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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