatments affected the species richness of breeding birds. Over the first two years, we found that there was basically no difference. But another decade on and there were clearly more bird species found in the ungrazed areas compared to the other experimental plots.
A fractious debate
It was not only bird species richness that needed time to respond to the change in grazing management. Although plant structure responded early, it was not until 2017 – 14 years since the experiment began – that an effect on plant species richness could be detected. In this case, the variety of species was greater in the intensively grazed areas, probably because the livestock holds back fast-growing plants from dominating. Whether this would remain the same in another decade is far from clear.
The ungrazed areas in our study, meanwhile, showed more shrub and tall-growing plants after a bit more than a decade. There were also patches of deciduous tree species, which were not there when the experiment commenced.
Rewilding is such a fractious debate because of the difficulty in obtaining solid scientific evidence on which to base decisions. It takes a very long time – far longer than our political cycles, most research studies, perhaps even a lifetime – to determine what the ultimate effects of large scale land management on the environment are. In our experiment, changes have been very slow. Pakeman explained to me that this is partly expected in cold and infertile habitats but another reason for slow responses is that plant communities exist in a sort of “mosaic”, with each community having a different preference for the grazers. He continued:
The long history of grazing has meant that the most highly preferred communities show little response to grazing removal as they have lost species capable of responding to this change.
There is no one management practice which creates the perfect environment. Some bird species (skylark and snipe) were only found in grazed areas. Other species were more abundant in the ungrazed areas. There is no one size fits all.
But much more consideration and effort needs to be given to unattended land and its potential for boosting biodiversity. There is no single answer to what is the best alternative, but our experiment indicates that a mosaic of different grazing types and shrub or woodland would be more suitable if the aim is to increase biodiversity, carbon uptake and habitats for endangered species.
The experiment also showed that changing the management had no effects on plant diversity and bird species richness in the first years. But this may only be the beginning of the transformation. Another decade of no grazing may result in even higher, or lower, species richness. This shows how important it is to be patient in receiving the effects of land management on plants and wildlife.
Using existing evidence
Our results bring some experimental evidence to the debate around sheep farming versus rewilding. Hopefully, decisions around new policies and subsidy systems will be based on such evidence. As new policies are formed, there will inevitably always be winners and losers, among both humans and wildlife, according to which habitat types receive more support.
Biodiversity is incredibly important. It creates a more resilient ecosystem that can withstand external stresses caused by both humans and nature. It also keeps populations of pollinators strong. At the moment, perhaps the most current and urgent reason is that it could be instrumental in protecting us from future pandemics. A wider range of species prevents unnatural expansions of single species, which can spill over their diseases to humans.
But preserving biodiversity is just one element of long-term environmental aims. Other processes, such as increased flood protection and carbon storage, which both can be achieved through more vegetation, may soon become more prevalent.
There are therefore several biological processes pointing towards public gain from increasing the area of unmanaged land. Across Europe, land is being abandoned due to low profitability in farming it. There are predictions that the amount of abandoned land in Europe will increase by 11% (equivalent to 200,000km² or 20 million ha) by 2030. This is often reported negatively, but it does not have to be. The problem most people see with land abandonment or rewilding is the decrease in food productivity, which will have to increase in order to feed a growing human population.
But as Richard Bunting at the charity Rewilding Britain explained to me, a decline in food production could be avoided, while increasing the areas subject to rewilding to 10,000km² (a million hectares) by the end of the century:
We’re working for the rewilding of a relatively small proportion of Britain’s more marginal land. One million hectares may sound like a lot, but there are 1.8 million hectares [18,000km²] of deer stalking estates and 1.3 million hectares [13,000km²] of grouse moors in Britain. In England alone, there are 270,000 hectares [2,700km²] of golf courses.
As farmers and other upland land owners may be opposed to the idea of rewilding, I also asked him how this would work in practice. He told me that he believes farming and rewilding could work well together, but he had some caveats:
We do need conversations around fresh approaches to the way farming is carried out and how land is used. A key point here is that for farmers, engaging with rewilding should always be about choice, as we seek a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive.
There are many ways to rewild. The Woodland Trust have been successful in restoring ancient woodlands and planting new trees by protecting them from large herbivores such as deer and livestock. Another method is to let “nature have its way” without intervening at all. This has been successful in restoring natural habitats, including woodland, such as the Knepp estate in West Sussex, which Isabella Tree has made famous in her book Wilding.
After 19 years of no conventional management, The Knepp estate now hosts a vast range of wildlife, including all five native owl species, the rare purple emperor butterfly and turtle doves. Large herbivores, including both livestock and deer, graze the area on a free-roaming level. These animals are replacing the large natural herbivores such as aurochs, wisent and wild boar which would have grazed the area thousands of years ago.
So there is room for discussion on what environmental and financial benefits there may be of different rewilding, or woodland restoration projects, and where they are most suitable.
The first thing to do, I think, is to diversify the types of land management championed by the government through subsidy. Natural habitats could be increased through more financial benefits to landowners for leaving land unattended, while improving public interest in visiting woodlands and thereby the support for preserving wild habitats.
Meanwhile, long-term research of land-use change would give us a better evidence base for future decisions. But this must go hand in hand with much needed serious evaluations of rural communities’ long-term income opportunities under alternative management scenarios, which will always be a cornerstone in land use politics.
One morning in 2009, I sat on a creaky bus winding its way up a mountainside in central Costa Rica, light-headed from diesel fumes as I clutched my many suitcases. They contained thousands of test tubes and sample vials, a toothbrush, a waterproof notebook and two changes of clothes.
I was on my way to La Selva Biological Station, where I was to spend several months studying the wet, lowland rainforest’s response to increasingly common droughts. On either side of the narrow highway, trees bled into the mist like watercolours into paper, giving the impression of an infinite primeval forest bathed in cloud.
As I gazed out of the window at the imposing scenery, I wondered how I could ever hope to understand a landscape so complex. I knew that thousands of researchers across the world were grappling with the same questions, trying to understand the fate of tropical forests in a rapidly changing world.
Bonnie Waring conducting research at La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica, 2011.
Author provided
Our society asks so much of these fragile ecosystems, which control freshwater availability for millions of people and are home to two thirds of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. And increasingly, we have placed a new demand on these forests – to save us from human-caused climate change.
Plants absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, transforming it into leaves, wood and roots. This everyday miracle has spurred hopes that plants – particularly fast growing tropical trees – can act as a natural brake on climate change, capturing much of the CO₂ emitted by fossil fuel burning. Across the world, governments, companies and conservation charities have pledged to conserve or plant massive numbers of trees.
But the fact is that there aren’t enough trees to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be. I recently conducted a review of the available scientific literature to assess how much carbon forests could feasibly absorb. If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold, we’d sequester enough carbon to offset about ten years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates. After that, there could be no further increase in carbon capture.
Yet the fate of our species is inextricably linked to the survival of forests and the biodiversity they contain. By rushing to plant millions of trees for carbon capture, could we be inadvertently damaging the very forest properties that make them so vital to our wellbeing? To answer this question, we need to consider not only how plants absorb CO₂, but also how they provide the sturdy green foundations for ecosystems on land.
How plants fight climate change
Plants convert CO₂ gas into simple sugars in a process known as photosynthesis. These sugars are then used to build the plants’ living bodies. If the captured carbon ends up in wood, it can be locked away from the atmosphere for many decades. As plants die, their tissues undergo decay and are incorporated into the soil.
While this process naturally releases CO₂ through the respiration (or breathing) of microbes that break down dead organisms, some fraction of plant carbon can remain underground for decades or even centuries. Together, land plants and soils hold about 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon – about three times more than is held in the atmosphere.
Because plants (especially trees) are such excellent natural storehouses for carbon, it makes sense that increasing the abundance of plants across the world could draw down atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.
Plants need four basic ingredients to grow: light, CO₂, water and nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus, the same elements present in plant fertiliser). Thousands of scientists across the world study how plant growth varies in relation to these four ingredients, in order to predict how vegetation will respond to climate change.
This is a surprisingly challenging task, given that humans are simultaneously modifying so many aspects of the natural environment by heating the globe, altering rainfall patterns, chopping large tracts of forest into tiny fragments and introducing alien species where they don’t belong. There are also over 350,000 species of flowering plants on land and each one responds to environmental challenges in unique ways.
Due to the complicated ways in which humans are altering the planet, there is a lot of scientific debate about the precise quantity of carbon that plants can absorb from the atmosphere. But researchers are in unanimous agreement that land ecosystems have a finite capacity to take up carbon.
If we ensure trees have enough water to drink, forests will grow tall and lush, creating shady canopies that starve smaller trees of light. If we increase the concentration of CO₂ in the air, plants will eagerly absorb it – until they can no longer extract enough fertiliser from the soil to meet their needs. Just like a baker making a cake, plants require CO₂, nitrogen and phosphorus in particular ratios, following a specific recipe for life.
In recognition of these fundamental constraints, scientists estimate that the earth’s land ecosystems can hold enough additional vegetation to absorb between 40 and 100 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. Once this additional growth is achieved (a process which will take a number of decades), there is no capacity for additional carbon storage on land.
But our society is currently pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere at a rate of ten gigatonnes of carbon a year. Natural processes will struggle to keep pace with the deluge of greenhouse gases generated by the global economy. For example, I calculated that a single passenger on a round trip flight from Melbourne to New York City will emit roughly twice as much carbon (1600 kg C) as is contained in an oak tree half a meter in diameter (750 kg C).
Peril and promise
Despite all these well recognised physical constraints on plant growth, there is a proliferating number of large scale efforts to increase vegetation cover to mitigate the climate emergency – a so called “nature-based” climate solution. The vastmajority of these efforts focus on protecting or expanding forests, as trees contain many times more biomass than shrubs or grasses and therefore represent greater carbon capture potential.
Yet fundamental misunderstandings about carbon capture by land ecosystems can have devastating consequences, resulting in losses of biodiversity and an increase in CO₂ concentrations. This seems like a paradox – how can planting trees negatively impact the environment?
The answer lies in the subtle complexities of carbon capture in natural ecosystems. To avoid environmental damage, we must refrain from establishing forests where they naturally don’t belong, avoid “perverse incentives” to cut down existing forest in order to plant new trees, and consider how seedlings planted today might fare over the next several decades.
Before undertaking any expansion of forest habitat, we must ensure that trees are planted in the right place because not all ecosystems on land can or should support trees. Planting trees in ecosystems that are normally dominated by other types of vegetation often fails to result in long term carbon sequestration.
One particularly illustrative example comes from Scottish peatlands – vast swathes of land where the low-lying vegetation (mostly mosses and grasses) grows in constantly soggy, moist ground. Because decomposition is very slow in the acidic and waterlogged soils, dead plants accumulate over very long periods of time, creating peat. It’s not just the vegetation that is preserved: peat bogs also mummify so-called “bog bodies” – the nearly intact remains of men and women who died millennia ago. In fact, UK peatlands contain 20 times more carbon than found in the nation’s forests.
But in the late 20th century, some Scottish bogs were drained for tree planting. Drying the soils allowed tree seedlings to establish, but also caused the decay of the peat to speed up. Ecologist Nina Friggens and her colleagues at the University of Exeter estimated that the decomposition of drying peat released more carbon than the growing trees could absorb. Clearly, peatlands can best safeguard the climate when they are left to their own devices.
The same is true of grasslands and savannahs, where fires are a natural part of the landscape and often burn trees that are planted where they don’t belong. This principle also applies to Arctic tundras, where the native vegetation is covered by snow throughout the winter, reflecting light and heat back to space. Planting tall, dark-leaved trees in these areas can increase absorption of heat energy, and lead to local warming.
But even planting trees in forest habitats can lead to negative environmental outcomes. From the perspective of both carbon sequestration and biodiversity, all forests are not equal – naturally established forests contain more species of plants and animals than plantation forests. They often hold more carbon, too. But policies aimed at promoting tree planting can unintentionally incentivise deforestation of well established natural habitats.
A recent high-profile example concerns the Mexican government’s Sembrando Vida programme, which provides direct payments to landowners for planting trees. The problem? Many rural landowners cut down well established older forest to plant seedlings. This decision, while quite sensible from an economic point of view, has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of hectares of mature forest.
This example demonstrates the risks of a narrow focus on trees as carbon absorption machines. Many well meaning organisations seek to plant the trees which grow the fastest, as this theoretically means a higher rate of CO₂ “drawdown” from the atmosphere.
Yet from a climate perspective, what matters is not how quickly a tree can grow, but how much carbon it contains at maturity, and how long that carbon resides in the ecosystem. As a forest ages, it reaches what ecologists call a “steady state” – this is when the amount of carbon absorbed by the trees each year is perfectly balanced by the CO₂ released through the breathing of the plants themselves and the trillions of decomposer microbes underground.
This phenomenon has led to an erroneous perception that old forests are not useful for climate mitigation because they are no longer growing rapidly and sequestering additional CO₂. The misguided “solution” to the issue is to prioritise tree planting ahead of the conservation of already established forests. This is analogous to draining a bathtub so that the tap can be turned on full blast: the flow of water from the tap is greater than it was before – but the total capacity of the bath hasn’t changed. Mature forests are like bathtubs full of carbon. They are making an important contribution to the large, but finite, quantity of carbon that can be locked away on land, and there is little to be gained by disturbing them.
What about situations where fast growing forests are cut down every few decades and replanted, with the extracted wood used for other climate-fighting purposes? While harvested wood can be a very good carbon store if it ends up in long lived products (like houses or other buildings), surprisingly little timber is used in this way.
Similarly, burning wood as a source of biofuel may have a positive climate impact if this reduces total consumption of fossil fuels. But forests managed as biofuel plantations provide little in the way of protection for biodiversity and some research questions the benefits of biofuels for the climate in the first place.
Fertilise a whole forest
Scientific estimates of carbon capture in land ecosystems depend on how those systems respond to the mounting challenges they will face in the coming decades. All forests on Earth – even the most pristine – are vulnerable to warming, changes in rainfall, increasingly severe wildfires and pollutants that drift through the Earth’s atmospheric currents.
Some of these pollutants, however, contain lots of nitrogen (plant fertiliser) which could potentially give the global forest a growth boost. By producing massive quantities of agricultural chemicals and burning fossil fuels, humans have massively increased the amount of “reactive” nitrogen available for plant use. Some of this nitrogen is dissolved in rainwater and reaches the forest floor, where it can stimulate tree growth in some areas.
As a young researcher fresh out of graduate school, I wondered whether a type of under-studied ecosystem, known as seasonally dry tropical forest, might be particularly responsive to this effect. There was only one way to find out: I would need to fertilise a whole forest.
Working with my postdoctoral adviser, the ecologist Jennifer Powers, and expert botanist Daniel Pérez Avilez, I outlined an area of the forest about as big as two football fields and divided it into 16 plots, which were randomly assigned to different fertiliser treatments. For the next three years (2015-2017) the plots became among the most intensively studied forest fragments on Earth. We measured the growth of each individual tree trunk with specialised, hand-built instruments called dendrometers.
Dendrometer devices wrapped around tree trunks to measure growth.
Author provided
We used baskets to catch the dead leaves that fell from the trees and installed mesh bags in the ground to track the growth of roots, which were painstakingly washed free of soil and weighed. The most challenging aspect of the experiment was the application of the fertilisers themselves, which took place three times a year. Wearing raincoats and goggles to protect our skin against the caustic chemicals, we hauled back-mounted sprayers into the dense forest, ensuring the chemicals were evenly applied to the forest floor while we sweated under our rubber coats.
Unfortunately, our gear didn’t provide any protection against angry wasps, whose nests were often concealed in overhanging branches. But, our efforts were worth it. After three years, we could calculate all the leaves, wood and roots produced in each plot and assess carbon captured over the study period. We found that most trees in the forest didn’t benefit from the fertilisers – instead, growth was strongly tied to the amount of rainfall in a given year.
One of the baskets for catching dead leaves.
Author provided
This suggests that nitrogen pollution won’t boost tree growth in these forests as long as droughts continue to intensify. To make the same prediction for other forest types (wetter or drier, younger or older, warmer or cooler) such studies will need to be repeated, adding to the library of knowledge developed through similar experiments over the decades. Yet researchers are in a race against time. Experiments like this are slow, painstaking, sometimes backbreaking work and humans are changing the face of the planet faster than the scientific community can respond.
Humans need healthy forests
Supporting natural ecosystems is an important tool in the arsenal of strategies we will need to combat climate change. But land ecosystems will never be able to absorb the quantity of carbon released by fossil fuel burning. Rather than be lulled into false complacency by tree planting schemes, we need to cut off emissions at their source and search for additional strategies to remove the carbon that has already accumulated in the atmosphere.
Does this mean that current campaigns to protect and expand forest are a poor idea? Emphatically not. The protection and expansion of natural habitat, particularly forests, is absolutely vital to ensure the health of our planet. Forests in temperate and tropical zones contain eight out of every ten species on land, yet they are under increasing threat. Nearly half of our planet’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, and forest clearing for cropland or pasture is continuing apace.
Meanwhile, the atmospheric mayhem caused by climate change is intensifying wildfires, worsening droughts and systematically heating the planet, posing an escalating threat to forests and the wildlife they support. What does that mean for our species? Again and again, researchers have demonstrated strong links between biodiversity and so-called “ecosystem services” – the multitude of benefits the natural world provides to humanity.
Carbon capture is just one ecosystem service in an incalculably long list. Biodiverse ecosystems provide a dizzying array of pharmaceutically active compounds that inspire the creation of new drugs. They provide food security in ways both direct (think of the millions of people whose main source of protein is wild fish) and indirect (for example, a large fraction of crops are pollinated by wild animals).
Natural ecosystems and the millions of species that inhabit them still inspire technological developments that revolutionise human society. For example, take the polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) that allows crime labs to catch criminals and your local pharmacy to provide a COVID test. PCR is only possible because of a special protein synthesised by a humble bacteria that lives in hot springs.
As an ecologist, I worry that a simplistic perspective on the role of forests in climate mitigation will inadvertently lead to their decline. Many tree planting efforts focus on the number of saplings planted or their initial rate of growth – both of which are poor indicators of the forest’s ultimate carbon storage capacity and even poorer metric of biodiversity. More importantly, viewing natural ecosystems as “climate solutions” gives the misleading impression that forests can function like an infinitely absorbent mop to clean up the ever increasing flood of human caused CO₂ emissions.
Luckily, many big organisations dedicated to forest expansion are incorporating ecosystem health and biodiversity into their metrics of success. A little over a year ago, I visited an enormous reforestation experiment on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, operated by Plant-for-the-Planet – one of the world’s largest tree planting organisations. After realising the challenges inherent in large scale ecosystem restoration, Plant-for-the-Planet has initiated a series of experiments to understand how different interventions early in a forest’s development might improve tree survival.
But that is not all. Led by Director of Science Leland Werden, researchers at the site will study how these same practices can jump-start the recovery of native biodiversity by providing the ideal environment for seeds to germinate and grow as the forest develops. These experiments will also help land managers decide when and where planting trees benefits the ecosystem and where forest regeneration can occur naturally.
Viewing forests as reservoirs for biodiversity, rather than simply storehouses of carbon, complicates decision making and may require shifts in policy. I am all too aware of these challenges. I have spent my entire adult life studying and thinking about the carbon cycle and I too sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. One morning several years ago, I was sitting on the rainforest floor in Costa Rica measuring CO₂ emissions from the soil – a relatively time intensive and solitary process.
As I waited for the measurement to finish, I spotted a strawberry poison dart frog – a tiny, jewel-bright animal the size of my thumb – hopping up the trunk of a nearby tree. Intrigued, I watched her progress towards a small pool of water held in the leaves of a spiky plant, in which a few tadpoles idly swam. Once the frog reached this miniature aquarium, the tiny tadpoles (her children, as it turned out) vibrated excitedly, while their mother deposited unfertilised eggs for them to eat. As I later learned, frogs of this species (Oophaga pumilio) take very diligent care of their offspring and the mother’s long journey would be repeated every day until the tadpoles developed into frogs.
It occurred to me, as I packed up my equipment to return to the lab, that thousands of such small dramas were playing out around me in parallel. Forests are so much more than just carbon stores. They are the unknowably complex green webs that bind together the fates of millions of known species, with millions more still waiting to be discovered. To survive and thrive in a future of dramatic global change, we will have to respect that tangled web and our place in it.
Biodiversity is plummeting, but restoring rivers could quickly reverse this disastrous trend.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
By Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Darryl Knudsen and Irikefe V. Dafe
In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global biodiversity framework to reverse biodiversity loss and its impacts on ecosystems, species and people. The conference is being held during a moment of great urgency: According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have less than 10 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to stave off catastrophic climate change. At the same time, climate change is exacerbating the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Half of the planet’s species may face extinction by the end of this century.
And tragically, according to a UN report, “the world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade.”
It’s time to end that legacy of failure and seize the opportunities before us to correct the past mistakes, manage the present challenges and meet the future challenges that the environment is likely to face. But if we’re going to protect biodiversity and simultaneously tackle the climate crisis, we must protect rivers and freshwater ecosystems. And we must defend the rights of communities whose livelihoods depend on them, and who serve as their stewards and defenders. By doing so, we will improve food security for the hundreds of millions of people who rely on freshwater ecosystems for sustenance and livelihoods—and give the world’s estimated 140,000 freshwater species a fighting chance at survival.
Rivers Are Heroes of Biodiversity
At the upcoming CBD, countries are expected to reach an agreement to protect 30 percent of the world’s oceans and land by 2030. But which land is protected, as part of this agreement, matters immensely. We cannot protect just any swath of land and consider our work done. Member countries must prioritize protecting regions where biodiversity is highest, or where restoration will bring the greatest net benefits. Rivers, which support an extraordinary number of species, must be a priority zone for protection and restoration.
Rivers are unsung heroes of biodiversity: Though freshwater covers less than 1 percent of all the water on the planet’s surface, it provides habitats for an astonishing number of species. Rivers are vital for conserving and sustaining wetlands, which house or provide breeding grounds for around 40 percent of Earth’s species. That is a staggering amount of life in a very small geographic area—and those figures don’t account for all the adjacent forests and other ecosystems, as well as people’s livelihoods that rely on rivers.
Reversing the Decline of Rivers and Freshwater Ecosystems
Freshwater ecosystems have suffered from some of the most rapid declines in the last four decades. A global study conducted by the World Wildlife Fund, “Living Planet Report 2020,” states that populations of global freshwater species have declined by 84 percent, “equivalent to 4 percent per year since 1970.”
That is, by any measure, a catastrophe. Yet mainstream development models, water management policies and conservation and protected area policies continue to ignore the integrity of freshwater ecosystems and the livelihoods of communities that depend on them.
As a result of these misguided policies, fisheries that sustain millions of people are collapsing. Freshwater is increasingly becoming degraded, and riverbank farming is suffering as a result of this. Additionally, we’re seeing Indigenous peoples, who have long been careful and successful stewards of their lands and waters, face increasing threats to their autonomy and well-being. The loss of biodiversity, and the attendant degradation of precious freshwater, directly impacts food and water security and livelihoods.
But this catastrophe also suggests that by prioritizing river protection as part of that 30 percent goal, the global community could slow down and begin to reverse some of the most egregious losses of biodiversity. We have an incredible opportunity to swiftly reverse significant environmental degradation and support the rebound of myriad species while bolstering food security for millions of people. But to do that successfully, COP countries must prioritize rivers and river communities.
Here are a few things countries can do immediately to halt the destruction of biodiversity:
1. Immediately Halt Dam-Building in Protected Areas
Dams remain one of the great threats to a river’s health, and particularly to protected areas. More than 500 dams are currently being planned in protected areas around the globe, states Yale Environment 360, while referring to a study published in Conservation Letters. In one of the most egregious examples, Tanzania is moving ahead with plans to construct the Stiegler’s Gorge dam in the Selous Game Reserve—which has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1982 and an iconic refuge for wildlife. In terms of protecting biodiversity, canceling dams like these is low-hanging fruit if the idea of a “protected area” is to have any meaning at all.
2. Create Development ‘No-Go’ Zones on the World’s Most Biodiverse Rivers
Freshwater ecosystems face myriad threats from extractive industries like mining and petroleum as well as agribusiness and cattle ranching, overfishing, industrialization of waterways and urban industrial pollution. Investors, financiers, governments and CBD signatories must put an immediate halt to destructive development in biodiversity hotspots, legally protect the most biodiverse rivers from development, and decommission the planet’s most lethal dams.
3. Pass Strong Water Protection Policies
Most policymakers and decision-makers—and even some conservation organizations—don’t fully understand how freshwater ecosystems and the hydrological cycle function, and how intimately tied they are to the health of the terrestrial ecosystems they want to protect. Rivers and freshwater ecosystems urgently need robust protections, including policies that permanently protect freshwater and the rights of communities that depend on them. In some places, this may go as far as granting rivers the rights of personhood. A growing global Rights of Nature and Rights of Rivers movement is beginning to tackle just this.
4. Respect the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Other Traditional Communities
Indigenous peoples protect “about 80 percent of the global biodiversity,” according to an article by National Geographic, even though they make up just 5 percent of the world’s population. These are the world’s frontline defenders of water and biodiversity; we owe them an enormous debt. More importantly, they deserve protection. It’s imperative governments respect Indigenous people’s territorial rights, as well as their right to self-determination and free, prior and informed consent regarding projects that affect their waters and livelihoods.
Many Indigenous communities like the Munduruku in the Amazon are fighting to defend their territories, rivers and culture. Threats to fishing and livelihoods from destructive dams, gold mining pollution and industrial facilities can be constant in the Tapajós River Basin in the Amazon and many other Indigenous territories.
5. Elevate Women Leaders
In many cultures, women are traditionally the stewards of freshwater, but they are excluded from the decision-making processes. In response, they have become leaders in movements to protect rivers and freshwater ecosystems around the globe. From the Teesta River in India to the Brazilian Amazon, women are leading a burgeoning river rights movement. A demand to include women’s voices in policy, governments and localities will ensure better decisions in governing shared waters.
The pursuit of perpetual unchecked economic growth with little regard for human rights or ecosystem health has led our planet to a state of crisis. Floods, wildfires, climate refugees and biodiversity collapse are no longer hallmarks of a distant future: They are here. In this new era, we must abandon rampant economic growth as a metric of success and instead prioritize equity and well-being.
Free-flowing rivers are a critical safety net that supports our existence. To reverse the biodiversity crisis, we must follow the lead of Indigenous groups, elevate women’s leadership, grant rights to rivers, radically reduce dam-building and address other key threats to freshwater.
What we agree to do over the next decade will determine our and the next generations’ fate. We are the natural world. Its destruction is our destruction. The power to halt this destruction lies in our hands; we only have to use it.
Alessandra Korap Munduruku is a Munduruku Indigenous woman leader from Indigenous Reserve Praia do Índio in the Brazilian Amazon. She is a member of Pariri, a local Munduruku association, as well as the Munduruku Wakoborûn Women’s Association. In 2020, Alessandra won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for her work defending the culture, livelihoods and rights of Indigenous peoples in Brazil.
Darryl Knudsen is the executive director of International Rivers. He has 20 years’ experience channeling the power of civil society movements to create enduring, positive change toward social and environmental justice for the underrepresented. Darryl holds a master’s degree from Columbia University and a BA from Dartmouth College.
Irikefe V. Dafe has advocated for river protections in Nigeria and throughout Africa for three decades. Much of his work has focused on protecting the River Ethiope and the rights of communities who rely upon the river for food, water and their livelihoods. He is a lead organizer of the First National Dialogue on Rights of Nature in Nigeria. He is also the founder and CEO of River Ethiope Trust Foundation and an expert member of the UN Harmony with Nature Initiative.
Editor’s note: This essay reminds me of premise ten from Derrick Jensen’s book Endgame: “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.”
According to The Parable of the Poisoned Well, there once lived a king who ruled over a great city. He was loved for his wisdom and feared for his power. At the heart of the city was a well, the waters of which were clean and pure and from where the king and all the inhabitants drank. But one evening an enemy entered the city and poisoned the well with a strange liquid. Henceforth, all who drank from it went mad.
All the people drank the water, but not the king, for he had been warned by a watchman who had observed the contamination. The people began to say, “The king is mad and has lost his reason. Look how strangely he behaves. We cannot be ruled by a madman, so he must be dethroned”.
The king sensed his subjects were preparing to rise against him and grew fearful of revolution. One evening he ordered a royal goblet to be filled from the well and drank from it deeply. The next day there was great rejoicing among the people, for their beloved king had finally regained his wisdom and sanity.
According to Fromm, we are inclined to see incidents of mental illness as individual and isolated disturbances, while acknowledging — with some discomfort, perhaps — that so many of these incidents should occur in a culture that is supposedly sane. Fromm haunts our self-image even today, attempting to unsettle these assumptions of sanity:
Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself.
In an age now widely described as the Anthropocene, the conventionally held distinction between sanity and insanity is at risk of collapsing … and taking our civilisation with it.
The line shifts over time
At least since Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), it has been understood that the idea of (in)sanity is an evolving, socially constructed category. Not only does the medical validity of mental health diagnoses and treatments shift with the times, but what has been judged “sane” in one era has the potential to blur into what is not in another — and without announcement.
This can disguise the fact that social practices or patterns of thought that may once have been considered healthy may now be properly diagnosed as unhealthy. And while this can apply to individual cases, there is no reason to think it should not also apply more broadly to a society at large. A society might go insane without being aware of its own degeneration.
One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise, with Foucault, that power shapes knowledge. If profits and economic growth are the benchmarks of success in a society, it simply may not be profitable to expose a society as insane, and even members of an insane society may sooner choose wilful blindness than look too deeply into the subconscious of their own culture.
How can we be so sure of our own sanity, asked psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, pictured in 1974. Wikimedia Commons
If our society is not sane — and I find myself pointing towards this thesis — another question follows: what might sanity look like in an insane world?
I come to these questions without mental health training or expertise, but simply as an ordinary member of late-stage capitalist society, one suffering in his own way and trying to understand the mental health burdens that accompany our ecocidal and grossly inequitable mode of civilisation. I make no comment on the very real biophysical causes for mental illness, such as chemical imbalances or physical injury.
Instead, I reflect, at a “macro” level, on the sanity or insanity of the dominant culture and political economy in contemporary capitalist societies such as Australia, asking how the world “out there” can impact the inner dimension of our lives.
Following Fromm’s lead, I inquire not so much into individual pathology, but into what he calls “collective neuroses” and “the pathology of normalcy”. Of course, collective neuroses are not easily observed, for they are, by nature, the background fabric of existence and so easily missed.
Drinking the Kool-Aid
At first, I tried to distil a positive life lesson from the Parable of the Poisoned Well, but I quickly realised this was the wrong way to approach it.
There is arguably no moral guidance in the fable, only an amoral social insight. If there is a lesson, it is that sometimes it is easier or safer simply to conform to common assumptions or practices, no matter how dubious or absurd they are, to avoid being socially ostracised. If you do not go with the flow you may be deemed mad, so it may be better just to blend in and drink the Kool-Aid.
A second reading of the parable points to the relativity of notions of sanity, again suggesting that what’s sane or insane isn’t fixed, but is culturally dependent: a person is sane if they “function” well enough in the society, even if that society is sick.
It is this relativity of sanity that Fromm calls into question in The Sane Society. “The fact that millions of people share the same vices,” he wrote, “does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
He felt that society needed certain objective conditions to be sane, including environmental sustainability. If too many of humankind’s most basic needs were not being met despite unprecedented capacity, he felt it would be proper to declare a society sick, even if the behaviour producing the sickness was widespread and validated by its own internal cultural logic.
What is “normal” behaviour today? The climate emergency points to our fatal addiction to fossil fuels. We know their combustion is killing the planet, but we can’t help ourselves. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 to advise us on the science of climate change, yet here we are, more than 30 years later, and carbon emissions continue to rise (excepting only the years of financial crisis or pandemic). We emit 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, in full knowledge of their impacts.
In 2019, fossil fuels supplied around 85 per cent of global primary energy demand. Driven by a fetish for economic growth, voters support politicians who bring lumps of coal into a parliament for a laugh and enthusiastically build new fossil fuel power stations. It is a tragedy disguised as a grim joke.
Scientists warn that current trajectories of climate heating are not compatible with civilisation as we know it, with potentially billions of lives at risk this century, both human and non-human. You know something is wrong when the Arctic is burning. And yet nothing is more “normal” than hopping into a fossil-fuelled car or consuming products shipped around the world to satisfy the carboniferous desires of affluent society.
We’re deforesting the planet and destroying topsoil to feed a population that is growing by over 200,000 people every day. The United Nations projects we’ll have reached almost ten billion people by mid-century.
This human dominance of the planet under global capitalism is contributing to a holocaust of biodiversity loss, with the World Wildlife Fund recently reporting that populations of vertebrate species have declined by 68 per cent since 1970. We are living through the sixth mass extinction, driven by human economic activity that is not just normal but encouraged, rewarded and widely admired.
Empire marches on like a snake eating its own tail, pursuing growth for growth’s sake — the ideology of a cancer cell.
For whom, then, do we destroy the planet? Is a greater abundance of “nice things” what we are lacking in the overdeveloped world? Or is there, as historian and philosopher Lewis Mumford once opined, an inner dimension to our crises that must be resolved before the outer crises can be effectively met?
Nice things that fail to meet our needs become trash, polluting the planet. Alexander Schimmeck/Unsplash, CC BY
How easy it is to live life regurgitating the prewritten script of advanced industrial society: cogs in a vast machine, easily replaced. Perhaps we see our disenchantment reflected in the eyes of those tired, alienated commuters, a class into which it is so easy to fall simply by virtue of being subjects of the capitalist order. We all know that there is more to life than this.
We find ourselves living in an age where the old dogmas of growth, material affluence and technology are increasingly exposed as false idols. Like a fleet of ships that has been unmoored in a storm, our species is drifting in dangerous seas without a clear sense of direction.
Where are the new sources of meaning and guidance that all societies need to fight off the ennui? Pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to refer to a condition in which a culture’s traditional norms have broken down without new norms arising that can give sense to a changing world. Perhaps this is the term that best explains our existential condition today.
I am reminded of a poem by Michael Leunig:
They took him on a stretcher
To the Home for the Appalled
Where he lay down in the corner
And be bawled and bawled and bawled.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he wailed,
When asked about his bawling,
‘It’s the world that needs attention;
It’s so utterly appalling.’
What is a sane reaction to an insane society?
One could go on, but it would be perverse to do so. “Doom porn” is not my business or purpose. But there is a case for diagnosing our society as insane — not as rhetorical strategy, but in the pursuit of literal truth.
If an individual knowingly destroyed the conditions of his or her own existence, we’d question their sanity. If a mother only fed her children if she could make a profit, we’d doubt the soundness of her mind. If a father took all the household wealth and left the rest of the family in destitution while building bombs in the basement that could destroy the neighbourhood, we’d call him psychopathic.
And yet these are characteristics of our society as a whole. Fromm would not permit us to diagnose ourselves and our society as sane just because the actions that produce the features outlined above are considered “normal”. There is a pathology to our normalcy — my own regrettably included — and this pathology is no less pathological just because it is shared by millions upon millions of people.
‘A sane person in an insane society must appear insane.’ Kurt Vonnegut. Shutterstock
There are negative mental health effects that might naturally and justifiably arise when otherwise sane people find themselves living in an insane world. The paradox that threatens to emerge has already been variously noted.
In Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut Jnr writes, “a sane person in an insane society must appear insane”. Thomas Stephen Szasz contends: “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society”. And the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing said insanity was “a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world”. I think I recall Star Trek’s Dr Spock saying something similar.
How can we not get depressed when reading the newspapers today or watching our politicians go about their business with such confident incompetence? How can we not grieve the wildlife and natural habitat being destroyed each moment? What parent can look to the future and not feel a foreboding dread at what world their children and grandchildren will inherit?
At the same time, and because of that dread, it is hard to maintain the emotional resources to care for strangers or “join a movement” when stress, agitation, worry and busyness clutter our mental lives. This can make society seem like a harsh place, lacking in generosity of spirit or compassion.
Whether it’s from watching white supremacists march or listening to climate deniers speak from platforms in parliament and mass media, a nausea sets in, a sickness not so much of the mind but of the soul.
This is an existential diagnosis, not a medical or psychiatric one. It would be wrong to make peace with this madness. The world we live in should not be treated as normal, and it should not be a sign of good health to become “well adjusted” to a society that is casually practising ecocide, celebrating narcissism, institutionalising racism and assessing the value of all things according to the cold logic of profit maximisation.
It is okay not to feel okay
We must not assume behaviour that makes an individual “functional” within a sick society is sufficient evidence of their sanity. In such a society, it is okay not to feel okay, to cry and feel grief, to feel dread and alienation. In our tears, let us find solidarity, for we are not alone.
Remember this when you wake up prematurely in the morning with an anxiety without object, or as you stare at the ceiling late at night as you try to fall asleep. You are not losing your mind. It is precisely because you have a grip on reality that reality seems so out of whack.
On my third reading of the Parable of the Poisoned Well, I noticed something I had missed — it was the watchman, the man who warned the king not to drink the poisoned water the rest of the citizenry had already consumed.
Wanting to quash the revolutionary sentiment, the king succumbed to public pressure and eventually drank from the well in order to fit in. But what about the watchman? Is it possible he never drank the poisoned water and remained sane in an insane society? Did that made him seem mad?
Perhaps my thoughts here are those of a watchman, someone who has tried not to drink the Kool-Aid, who has attempted to resist the pathology of normalcy.
Admittedly, I have questioned my own sanity at times — when, for example, I’ve found myself dancing in the middle of a busy intersection with Extinction Rebellion, risking arrest. What had driven me to act in a way that sees me surrounded by police with batons, guns and pepper spray? They sure looked mad.
Call me crazy, but I’ll finish with the words often attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.
