Our New World

Our New World

Much of “The Natural History of the Present” looks back toward the America the Europeans found, the fragrant narcotic ‘natural world,’ even then much modified by its earlier human inhabitants, soon emptied of them by European diseases. Parts look forward to a new world where people once again let nature regain control. To look back to an ideal past is a very Western behavior: the Roman poet Hesiod looked back to a ‘golden age’ from his of iron, so did the Greeks, and the Christians (the Garden of Eden). A golden age formed one of the Hindu cycles of time. Are these memories of the hunter-gatherer life, when at certain seasons fish were there for the taking and at others fruit hung from the trees? We moderns look back to the golden days of childhood, a modern development, when in our memories, we spent long afternoons picking blackberries in the long grass. Audubon clearly saw the end of the golden age of the American wilderness coming. He regretted the loss of the great trees (he complained he never saw a ‘great tree’ in England). He built a sawmill on the banks of the Ohio to saw their trunks, then lost it in the cash squeeze of 1837. He took with his paints to the woods in the hope of other successes. He wrote admiringly of those men who were ‘civilizing’ their landscape by logging and clearing it. What other choice was there? The past is gone and the future may be less susceptible to change than we think. Like John Muir, Audubon had little connection to Native Americans, the true native ‘men of the woods.’

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Plants and animals have always been long distance travelers. Now we move them from place to place by ship and plane. New plants whose chemistries the native insects and microorganisms find unpalatable or poisonous, and so don’t eat, may (as they lack predators, competition or parasites) take over ecosystems. Then, foodless, populations of native plants, animals and invertebrates decline. Native or alien plants and animals may become invasive in ecosystems degraded by logging, settlement, altered water tables or nutrient pollution. Such changes expand habitats for some organisms and shrink them for others. Thus high water tables have let monocultures of silver maple (a native tree) replace the mixed deciduous oakwoods along the regulated middle Mississippi, with the loss of many game animals and birds. White footed mice and white tailed deer have few predators in the fragmented woodlands of the suburban northeast, greatly increase in number, eat ornamental plants and bird food, infect each other (and the local human population) with Lyme disease and prevent regeneration of the forest. Alien plants and animals may take over if they find the habitat to their liking. If they lack competitors are not eaten by insects, microbes or vertebrates (thus lack parasites and predators), their populations are not controlled, and they do become part of the local food web (for instance, by being eaten by an insect which is eaten by a bird). Such organisms include purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil, Japanese knotweed, European wild boar. Some of them can probably be controlled by introducing insects specific to them; by encouraging their picking for profit (say, with loosestrife); or with hunting (open season on boar). Introducing insects is risky, since the insects themselves lack local microbial and insect predators, may find other plants to their liking and their populations grow out of control. If the attempt at control works, the introduced insects become food for local birds and insects and introduce the new plants into the local food web. Introduced diseases in trees, many of them fungi (blister rust in pines, phytophora in oaks, chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, beech decline), are essentially uncontrollable. So may be some introduced insects (perhaps wooly adelgid in Hemlocks and emerald ash borer). These introduced organisms will change the landscape, modifying forests and meadows as much as we, our grazing animals and our nutrients falling from the air. The chestnut blight of the early twentieth century perhaps changed northeastern forests the most by eliminating a common tree and a large and dependable supply of autumn carbohydrates, food for people, bears, deer, buffalo, squirrels, turkeys. Dutch elm disease changed the street profile of American cities from the tall, vase shaped American elms (100 feet high) to the fat stubby profile of Norway maples. After some hundreds of generations the insect and plants will find their populations coming under control as local insects and microbes adapt to them and they become part of the food chain. Some of the plants under attack (such as the American elm, which sets seed before being killed by the Dutch elm fungus) will develop resistance to their diseases. Elms in Europe suffered a catastrophic decline several thousand years ago but recovered. The problem is that plants, whose time between generations is years to decades, take much longer to adapt than most insects and microbes, with a generation time of weeks to minutes. The woods and meadows will adjust to the newcomers but will be different.

How to evaluate such change? In the near term, most such changes (climate shifts, new organisms, more nutrients) makes things worse. More nitrogen from the combustion of fossil fuels falling from the air tends to convert the perennial grasses of Middle Western prairies, whose roots transfer huge amounts of carbon to the soil, to annual grasses, whose carbon storage capacity is negligible. The long term is more difficult to evaluate. In the northeastern United States, Eurasian honeysuckle, distributed with autumn olive and rosa rugosa 50 years ago by state conservation departments to provide food and shelter for game birds, are now considered invasive. They are so in old fields (this was more or less the intention). Honeysuckle forms impenetrable clumps, used by as nesting and foraging sites by warblers and sparrows; their berries are eaten by migrating thrushes. Meadows are unnatural habitat in much of the northeast and the return of the forest would shade much of the honeysuckle out, though, its seeds spread by birds, honeysuckle would colonize openings in the forest left by falling trees or by logging, and so maintain itself in the ecosystem. Some insects feed on honeysuckle and butterflies nectar on it. By growing in openings, honeysuckle would compete with the native trees and herbs (early succession or sun loving species like white and yellow birch, pin cherry, oaks, the spring emphemerals of the forest floor, and the insects and other animals associated with them), that also colonize such openings and maintain the forest. Whether this is good or bad depends on how much the honeysuckle takes over and how it affects the regeneration of the forest. One could argue, for instance, that the silver maple monoculture along the Mississippi is undesirable from the point of view of a more complex ecosystem but there is little to do about it except plant oaks on higher ground as long as water tables remain artificially high. In the case of honeysuckle in the northeastern forest, some honeysuckle (not honeysuckle in every clearing) may simply add to its diversity and its variety of moths, birds and butterflies.

We have to face the question of how much we accept our new world. The survival of Pacific salmon along the northwest coast of North America is an example. Salmon numbers there have been dropping, partly from climate change, partly from dams, partly from degradation of spawning habitat in the rivers and tributary streams, partly from competition with introduced fish. On the Columbia River, introduced shad (introduced from the North American east coast) now are thought to make up most of the missing biomass of salmon, which are in serious decline. Shad were introduced in the early twentieth century and fished mainly for their roe, which was a favorite of eastern gourmands (the fish itself is also a spring delicacy in the northeast). Since the 1980s shad populations in the Columbia River have boomed. There is only so much food and space in the river and the ocean, for species that occupy similar niches: only so much fish of both can survive. Salmon populations are also affected by rising temperatures in the river and the ocean. These are likely to continue to rise, depressing salmon populations further. (Salmon will move north, into the rivers of the Arctic Ocean.) Dams don’t seem to bother shad, a more fragile fish (but one perhaps capable of more rapid reproduction than salmon, though salmon is a weedy fish, capable of rapid reproduction under favorable conditions). Dams can be modified to be more friendly to salmon and river flows adjusted, without sacrificing much of their power. Many other things can also be done for salmon. Ocean fishing, which catches salmon before they reach the river, and so prevents them from spawning, should be stopped (ocean fishing catches about 70% of some declining runs). All the hundreds of small spawning streams whose gravels have been silted in by logging and road construction should be restored by adding gravels, controlling erosion, planting trees, stream by stream. (A good work for a conservation corp of draftees.) Irrigation diversions should be screened so juvenile salmon don’t end up in cornfields, so many to the acre. The restoration of degraded river habitat may do more for restoring Columbia salmon than removing dams. (This varies from dam to dam: unnecessary dams or dams that produce little power or interfere too much with the life of salmon should undoubtedly go.) Thus we can probably have salmon and dams, within climatic limits. We will need some dams in the new solar powered world, to provide base line power and even out the variations in solar supply (the latter the worst use of dams, since the flows have little relation to natural ones, from the point of view of the fish). The Columbia is full of fish, just not those fish that were historically there. This state of affairs can be adjusted but probably not largely changed, especially considering the climatic changes we have put in motion. But improvement in the fish habitat in the river would make life better for everyone living in the river basin.

More Grim Matters

More Grim Matters

We won’t know when we have passed the point of no return for a changing climate. Current changes are only apparent to butterflies, migratory birds, sea fish and gardeners. At some point, linear changes become catastrophic ones, as temperatures soar, winds howl and natural feedback processes take over. Perhaps one day we will be able to say it was when the earth passed 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide plus the carbon dioxide equivalent of other warming gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), perhaps 450 ppm. When feedback processes take over and climate change starts to accelerate, it’s out of our hands. (There are always dangerous, desperate measures.) The atmosphere now has a concentration of carbon dioxide plus carbon dioxide equivalents of 430 ppm (390 ppm Carbon dioxide, 50 ppm other warming gases). This is about 150 ppm above the ‘natural’ background of 280 ppm and 20 ppm below the predicted ‘tipping point’ of 450 ppm (an educated guess), at which point climate change becomes nonlinear. Essentially we are at the point where feedback processes (methane bubbling out of tundra pools, melting Arctic ice, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets) take hold.

Our economic lives have tremendous momentum. To decarbonize industrial infrastructure (turn carbon producing industry into photo-voltaics or nuclear power; create energy reductions on the scale needed) takes fifty years, if one replaces 2% of the carbon producing infrastructure every year. Fifty years is the time such energy shifts (from wood to coal, or coal and oil to electricity made from coal and oil) have taken in the past, under purely economic incentives. To insulate all buildings, replace inefficient motors, appliances, light bulbs, pipeline designs, inefficient industrial processes with efficient ones also takes time. Because doing all that involves using carbon based infrastructure (trucks, trains, mining machinery), and because the economy and population will continue to grow, the carbon content of the atmosphere is virtually certain to rise another 100-150 ppm before the changeover (whenever we start it) is complete. The climate system also has tremendous momentum and much warming is stored up in it but not yet expressed. With the best will in the world (turning the system around in, say 20 years), we’re in for a wild ride. But we haven’t yet started.

A grim outlook, perhaps: even if we save energy with more efficient houses, cars, light bulbs, electrify the economy with photo-voltaic panels or nuclear power (this saves the 60-70% of carbon wasted in converting fossil fuels to electricity, the 90% of it wasted in powering automobiles), stop overfishing the oceans, stop destructive farming practices, stop engaging in polluting industrial chemistries, give poor third world women more control over their lives so they limit the number of their children), the earth is still going to warm (4ºC? 9ºC?), sea level rise (3'? 7’? 80'?), rains beat down or fail, glaciers melt, reservoirs dry up, the oceans acidify, ocean currents slow. On the other hand, if we listen to the economic optimists and burn up all the available fossil fuels in the next 100-400 years (the speed of depletion depends on the rate of use), we will certainly see catastrophes: a temperature rise of 9-20ºC, collapsing forests, Arctic farms, a sea level rise of 80-400 feet (putting modern coastal settlements below the cleansing waves). The richest or best organized among us will be able to deal with the changes for a while. When fossil fuels are gone, so is easily obtainable energy, and unless a technological society capable of making solar voltaic panels, or solar thermal devices, and probably nuclear power plants, survives, the people at the tropical poles will live in a permanent stone age, growing some food, hunting animals, taking their hot baths in mineral springs at the edge of the sea.

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Culture provides life with meaning. Science, part of culture, tells stories that explain the world. Without culture, we are reduced to eating, breathing, defecating, perhaps reproducing (but how to raise the children? Why bother?): the fate of stranded men like Robinson Crusoe. I write because I want to be part of the ongoing dialogue between people and their culture, people shop to define themselves in their culture (what they can afford, the objects they choose to buy), children are brought up in ways that conform or don’t conform to cultural norms. Culture defines our view of the future and the past. As a plains Indian remarked, when the buffalo were gone, life was over. His people defined themselves by their relationship to the buffalo; without buffalo, life became meaningless. Modern lives are defined by their place in the so-called meritocracy of rationalist western society and culture. Western material lives (hot running water, clean clothes, abundant food, nuclear weapons) are the product of that rationalist culture. We westerners live apart from nature in a man-made world of sidewalks, houses, cars. In a hunting and gathering culture people are seen as separate from nature (which they explain with different stories and which may be terrifying) but also as part of it. Such people are far better observers of their natural surroundings than we, and far better integrated with them. With the energy from fossil fuels, we have constructed a heated, well washed world apart from the messy chaotic natural world. So the scientist sits in his laboratory, the banker in his office, and paved roads penetrate the countryside. Our rationalist approach (together with fossil fuels) has let us understand the natural world in a way the hunter never would, though he understood his place in that world better than we. Our world is a mechanical one, of cars, roads, furnaces, fans (for instance, to move the mephitic air from cavernous chicken houses). In this world, nature for the most part is incidental, and put to use.

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Empires collapse when they run out of resources, or when, through no fault of their own, those resources are compromised by nature herself. (A drying climate, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis are examples.) Many, perhaps most, empires expand their populations, their use of resources and their conquests of other lands with no thought of the future. To an extent, hunting and gathering bands may have done this too and so slowly forced each other into new habitats. Growth equaled success and human fertility let populations cope with great losses. Rome began to falter after it conquered the poorer agricultural peoples of northern Europe (Gaul, Britain, Germany). These new provinces, unlike the richer older civilizations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, did not return a profit—the cost of keeping them was more than the territories brought in. And soils near home wore out under a more and more capitalist exploitation. The Sumerian empire failed as its soils salted up from heavy summertime irrigation and as new lands to bring under irrigation ran out. (But the Sumerians lasted longer than the modern West has.) The Hohokum empire of southern Arizona faced the same problem and survived by rotating its fields on a ten year growing cycle. The Anasazi civilization of Chaco Canyon probably collapsed because of a long drought (the flowering of the civilization corresponded with a period of above average rainfall in the Southwest). The drought came after soils had been depleted by decades or centuries of continuous corn; and after the intensive cutting of pinion pine for firewood (for cooking and to fire pottery) and ponderosa pine for building timbers (for monumental shrines and dwellings) had changed the local ecosystems (removing some of their food resources) and accelerated sheet erosion on the uplands, preventing regeneration of the trees and increasing the likelihood of flooding and downcutting of streams.

The modern West has taken the whole world as its resource base. It is changing the atmosphere by its emissions; its rivers and coasts by dams, erosion and nutrient pollution; its soils by the relentless growing of cereal crops; the planet’s other organisms (frogs, dolphins, songbirds, tigers) by its pollutants and expansive settlement patterns. Driven by the search for profit, it does this essentially without a thought, shedding few tears of regret (growth is necessary, a platted suburb looks better than a messy meadow, you can see wonderful nature shows on TV). The human population continues to grow. While the current biomass of ants is greater, humans have the greatest biomass of any animal in their size class to occupy the earth. Perhaps more people are alive now than ever lived. This is a measure of our evolutionary success. Every successful plant or animal changes the planet. But few have changed it so greatly, or will take as much of it with them, as we.

Growth

Growth

Environmentalists and economists view the natural landscape differently. One sees it as something to be turned into saleable goods (grain, timber, furs, building lots), one sees it as something good in itself, connected to other ecosystems, and maintaining a growing, cyclical or simply varying state of biological production. Their differences are for the most part irreconcilable, despite recent attempts, over the last two or three decades, to place a dollar value on the work of nature. Farmland, a necessary use for most civilizations, provides a good example. In a growing agricultural society farmland, partly because of its extent, changes the natural environment considerably, reducing some species, increasing others, changing the state of water courses, changing farmed soils. Such changes in the natural landscape can be minimized, farmed soils conserved or improved, nutrients kept on the farm (and out of rivers and lakes), and some of the natural biota maintained, by using regenerative agricultural practices and giving nature room to work (that is, leaving large parts of the landscape unfarmed). The natural productivity of the ecosystem, and the work it does, will be reduced, some parts of it eliminated. For instance, large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions) rarely survive in agricultural regions, partly because they compete with humans by eating domestic animals, partly because their prey animals (deer, moose, beaver) are too few for them to maintain viable populations. The connections among patches of suitable habitat are too few. But if agricultural practice is enlightened and takes into account the needs of the natural world (rarely the case now because regenerative practices are seen as limiting profits) and limits itself to a proportion of the landscape (say, 60-70% of any ecosystem, which is seen as limiting real estate profits), both the natural world and the agricultural/industrial society can survive.

In a capitalist world, land tries to maximize its value. So farmland is over fertilized to grow more crops, polluting ground water and waterways, and takes over as much of the landscape as it can. River floodplains, with their connected swampland—land eminently useful as natural habitat but of no value in a capitalist economy—tries to become dry, saleable land. Controlling a river with dams and levees creates new dry land in the river’s floodplain; and also hydroelectricity; water for drinking, irrigation and industry; a mode of transportation. The amount spent on controlling the river, which continues for as long as the riverworks are maintained, raises the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of all these uses, hydroelectricity is the only one that comes close to paying the costs of river development, which is—in terms of costs and benefits—a loss funded by the state, whose benefits such as transportation and water supply could have been provided otherwise, if one ignores the value of the newly created dry land (its value growing daily as farmland becomes factory or subdivision). River development is a windfall to riverside landowners and land speculators, whose profits also add to the GDP. What are lost are the fisheries the river provided, the timber and collectable mushrooms, the habitat for migratory birds, for fur bearing and game animals, for spawning fish, the work of the floodplain in storing and cleaning water, in controlling flooding downstream, in removing nutrients (and using them to grow fish, animals and trees), in regulating the pulse of fresh water to the marine estuary to which the river flows, and to which the spawning fish of the estuary (many of them commercial species) are adapted: the whole seasonal background of human life. These values require no human input and the most valuable of them (nutrient removal, flood control) are not counted as part of the GDP. Income—from harvested fish, recreational hunting and fishing, harvested timber—count in the GDP. Adding things up, the additional cost of purifying water by communities all along the river, of flood control, of lost fisheries and timber, of collectable mushrooms, of recreational use, of lost marine fisheries often exceeds the value of the hydroelectricity, the production of floodplain farmlands, the navigational use. In some streams the loss becomes clear and dams are removed. In rivers with great hydroelectric potential like the Columbia, development is probably profitable on a cost-benefit analysis, though even there, a healthy salmon fishery would, at current prices for fish (and the increased value of recreational fishing), rival the value of the power. Without the dams the whole pattern of settlement along the river and its industrial evolution would have been different. (No aluminum industry, for instance, and thus no manufacturer of aircraft like Boeing.) Nowadays the power could be generated by solar thermal collectors in the deserts west of the Cascades, or by photo-voltaic panels on roofs of houses, parking lots and warehouses anywhere in the Columbia valley. With solar systems, the power from water stored behind dams provides a useful backup for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind blow; but less water is required and the dams have more flexibility of operation—they can make more concessions to the needs of fish. On the other hand, power from dams in flatland streams (the Mississippi valley, the lower Amazon basin) doesn’t pay the costs of construction and maintenance. Such dams require more land per watt than photo-voltaic collectors (often criticized for the land they take up). Half the power reservoirs in the Amazon emit more carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane from decaying vegetation left in the reservoir during construction, or growing and dying in it, and washed into it from above, than a coal-burning power plant producing the same amount of electricity.

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The push for development comes partly from population growth: more people need more farms, more land to be turned into saleable real estate. The idea of living within nature has not applied to human settlement in any serious way since the adoptions of agriculture 7-10,000 years ago. (All this time I am sure some people mourned the end of fish runs, of migrations of gazelles, of great trees—for instance, of the cedars of Lebanon, their wood prized by the Egyptians for its durability and sweet smell.) Agricultural peoples carved out their niche from nature: fields from forests, irrigated fields from deserts, floodplain fields from diked rivers. Forests provided wood for brickyards, iron foundries, buildings, ships, cookfires; rivers provided water and power and took away waste. The corn that could be grown on a floodplain field in the Middle West was marketable and edible, more desirable than a hatful of wild mushrooms or a dozen muskrat pelts.

Much of the problem with modern human settlement patterns is their extent. Temperate forest recovers rapidly from logging (full recovery can take 300-2000 years, depending on the forest—redwoods take the longest) and the berries and shrubs that colonize the bare ground make habitat for the animals of the edge. So a watershed’s forests could be logged on a long rotation (300-500 years in the eastern United States, 150 in some environments), with some areas (steep slopes, stream edges out 100 feet) left uncut, or cut more lightly (light, infrequent selective cuts). Such cutting would preserve the different ages of forest habitat in the watershed (old growth, edge, young forest) and the mix of tolerant and intolerant, deciduous and coniferous, trees; minimize loss of nutrients and water; protect fisheries and streams (and thus the land downstream). Such forests would be managed for their place in the water cycle and as habitat for their plants and animals as well as for their marketable timber. How can this be done? The timber after 50 or 80 years is too valuable, the time too long, the need to make a mark on the land too great.

Capitalism has successfully harnessed human greed, which is unstoppable. People build up to the banks of rivers or the shores of the sea and are driven out in floods, and expect the government to correct the problem. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries milldams were built every few hundred yards on northeastern rivers (low dams, often passable by fish), turning them into a series of ponds. The edges of the ponds silted in from erosion from agriculture in the watershed and the dams were finally abandoned for steam or electrical power. The freed rivers downcut through the silt to form single channel streams, unconnected with their former floodplains and wetlands: a loss no one foresaw. Homemade levees at the mouths of small salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest destroy the nursery habitat for the fish but carve out a few flat acres for a homestead. The millions of acres of the Mississippi valley that were drained and developed under the nineteenth century Swampland Act would be immensely valuable today in maintaining the flow and fisheries of the river, and in reducing the nutrients that reach the Gulf. The need to grow—the existence of land that could potentially be used—made preserving them impossible. The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century rationalized such use as turning the environment to maximum human benefit (to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, a Benthamian proposition). Farmers living near rail lines who sued railroads for the fires that resulted from the sparks flying from locomotive smokestacks that burned down their haystacks and barns found a similar rationale less benevolent. They invariably lost their suits—progress, in the form of railroads, was regarded as the greater good. Perhaps this argument started to weaken with the regulation of contaminants in food and drugs under Teddy Roosevelt.

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Our current effect on the environment (especially the changing climate) forces us to look at nature as a good in itself, not as something to be manipulated for human use. But how can we live in nature? We haven’t done it since people lived among the great herds of animals in the Pleistocene. That way of life lasted tens of thousands of years; and hunting peoples regularly burned forests and grasslands, hunted some animals to extinction, ditched swamps to favor certain trees or fish, affected the evolution of herbivores. The effect of people on the natural world runs along a continuum. Geographers use ways to measure it, such as energy use per capita (the more, the more the environmental impact), the size of the American corn crop (the greater the crop, the greater the effect on farmland, rivers, estuaries), the rate of growth of population, or of economic output; the land required to support each person (the ‘ecological footprint’). Technological development is not necessary for the destruction of an environment or the collapse of the population that depends on it. A rise in population of microbes, sheep or people beyond the carrying capacity of their environments will do that, though the long term damage to the environment is likely (but not necessarily) less than that of a technologically advanced civilization with its mines, waste dumps, ubiquitous chemical contamination. (The banned industrial chemicals released by melting glaciers are once again accumulating in Swiss alpine lakes.) An agricultural population that puts too much pressure on its soils can collapse as easily as a technologically advanced one that overwhelms many natural systems at once.

A focus on nature is totally new for us; it means giving nature room to work. Modern people can consolidate their lives into linear cities, and recycle their biological and manufactured wastes into resources, but the natural world needs room to work: 40% of any ecosystem left to itself was Eugene Odum’s estimate, not a bad one. Letting nature work means the end of expansive growth. It means halving the size of the American corn crop, as a quarter of cornland goes into hayfields and another quarter into annual grasses like rye and wheat. Crop rotation reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, greatly reduces soil erosion and helps control runoff of nutrients and pesticides into streams. A focus on nature means putting enough land, farmland or suburbs, into unused (or lightly used) habitat to reduce the runoff of soil, water and nutrients into streams to something near aboriginal levels (that 40% of the landscape in natural habitat, some of which can be in one’s back yard). It means recreating riverside wetlands and connecting separated natural habitats so plants and animals can move around us. It means reducing energy use in the US by 75-90% and keeping carbon emissions per person to a fraction of what they are now. It means opening up streamside wetlands (buying farmland, moving houses) so rivers can flood and fish can spawn. It means moving permanent structures back from the river or the beach (at least 20-30 feet above flood level or mean high tide; beyond the surges of storms or hurricanes) and being ready to move riverbank and coastal settlements back further as the sea rises (7 feet by 2100 is a reasonable planning figure). It means banning hormone-mimicking chemicals that accumulate in animals, plants and people; controlling the use of heavy metals like lead and mercury; and phasing out the industrial chemistry of chlorine. It means falling human populations, at least until their footprints match their environments. It means a more egalitarian world, less third world poverty, more women with control over their lives

Little of this seems likely, some, such as drinkable rivers, is probably impossible. Wars over resources, over Australian iron ore or North American water, are much more likely our future.

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For the last few hundred years westerners have lived with the idea of progress. In the west, progress in understanding the world (a scientific outlook) became part of controlling and exploiting it (a capitalist impulse? this was less so, say, in China) and coincided with the west’s beginning to dominate the rest of the planet. As agricultural practices improved and industrialization revolutionized the production of soil nutrients and the transportation of crops, people ate more, and as public health measures (such as vaccination and better sewage disposal) improved human health, progress in ‘scientific’ understanding coincided with a tremendous growth in human population. Growth and progress were intertwined. Progress meant growth, in population, land area, military power, personal income. The idea of progress replaced the notion that human societies are cyclical: that societies rise and fall, like the prosperity of the individual, while the human heart remains the same. We think of moderns as rising above racism, sexism and homophobia and while there is a progressive strain in modern western thought, other strains, usually associated with fundamentalist interpretations of the traditional near-eastern religions of the west, are quite reactionary; and despite the tremendous sentimental streak in western culture (a product of our wealth, that insulates us from biological realities), we seem as capable of cruelty to each other as any Assyrian or Roman. But progress in understanding the earth, or in human relations, and growth are not the same; and a society can advance in understanding of the world and not (or not necessarily) grow in overall income; for instance, it might use new knowledge to modify its environmental impact. The idea of the usefulness of science is very old—think of Ariadne showing Theseus how to escape from the Minotaur’s cave—and I am not arguing against it. ‘Progress’ in the future may mean a different, perhaps ’better,’ more comfortable life with less use of natural space or of materials; some say for more people, some for fewer. (But aren’t we comfortable enough, when we must schedule exercise at the gym?) ‘Better’ is a normative word and depends on point of view. I fail to see the advantage, except militarily, of more people—one or one-and-a-half billion are enough. I would prefer some jungle with tigers to remain and some old deciduous forest with elk and wolves, out beyond the suburban edge. While the human heart remains mysterious, the end of growth is not the end of rational thought. Still, it raises some practical problems.

These are being faced by declining industrial cities in the American Middle West. The Middle West has been losing jobs for decades as industrial production becomes more efficient or moves to lower cost labor markets. As people leave and housing deteriorates, neighborhoods fall apart. Some cities attempt to consolidate neighborhoods, some of which remain viable, in order to maintain services (water, roads, police, sewers) which otherwise become unaffordable. Ideally, many abandoned neighborhoods would become parkland, their houses dis-assembled, the lumber and metals in them sold, their roof shingles and wallboard recycled, their foundations crushed and filled in. The parks would be planted with native, or more or less native species (perhaps, with an eye on the future, those from 300-500 miles to the south), and so be more or less self-maintaining—not Mr. Olmstead’s charming vistas of green slopes and groves, whose meadows require constant input. Neighborhood associations could maintain playing fields fertilized with urban composts provided by the city. Double or triple size lots would have vegetable gardens and orchards. Geese or sheep would mow the Olmsteadian meadows, the availability of the grass the shepherd’s payment. Such parks, if well designed, let nature back into the city, reclaim natural habitat, let people inhabit the more geographically desirable areas (such as breezy ridgelines), and protect aquifer recharge areas and streams. Decline is turned into something positive, letting cities adapt themselves to the landscape in a way the pressures of development (that is, shortsighted profit taking and greed) prevented when they were growing. The hopefulness of this sort of consolidation may be difficult to grasp amidst an ideology that growth is good. It requires accepting the place demanded by nature and some unpleasant realities. Such matters were not grasped after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Much (probably most) of New Orleans is indefensible in the modern world. Relative sea level has risen three feet in southern Louisiana in the last century, a product of rising seas and the subsidence of delta muds. The muds subside from their own weight, from being starved of annual replenishment in floods by dams and levees, and from slow collapse caused by the pumping out of underground oil and water. That is, the subsidence is largely manmade and could be slowed, but at a cost in lost real estate and in oil company profits. Low-lying areas in New Orleans that flooded once will flood again. Such areas should be turned into parks and their inhabitants (largely poor and black) offered a stake on higher ground, financed by a tax on those who benefit from the subsidence. But doing something like this requires accepting that some things can’t be fixed—that a rising sea on a sinking coast can’t be held back—with a disastrous racial twist in the United States. The whole management of the Mississippi Delta and of low-lying coasts everywhere is a disaster. The mangroves, marshes and coral reefs of sea coasts are important for coastal protection and marine fisheries. Coastal areas should not have permanent structures within the reach of high tides or storm surges but—rich or poor—everywhere in the world they do. In general, planning for a rise in sea level of seven feet by 2100 is a reasonable goal for coastal development, but much more in southern Louisiana because of accelerated subsidence caused by the erosive power (eroding the delta marshes) of the rising seas.

An economy that does not grow supporting a population that does is not a good thing, though the current American economy could probably support a billion people with a comfortable standard of living: an adequate diet, education, warmed or cooled houses, running water, transportation, communication, medical care, a room of one’s own. Income would be radically redistributed. What environmentalists want is not necessarily an economy that doesn’t grow in income but one that doesn’t grow in materials use or in the use of space—so one in which the wastes of one process become the resources of another; the natural world is not assaulted with bioaccumulating chemicals; and nature is left room to work. The process of getting more from less is probably self-limiting, and always requires energy, but who can tell—that is a matter of human ingenuity.

While nature, and the growing of fresh food, require space, industrial production and human housing don’t require much of it. Unfortunately, both settlement and industry are usually located in the wrong places, along coasts, on river banks, on major estuaries. Photo-voltaic panels and ground source heat pumps set certain lower limits (both require more space than oil fired burners or fossil fuelled power plants). A world that produces its food without harmful chemicals, without eroding its soils, or degrading its streams or rivers (a so-called regenerative agriculture) and leaves half the landscape alone for nature to work, is probably already at its limits of population. In much of South Asia, Europe and coastal North America, the print of human settlement is too large for the natural world to function properly.

A population that is falling should be able to manage a falling economy. The initial period is difficult because of the increased proportion of old people. This can be partly managed by letting people work longer, partly by better preparing young people (abandoning fewer of them to poverty and prison), partly by a universal military draft with an option to do other work. Many growing economies depend on growth to raise the income of the poorer parts of the population. A shrinking or steady state economy would have to redistribute income to maintain some sense of fairness, and popular support. Egalitarianism has its advantages. The less the gap between rich and poor in a society, the better the quality of life for the average person. To an extent, quality of life is determined less by income itself than by income equality. Thus children from the highest social group, the richest 20%, in (richer) England and Wales are more likely to die than those in the lowest social group (the poorest 20%) in poorer, more egalitarian Sweden. Similarly, wealthy English schoolchildren have poorer test scores than wealthy Finnish children—though better than poor Finnish children. At any rate, an economy that shrinks in accordance with its population should be able (more or less) to maintain its level of personal income.

Whatever that means. Beyond an (easily reachable) point, human happiness and wellbeing have little to do with income. Human needs are few, wants infinite. Most of what we buy and expect is culturally determined. American houses in 2008 are more than twice the size of those 50 years ago, while families are smaller. Western societies in the 1960s used a fraction of the energy of today (one-seventh of today in France and Japan) and were ‘modern.’ We buy to meet our cultural expectations, to soothe our anxieties or to impress or neighbors, less than to satisfy our material needs or provide for our comfort. (‘Comfort’ in terms of modern levels of heat, living space, running hot water and personal hygiene arrived for the mass of people in the 1950s.) Our public priorities suffer from the same lack of perspective. Much of the money the US spends on its armed forces could be spent elsewhere, and the soldiers, many of whom sign up because of lack of economic opportunity in their towns, employed in doing something socially useful. (The two trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have solarized our energy supply and changed our health care system but we wouldn’t have spent the money for that.) Our hired military forces don’t keep us safe, they bring us prestige and let us engage in expensive and unwise military adventures, that would never be undertaken with a people’s army of draftees, trained by a small core of professionals, the proper army for a democracy, since it brings the implications of foreign policy home. I see nothing to fear and much to hope for in a shrinking population and a shrinking economy—better food, a working natural environment, more open space in cities, cleaner rivers, fish runs, birds moving through the trees and migrating over our heads.

Sustainability?

Sustainability ?

The idea of the balance of nature and of people’s sustainable use of nature are human notions that come from looking at nature from relatively short periods of time. They likely have limited application in the natural world.

After the last glaciation, the temperate world reassembled itself from seeds that arrived on foot, in poop, in beaks, in the stomachs of fish, or on the wind. Plants moved north, their seeds carried by birds, squirrels, ants, high winds, floods, accompanied by animals that ate them. People were part of these assembling landscapes. In Europe the closest relatives of Homo sapiens , the Neanderthal people, went extinct about 30,000 years ago, leaving modern people, with their spears and firesticks, along with mammoths, as the major influence on the biotic environment. The continental glaciers began to retreat about 20,000 years ago, and sea level rose (eventually by 360 feet), forcing people and animals inland, off the continental shelves. The climate moderated (and dried further south), forests moved north, and the hairy elephants found their habitat growing smaller, their predators more aggressive, life more difficult.

The primeval forests of temperate Europe and North America are about six thousand years old. Probably from the beginning, people burned them. Perhaps people were used to savannah and steppe. Australians burned to ‘clean’ the land and make travel easier, thus converting brushlands to grass and eliminating the food of many native animals. Burning northeastern American forests thinned the trees and pruned and invigorated the understory, which regrew, and whose new leaves, stems and berries fed many birds and animals, increasing by several times the abundance of game animals (grouse, rabbits, deer). Burning created forests of large old nut-bearing trees. Some North American landscapes—the grassy meadows with elk and buffalo in the forests of Kentucky, the scrub oak and berry barrens of New England, home of the heath hen, which disappeared as its landscape was converted to closed forest or farm—may have been burned continuously for several thousand years: people had inhabited these places before the forest was there. Oysters became abundant in northeastern estuaries about 4000 years ago, as the rise in the sea level slowed, and soon after became a major part of the native diet. Abundant fish and shellfish made coastal lands desirable and Native Americans ate a lot of both: the largest oyster shells and fish skeletons are found at the bottom of Indian middens. Fire could make some environments less ‘sustainable.’ The extensive longleaf pine forests of the coastal Southeast were maintained by human burning and without fire succeed to mixed oak and hickory forest—an environment more productive of game animals. Similarly the slash pine forests of Florida were produced by Indians using fire to drive deer, which became less abundant in those forests than in the mixed scrub that preceded them. (All the same, deer were phenomenally abundant in the aboriginal Southeast.) Red spruce, the signature tree of the uplands of New York State and New England for the nineteenth century loggers, became abundant in that northern hardwood forest relatively recently, just in time for their slow-growing trunks to produce the 2-3 foot thick logs whose sawn joists now hold up the floors of New York City apartments. Abundance in the forests and oceans was produced by chance, competition and time—that is, by the long history of these environments—and by the restriction of human tools for the most part to stone axes, digging sticks, bows and arrows, bone needles, fire. As more extensive agriculture began to replace foraging and horticulture, as animals were domesticated, and the use of iron and burned brick replaced renewable materials, people got shorter, less healthy and more abundant, and the balance between the civilized world and the natural worlds shifted.

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The idea of ‘the balance of nature’ comes from the typical J-shaped curve of population growth: populations of animals tend to level off after a period of exponential growth. Animal populations are limited by weather (in itself or through its effects on food plants), competition, parasites and predators. The effects of food supply, parasites, and microbial predators are often density dependent. The parasite that limits red grouse populations in Scotland is weather dependent and so the grouse population fluctuates irregularly. Red grouse would have more large predators (peregrine falcons, owls, foxes), which might or might not affect their populations, if they weren’t eliminated by gamekeepers. Icelandic ptarmigan are hunted by gyrfalcons and snowshoe hares in the Canadian arctic by lynx. Both prey animals follow regular 7-10 year cycles of increase and decline, that of the hare followed, at a remove, by the lynx. The large predators don’t cause the cycles, which are thought to be density dependent. Density dependent cycles are often controlled by the abundance of food plants (that is, by competition: thought to be the case in the hare) or by parasites, microbial or multicellular, probably the case with the ptarmigan.

Wolves in Yellowstone Park seem to keep elk populations about 30% below what plants and the weather would allow, with benefits to the landscape (the recovery of aspen groves along streams, the return of beaver and many songbirds, aggradation of stream beds, healthier populations of trout). Declining elk populations can however be eliminated by wolves, as mountain lions are eliminating remnant populations of bighorn sheep in the California Sierra (keeping the terrified sheep above snowline in winter), or wolves reduce small populations of moose in Alaska. Insect populations often go through rapid increases, controlled only by a disease (as in gypsy moth caterpillars), a change in the weather, or the elimination of the food supply (as in spruce budworm outbreaks in mature balsam fir forests in Atlantic Canada, which end with the burning of the forest). Outbreaks are probably the result of weather conditions, along with abundant food. (The explosion of pine bark beetles that is killing million of acres of tree in the western United States, Canada and Alaska is probably caused by the significantly warmer winters and longer summers that allow populations of the insects to build up, as well as by a century of poor forest management that has left a population of vulnerable trees.) Insect populations may increase more than a million times over ‘normal’ and overwhelm their predators (wood warblers foraging on spruce budworm in Canada, for instance). With gypsy moth caterpillars, a virus eventually infects the expanding population and kills most of the insects. In between outbreaks, predation by white footed mice on gypsy moth egg cases is thought to control the population. Red tides in the ocean (populations of single celled dinoflagellates toxic to vertebrates that color the water red) occur where weather and nutrient supply are favorable (warm, nitrogen-rich seas: for instance, off the west coast of Florida). Red tides disappear when the nutrients are gone (though they produce more in tons of rotting fish), or when weather or currents disrupt them (a matter of ‘chance’).

The ‘balance of nature’ is an ideal formulation of a messy, chaotic natural world. ‘Control’ in nature is not the same as ‘control’ on a factory assembly line. The natural world changes, partly because of weather, partly because of its own internal dynamics and the trajectory its history has put it on, partly from the influence of solar irradiance and plate tectonics, and human influence on this world is only partly predictable.


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‘Sustainability’ competes with capitalist economics. The abundance of animals and trees in North America bewitched the Europeans but they lost no time into converting the landscape into something more marketable (logs, fish oil, salted meat, farms). No timber company or landowner is going to wait 300 years to harvest a mature red spruce or white pine, 150-300 to harvest mature red oak or sugar maple, 500 years for an eastern hemlock, 700 years for a coastal Douglas fir or redwood. No capitalist society is going to let enough of the natural landscape remain in forest, grassland or swamp (a reasonable number is 40-60%) to let that landscape function in a real way, with herbivores, predators, insects, amphibians, change, chance, fish, though over the long term such management may be more profitable. (Over that long a term we are all dead.) Sustainability in a coppiced medieval woodland meant the trees that sprouted from stumps could be cut every ten or fifteen years for fuel (the ‘sustained yield’) with some trees allowed to mature further for building timbers. Such forests are very different from native ones (for one thing, they produce very little timber and mast) but provide some habitat for birds, for deer and boar, mice, voles, frogs, mushrooms. The tree roots hold the soil and minimize erosion and (perhaps) loss of nutrients after a cutting cycle.

Formerly sustainable agricultural landscapes often depended on the health of the surrounding forest. Paddy rice in the Philippines and Indonesia depended on manure from water buffalo, which were fed on forage harvested from the forest. Tropical soils are in general poor. The fertility of the rice paddy came partly from the forest (through water and manure), partly from nitrogen fixing Azolla plants growing in the paddy’s water, partly from insects and plankton recycled through the fish that colonized the paddy. The mineral content and seasonal availability of the water that fed the paddy depended on the health of the whole forested watershed, which also produced fuel, nuts and fruits, medicines and building material. Logging the forest destroyed the water source and removed the forest’s other fruits. So the paddy was sustainable within limits. Too many people, or too much demand put on the forest for other income, destroyed the system.

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Like large old trees, Atlantic salmon were once abundant in northeastern rivers. (Shad and river herring were more so and their ranges extended south, into the Middle Atlantic states.) When the Europeans arrived in the 1600s Atlantic salmon had been fished for several thousand years by settled populations of Native Americans, though ones in which salmon outnumbered people by 1000 to 1. For the last several hundred of those years many of the natives were farming peoples (horticulturalists). The European settlers of the 1600s and 1700s were also farmers, but they grew crops for market as well as for subsistence, and changes in the rivers caused by their more extensive and intensive use of the landscape reduced the landscape’s suitability for fish. Fishing for subsistence and to sell reduced the numbers of fish. Dams cut off rivers to fish migration, siltation shallowed them and covered spawning gravels with mud, cutting trees along their banks let the water warm in summer. Without the forest, summer water levels were lower and without trees to fall into them, rivers lost their deep pools. High rates of fall and winter runoff from cleared ground scoured out fish nests. The logs in spring log drives killed fish directly. The economic outlook of the Europeans, the pattern of European settlement, the density of settlers, made their settlement (as far as the rivers were concerned) ‘unsustainable.’

Much the same thing has happened in the oceans. Postwar fishery biologists mistook the ability of fish populations to recover from fishing. It was thought that catching a large percent of the population yearly would, by reducing competition, let the young fish grow faster and produce a larger number of fish indefinitely. But taking most of the large fish has an evolutionary effect on a population of fish. The fish that breed at earlier ages, when they are smaller, produce more young, and begin to dominate the population. But smaller female fish produce fewer and less viable eggs, so the population becomes less able to reproduce itself. Weather also strongly affects the survival of juvenile fish. A population of poor breeders reduced by bad weather finds it harder to recover. Predation on fish eggs and larvae by other fish and invertebrates have a larger effect. Trawling for fish also destroyed the bottom habitat, turning the coral and invertebrate forests of the seafloor into muddy plains. Development and nutrient runoff reduced the quality of breeding and nursery habitat in the estuaries where most marine species breed and grow to maturity. The forage fish on which large predatory fish feed were fished for food for farmed fish and for chicken and pigs. So over time, settlement and fishing pressure also made the marine fishery ‘unsustainable’. The continuing development of fish farming and the exploitation of new stocks of wild fish means fish will be available until (like oil) one day they aren’t.

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Energy flows through living things, letting them grow and maintain themselves, and ends up lost to space as heat. Without a continuous source of energy the unlikely combination of matter that is life on earth would not be possible.

The sun powers life on the surface of the earth, though a not inconsiderable biosphere deep below the surface (warmed by the radioactive decay of the earth’s interior) is powered by the energy in chemical compounds. Biological life is ‘sustainable’ in that the sun will keep shining for another 500 million years. Life also depends on large, chemically unstable, biogeochemical pools of minerals like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. These biogeochemical pools are maintained (more or less) by living things. For instance, carbon enters the atmosphere from chemical reactions deep in the earth through the vents of volcanoes. It is incorporated into living tissue of plants through photosynthesis, into animals and fungi when they ‘eat’ (break down) plants, and into predatory animals when they ‘eat’ the plant eaters. Carbon from plants that was stored as coal, oil and natural gas also enters the atmosphere through fires, from warming bottom muds of oceans or thawing tundra, from the subduction of continental plates (and then once again through deep ocean vents or volcanoes). Nitrogen is a major constituent of the atmosphere and is put in a usable form by lightning and nitrogen fixing bacteria, some of which are allied with the roots of higher plants. That caught in the biological pool is recycled many times before escaping back to the inert form of the atmospheric gas. Phosphorus is cycled between land and sea. Sulfur, iron and potassium have their own cycles. The minerals necessary for life are ‘sustainable’ in that the pools are large. But there are limits. The growth of land plants is often limited by the supply of nitrogen, of riverine plankton by phosphorus. Iron is a limiting nutrient in the oceans and in tropical forests. Sulfur can be a limiting nutrient in tropical soils. All nutrients become limited at the sea surface and are renewed by upwelling from below, which explains why some areas of the sea, where nutrient rich cold currents meet warmer waters, are so productive. Before human intervention in the nutrient pools, nutrient-limited habitats (coral reefs, most forests) had developed recycling techniques that (where climate permitted) allowed for a great abundance of living things (many species of plants and animals) and a large standing biomass (of trees, prairie grasses, buffalo). But this abundance of wildlife or trees was often easily eliminated by over exploitation and might then take a great time to re-establish itself (if it would do so, the ecosystem having been put on a new trajectory by human intervention). At present, thanks to the combustion of fossil fuels and the use of fertilizers, people have doubled the amount of available nitrogen and greatly increased that of phosphorus. The more available nutrients tend to simplify former habitats, turning, for instance, perennial grasslands into annual ones, and favoring early seral species over trees of the primary forest.

With the help of limitless energy from fossil fuels over the last century and a half, we have also introduced many new minerals into the pools of biologically active compounds. Chlorine is usefully reactive. The modern chemical industry is largely based on the chemistry of chlorine and so many of the new compounds are chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as DDT. DDT slowly breaks down (sunlight, bacterial action) into more toxic daughters. Along with other chlorinated hydrocarbons, it is raised by storms from the bottoms of lakes and seas, into which it has been washed or dumped, or onto which it has settled from the air. Once in the water column, chlorinated hydrocarbons are adsorbed on the fatty surfaces of living material and taken up by plankton, cycled through zooplankton, small fish, larger fish, sea birds, sea mammals, all the time becoming more concentrated in fat, and also drifting down towards the sea bottom, in fish poop or the fat in dead seals and whales, from which storms will raise them once again. Many chlorinated hydrocarbons are hormone mimics and disrupt embryonic development in vertebrates (especially those that spend much time exposed to them in water), lower the functioning of immune systems and (probably partly through those two mechanisms) are implicated in many types of cancer, in many animals and humans. The brominated hydrocarbons are similar. Such compounds, new to the microbial world, are only slowly broken down (that is, torn apart for the energy in their chemical bonds) by microorganisms.

We have also greatly increased the biogeochemical pools of heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and mercury, some of which have known and deleterious effects on living things. Lead concentrations in the modern atmosphere are several thousand times that of the Paleolithic background. Lead and mercury are neurotoxins. The atmospheric concentration of mercury continues to rise, like carbon dioxide, by about 2% per year.

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Against this background, a sustainable society is one in which we stay out of the way. Sustainability implies sufficient ‘natural landscapes’ (Eugene Odum said 40% of any landscape) to let the natural world work and adapt to longterm changes. In many landscapes (the urban and suburban landscapes around large lowland cities) this is no longer possible but might be more so one day as rising seas and higher rivers make abandoning many settled lands necessary. Such ‘wild’ landscapes should be connected and (ideally) would blend into suburban lands with sufficient native plant cover to support some wildlife (especially insect and amphibian life). Wild landscapes should include all ecosystems and subecosystems but be concentrated where they do the most good: along streams and rivers to allow floods to spread out (floodplains provide essential habitat for many species of fish), and to soak up silt, pollutants and nutrients running off developed land; on aquifer recharge areas (ditto); along migratory pathways and in nesting and wintering areas of birds, mammals and invertebrates; along coasts, to allow for storm surges and the alongshore movement of sand. If the massive movement of human populations climate change will cause turns out to be orderly, much of our pattern of settlement could be revised: cities and roads could be located above (rather than on) river floodplains, coastal cities live surrounded by their natural wetlands. Old growth would climb up the banks of salmon streams.

Sustainable agriculture would focus on the agricultural landscape as well as on crop production. Meadows and woods amidst cropland would catch nutrients and silt running off the fields (already reduced by crop rotation, strip cropping and less use of manufactured fertiliser). Such lands would also recharge water tables and streams; provide habitat for populations of native pollinators and bats; for predatory and parasitic insects that help control crop eating insects; for insects that feed on weeds (such as the larvae of the American painted lady butterfly on Canada thistle). Wild lands would also provide habitat for mammals and birds (foxes, owls, falcons) that prey on mammals and insects that damage crops. Some of the herbivores of these wild lands (say, the corn and alfalfa eating white tailed deer in Wisconsin dairy country) would have to be controlled by people, since it is doubtful that people will willingly coexist with mountain lions and wolves (as Italians—for the most part unknowingly—do with Eurasian wolves in Tuscany). Forestlands would be managed for their animals, nuts, mushrooms and fish as well as their timber. Some landscapes, like the short grass plains, might be managed communally as semi-natural pasture for their native grazers (the idea of the ‘buffalo commons’). In this case a corporation of landowners replaces the organization of the medieval village or the tribe; and mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep, coyotes, wolves, prairie dogs, and grizzlies share the grasslands with the buffalo.

Riverine fisheries and marine estuaries would be major beneficiaries of such a resettlement of the landscape.

The industrial world would abandon the chemistry of chlorine for less toxic alternatives. (Carpets made by the Steelcase Corporation are compostable and recyclable. No toxic materials are used in the manufacturing process.) Chip factories would degrease with ethyl lactate, carbon dioxide or steam. Demolished buildings would be taken apart so their materials could be reused. Dumps would be mined. The wastes of one industry would become the raw materials of another. Water use by power plants and paper mills would be cut by 90% or more (doable now) making it possible to locate paper mills in cities, where waste paper is a major resource (and cleaned sewer water another), and reducing the effects of both on rivers (power plants are the greatest industrial users of water). Energy use will fall as buildings are better insulated, cooled and lighted. More electricity will come from the sun or geothermal heat, house heat or coolness from the ground. Our impact on the global cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus will lessen. The human population will slowly fall as women become better educated and able to control their destinies.

A Short History of the End of Our World (II)

A Short History of the End of our World


When the current recession ends (if it ends), economic growth will return and carbon dioxide will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. (The current rate of accumulation is about 2% a year, or a doubling from the current 385 parts per million to over 700 ppm in less than 50 years.) No one is talking about limiting growth and adjusting developed economies to a new reality. Few people are talking about limiting population. No one is talking about cutting carbon dioxide emissions to a level that would stabilize and then reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and slowly let it return to a “normal” level (probably 280 parts per million). Such cuts would amount to 70-90% of carbon emissions in the developed world. That is a monumental project that can only be accomplished by reducing energy use—insulating houses, building very efficient cars, motors, pumps, redesigning cities for public transportation. There are also two safe, relatively inexpensive methods of taking carbon out of the atmosphere in large enough amounts to make a difference: converting crop waste to charcoal (biochar) and spreading it on farmland, where it raises soil fertility, and the carbon remains bound up for approximately 50,000 years; and revegetating degraded lands to forests or grassland (5 billion acres, land equivalent to current cropland, is available). No one is doing either of these on any scale. Most schemes for engineering a lower temperature (seeding the oceans with iron, pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, launching fleets of tiny reflective sunshades) have serious disadvantages. That is, they are either risky or nuts.

As the atmosphere warms, the sea warms (but more slowly) and sea level rises, partly from more water in the ocean from melting glaciers, partly from the thermal expansion of water already there. A disastrous rise in temperature and sea level will supposedly occur after a global warming of 4˚ Centigrade (within the generally accepted range of temperature predicted for 2100 if we don’t control carbon emissions). However, the most recent time carbon dioxide levels were at 350 ppm, sea level was 80 feet higher, so we may already be there, so to speak, the sea just hasn’t responded yet. What is certain is that the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere implies much additional warming. The earth responds slowly to the temperature of its atmosphere. Both land and sea have great thermal inertia. The ocean has bulges and hollows and because of changing currents and jet stream winds and shifting gravitational pulls from collapsing ice sheets, sea level rise will vary considerably from place to place.

Ecosystems and climates flip. That is, a slow change turns into a new regime. Feedback processes kick in. The forests in the western United States and across the boreal regions of Canada and Russia are collapsing from drought, insect damage and warmer temperatures. Drought stresses the trees, thawing permafrost uproots them, and insects are many times more abundant in the shorter winters and warmer summers. These dying forests will decay, or more likely, burn, putting hundreds of millions, or billions, of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As the permafrost below them thaws, it emits methane and carbon dioxide. So do warming boreal peat bogs. The tundra lakes, filled with water from the last ice age, expand as the ice beneath them melts, then drain away, exposing more bare ground to the sun. This soil also emits methane and carbon dioxide. As the sea ice melts in the Arctic, the ocean warms from the sun. Along the east Siberian coast, methane, produced by bacteria and locked in a water/ice lattice by cold and the weight of the sea water, bubbles up from the seabed. Such lattices store perhaps 400 billion tons of carbon as methane. As they warm and dry further, the tropical peat-swamp forests of Indonesia burn. (Burning tropical peat swamps to plant palm oil plantations has been a major contributor over the last 20 years to global warming.) The Amazon rain forest burns more frequently and as transpiration from the trees falls, and then rainfall fails, begins to collapse. These are all positive feedback processes put in place by a small amount of warming (and some additional human interference).

Melting large glaciers like the Greenland ice sheet or the Antarctic glaciers takes time (millennia or centuries, one century for the Greenland ice sheet under the most calamitous and respectable of recent scenarios), so sealevel rise beyond 6-10 feet by 2100 is unlikely but 80 feet is possible. A sea level rise of 10 feet would displace tens of millions of people (in Long Island, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, the Rhine Delta). Higher seas push river floods back upstream, into areas that didn’t flood before, and makes the rice fields in the deltas of the great south Asian rivers (the Ganges, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy, the Red, the Pearl) unusable. The fields will become brackish estuaries and produce shrimp and fish. Barrier islands will move to the coast and coastal aquifers (such as the Magothy under Long Island) will become too salty to drink. Mountain glaciers, smaller and fed by yearly snows, melt more quickly than continental ones. Those in the Andes that water the high terraces of Peru (most cultivable land in Peru is over 9000 feet) are almost gone. When they are gone and ground water levels fall, many crops will no longer be grown. The Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of India, Pakistan, China and Southeast Asia, are also melting. Without them, spring floods will be greater and summer flows lower. Much land now irrigated by these rivers will no longer be cultivable. Two billion people depend on its crops. Since groundwaters in India and China are already overpumped, the only way to maintain agricultural production will be with older water harvesting techniques, such as the bunds and valley tanks that once caught the rains in monsoon India. But rising temperatures and a failing or flooding monsoon may make that effort difficult, or fruitless.

Except for island nations, and a few tens of millions of coastal dwellers, sea level rise will likely be a problem for the future, but other things will happen in the ocean. Its rising acidity will cause its fisheries to collapse, as the shell-forming algae at the center of food webs die. (All commercial fish stocks are already predicted to collapse from overfishing by 2048, so we may have caught the last fish just in time.) Coral reefs will melt away and animals with calcium carbonate shells (clams, oysters, mussels) will go extinct. Whales and other sea mammals will go extinct. The Gulf Stream will slow greatly or shut down, ending the circulation of oxygenated water to the deep sea and suffocating the animals of the depths. As the sea stagnates, it will become perfused with toxic hydrogen sulfide. The change in ocean currents and surface temperatures will change weather patterns and make many parts of the earth (the east coast of North America, much of Mexico and Central America, South America south of the Amazon, parts of southeast Africa, much of Southeast Asia) uninhabitable from constant storms, floods and drought.

The land warms more quickly than the sea. Much of the land on earth is between 30˚ north and 30˚ south (that is, about the equator). Some of this is now desert, some tropical forest and savannah. As the climate warms these forests and grasslands will be replaced by desert (though some pockets of vegetation in favored locations may remain). Desert conditions will spread south and north, encompassing most of the United States, southern Europe up to the latitude of Paris, northern South America, most of Africa, India, Southeast Asia and all of China: most of the inhabited world. The boreal forests and tundra of North America and Eurasia be replaced by mixed deciduous woodland and grassland. (Not long ago, the Arctic islands were covered by redwood forests.) Most flowering plants and large animals, unable to migrate quickly enough, or their way blocked by human settlements, will go extinct. The habitable parts of the world, where large animals can live and crops grow, will consist of the boreal regions (an immense landscape, its Siberian section unfortunately contaminated by radioactivity from the Soviet nuclear program), the west coast of Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Tasmania, southern Patagonia, western Antarctica. Some writers imagine high rise cites amidst intensively cultivated stony Arctic soils.

What will happen to people? Most, in both undeveloped and developed parts of the world, will die, probably not catastrophically, but slowly, from starvation and despair, as death rates climb by 15-20%. This happened in Russia recently (with a lesser rise in the death rate) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is still happening there today. (The collapse of the Soviet system explains why Russian troops stationed far from their home bases must return in spring to plant, and in fall to harvest, their potatoes.) It probably happened with the collapse of the Maya and the Aztec civilizations in Mexico and Central America, or the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Industrial civilization can maintain itself in a desert, desalinating seawater, growing crops in greenhouses cooled by seawater and watered by its sweet condensation, mining copper, pumping oil out of the sand, fueling itself largely with solar panels, living underground where daytime temperatures average 150˚ Fahrenheit. Would it? As the economic blows worsen, and food, water and electricity become scarce, I doubt whether the retreat from the present will be orderly. Farmers will not plant with perennial cover crops the fields they abandon. For one thing, they will have no money to do so. People imagine an orderly retreat to the Arctic coasts (forget about national boundaries) but this ignores the difficulties of feeding large populations, purifying polluted surface water, maintaining the infrastructure necessary to build roads, power stations, vehicles, cement plants in the north. As the seas rise, the water will flood the containment ponds of abandoned nuclear power stations, where the spent fuel rods are stored, oil refineries with their stored oil and chemicals, private houses with their toxic cleaners and pesticides. This material will spread to river deltas and inshore waters. Public zoos and private animal shelters will release their animals rather than let them starve: lions, tigers, elephants, camels, yaks may once again populate North America. Tropical plants will escape from botanical gardens into the new tropical habitat. Over a long time (20,000-100,000 years?), the ocean, finally cleansed of man-made and natural toxins, its circulation restored, will return to something like normal, and after another million years or more, new adaptive radiations will fill it with new creatures.

Perhaps people will watch some of this, as they wander the corners of the deserts with palms and springs, carrying their bows and arrows, and digging tools scavenged from former habitations (much of it now under water), and the great savannahs and woods of the Arctic and Antarctic coasts.

The Natural History of the Present: Chapter 19

Part III: Energy, Population, Hope


Chapter 19: Thoughts on Energy and the End of our World


If cars got 90 miles per gallon, the straw burned in the fields of Denmark and France, converted to hydrocarbons, would fuel the car fleets of those countries: this is one of the more startling claims of Natural Capitalism. Today’s cars can probably reach 100 miles per gallon, 200 if the steel in them were replaced by carbon fiber resin and their engines by an electric generator. A more traditional calculation comes from Sunshine Farm, an imaginary Iowa spread, where 25% of the cropland is put aside to raise food for draft animals, or for material to be converted into fuel for tractors. One could not fuel the current American transportation fleet on crops grown on 25% of the country’s land but a writer claims that algae grown on 20 million acres of ponds, a small percentage of U.S cultivable land, would do the job. If the Danish straw were converted to fuels, its fertilising elements would be lost to the fields, unless the residue of the conversion process were spread on them. (Burning, whether in an internal combustion engine or in place, simply speeds up the conversion of the plant-based carbon into carbon dioxide, which goes up in flames, rather than being transformed in a slower, bacterial combustion.) Some mashes left from fuel conversion (such as that of corn converted to ethanol) can be used as animal feeds, and the manure spread.

The transportation sector of a modern economy produces about 14% of its carbon emissions (nearly the same as agriculture), almost all of it from fossil fuels. Increasing a car’s mileage lowers its production of carbon dioxide, and thus lowers its effect on global warming; so efficient cars would warm the world, but less. Increasing the mileage sufficiently, but still well within current technological limits, lets a nation’s car fleet run on waste biological materials; that is on wheat straw, peach pits, apple pomace, walnut shells, cotton waste, tree trimmings, sawdust, waste cooking oils, spoiled grain: materials that are transformable by bacterial action into fuels. (Waste cooking oils can be burned directly.) So the car fleet can be powered by renewable fuels. Since the carbon in these fuels comes from modern (not fossil) plants, which grow again the next year, taking up the released carbon, no net carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. Some may be lost from the soil by the agricultural and forestry practices that produce the feedstock. But increasing car mileage sufficiently means that vehicles need so little fuel that its source becomes almost irrelevant.

Transforming wastes into fuels involves costs in energy and materials. Trucks and trains must be used to move the wastes, which are bulky (of course, trucks, ships and pipelines also move gas and oil), one must build the manufacturing sites to do the fermenting, the distilling, and so on. Processing wastes locally eliminates some of these costs and lets the material left from fermentation be returned to the soil (rather than, say, landfilling it). Energy gains in converting plant wastes to hydrocarbon fuels are often neutral or negative. With oil in its heyday, fuel oil contained 60 to 80 times the energy that went into mining and manufacturing it, but with corn-based ethanol the ratio is 1 to 1. In other words, it takes 10 gallons of ethanol-equivalent fuel to make 10 gallons of ethanol. If the fuel one uses is ethanol, the process isn’t worth it economically. (That one can use the left-over mash as animal feed helps.) If one uses fossil fuels to make the ethanol, the process is pointless from the point of view of carbon emissions: one might as well burn gasoline in one’s very efficient car, and subsidize the planting of a tree each year to soak up one’s carbon emissions. The whole chain of conversion must use renewable energy for the process to be worthwhile in terms of reducing carbon emissions. The greatest fuel use in ethanol conversion comes from the distilling process; and this might be cut considerably by the development of appropriate semi-permeable membranes, such as are now available for making maple syrup or desalinating water. Making fuel from grain (a food and a row crop) does not seem like a very good idea. However some food crops perform better than corn: making ethanol from sugar cane yields an energy surplus and sugar cane ethanol fuels most of the motor vehicles of Brazil. Making fuel from agricultural or forestry wastes, or from a sod crop like switchgrass (so called cellulosic ethanol), perhaps from a native plant like cattails (harvested in winter, from the ice) is a better one, but only makes biological sense if the manufacturing sites are decentralized (Georgia cars running on peach pits and peanut shells, Oregon ones on fruit waste) and if cars are much more efficient. In all industrial processes, reducing energy use, which also reduces the energy embodied in manufactured materials, is the key to a low-carbon economy. The energy costs of transportation make one wonder whether subsidizing those railroad cars of New York City sewage sludge heading to Texas cotton fields is worth it; or those trucks of recyclables one sees lumbering along the highways. The alternatives are even less desireable— ocean disposal of sewage sludges, or landfilling of sludges, bottles and cans. The production and transport of fossil fuels also involves energy costs, as does the manufacture of virgin metals and plastics, which are from 2 to 10 times more energy consumptive than recycled materials.

It was a dream of the Sixties to run the world on natural products: wood, sand, sunlight, straw, organic food. Trees cut on short-term rotations would produce fuel for electric power plants. Some plants were built but the landscape that resulted in the tree-shed was neither esthetically pleasing nor biologically or hydrologically functional. This was true even where chips were produced as part of a logging operation that also produced sawlogs; that is when just “junk” trees and tops went into chips. Landowners appreciated the fact that less mess was left behind in the woods, but the woods are naturally chaotic, as are grasslands on a smaller scale. The mess had included the nutrients in the tops and limbs (structures where above-ground nutrients are concentrated); the shade the cut branches provided, that kept the soil of the logged forest cooler, reduced nutrient losses, helped in the survival of invertebrates, fungi and amphibians and in the regeneration of the plants of the forest floor. The mess also included wolf trees, whose shape makes them unmarketable as sawlogs, and other large old trees, partly rotten and unmarketable as sawlogs, but which produce crops of mast, are habitat for birds, bats, fungi and insects, and are essential parts of the structure of the forest. With so much of the forest removed, its place in the local hydrology was substantially altered. Erosion increased because of the loss of forest cover and the destruction of the soil surface by heavy equipment. Soil and nutrients flowed into forest streams. Besides all this, agriculture or forestry that produces hydrocarbons for fuel is subject to at least as much economic pressure as one that produces sawlogs and food. Such landscapes are ruled by economics, not biology. Only so much land in a watershed should be put into producing food and fiber. If such landscapes can produce bio-fuels, without compromising the ecosystems of which they are a part, that would be wonderful. But the main advantage for the larger landscape comes from reducing fuel use, not from using bio-fuels. In a sense, we are already growing our fuel, in that our enormous corn exports help pay for our imported petroleum (6 barrels per acre with 150-bushel per acre corn at $4 a bushel and oil at $100 a barrel): that is, our eroding landscape pays for our oil.

During the 1970s I followed a debate in the margins of the scientific literature about the relative energetics of styrofoam and paper coffee cups (lab workers get their coffee from machines). I think the fundamental basis of the debate was between the old and the new; between good old, semi-natural paper and new, forward-looking, petroleum-based styrofoam. (A better insulator, styrofoam kept the liquid warmer longer; the downside was burning your tongue on the first sip or burning your fingers when you picked up the cup.) At the time, thanks partly to DDT, petrochemicals were in poor repute (this hasn’t improved), but paper-making, because of its use of mercury as a biocide in the pulp mix and of chlorine as a bleach has been a major polluter of waterways and of their food chains; and thus of waterbirds, fish and people. The fish in large parts of major Canadian river systems have been made inedible through paper-making. After many calculations of the energy involved in the manufacturing chain, styrofoam came out with a slight advantage in energy and water expenditure. However, it turned out that pottery cups (the old old thing) were the best, if wash water use were kept low and if they lasted long enough. Rinsed-out cups that lasted several years involved by far the least expenditure of energy and materials. On a similar theme, glass bottles, if re-used 8 times or more, are superior in terms of energy consumption to plastic or aluminum, even if these materials are recycled. Glass bottles are however (like pottery) heavy; and for the numbers to work refills cannot be transported more than 150 miles. So optimists like me picture local bottling plants (a current feature of the American landscape) refilling local bottles. Ideally these are standard bottles, in several sizes, with glued-on labels (non-toxic inks, water-soluble glues), usable for any fluids (soda, fruit juice, spaghetti sauce). At the end of their useful lives the bottles are ground up and remelted into new bottles, at a considerable energy savings over manufacturing new glass. The wash water for the bottling plant is cleaned by a man-made marsh next door (with a greenhouse for winter use in cold climates, that grows flowers, bedding plants, fish and edible greens). The greenhouse and marsh also handle the run-off from the roof and parking lot. The cleaned water sinks into the ground or flows through a vegetated ditch into a local waterway. Power comes from photo-voltaic panels on the flat roof of the super-insulated building.

The main way to make cars more efficient is to make them lighter. Better aerodynamics also help. Currently, with fleet mileage in the United States a little over 21 miles per gallon, about 1% of the gasoline burned in the engine goes into moving the passengers. Very efficient cars (90-200 miles per gallon) can’t be made of steel; it’s too heavy. Heavy cars require a large engine for acceleration. Composites are stronger than steel and can absorb 5 times more energy per pound, and thus are as safe in crashes. Composite cars weigh 2-3 times less than metal cars, perhaps 1500 pounds, 10 times more than a person. Powering cars with electricity produced by a gasoline-powered generator saves weight by eliminating the engine (the generator and electric motor are much lighter), the drivetrain, clutch, driveshaft and transmission. If car bodies are manufactured of carbon fiber and resin, something like 90% of the steel and 30% of the aluminum in a car can be eliminated. U.S. resin production would rise by 3%. All that metal that doesn’t have to be made involves tremendous savings in fossil fuels (less carbon dioxide, metals and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere), in mining (less atmospheric pollution and earth-moving), and in transportation (ditto). Thus making cars lighter also (in general) helps with the carbon footprint involved in building them, which for a midsize car in 2007 was equivalent to burning 900 gallons of gasoline. According to the authors of Natural Capitalism, the savings for car manufacturers in going to composite bodies are also tremendous: the capital costs of manufacture (tooling costs, fabricating plants, the time needed to bring a new model out) are reduced by 50-90%. Our need for oil would drop precipitously. We could save the $50 billion a year we now spend, on average, to keep the Persian Gulf safe for oil production. (Lowering the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, or requiring the car fleet to average 40 miles to the gallon, would also save the oil we now import from the Persian Gulf: around a billion barrels a year.) We would also save the steel that goes into the military ships and oil tankers, the coal and oil needed to make that steel, the diesel or uranium that powers them, the economic costs and biological problems involved with petroleum production and weapons manufacture, and so on. We could put that $50 billion a year into infrastructure projects that saved energy (home insulation, energy-efficient lighting, more efficient heating and cooling equipment) and into supporting renewable energy (solar thermal power plants, solar cells on roofs); and thus further reduce our need for oil. Money that went for oil would now be invested at home. Our balance of payments situation would improve by $80-$100 billion (now, in 2008, $125-$135 billion) per billion barrels of oil. The materials used in car bodies have changed once before; from 85% wood in 1920, car bodies shifted to 70% steel by 1927.

The point of making cars that get 100 miles a gallon is to reduce fuel use and carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere, as well as to reduce air pollution generally (nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, ground level ozone); that is to reduce the environmental impact of cars. In the United States it also reduces our international indebtedness and our dependence on foreign oil. But the effect is to make room for more cars. Since many of the environmental effects of cars are worldwide, in a more just world this room would be in under-developed countries, but in fact it will be in the developed world as well. In our current capitalist world, cars will expand to fill the available space; or to use up the available fuel. Oil prices rose in the 1970s and the average energy intensity of the United States’ economy (the energy required per dollar of economic output) fell by 34% from 1980 to 2000. (Energy costs are typically 1-2% of industrial costs and so aren’t worth worrying about, but high enough costs make them so, and so energy efficiency doubled from 1975 to 1985.) At the same time the population increased by 22%, mostly from immigration. The economy also grew. If the average percapita Gross Domestic Product had remained constant, the United State’s energy use in 2000 would have been 20% below the 1980 level, but the percapita GDP rose 55% and so total energy use was up 26% in 2000. The point is that growth in the economy or in population will eventually swallow up any energy gains. This is the Malthusian dilemma, which human ingenuity sometimes lets us evade.

In a typical herbivore irruption (meadow voles introduced to a temperate island, sheep in the late 1500s to the highlands about Mexico City) the animals, now without predators, parasites or diseases, and with an unlimited food supply, increase in population exponentially until they overshoot the landscape’s carrying capacity. This phenomenon has been documented mostly in hooved animals, the ungulates, but English sparrows, when introduced the the United States in the 1800s, had up to 5 broods a year, the young of one brood warming the eggs of the next, as the birds spread from barnyard to barnyard across the continent. The population crashes as the animals run out of food, then reaches an accommodation with the (now degraded) food supply. The plant population stabilizes under grazing pressure at a lower density, height and species diversity. The population of animals (sheep, voles) is also much reduced and begins to oscillate about the food supply. In some cases the landscape is so degraded it will no longer support any grazers; or hold much water, which runs off the bare ground. The human situation is something like this. When people were hunters and gatherers, they slowly filled the world. Some niches were difficult and took a long time to exploit, such as the Arctic lands of the Inuit. Some landscapes, such as Antarctica, or altitudes above 16,000 feet, were unexploitable. The constant expansion shows population pressure remained a factor in human life. Polynesians living on small islands kept their populations low, partly by exposing infants, partly by forced emigration of young people (which is how the far-flung islands of Polynesia were settled). Probably through active control, many hunter-gatherer populations stabilized about 30% below the maximum carrying capacity of their landscapes to provide food. (But some must not have, for the human population continued to grow.) This is near where wolves and weather keep populations of elk and may reflect a long term lower limit of capacity.

Of course what a landscape will provide in food depends partly on human abilities and tools. Agriculture let people fill the world more completely. (It supported up to 100 times more people per unit of land.) But agricultural productivity fell as the post-glacial world warmed and dried and as poorer soils were exploited and better soils were depleted. Hierarchical agricultural societies and more limited diets meant shorter, poorer lives for much of the population. Agricultural populations tend to oscillate around the maximum food supply, so starvation was common. New lands, new crops, new crop rotations, plant and animal breeding, new irrigation schemes kept agricultural productivity and the world population slowly rising, but at least in Europe, periodic starvation only ended with the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, the cheap transport of grain from new lands, new fertilisers derived from inorganic minerals. (All the same, under solar powered agriculture, world population grew from 4 million people 12,000 years ago, at the end of the time of the hunter-gatherers, to 750 million in 1750, the beginning of industrialization.) The continuing industrial and economic revolution is still filling the world with people. One might speculate that population growth (like economic growth) is an evolutionary imperative, but in fact women will control their fertility if it seems advantageous to them and if they are allowed to do so. If not for immigration, populations throughout the the industrial world would be falling—children are seen as too expensive. The economic emancipation of women from the control of men, universal education, better medical care (thus better childhood survival), and some sort of social safety net slows population growth to near zero even in relatively poor countries. Control of economic growth is another matter: growth in the economy is driven not just by growth in the population but, as the French textbook made clear, by our ideas of what life should be—that is, without the possibility of becoming rich, man loses hope and France declines. (Modern Americans, when asked about the purpose of the American government, reply that it is to let them get rich.) Early in the Industrial Revolution growth that was faster than that of population allowed Europeans to outrun the Malthusian dilemma. Now one might say, as we approach the dilemma from another direction, that sustainable growth is growth that does not cause the implosion of the society from which it springs. No cycle of growth, including that of population, continues forever and no economist knows how to run a capitalist economy that doesn’t grow. People have ideas: for instance, taxing raw materials rather than capital and labor, by favoring the use of labor over the use of materials, should let a considerably lower level of material growth—perhaps a negative one—be possible and profitable. Declining populations remove the need for growth. But in the coming world, new sources of energy will have to be developed, houses made more energy efficient, degraded lands, fisheries and rivers renovated, coastal and riverine settlements moved inland and uphill. The development of capitalist economics turned human greed into a developmental force. The rational pursuit of profit has transformed our world more than technology, which is only a tool.

* * *

“We’re cooked,” remarked Vaclav Smil, a Canadian expert on agriculture, energy and the environment at a conference on global warming with 10,000 participants in Montreal in 2006. He’s right. The earth responds slowly to changes in its atmospheric gases and to the surface warming of its oceans. The extra carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will take a century or more to exert its full warming potential. But feedback processes are already in play. The missing sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic exposes more of the polar oceans to the sun’s heat, which the ice reflected; the warming waters will melt more ice, and those exposed waters absorb more heat, in an ineluctable downward spiral. The peat bogs of the boreal tundra contain something like 400 billion tons of carbon in the form of methane. (We emit the equivalent of about 7 billion tons of carbon a year to the atmosphere, mostly as carbon dioxide.) Methane is beginning to bubble out of the thawing ground and out of tundra lakes, some of which no longer freeze because of this. Those tundra lakes, filled with fossil water from the glacial age, and covering up to half the tundra’s surface, expand as the permafrost thaws, then drain away as it thaws more deeply (the water, a good conductor, absorbing the underground ice’s latent heat). Boreal forests across the subarctic have turned into carbon emitters as the ground under them thaws and shifts and the trees lose their grip on it and lean over and as bark beetles, no longer kept in check by the length of winter, kill them. The forests burn, or the trees decay, in either case releasing their carbon to the atmosphere. Bark beetles and fire also take a toll on the forests of the mountain ranges of western North America, a toll worsened by a century or more of spectacularly bad forest management. Increasing temperatures may turn all forests and grasslands into net emitters of carbon dioxide and methane. Increasing heat and drought will make forests in warmer, drier regions (such as the American Southwest) collapse. Collapsing forests emit carbon. Burning peat bogs in Indonesia, burned as part of the illegal clearance of forest lands for palm oil plantations (like corn, another biofuel), put from 10-20% of current anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. The oxidising peat will continue to emit carbon for years and makes the production of those biofuels pointless. Biologically produced methane is also held in hydrates along the outer continental shelves, kept in stable form by low temperatures and high pressures. As the sea warms (not much: 1º-2º C.), these hydrates become unstable. A sudden release of methane from seafloor hydrates is thought to have been behind a dramatic warming of the earth 55 million years ago.

Climate change is a problem mostly for charismatic animals like us. Rapid climate change, like too much ultraviolet light, may make much of the green and blue world uninhabitable for many of its larger plants and animals, whose generation times are relatively long and whose ability to move is limited. Trees, for instance, will have trouble moving fast enough to accomodate the changing climate. For many species of amphibians, the current state of the world, awash in man made chemicals that compromise their immune systems and in man made ultraviolet light that scrambles the DNA in their eggs, in warm air from cleared lowlands swallowing up the clouds on mountaintops—which become sunny and dry, too dry for breeding frogs—and in diseases spread by amphibians from other continents, is already too much and many populations have collapsed. Fewer amphibians means fewer hawks, minks, raccoons, fisher, fewer nutrients brought from the margins of beaver ponds (where the frogs live) to the uplands, as urine, bones and dung. Higher seas, more powerful rains and windstorms, more severe droughts, rising or falling average temperatures will make much human infrastructure obsolete. Such infrastructure includes roofs, bridges, tunnels, seawalls, roads, farmland, water reservoirs, river works, riverbank housing, seaside lots, buildings in fire-prone woodlands or in regions with hurricanes or tornados. Places are occupied and houses built according to long-term climatic averages. Human settlements are manifestations of climate. At the same time, chemical and nutrient pollution may make much of the landscape unstable or uninhabitable. Ecological collapse came for the Maya and the Tiahuanaco people in small changes of climate, for which their cultures, already stressed by overpopulation and habitat destruction, could not cope; for Native Americans in the 1500s and 1600s in microbes to which they were not adapted. When cultures and their support structures collapse, many people die. What keeps us from acting to alleviate the growing risk is fear: fear of change, fear of economic collapse.

At the least, since governments seem incapable of acting except in the face of calamity, we are in for a warming of 2º-3º C. (and then probably 4º-5º C.) and a sealevel rise of 1-4 meters (up to 25 meters). This is catastrophic for low-lying countries (those on river deltas or on islands) and for any settlements near the coast. Perhaps 10-20% of people worldwide will be displaced (about a billion people, perhaps 50 million in the United States). If warming can be kept to this level however, it may be less of a worry than the contamination of the biosphere with bio-accumulating chemicals. Changes on this scale don’t mean the end of people, but because of the financial losses involved, may mean the end of our civilization. Of course, people can plan for the coming changes and thus reduce their economic consequences and try (like our ancestral hunter-horticulturalists) to live within the green world. In 2040, when the Arctic is mostly ice-free in summer, there will be refugia for some arctic mammals (ringed seals, polar bears) about the northern tip of Greenland. (The several species of Arctic seals depend on different ice conditions and depths to the seabed and it is unlikely all species will survive. Polar bears evolved from grizzlies, with which they still can mate, and can evolve again.) Other refugia for cold-adapted animals will exist about Antarctica; new animals will colonize that continent, perhaps from the other end of the globe, and evolve there into new animals. The connected wild and semi-wild landscapes I have tried to describe, into which the man-made landscape of cities, roads, farms, and fiber-farm forests fits, should let plants and animals move around in response to a changing climate. (Plants also move through landscape connections and connected landscapes have more species of plants.) Prudent homeowners may order seeds from forests 500 miles south, so as the trees around them die from winters that are too short or summers that are too hot, others can take their place. Connected, functioning landscapes let small populations of organisms survive, which expand as conditions change. Audubon saw a chestnut-sided warbler once. A bird of the woodland edge, it is now one of the more abundant warblers in the settled parts of the northeastern forest.

The gift of fossil fuels was cheap, abundant energy. Our civilisation runs on energy. Without electricity and motor fuels our cities would start to collapse in 3 days (the length of their food supply), perhaps a week (far too long to be without water). There are three reasons for hope. One of them is that the development of a low-carbon, energy efficient economy would be immensely profitable. Carbon emissions become worth avoiding at $50-$100 per ton. The United States produces about 2 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon a year, or $100-$200 billion worth. This amounts to a rounding error in the current budget, but a potent economic incentive. Paying farmers $50-$100 a ton ($25 to $100 an acre) for storing carbon would transform farming practices. Paying electricity producers $50-$100 per ton for avoided carbon (and guaranteeing the payments for 20 years, as the Germans do with their solar power premiums) would make photo-voltaic power profitable. Under such conditions, photo-voltaic power generation, or generation from solar thermal power plants (which are more cost effective than photo-voltaic panels but only work in sunny climates and on a large scale), makes much more sense than coal. Machines turn over every 20 to 50 years, appliances and cars every 3 to 10, commercial buildings every 30, so it wouldn’t take long to transform our energy use. From 1800 to 1950 industrial energy in the United States changed from wood to coal and then to oil and natural gas, largely under economic incentives, but influenced by government policy. A reasonable estimate for shifting to a solar powered energy supply (worldwide) is 50 years, too long to prevent much of the coming climate change but better than doing nothing. A changeover in 20 years is probably possible. (A small Danish island did it in 10.) Buildings use one-third the total energy in the United States, two-thirds of the electricity. Efficient new (or retrofitted) buildings save 70-90% of this energy, and with solar collectors on their walls or roofs produce more daytime electricity than they use. Dispersed electric generation is much cheaper than the current centralized system. Efficient retrofitting means replacing windows with more energy efficient ones, super insulating, using daylight for lighting office spaces, and using more efficient lights, office equipment, heating and cooling equipment, perhaps in some climates replacing air handling equipment with building designs that exploit the natural bouyancy of air. Replacing all the electric motors and lights in the United States with efficient ones would save half the United States’ electricity production. If investment focused on reducing energy use (say, if utilities were allowed to profit from some of the energy saved), the United States after 20 years (the time between renovations) would use 10-25% of the energy it now uses to produce the same value of national income. Reducing energy use by 75% is not technically difficult, but would require public policies that more or less guaranteed the new investments. Reducing energy use also speeds up the time it takes to replace fossil fuelled with solar energy, since so much less energy is required.

Using that much less energy makes renewable resources look good. Back-of-the-envelope calculations from the 1980s indicate that covering suitable roofs and walls of houses in Britain with solar collectors would supply most of Britain’s daytime electricity needs. (That is, Britain’s needs at that time: not needs that were 75-90% less.) More generally, it is thought that surfaces of buildings in industrial countries could generate 15-50% of the countries’ electricity needs; or all of them, with energy use reduced 90%. Putting collectors on the roofs of buildings in the United States, much of which is quite sunny, would supply more than the United States’ daily electricity needs. If energy use fell by 75%, such collectors would provide 3 times the power we need. Some fossil-fueled or nuclear power would be necessary to provide so-called base-line power, but only about 5% of what we have now (which would provide 25-50% of total electricity needs). Reducing energy use so much makes many thing possible. About 9% of California’s current electricity supply comes from the wind; that is somewhat more than 35% of what would be needed if electricity use fell by 75%. Reducing home heating and cooling by better insulation and design shifts part of the energy costs of heating and cooling to insulation manufacturers. But the energy embodied in an efficient house equals 50 years of heating, rather than 3 to 5 years, as now. (This is better than the past: in 1850 a farmhouse in the colder parts of the United States burned the equivalent of the wood that went into it every year.)

Another reason for hope is that a similar approach would also make a non-toxic economy profitable. The European Union’s classifying of carpet remnants as toxic waste (thus increasing disposal fees) made the Steelcase Company invent a non-toxic, recyclable carpet (no waste, period). Increasing dumping fees increased the recycling of materials from house demolitions in Denmark from 12% to 82% of the total (4% is the average in industrial countries). Developing non-toxic materials would mean transforming another aspect of the industrial system, and another immensely profitable enterprise, if government policy guaranteed the regulations for the lifetime of the investment. With forward looking policies (tweaking the market), the goal of capitalist effort would be zero net carbon emissions and a chemical industry based on nonaccumulating, recyclable and biodegradable materials. Taxes on labor, income and investment (high tax rates on investment require high rates of return) would slowly be replaced by taxes on climate change gases, non-renewable fuels, air traffic, pesticides, toxic chemicals (dioxins, benzene, bromine, chlorine), nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, irrigation water, loss of topsoil, newly cut timber, aquifer depletion, landfill waste. As the cost of labor fell, businesses could hire more workers to remanufacture products, close the loops in material flows (so one company’s waste becomes another’s raw material), save energy, change raw materials and manufacturing processes.

The last reason for hope is a line on a graph. The problem of growth in capitalist societies may be insoluble. Reducing the energy and materials needed for a modern lifestyle, making them nontoxic, and leaving room for the natural world to operate, helps. For the rest, since capitalist societies to become more and more skewed in income over time, redistributing income may be necessary for democratic institutions to survive. Perhaps growth in wealth will become self-limiting. Growth in population is another matter. Growth in wealth may help: no country in the world with a per capita income over $5000 has a fertility rate much above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Some writers think the current global fertility rate of 2.7 children per woman is an all time low. In our agricultural-industrial world, family size depends on infant mortality (that is, on health care and diet); the status of women (whether they have status as individuals or as childbearers, whether they can control their incomes, their fertility and their destinies); education; and (perhaps) on industrialization, which makes children a financial liability rather than an economic asset. If every woman had one child, world population would fall from 6.3 billion people now to 1.6 billion by 2100. If she had two children, or slightly fewer than two, population would also fall, but more slowly. That slow transition to a world population of 1-2 billion would be more manageable. That line on the graph is another reason for hope.


Who Are We? What Are We? Where Are We Going?


In the years about the turn of the nineteenth century came three great paintings dealing with our relations to the natural world. By then fossil-fueled civilisation had consolidated its hold on daily life and life had become much more comfortable. The paintings are Georges Seurat’s Un Dimarche a la Grande Jatte, Paul Gaugin’s D’ou Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Ou Allons Nous?, and Henri Matisse’s Calme, Luxe and Volupte. These paintings show people at ease in an idealized nature. The idea of the protected space of the garden is ancient. Here, the world has become a garden. Any idea of a human relationship with nature is of course a human construction. “Nature” is a human idea. But it pleases us to think of the world as benign (why else live?) and to construct human landscapes that fit a benign world. It would be hard to survive in a world that was always inimical. (So even the Inuit live, and regard their world as hospitable.) I argue that for the garden to work, it must shade into wilderness. (So there are mountain lions in the garden and the ideal landscape is perhaps more that of Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.) Contrary to popular opinion, the end of growth is the beginning of hope.

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I end with notes for a web site:


There are 5 billion chickens in the United States at any one time. Feathers are a major waste product of the chicken industry. Circuit boards made from chicken-feather keratin (a waxy substance in the feathers), coated with soybean resin, have a lower die-electric constant than standard boards, which are made from virgin plastics and coated with petroleum-based hydrocarbons. Chicken-feather boards can switch signals faster and support faster processing speeds.


Chickens turn calcium carbonate into eggshells at body temperature. Shellfish make calcium carbonate materials harder than cement at 40º Fahrenheit. Spiders spin silk stronger than kevlar at ambient temperatures. People manufacture portland cement by heating limestone to 2700º Fahrenheit and make Kevlar from petroleum-based molecules boiled at several hundred degrees Centigrade in pressurized sulfuric acid. Chicken eggshells, shellfish shells and spider webs are all biodegradable, and their manufacture, as far as is known, does not use hazardous chemicals. Can new manufacturing techniques mimic these processes?


Twenty-two million tons of food waste are landfilled in the United States each year. Bacteria have been used to turn it into a biodegradable plastic polymer. The yield of polymer is about 20% of the weight, so the process would produce about 4.5 million tons of polymer a year. To this feedstock could be added the many millions of tons of slaughterhouse waste currently reprocessed into animal feed. (Thirty percent of commercial cattle feed consists of reprocessed animal fats. Cows are no longer supposed to be fed cows, but they are fed pigs and chickens, which are fed cows, and mistakes are made. Such high-tech cannibalism gave us mad cow disease. Some European cattle feed in the 1980s may have contained human bodies, which are often only partly burned when put into the Ganges River, where their flesh is eaten by turtles.)

Food waste and slaughterhouse waste could also be composted, or processed into fuels. Steaming organic matter (food waste, landfill waste) under low pressure with a citric acid catalyst produces a fuel, heat, which can be recycled into the process, and biochar, a charcoal that greatly increases the productivity of agricultural soils.


Ethyl lactate made from fermented corn starch can replace many dangerous and polluting volatile organic compounds. It is cost-competitive with existing paints, paint thinners, glues, inks, dyes and circuit-board cleaners (such as di-chloroethylene and tri-chloroethylene, major pollutants of much U.S. ground water). Ethlyl lactate breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. It is a much better use for corn than distilling it into fuel.

Agricultural oils may find similar uses. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons produced by tire wear (40,000 tons per year in the United States) that form a haze over Los Angeles freeways derive from the petroleum-based oils used to make the tires. Tires made from plant-based oils (jojoba, soybean, cottonseed, hazelnut) might eliminate these hazardous chemicals, though this has not yet been shown. Jojoba is an oilseed shrub that grows in the desert without irrigation. (If irrigated, it can be irrigated with salty water.) Using less material lets us return to a carbohydrate-based chemical industry, from a petrochemical-based one.


Do we need the chemistry of chlorine? No, but changing the stream of chemical manufacturing processes of which it is a part would be a major headache. Approximately 1% of chlorine is used to disinfect water. Adding chlorine to water for the purpose of disinfection creates a whole family of chlorinated hydrocarbons, from the reaction of chlorine with organic molecules in the water. Many of these chemicals are cancer promoting or mutagenic; some mimic human hormones. Treating water with ultra-sound, ozone, and untraviolet light disinfects it without creating hazardous compounds. Polyoxymetalate can be used to bleach paper. It works as well as chlorine. The chemical is easily regenerated from the waste stream for reuse. Using a polyoxymetalate bleaching process lets paper mills increase the recycling of their process water and saves half their use of electricity. Modern paper mills produce essentally no effluent and use very little new water (some evaporates in the paper-making process). Nontoxic, soybean based inks that float off waste paper in a warm water bath are collected and reused. Limiting their water use lets paper mills locate in cities near their suppliers and markets, use a feedstock of urban waste paper, and save many dollars and millions of gallons of fuel in delivery costs. (The annual production of cellulose from waste paper in New York City amounts to 50-100% of that harvested from the forests of Brazil.)

Citus-based solvents, made from orange peels, and materials like ethyl lactate can adequately replace chlorine-based solvents. Cleaning with mild soap and water has been successfully used to replace dry-cleaning fluids. Dry-cleaning fluids like tetra-chloroethylene, a neurotoxin and carcinogen, are ubiquitous in North American water and food supplies.


Placing 6 foot tall concrete bat boxes in clearings formerly occupied by tropical forest in Costa Rica attracts bats. The roosting bats drop seeds of forest plants in their manure (5-20 times as many seeds as in clearings without bat boxes). The plants that grow, especially the fast growing pioneer plants, provide cover for mammals, birds and insects that disperse more seeds. Replanting a forest this way is much cheaper and more efficient than replanting one using human labor.


Tuberculosis hospitals in Lima, Peru, with large windows and high ceilings had better air circulation than hospitals with mechanical ventilation systems. Especially in warm climates, passive airflow systems (which depend on the building’s design), with roofed outdoor walkways and waiting rooms, may be preferable to mechanically ventilated closed systems.


The Steelcase Company recently invented a compostable upholstery fabric. Their reason for inventing it was the designation by the European Union of textile mill trimmings as hazardous waste. Disposal of the trimmings was going to cost the company considerably more than previously. The new fabric contains no mutagens, carcinogens or heavy metals. Its manufacture generates no toxic waste. Manufacturing costs for the material are less than for fabrics that use standard, hazardous materials. (An added benefit is that users of the fabric do not accumulate toxic chemicals through their skins.) The carpet is completely recyclable and can be remanufactured with little energy input indefinitely. The company leases its floor coverings. The manufacturing process allows it to renew the leased material at little cost to itself.

A tax on pollutants sends a clear, long-term signal.


Melting mixed plastics produces a weak, unstable material. Pulvering mixed plastics in a ball mill under pressure in the presence of carbon dioxide breaks the plastics up sufficiently at a molecular level to let the molecules recombine. The hybid polymer yields a homogeneous melt that can be formed into durable new plastics. Is this is a temporary solution for mixed plastics in the landfill, another side-trip on plastics’ long journey into oblivion; or a way to reconstitute plastics indefinitely?


Concrete production produces 5-8% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide globally. (Twenty percent of China’s production: China is now the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases). Geopolymer concrete (E-crete) produces 10-20% of the greenhouse gases associated with the production of portland concrete. Adding alkali to silicates and aluminates derived from fly ash and slag (waste products of coal burning and steel production), plus gravel and sand, makes E-concrete. Unlike portland concrete, no carbon dioxide is produced during polymerization. No heating is required to produce the raw materials, which are waste products—though heat went into producing them originally. Geopolymer concrete is more porous than regular concrete, hardens faster, is more resistant to acid, fire and microbial attack.


Beer bran, a byproduct of brewing beer from barley, adsorbs hazardous organic molecules, such as benzene and tri-chloroethylene. Beer bran is a waste product. The activated charcoal usually used as a filter requires heating coal to 900º Centigrade.


Tomato sauce can be extracted from crushed tomatoes using a semipermeable membrane (so-called reverse osmosis technology). The process uses 30 times less energy than heat reduction. The sauce tastes better and has more nutritional value. (In general concentrating foods using direct osmosis rather than heat uses 95% less energy and produces foods of better nutritional value.)

Direct osmosis can also be used to desalinate water. Windmills could mechanically drive reverse osmosis desalination plants and pump the fresh water ashore. This would not require converting the wind power to electricity. The stream of salty waste water can be processed using rapid spray evaporation. Salt water is sprayed as a fine mist into a heating vessel. The salt falls to the floor, the vapor is condensed to pure water. The cost is of rapid spray evaporation is one-third that of regular desalination and virtually all the brine stream can be converted into fresh water and salt. (The brine stream, a polluting byproduct of desalination plants, is usually released into the sea, where it damages the flora and fauna of the seafloor.)


Titanium dioxide solar cells are currently 33% efficient, approximately double that of solid-state silicon (the current standard). They are transparent. Their cost is not that much more than glass.


Methane digesters can be used to compost food waste. The extracted methane can be burned to generate electricity and the compost sold as fertiliser. This process does not decrease the global warming effect of the methane but burning it to produce electricity replaces the burning of other fuels. (The carbon dioxide and methane in landfills are recyclable: they come from renewable sources.) Food waste normally goes into landfills, which are currently the largest single source of methane in the United States. The contents of old landfills can also be put through methane digesters. In time, the one trillion aluminum cans old landfills contain (a year’s supply of aluminum ingot, worth $21 billion) will make them worth mining.

Shallow landfills can be used as digesters in place. The landfill is capped with two impervious (low permeability) layers of clay, with a permeable layer of sand between. The methane trapped beneath the lower level of clay is extracted and used to generate electricity. The carbon dioxide extracted from the landfill gas is pumped back into the permeable layer at slightly above atmospheric pressure to keep oxygen from being drawn into the landfill as methane is drawn out. This keeps the production of methane up. (The methane production process is anaerobic.)

Processing the 200 million tons of manure confined animals produce annually in the United States in a methane digester makes electricity, a non-smelly liquid fertiliser, and processed solids for sale as a soil amendment. The anaerobic digestion process is sensitive to the properties of the feedstock (its temperature, liquidity, alkinality, pH, carbon-to-nitrogen ratio) and so must be properly overseen. Keeping animals in confinement is not something anyone except the owners of the facility should favor, but this a is a good way to dispose of their manure.


Texas Instruments built a green chip factory in Dallas, Texas, for 30% less per square foot than a conventional one. Water usage is 35% percent less, electricity usage 20% less. The lower costs make it competitive with plants in China or Singapore. (Do they clean their circuit boards with steam, ethyl lactate, or trichloroethylene?)


It would cost $23 billion a year to turn 10% of every region on earth into a national park. This figure includes land purchase and staffing costs. (It may be too low.)


A petrochemical plant covering 300 acres, with some additional acreage in natural gas production facilities and pipelines, can produce the fiber grown on 600,000 acres of cotton. A tempting idea, since cotton grown conventionally is destructive of both soils and landscape. But the petrochemical industry has left us an overwhelming legacy of pollution. Hemp, bamboo and sweet gum are much less demanding fiber crops than cotton. Perhaps there are non-polluting ways to manufacture synthetic fibers.


With a 17-year cutting rotation, tree plantations for railway fuel in India would occupy 20 acres per mile of track. This constitutes a band about 200 feet deep along 80% of the track on one side. Approximately 5-10% of that acreage in photo-voltaic panels would also work.


Organic vegetable soups have 6 times the salicyclates of conventional vegetable soups. Pests feeding on the organically-grown plants stimulates them to secrete salicyclates. (In general, crop plants like potatoes can lose a third of their leaf area without reducing yields.) Salicyclates (aspirin is one) are anti-inflammatories and anti-oxidents. They help prevent heart attacks, strokes, several cancers and may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Similarly, organic tomato ketshup contains 2 to 3 times the cancer-fighting lycopenes of non-organic ketchup. Temporary shortages of nutrients (as occur in organic agriculture) may also stimulate the production of anti-oxidants in plants.


A fleet average of 40 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks would save over a billion barrels of oil in the U.S. annually, more than we now import from the Persian Gulf. Cutting the speed limit to 55 miles per hour would let the present fleet save the same amount of oil.


Cars running on compressed air can go 200 miles at 30 miles per hour and refuel in three minutes at a cost of $2.50 . Of course, faster speeds reduce the car’s range.


Human urine makes up about 1% of the volume of waste water flow, but contains 80% of its nitrogen and 45% of its phosphorus. Urine could replace a quarter of the commercial fertiliser currently used for crop production. Removing 50-60% of the urine in waste water would turn sewage treatment plants into net producers of energy. With fewer nutrients in the water, microbes in the aeration tanks turn the remaining nitrogen and phosphorus into biomass much more quickly and efficiently. The biomass formed is richer and generates more methane (the source of the plant’s energy) in the anaerobic digesters. The transit time of the waste water through the plant is much reduced.

Urine separation toilets separate out urine and store it in tanks until it is collected and taken away to be converted to fertiliser. Such toilets require replumbing existing waste-water systems. Separating the urine from the waste water flow itself would be simpler. Low-flush toilets reduce the volume of waste water and toilets with separate flushes for urine and for solids reduce it further. This helps concentrate the urine. Once solids have been settled out, reverse osmosis membranes might further concentrate the urine. Then the urine-water mix is cooled until it is half frozen. Water freezes preferentially out of the mixed fluid. Water freezes as a pure substance, expelling other molecules from its crystal lattice, so most of the fertilising elements remain in the liquid fraction, which is then decanted and reacted with magnesium oxide to produce struvite, an ammonium phosphate fertiliser.

One of the best uses for partially treated wastewater is for irrigation. One-tenth of the world’s irrigated crops are grown with partially treated wastewater. The crops use the nutrients in the urine and the water is cleaned during its passage through the soil. Excess water moves as groundwater flow into streams or percolates into the soil, where it maintains groundwater levels. Such waters should not contain industrial waste (as they usually do). Unless further cleaned, such waters should not be used on vegetable crops.


Nanoparticles of iron seem to catalyze the breakdown of chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylene. If so, they could be used to decontaminate soil or ground water. (Bacteria recently isolated from sewage also break down the chloroethylenes. Chloroethylenes are neurotoxins and carcinagens now common in soils and drinking water.)


A cheap molecular sieve of zeolites will filter carbin dioxide from the exhause gases of power plants. The gas can be pumped into depleted oil wells, or reacted with magnesium oxide to create building blocks and the filter reused. But even at present prices, photovoltaic electricity is probably cheaper than that produced by coal burning plants that have to sequester their carbon dioxide. Solar panels may also be more efficient, as much of the energy in the coal is used up in its mining, transportation and burning (about half in modern plants). The recapture of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and carbon dioxide and the proper disposal of fly ash (perhaps in E-crete) would add to this.


Raising cattle sustainably in Montana raised the profits of the ranchers over 20%. The cattle were raised on grass and given antibiotics only when they were sick.


There are 5 billion acres of currently degraded soils on the planet (more than 5 times the current cropland of the United States: degraded by human use). Revegetating them (perhaps farming them with perennial crops) could absorb most of the carbon dioxide now emitted by human activity. In the dry Sahel, for instance, acacia trees encouraged by local farmers form a virtuous circle. The trees add carbon and nitrogen to the soil. They provide shade and forage for cattle. More cattle mean more manure for the fields and better crop yields. More land can then be used for the trees (which in this case remove carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming). In California pasturelands, grass grows better under native blue oaks and cattle prefer to graze there. Cattle also eat the oak seedlings, which must be protected if the trees are to regenerate. Modern farmers do not allow trees in their fields or pastures.


Injecting an appropriate mix of bacteria into sewers reduces odor and digests 50% of the solids before they reach the treatment plant. This clever idea uses the sewers as an extension of the plant.


Approximately 1.4 million pounds of human hair contained in mesh pillows (so the hair could be easily retrieved) would have soaked up the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in a week. (Barbershops in the City of London produce several times that in a year.) Exxon spent $2 billion on a high-tech cleanup which further damaged the environment and recovered 12% of the oil.


Selling 10% of the straw from wheatfields in Oregon as a feedstock for non-toxic paper pulp raised the earnings of the farmers by 25-50%. The rest of the straw is left as a stubble mulch. The effuent from the paper mill that processes the straw can be used as a fertiliser.


Land contaminated with cadmium and zinc can be cleaned up by cultivating a flowering brassica, a subspecies of Thlassi caerulescens, which accumulates the metal in its tissues (stems, leaves, flowers). After harvest, the plants are dried and burned and the metals recovered from the ash.


Radiation will kill food-borne pathogens like salmonella in chicken and ground beef; so will the anti-oxidants found in dried plums.


Miners removed 700 tons of gold from the California hills during the 1850s and 1860s, using 7000 tons of mercury to do this. (Mercury attracts finely divided gold. Woolen mats soaked with mercury were used to pick up particles of gold in crushed ore.) Much of the mercury ended up in San Francisco Bay, where 150 years later it makes the fish unsafe to eat. The level in the fish is falling and will probably reach a safe level in another 50 years. So contamination is not forever. (Size, sedimentation, bacterial action, dilution have helped heal the bay.) New Haven harbor on Long Island Sound however is still however too toxic for benthic organisms. This probably is related to the concentration of metal-working industries in Connecticut in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the continuing transport of metals from the rivers to the harbor. The larvae of polychaete worms settle, but as soon as they bore into the mud and ingest the sediment they die.

Environmental damage may occur abruptly and be irreversible: thresholds are crossed, buffering capacities exceeded, ecosystem resilience lost. Without warning, moose populations flip to a lower level, water plants disappear from estuaries, jellyfish and algal blooms replace striped bass and oysters. Since the new states are stable, such changes can be hard to reverse. Basic ecosystem services such as purifying the air, cleaning the water, maintaining the carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere, decomposing wastes, filtering untraviolet light out of the solar spectrum, providing sources of new medicines or new knowledge, permitting recovery from natural disturbances, are not tradeable for economic gain, at least not by any economy grounded in reality. There are few trade-offs in most human interference with the natural environment: only losses. Mines leach heavy metals and other toxic compounds essentially forever, unless their drainage waters are filtered (forever) by men. The economic users of an environment need economic signals of the harm they are doing. Thus—one way or another—farmers and homeowners should pay if they deplete rivers or groundwaters, trawlers pay for the damage they cause to the seabed, and chemical companies pay for the damage their products cause. Putting a realistic cost on environmental damage would make much of it cease immediately. Taxes on pollutants like mercury provide a clear long-term signal of social intent. So the recovery of San Francisco Bay from massive mercury contamination, even after 200 years, is a hopeful sign. (A variety of E. coli has been engineered to take up mercury. It could be used to clean up waste water streams or polluted waterways.)



In the United States and Canada 10-15 million tons of salt are spread on roads annually. According to a 1987 study, each ton does $1400 of damage to roads and bridges. It also increases the saltiness of surface waters. This becomes a problem if the water is a source of drinking water. It is also a problem for aquatic organisms. Digesting whey (a diary waste) with bacteria to produce acetate, and combining the acetate with limestone makes calcium magnesium acetate, a nontoxic, noncorrosive salt substitute that can be sprayed on roads in advance of storms. A new process makes calcium magnesium acetate more competitive in cost with salt, but it still costs considerably more. Looking at the whole costs of road maintenance would make the new material affordable. (It was probably affordable in 1987, at $1200 a ton, but states and localities paid for the salt, the federal government for road and bridge repairs.)


Electricity can be extracted from hot rocks 5 kilometers down at a rate of about 25 megawatts per cubic kilometer of granite for about 20 years. (Then the rocks must be let reheat.) Pumping water through the rocks uses about 20% of the power produced. There is sufficient geothermal heat within 10 kilometers (4 miles) of the earth’s surface in the United States to provide all the 27 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity the United States used in 2005 for the next 2000 years. Such drilling distances are well within modern limits. Of course the energy is renewable.


Yam beans from the American tropics yield 35 to 70 tons of plant per acre. A crop fixes about 50 tons of nitrogen per acre per year. After rotenone (a natural pesticide) is extracted from the seeds, they can be pressed for oil, and the oil cake, similar to soybean meal, fed to pigs. All parts of the plant are edible. Its roots keep without refrigeration. It will grow in poor, dry soil. It is traditionally grown in Mexico along with corn and beans.


In the late 1990s the Danish island of Samsoe won a contest for Denmark’s “renewable energy island.” Winning was the result of a plan put together by an engineer who didn’t live on the island but thought that its small size and steady winds would make it a good candidate. No prize monies or economic incentives came with the prize but one island resident became interested in the idea and found the money to fund a position for himself to develop the project. Also at the same time, the Danish government passed a law requiring electric utilites to offer producers of wind power 10 year contracts at a fixed rate. Under such contracts the cost of the turbines was usually paid off in 8 years.

The changeover to renewable energy on Samsoe was created by this one man, who talked his neighbors into thinking renewable energy was a good idea. After the start, thinking about how to use renewable energy (and make money at it) became a game. The island now produces more renewable energy than it uses, mostly from large wind turbines owned by the islanders or other investors, also from small backyard turbines, photo-voltaic panels, and rooftop hot water heaters. Heat and hot water in several of the small villages (Samsoe has 4300 inhabitants) is provided by furnaces that burn straw and (in one case) wood chips). The residents of Samsoe still use fossil fuels in their cars, tractors and trucks but the island as a whole produces more renewable energy than it uses in renewable and fossil fuelled energy combined. (A few farmers press diesel—or salad oil—from canola seeds, a major oilseed crop in Europe.) Samsoe did not make any attempt to save energy during the conversion and energy use is now the same, or perhaps slightly greater, than before.

Like the American Middle West, Samsoe is a radically simplified human habitat, lacking much of its original mammalian, avian, amphibian, insect and fishy life. Leaching of nutrients into groundwater, streams and estuaries is a major problem, as is overfishing in the surrounding seas. However nothing stops the island from going further and trying to become a sustainable landscape. The flat sandy fields of Holland and Denmark were long maintained with leaf mold, crop rotation, rock powders and manure. Land to protect streams and estuaries and for wildlife can be set aside, as can undersea habitat.

Like Samsoe, the United States could remake its energy environment. It would take guaranteed contracts for renewable electricity production for periods somewhat longer than the time needed to pay off the investment, new long distance power lines, much solar thermal investment in the West and Southwest, solar electric panels and water heaters on private walls and roofs. Besides that, buildings that use 50-75% less energy, electric motors and appliances that use 25-50% less energy, and cars that get 150-200 miles per gallon (all of this built of nontoxic materials) are not a bad idea. Whether we can stop global warming or construct a sustainable landscape isn’t clear but we can quickly reduce our carbon footprint.


On the dry eastern slopes of the Casacade Mountains in Oregon the United States Forest Service is trying to restore forests that have been altered by logging, replanting and fire suppression into dense forests that are susceptible to drought, root diseases, insects and catastrophic fire. In this area, prior to 1900, frequent low-intensity fires had created open forests of sun-loving trees; ponderosa pine dominated the high desert forests, along with some sugar pine, western white pine, western larch and coastal Douglas fir. (The last is intermediate in shade tolerance; it will grow in some shade.) Early logging removed most of the big trees, low intensity fires were suppressed, and the open woodlands were invaded by the shade tolerant white fir, which formed thick stands. Some parts of the forest were replanted to plantation conifers, also thickly. The dense mid-level fir canopy, with some remaining large pines above it, provided ideal habitat for spotted owls, which colonized the area. But the new forest was overcrowded and unstable. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drought, an epidemic of budworm, root diseases (which spread easily in a crowded stand) and bark beetles killed most of the firs. Bark beetles also killed many of the ponderosa pines, which lose the vigor necessary to ward of insect attack in crowded stands. With so much fuel, a series of catastrophic wildfires burned large areas of the Sister’s Ranger District (91,000 acres of 324, 000 in the district burned in 1991). The Sister’s Ranger District then came up with a plan to restore the original, fire-resistant old growth forests. Most of the dead trees were removed (4 to 13 were left per acre for wildlife); all large, healthy pines and larches (the sun-loving trees) were left; and as much fir as possible was removed. The amount of fir that could be removed was constrained by the need to provide habitat for the spotted owls, a protected species. Large firs were left along with the large pines and larches, whose numbers were too few to make a sufficiently dense stand. Some mid-level fir stands were left amidst the taller sun-loving trees for the owls. The thicker stands were surrounded by the more open historical forest of old growth pines, which is now maintained by cutting and low-intensity fires. High-intensity fires that invade the fir stands die down when they reach the surrounding open forest. The mid-level fir canopy regenerates quickly and will be rotated through the whole area. This likely mimics the natural situation, since ideal owl habitat consists of regenerating old growth woodland. This new woodland, neither completely historical, nor what the forest developed into with cutting and without fire, will produce sawtimber, poles, pulpwoods and fuelwood. Some of the clearing does not produce a profit and has been contracted out to prison labor; volunteer organizations also take part. A major purpose of the management is to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire and make the surrounding area safer for human settlement.


Further north, also on the dry side of the Cascades, in southern British Columbia, open pondersosa pine forests with an undergrowth of bunch grasses and forbs slowly filled in with Douglas fir during the twentieth century, as the low intensity fires that maintained the stands were suppressed. The fires had been set by the Lilloet First Nations people, a Salish tribe that had historically burned the woods to regenerate collected foods (huckleberry, raspberry, glacier lily, wild onion, spring beauty, buffalo berry, service berry) and to increase forage for mule deer. This dry, warm woodland (July temperatures average 75º F.) had 5-40 ponderosa pines per acre. The low intensity fires also allowed trees growing on moist sites (red cedar and paper birch, along with many shrubs and herbs important to wildlife) to survive. (High intensity fires would have killed these trees.) So the fires also maintained variety in the woodland. When the fires were suppressed, the woods filled in with young conifers (up to 500 trees per acre) and in the late twentieth century large areas began burning catastrophically, destroying houses and threatening nearby towns. Now an attempt is being made to restore the historical old growth forest. Most fires in western North America are started by lightening but lightening is uncommon in this part of British Columbia. Studies of fire scars on trees showed that fires burned at 5-10 year intervals for the last 400 years. These fires were almost certainly set by the Lilloets or their predecessors. No one knows when the process started. The forest may have been continuously manipulated by people from the time of its establishment after the retreat of the glaciers. (One suspects this is how the scrub oak barrens, habitat of heath hens in New England, arose.) Burning of the herbaceous cover to renew it would have let only the fire-resistant pines survive. The goal of restoration is not the forest of a golden age, but a healthy, vigorous woodland adapted to today’s world. (In north temperate landscapes, the golden age from the beginning included people, with their spears and firesticks.)





I want to avoid proposing one of those totalitarian utopias in which people walk, take public transportation, drink tap water instead of soda, and borrow a communal car now and then for a trip to the country— those utopias so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so terrible when put into operation. Of course I do end up proposing one. The engineering ideas of the hypercar, if applied to the vehicles of public transportation, would multiply their beneficial effects several-fold (in some calculations, by 10 times). In other words, energy efficient public transportation, in cities where public transportation worked—that is, where zoning encouraged mixed development and dense human settlement along transportation corridors, and where bus lines, light rail lines, and subsidized taxi services put everyone within reach of public transportation—would save even more energy and materials than a fleet of very efficient cars, one for every 1.5 persons. In terms of public monies, sudsidizing public transportation is much cheaper than subsidizing private cars. Depending on how you calculate it, the current public subsidy for cars in the United States is several hundred billion dollars annually (including things like road resurfacing, drilling subsidies for oil companies, military operations to protect oilfields). And in general what consumers pay directly for public transporation (their personal outlay: this is a political decision) is less than the cost of purchasing and maintaining a car. It is probably close to the cost of maintaining a car (gas, insurance, tires, oil changes, brake jobs). Of course those freeways and car repair shops represent jobs; many, many jobs if one traces the chain back to the manufacturers of steel, aluminum, plastics and concrete, and forward to the car dealers, insurance agencies, motor vehicle bureaus and banks. Public transportation is also a source of jobs, with its own construction, financing and maintenance streams.

People like me are run over by events. While writers like me speculate about what should be done, things take their course. It now seems most probable that world oil production will peak early in the third millennium (2010? 2020?). If demand is sufficient, production will be maintained, but at steadily rising cost. When the cost becomes too great, production of oil will fall. If the oil geologist Hubbert is right, the great bulk of oil production will have occupied the century between 1950 and 2050. A rise in the real price of oil will reverse the trend of the previous 50 years. (That steady fall in the price of energy is what made Paul Ehrlich lose his bet to Julian Simon. Ehrlich bet that as the better deposits of metal ores were used up and poorer and poorer ones exploited, the price of the refined metal would rise. But thanks to lower and lower energy costs and advances in the refining process, that didn’t happen. In many ways, their bet—one betting on human ingenuity, one on the limits of the world—encompass the arguments in this book. Ehrlich was too prescient and he shouldn’t have bet on prices. But on what? The state of native fish stocks ? — not the price of fish in markets. The presence of working ecosystems?) As the real price of fuel rises, we may not need a tax to make cars more efficient, or public transportation more desireable. We may still need government fuel standards; Europeans now pay double or triple what Americans do for gasoline, have for the most part excellent public transportation systems, and still fill their roads with not-very-efficient cars. (But cars that are twice as efficient as ours.)

The end of oil doesn’t necessarily mean the end of our dependence on fossil fuels, since at present rates of consumption considerable natural gas and several hundred years of coal are left, but it gives one pause for thought. Perhaps, as some have argued, it would be better to use oil as a more or less recyclable lubricant, and coal and natural gas as feedstocks for a non-polluting, also recyclable chemical industry. This won’t happen soon. Perhaps some coal and oil should be left in place—a spiritual perspective, or a resource for future generations. Renewable energies are the only permanent sources of supply on earth, which is to say they will last us for the next 500 million years (one-eighth of the earth’s 4 billion years of evolutionary time), the span set for life on earth by the growing radiance of the sun. People not fond of the possibilities of renewable energy consider nuclear fusion, which, though not yet worked out technically, is currently the most long-term solution to the problem of obtaining large amounts of high-density energy. (Renewable sources like solar cells are so-called low density sources because they occupy a lot a space.) While supplies of uranium on earth are limited, nuclear fission could also carry us for some time, especially if we gave up our squeamishness over plutonium and used fast breeder reactors to process new fuel from old (and help solve the problem of radioactive waste). In the case of fusion power, estimates vary, but the deuterium in the oceans should last several thousand years at present rates of energy consumption. After deuterium, there is helium-3 from the moon. Our civilization’s dependence on energy is greatly underestimated. (People compare the Internet Revolution to the Industrial Revolution: but the Internet Revolution sits squarely amidst the warm houses and cheap energy supplies of the Industrial Revolution: one is a subset of the other.) Our world may simply collapse whencheap supplies of coal and oil collapse, as the Tiahuanaco people collapsed when their water supply failed.

Bringing the underdeveloped world to the living standards of the developed one means maintaining our present global rate of using energy and materials (with much higher rates in Asia and Africa, falling ones in Europe and the United States) but reducing the polluting effects of both. To maintain a livable world (about a third of the air pollution in Los Angeles now comes from China) energy use in the West has to fall by over 90%, and continue (like population) on a downward trend. The climate will still warm, but less. Continuing growth in energy use or population will obliterate any advantages of energy efficiency. (Using the internet now takes 10% of the U.S. electricity supply.) One of the advantages of photo-voltaic power is that energy supply can be integrated with human habitation—that is, put on the roofs of houses, in back yards, over parking lots. Separate structures and more land development aren’t needed. But if we want this new solar powered world, we have to grasp it, and not wait for the invisible hand of the market to give it to us, as energy prices (perhaps) rise, or as the costs of a changing climate and a polluted biosphere become clearer. Energy prices are unlikely to rise soon enough to avoid large and irreversable changes in both ecosystems and climate. Too much ultraviolet light will make much of the green and blue world uninhabitable by its present plants and animals, some populations of which have already collapsed, though in general climate change is less a problem for the biosphere than for us. Higher seas, more powerful rains and windstorms, longer and more severe droughts, rising or falling average temperatures will make much of the human infrastructure of the world obsolete. Chemical and nutrient pollution will make much of the landscape uninhabitable. If we continue to do nothing, we will lack the means or the will to deal with the unfolding catastrophe. Historically, societies like ours collapse at the height of their powers. Growth in population and wealth for us is over. This is not a bad thing. What we must do is provide a soft landing.

* * *

Against the backdrop of planetary evolution, our concerns for growth and riches seem petty. Mammalian extinctions peak every 2.5 million years, when the earth’s orbital geometries combine to produce a more strongly seasonal climate (harsh winters, hot dry summers), which makes survival difficult. Every 100,000-2,000,000 years a stony asteroid 1-2 kilometers in diameter strikes the earth. Dust from the collision and soot from widespread fires dim the sun, slowing or halting photosynthesis and cooling the climate worldwide. About once every 50 million years a nearby supernova explosion bathes the eath in sufficient X-ray radiation to kill most vertebrates (the microbial world remains undisturbed). But in 500 million years the increasing brightness of the sun will make the earth too hot to inhabit. As the increasing radiance of the sun evaporates the oceans, hot fierce winds will sweep their water into the stratosphere, from where it will be lost to space. One billion years from now increasing temperature will have made the earth lifeless.


Bibliography

This book depends almost entirely on secondary sources. It is not a work of original scholarship or a reasoned argument so much as a pastiche of examples and data that support the central place of nature in the human world. The stories that scientists tell change (some have changed while I have written this book); even data change. I have tried to be accurate and up-to-date. But in a decade someone may write a book that reaches similar conclusions with entirely different stories.

While I think footnotes are superfluous in a work of this sort, some parts of it are more dependent on others’ work than other parts. The description of rivers and salmon derive a good deal from David Montgomery’s King of Fish and Alice Outwater’s Water (both excellent books), the descriptions of western forests from Arno and Fiedler’s Mimicking Nature’s Fire, the logging rules for western forests from the work of Jerry Franklin. Other sections derive from many works: that on buffalo from the Buffalo Book, Buffalo Management and Marketing, Lives of Game Animals, Mammals of the Northern Great Plains, Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains, Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, Water, The World’s Water 2000-2001, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Bring Back the Buffalo, The Destruction of the Bison, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land; that on forests from The Work of Nature, Defining Sustainable Forestry, The Hidden Forest, Toward Forest Sustainability, Natural Capitalism, California Forests and Woodlands, Land Use and Watersheds, Deforesting the Earth, Americans and their Forests, Mimicking Nature’s Fire. Certain works I admired for their perfection as works of art (The Work of Nature by Yvonne Baskin) as well as for the information they contained. Many examples, facts, and factoids came from New Scientist, 1995-2008, others from Ecology and Ecological Applications (especially 1995-1997), some from Natural History (for instance, the story about the difficulties faced by the gray jay in the southern parts of its range), a few from The New York Review of Books and The New York Times (most of whose relevant articles were better reported in New Scientist). Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 opened a door in my mind and I.G.Simmons Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History pushed me through it. Some of the books listed contributed a single word to my essay, some a sentence, but all of them improved my understanding of the place of man in nature.

Journals
Ecology
Ecological Applications
Natural History
New Scientist
The New York Review of Books
The New York Times

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