Our New World
Much of “The Natural History of the Present” looks back toward the America the Europeans found, the fragrant narcotic ‘natural world,’ even then much modified by its earlier human inhabitants, soon emptied of them by European diseases. Parts look forward to a new world where people once again let nature regain control. To look back to an ideal past is a very Western behavior: the Roman poet Hesiod looked back to a ‘golden age’ from his of iron, so did the Greeks, and the Christians (the Garden of Eden). A golden age formed one of the Hindu cycles of time. Are these memories of the hunter-gatherer life, when at certain seasons fish were there for the taking and at others fruit hung from the trees? We moderns look back to the golden days of childhood, a modern development, when in our memories, we spent long afternoons picking blackberries in the long grass. Audubon clearly saw the end of the golden age of the American wilderness coming. He regretted the loss of the great trees (he complained he never saw a ‘great tree’ in England). He built a sawmill on the banks of the Ohio to saw their trunks, then lost it in the cash squeeze of 1837. He took with his paints to the woods in the hope of other successes. He wrote admiringly of those men who were ‘civilizing’ their landscape by logging and clearing it. What other choice was there? The past is gone and the future may be less susceptible to change than we think. Like John Muir, Audubon had little connection to Native Americans, the true native ‘men of the woods.’
* * *
Plants and animals have always been long distance travelers. Now we move them from place to place by ship and plane. New plants whose chemistries the native insects and microorganisms find unpalatable or poisonous, and so don’t eat, may (as they lack predators, competition or parasites) take over ecosystems. Then, foodless, populations of native plants, animals and invertebrates decline. Native or alien plants and animals may become invasive in ecosystems degraded by logging, settlement, altered water tables or nutrient pollution. Such changes expand habitats for some organisms and shrink them for others. Thus high water tables have let monocultures of silver maple (a native tree) replace the mixed deciduous oakwoods along the regulated middle Mississippi, with the loss of many game animals and birds. White footed mice and white tailed deer have few predators in the fragmented woodlands of the suburban northeast, greatly increase in number, eat ornamental plants and bird food, infect each other (and the local human population) with Lyme disease and prevent regeneration of the forest. Alien plants and animals may take over if they find the habitat to their liking. If they lack competitors are not eaten by insects, microbes or vertebrates (thus lack parasites and predators), their populations are not controlled, and they do become part of the local food web (for instance, by being eaten by an insect which is eaten by a bird). Such organisms include purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil, Japanese knotweed, European wild boar. Some of them can probably be controlled by introducing insects specific to them; by encouraging their picking for profit (say, with loosestrife); or with hunting (open season on boar). Introducing insects is risky, since the insects themselves lack local microbial and insect predators, may find other plants to their liking and their populations grow out of control. If the attempt at control works, the introduced insects become food for local birds and insects and introduce the new plants into the local food web. Introduced diseases in trees, many of them fungi (blister rust in pines, phytophora in oaks, chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, beech decline), are essentially uncontrollable. So may be some introduced insects (perhaps wooly adelgid in Hemlocks and emerald ash borer). These introduced organisms will change the landscape, modifying forests and meadows as much as we, our grazing animals and our nutrients falling from the air. The chestnut blight of the early twentieth century perhaps changed northeastern forests the most by eliminating a common tree and a large and dependable supply of autumn carbohydrates, food for people, bears, deer, buffalo, squirrels, turkeys. Dutch elm disease changed the street profile of American cities from the tall, vase shaped American elms (100 feet high) to the fat stubby profile of Norway maples. After some hundreds of generations the insect and plants will find their populations coming under control as local insects and microbes adapt to them and they become part of the food chain. Some of the plants under attack (such as the American elm, which sets seed before being killed by the Dutch elm fungus) will develop resistance to their diseases. Elms in Europe suffered a catastrophic decline several thousand years ago but recovered. The problem is that plants, whose time between generations is years to decades, take much longer to adapt than most insects and microbes, with a generation time of weeks to minutes. The woods and meadows will adjust to the newcomers but will be different.
How to evaluate such change? In the near term, most such changes (climate shifts, new organisms, more nutrients) makes things worse. More nitrogen from the combustion of fossil fuels falling from the air tends to convert the perennial grasses of Middle Western prairies, whose roots transfer huge amounts of carbon to the soil, to annual grasses, whose carbon storage capacity is negligible. The long term is more difficult to evaluate. In the northeastern United States, Eurasian honeysuckle, distributed with autumn olive and rosa rugosa 50 years ago by state conservation departments to provide food and shelter for game birds, are now considered invasive. They are so in old fields (this was more or less the intention). Honeysuckle forms impenetrable clumps, used by as nesting and foraging sites by warblers and sparrows; their berries are eaten by migrating thrushes. Meadows are unnatural habitat in much of the northeast and the return of the forest would shade much of the honeysuckle out, though, its seeds spread by birds, honeysuckle would colonize openings in the forest left by falling trees or by logging, and so maintain itself in the ecosystem. Some insects feed on honeysuckle and butterflies nectar on it. By growing in openings, honeysuckle would compete with the native trees and herbs (early succession or sun loving species like white and yellow birch, pin cherry, oaks, the spring emphemerals of the forest floor, and the insects and other animals associated with them), that also colonize such openings and maintain the forest. Whether this is good or bad depends on how much the honeysuckle takes over and how it affects the regeneration of the forest. One could argue, for instance, that the silver maple monoculture along the Mississippi is undesirable from the point of view of a more complex ecosystem but there is little to do about it except plant oaks on higher ground as long as water tables remain artificially high. In the case of honeysuckle in the northeastern forest, some honeysuckle (not honeysuckle in every clearing) may simply add to its diversity and its variety of moths, birds and butterflies.
We have to face the question of how much we accept our new world. The survival of Pacific salmon along the northwest coast of North America is an example. Salmon numbers there have been dropping, partly from climate change, partly from dams, partly from degradation of spawning habitat in the rivers and tributary streams, partly from competition with introduced fish. On the Columbia River, introduced shad (introduced from the North American east coast) now are thought to make up most of the missing biomass of salmon, which are in serious decline. Shad were introduced in the early twentieth century and fished mainly for their roe, which was a favorite of eastern gourmands (the fish itself is also a spring delicacy in the northeast). Since the 1980s shad populations in the Columbia River have boomed. There is only so much food and space in the river and the ocean, for species that occupy similar niches: only so much fish of both can survive. Salmon populations are also affected by rising temperatures in the river and the ocean. These are likely to continue to rise, depressing salmon populations further. (Salmon will move north, into the rivers of the Arctic Ocean.) Dams don’t seem to bother shad, a more fragile fish (but one perhaps capable of more rapid reproduction than salmon, though salmon is a weedy fish, capable of rapid reproduction under favorable conditions). Dams can be modified to be more friendly to salmon and river flows adjusted, without sacrificing much of their power. Many other things can also be done for salmon. Ocean fishing, which catches salmon before they reach the river, and so prevents them from spawning, should be stopped (ocean fishing catches about 70% of some declining runs). All the hundreds of small spawning streams whose gravels have been silted in by logging and road construction should be restored by adding gravels, controlling erosion, planting trees, stream by stream. (A good work for a conservation corp of draftees.) Irrigation diversions should be screened so juvenile salmon don’t end up in cornfields, so many to the acre. The restoration of degraded river habitat may do more for restoring Columbia salmon than removing dams. (This varies from dam to dam: unnecessary dams or dams that produce little power or interfere too much with the life of salmon should undoubtedly go.) Thus we can probably have salmon and dams, within climatic limits. We will need some dams in the new solar powered world, to provide base line power and even out the variations in solar supply (the latter the worst use of dams, since the flows have little relation to natural ones, from the point of view of the fish). The Columbia is full of fish, just not those fish that were historically there. This state of affairs can be adjusted but probably not largely changed, especially considering the climatic changes we have put in motion. But improvement in the fish habitat in the river would make life better for everyone living in the river basin.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
More Grim Matters
More Grim Matters
We won’t know when we have passed the point of no return for a changing climate. Current changes are only apparent to butterflies, migratory birds, sea fish and gardeners. At some point, linear changes become catastrophic ones, as temperatures soar, winds howl and natural feedback processes take over. Perhaps one day we will be able to say it was when the earth passed 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide plus the carbon dioxide equivalent of other warming gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), perhaps 450 ppm. When feedback processes take over and climate change starts to accelerate, it’s out of our hands. (There are always dangerous, desperate measures.) The atmosphere now has a concentration of carbon dioxide plus carbon dioxide equivalents of 430 ppm (390 ppm Carbon dioxide, 50 ppm other warming gases). This is about 150 ppm above the ‘natural’ background of 280 ppm and 20 ppm below the predicted ‘tipping point’ of 450 ppm (an educated guess), at which point climate change becomes nonlinear. Essentially we are at the point where feedback processes (methane bubbling out of tundra pools, melting Arctic ice, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets) take hold.
Our economic lives have tremendous momentum. To decarbonize industrial infrastructure (turn carbon producing industry into photo-voltaics or nuclear power; create energy reductions on the scale needed) takes fifty years, if one replaces 2% of the carbon producing infrastructure every year. Fifty years is the time such energy shifts (from wood to coal, or coal and oil to electricity made from coal and oil) have taken in the past, under purely economic incentives. To insulate all buildings, replace inefficient motors, appliances, light bulbs, pipeline designs, inefficient industrial processes with efficient ones also takes time. Because doing all that involves using carbon based infrastructure (trucks, trains, mining machinery), and because the economy and population will continue to grow, the carbon content of the atmosphere is virtually certain to rise another 100-150 ppm before the changeover (whenever we start it) is complete. The climate system also has tremendous momentum and much warming is stored up in it but not yet expressed. With the best will in the world (turning the system around in, say 20 years), we’re in for a wild ride. But we haven’t yet started.
A grim outlook, perhaps: even if we save energy with more efficient houses, cars, light bulbs, electrify the economy with photo-voltaic panels or nuclear power (this saves the 60-70% of carbon wasted in converting fossil fuels to electricity, the 90% of it wasted in powering automobiles), stop overfishing the oceans, stop destructive farming practices, stop engaging in polluting industrial chemistries, give poor third world women more control over their lives so they limit the number of their children), the earth is still going to warm (4ºC? 9ºC?), sea level rise (3'? 7’? 80'?), rains beat down or fail, glaciers melt, reservoirs dry up, the oceans acidify, ocean currents slow. On the other hand, if we listen to the economic optimists and burn up all the available fossil fuels in the next 100-400 years (the speed of depletion depends on the rate of use), we will certainly see catastrophes: a temperature rise of 9-20ºC, collapsing forests, Arctic farms, a sea level rise of 80-400 feet (putting modern coastal settlements below the cleansing waves). The richest or best organized among us will be able to deal with the changes for a while. When fossil fuels are gone, so is easily obtainable energy, and unless a technological society capable of making solar voltaic panels, or solar thermal devices, and probably nuclear power plants, survives, the people at the tropical poles will live in a permanent stone age, growing some food, hunting animals, taking their hot baths in mineral springs at the edge of the sea.
* * *
Culture provides life with meaning. Science, part of culture, tells stories that explain the world. Without culture, we are reduced to eating, breathing, defecating, perhaps reproducing (but how to raise the children? Why bother?): the fate of stranded men like Robinson Crusoe. I write because I want to be part of the ongoing dialogue between people and their culture, people shop to define themselves in their culture (what they can afford, the objects they choose to buy), children are brought up in ways that conform or don’t conform to cultural norms. Culture defines our view of the future and the past. As a plains Indian remarked, when the buffalo were gone, life was over. His people defined themselves by their relationship to the buffalo; without buffalo, life became meaningless. Modern lives are defined by their place in the so-called meritocracy of rationalist western society and culture. Western material lives (hot running water, clean clothes, abundant food, nuclear weapons) are the product of that rationalist culture. We westerners live apart from nature in a man-made world of sidewalks, houses, cars. In a hunting and gathering culture people are seen as separate from nature (which they explain with different stories and which may be terrifying) but also as part of it. Such people are far better observers of their natural surroundings than we, and far better integrated with them. With the energy from fossil fuels, we have constructed a heated, well washed world apart from the messy chaotic natural world. So the scientist sits in his laboratory, the banker in his office, and paved roads penetrate the countryside. Our rationalist approach (together with fossil fuels) has let us understand the natural world in a way the hunter never would, though he understood his place in that world better than we. Our world is a mechanical one, of cars, roads, furnaces, fans (for instance, to move the mephitic air from cavernous chicken houses). In this world, nature for the most part is incidental, and put to use.
* * *
Empires collapse when they run out of resources, or when, through no fault of their own, those resources are compromised by nature herself. (A drying climate, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis are examples.) Many, perhaps most, empires expand their populations, their use of resources and their conquests of other lands with no thought of the future. To an extent, hunting and gathering bands may have done this too and so slowly forced each other into new habitats. Growth equaled success and human fertility let populations cope with great losses. Rome began to falter after it conquered the poorer agricultural peoples of northern Europe (Gaul, Britain, Germany). These new provinces, unlike the richer older civilizations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, did not return a profit—the cost of keeping them was more than the territories brought in. And soils near home wore out under a more and more capitalist exploitation. The Sumerian empire failed as its soils salted up from heavy summertime irrigation and as new lands to bring under irrigation ran out. (But the Sumerians lasted longer than the modern West has.) The Hohokum empire of southern Arizona faced the same problem and survived by rotating its fields on a ten year growing cycle. The Anasazi civilization of Chaco Canyon probably collapsed because of a long drought (the flowering of the civilization corresponded with a period of above average rainfall in the Southwest). The drought came after soils had been depleted by decades or centuries of continuous corn; and after the intensive cutting of pinion pine for firewood (for cooking and to fire pottery) and ponderosa pine for building timbers (for monumental shrines and dwellings) had changed the local ecosystems (removing some of their food resources) and accelerated sheet erosion on the uplands, preventing regeneration of the trees and increasing the likelihood of flooding and downcutting of streams.
The modern West has taken the whole world as its resource base. It is changing the atmosphere by its emissions; its rivers and coasts by dams, erosion and nutrient pollution; its soils by the relentless growing of cereal crops; the planet’s other organisms (frogs, dolphins, songbirds, tigers) by its pollutants and expansive settlement patterns. Driven by the search for profit, it does this essentially without a thought, shedding few tears of regret (growth is necessary, a platted suburb looks better than a messy meadow, you can see wonderful nature shows on TV). The human population continues to grow. While the current biomass of ants is greater, humans have the greatest biomass of any animal in their size class to occupy the earth. Perhaps more people are alive now than ever lived. This is a measure of our evolutionary success. Every successful plant or animal changes the planet. But few have changed it so greatly, or will take as much of it with them, as we.
We won’t know when we have passed the point of no return for a changing climate. Current changes are only apparent to butterflies, migratory birds, sea fish and gardeners. At some point, linear changes become catastrophic ones, as temperatures soar, winds howl and natural feedback processes take over. Perhaps one day we will be able to say it was when the earth passed 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide plus the carbon dioxide equivalent of other warming gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), perhaps 450 ppm. When feedback processes take over and climate change starts to accelerate, it’s out of our hands. (There are always dangerous, desperate measures.) The atmosphere now has a concentration of carbon dioxide plus carbon dioxide equivalents of 430 ppm (390 ppm Carbon dioxide, 50 ppm other warming gases). This is about 150 ppm above the ‘natural’ background of 280 ppm and 20 ppm below the predicted ‘tipping point’ of 450 ppm (an educated guess), at which point climate change becomes nonlinear. Essentially we are at the point where feedback processes (methane bubbling out of tundra pools, melting Arctic ice, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets) take hold.
Our economic lives have tremendous momentum. To decarbonize industrial infrastructure (turn carbon producing industry into photo-voltaics or nuclear power; create energy reductions on the scale needed) takes fifty years, if one replaces 2% of the carbon producing infrastructure every year. Fifty years is the time such energy shifts (from wood to coal, or coal and oil to electricity made from coal and oil) have taken in the past, under purely economic incentives. To insulate all buildings, replace inefficient motors, appliances, light bulbs, pipeline designs, inefficient industrial processes with efficient ones also takes time. Because doing all that involves using carbon based infrastructure (trucks, trains, mining machinery), and because the economy and population will continue to grow, the carbon content of the atmosphere is virtually certain to rise another 100-150 ppm before the changeover (whenever we start it) is complete. The climate system also has tremendous momentum and much warming is stored up in it but not yet expressed. With the best will in the world (turning the system around in, say 20 years), we’re in for a wild ride. But we haven’t yet started.
A grim outlook, perhaps: even if we save energy with more efficient houses, cars, light bulbs, electrify the economy with photo-voltaic panels or nuclear power (this saves the 60-70% of carbon wasted in converting fossil fuels to electricity, the 90% of it wasted in powering automobiles), stop overfishing the oceans, stop destructive farming practices, stop engaging in polluting industrial chemistries, give poor third world women more control over their lives so they limit the number of their children), the earth is still going to warm (4ºC? 9ºC?), sea level rise (3'? 7’? 80'?), rains beat down or fail, glaciers melt, reservoirs dry up, the oceans acidify, ocean currents slow. On the other hand, if we listen to the economic optimists and burn up all the available fossil fuels in the next 100-400 years (the speed of depletion depends on the rate of use), we will certainly see catastrophes: a temperature rise of 9-20ºC, collapsing forests, Arctic farms, a sea level rise of 80-400 feet (putting modern coastal settlements below the cleansing waves). The richest or best organized among us will be able to deal with the changes for a while. When fossil fuels are gone, so is easily obtainable energy, and unless a technological society capable of making solar voltaic panels, or solar thermal devices, and probably nuclear power plants, survives, the people at the tropical poles will live in a permanent stone age, growing some food, hunting animals, taking their hot baths in mineral springs at the edge of the sea.
* * *
Culture provides life with meaning. Science, part of culture, tells stories that explain the world. Without culture, we are reduced to eating, breathing, defecating, perhaps reproducing (but how to raise the children? Why bother?): the fate of stranded men like Robinson Crusoe. I write because I want to be part of the ongoing dialogue between people and their culture, people shop to define themselves in their culture (what they can afford, the objects they choose to buy), children are brought up in ways that conform or don’t conform to cultural norms. Culture defines our view of the future and the past. As a plains Indian remarked, when the buffalo were gone, life was over. His people defined themselves by their relationship to the buffalo; without buffalo, life became meaningless. Modern lives are defined by their place in the so-called meritocracy of rationalist western society and culture. Western material lives (hot running water, clean clothes, abundant food, nuclear weapons) are the product of that rationalist culture. We westerners live apart from nature in a man-made world of sidewalks, houses, cars. In a hunting and gathering culture people are seen as separate from nature (which they explain with different stories and which may be terrifying) but also as part of it. Such people are far better observers of their natural surroundings than we, and far better integrated with them. With the energy from fossil fuels, we have constructed a heated, well washed world apart from the messy chaotic natural world. So the scientist sits in his laboratory, the banker in his office, and paved roads penetrate the countryside. Our rationalist approach (together with fossil fuels) has let us understand the natural world in a way the hunter never would, though he understood his place in that world better than we. Our world is a mechanical one, of cars, roads, furnaces, fans (for instance, to move the mephitic air from cavernous chicken houses). In this world, nature for the most part is incidental, and put to use.
* * *
Empires collapse when they run out of resources, or when, through no fault of their own, those resources are compromised by nature herself. (A drying climate, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis are examples.) Many, perhaps most, empires expand their populations, their use of resources and their conquests of other lands with no thought of the future. To an extent, hunting and gathering bands may have done this too and so slowly forced each other into new habitats. Growth equaled success and human fertility let populations cope with great losses. Rome began to falter after it conquered the poorer agricultural peoples of northern Europe (Gaul, Britain, Germany). These new provinces, unlike the richer older civilizations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, did not return a profit—the cost of keeping them was more than the territories brought in. And soils near home wore out under a more and more capitalist exploitation. The Sumerian empire failed as its soils salted up from heavy summertime irrigation and as new lands to bring under irrigation ran out. (But the Sumerians lasted longer than the modern West has.) The Hohokum empire of southern Arizona faced the same problem and survived by rotating its fields on a ten year growing cycle. The Anasazi civilization of Chaco Canyon probably collapsed because of a long drought (the flowering of the civilization corresponded with a period of above average rainfall in the Southwest). The drought came after soils had been depleted by decades or centuries of continuous corn; and after the intensive cutting of pinion pine for firewood (for cooking and to fire pottery) and ponderosa pine for building timbers (for monumental shrines and dwellings) had changed the local ecosystems (removing some of their food resources) and accelerated sheet erosion on the uplands, preventing regeneration of the trees and increasing the likelihood of flooding and downcutting of streams.
The modern West has taken the whole world as its resource base. It is changing the atmosphere by its emissions; its rivers and coasts by dams, erosion and nutrient pollution; its soils by the relentless growing of cereal crops; the planet’s other organisms (frogs, dolphins, songbirds, tigers) by its pollutants and expansive settlement patterns. Driven by the search for profit, it does this essentially without a thought, shedding few tears of regret (growth is necessary, a platted suburb looks better than a messy meadow, you can see wonderful nature shows on TV). The human population continues to grow. While the current biomass of ants is greater, humans have the greatest biomass of any animal in their size class to occupy the earth. Perhaps more people are alive now than ever lived. This is a measure of our evolutionary success. Every successful plant or animal changes the planet. But few have changed it so greatly, or will take as much of it with them, as we.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Growth
Growth
Environmentalists and economists view the natural landscape differently. One sees it as something to be turned into saleable goods (grain, timber, furs, building lots), one sees it as something good in itself, connected to other ecosystems, and maintaining a growing, cyclical or simply varying state of biological production. Their differences are for the most part irreconcilable, despite recent attempts, over the last two or three decades, to place a dollar value on the work of nature. Farmland, a necessary use for most civilizations, provides a good example. In a growing agricultural society farmland, partly because of its extent, changes the natural environment considerably, reducing some species, increasing others, changing the state of water courses, changing farmed soils. Such changes in the natural landscape can be minimized, farmed soils conserved or improved, nutrients kept on the farm (and out of rivers and lakes), and some of the natural biota maintained, by using regenerative agricultural practices and giving nature room to work (that is, leaving large parts of the landscape unfarmed). The natural productivity of the ecosystem, and the work it does, will be reduced, some parts of it eliminated. For instance, large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions) rarely survive in agricultural regions, partly because they compete with humans by eating domestic animals, partly because their prey animals (deer, moose, beaver) are too few for them to maintain viable populations. The connections among patches of suitable habitat are too few. But if agricultural practice is enlightened and takes into account the needs of the natural world (rarely the case now because regenerative practices are seen as limiting profits) and limits itself to a proportion of the landscape (say, 60-70% of any ecosystem, which is seen as limiting real estate profits), both the natural world and the agricultural/industrial society can survive.
In a capitalist world, land tries to maximize its value. So farmland is over fertilized to grow more crops, polluting ground water and waterways, and takes over as much of the landscape as it can. River floodplains, with their connected swampland—land eminently useful as natural habitat but of no value in a capitalist economy—tries to become dry, saleable land. Controlling a river with dams and levees creates new dry land in the river’s floodplain; and also hydroelectricity; water for drinking, irrigation and industry; a mode of transportation. The amount spent on controlling the river, which continues for as long as the riverworks are maintained, raises the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of all these uses, hydroelectricity is the only one that comes close to paying the costs of river development, which is—in terms of costs and benefits—a loss funded by the state, whose benefits such as transportation and water supply could have been provided otherwise, if one ignores the value of the newly created dry land (its value growing daily as farmland becomes factory or subdivision). River development is a windfall to riverside landowners and land speculators, whose profits also add to the GDP. What are lost are the fisheries the river provided, the timber and collectable mushrooms, the habitat for migratory birds, for fur bearing and game animals, for spawning fish, the work of the floodplain in storing and cleaning water, in controlling flooding downstream, in removing nutrients (and using them to grow fish, animals and trees), in regulating the pulse of fresh water to the marine estuary to which the river flows, and to which the spawning fish of the estuary (many of them commercial species) are adapted: the whole seasonal background of human life. These values require no human input and the most valuable of them (nutrient removal, flood control) are not counted as part of the GDP. Income—from harvested fish, recreational hunting and fishing, harvested timber—count in the GDP. Adding things up, the additional cost of purifying water by communities all along the river, of flood control, of lost fisheries and timber, of collectable mushrooms, of recreational use, of lost marine fisheries often exceeds the value of the hydroelectricity, the production of floodplain farmlands, the navigational use. In some streams the loss becomes clear and dams are removed. In rivers with great hydroelectric potential like the Columbia, development is probably profitable on a cost-benefit analysis, though even there, a healthy salmon fishery would, at current prices for fish (and the increased value of recreational fishing), rival the value of the power. Without the dams the whole pattern of settlement along the river and its industrial evolution would have been different. (No aluminum industry, for instance, and thus no manufacturer of aircraft like Boeing.) Nowadays the power could be generated by solar thermal collectors in the deserts west of the Cascades, or by photo-voltaic panels on roofs of houses, parking lots and warehouses anywhere in the Columbia valley. With solar systems, the power from water stored behind dams provides a useful backup for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind blow; but less water is required and the dams have more flexibility of operation—they can make more concessions to the needs of fish. On the other hand, power from dams in flatland streams (the Mississippi valley, the lower Amazon basin) doesn’t pay the costs of construction and maintenance. Such dams require more land per watt than photo-voltaic collectors (often criticized for the land they take up). Half the power reservoirs in the Amazon emit more carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane from decaying vegetation left in the reservoir during construction, or growing and dying in it, and washed into it from above, than a coal-burning power plant producing the same amount of electricity.
* * *
The push for development comes partly from population growth: more people need more farms, more land to be turned into saleable real estate. The idea of living within nature has not applied to human settlement in any serious way since the adoptions of agriculture 7-10,000 years ago. (All this time I am sure some people mourned the end of fish runs, of migrations of gazelles, of great trees—for instance, of the cedars of Lebanon, their wood prized by the Egyptians for its durability and sweet smell.) Agricultural peoples carved out their niche from nature: fields from forests, irrigated fields from deserts, floodplain fields from diked rivers. Forests provided wood for brickyards, iron foundries, buildings, ships, cookfires; rivers provided water and power and took away waste. The corn that could be grown on a floodplain field in the Middle West was marketable and edible, more desirable than a hatful of wild mushrooms or a dozen muskrat pelts.
Much of the problem with modern human settlement patterns is their extent. Temperate forest recovers rapidly from logging (full recovery can take 300-2000 years, depending on the forest—redwoods take the longest) and the berries and shrubs that colonize the bare ground make habitat for the animals of the edge. So a watershed’s forests could be logged on a long rotation (300-500 years in the eastern United States, 150 in some environments), with some areas (steep slopes, stream edges out 100 feet) left uncut, or cut more lightly (light, infrequent selective cuts). Such cutting would preserve the different ages of forest habitat in the watershed (old growth, edge, young forest) and the mix of tolerant and intolerant, deciduous and coniferous, trees; minimize loss of nutrients and water; protect fisheries and streams (and thus the land downstream). Such forests would be managed for their place in the water cycle and as habitat for their plants and animals as well as for their marketable timber. How can this be done? The timber after 50 or 80 years is too valuable, the time too long, the need to make a mark on the land too great.
Capitalism has successfully harnessed human greed, which is unstoppable. People build up to the banks of rivers or the shores of the sea and are driven out in floods, and expect the government to correct the problem. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries milldams were built every few hundred yards on northeastern rivers (low dams, often passable by fish), turning them into a series of ponds. The edges of the ponds silted in from erosion from agriculture in the watershed and the dams were finally abandoned for steam or electrical power. The freed rivers downcut through the silt to form single channel streams, unconnected with their former floodplains and wetlands: a loss no one foresaw. Homemade levees at the mouths of small salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest destroy the nursery habitat for the fish but carve out a few flat acres for a homestead. The millions of acres of the Mississippi valley that were drained and developed under the nineteenth century Swampland Act would be immensely valuable today in maintaining the flow and fisheries of the river, and in reducing the nutrients that reach the Gulf. The need to grow—the existence of land that could potentially be used—made preserving them impossible. The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century rationalized such use as turning the environment to maximum human benefit (to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, a Benthamian proposition). Farmers living near rail lines who sued railroads for the fires that resulted from the sparks flying from locomotive smokestacks that burned down their haystacks and barns found a similar rationale less benevolent. They invariably lost their suits—progress, in the form of railroads, was regarded as the greater good. Perhaps this argument started to weaken with the regulation of contaminants in food and drugs under Teddy Roosevelt.
* * *
Our current effect on the environment (especially the changing climate) forces us to look at nature as a good in itself, not as something to be manipulated for human use. But how can we live in nature? We haven’t done it since people lived among the great herds of animals in the Pleistocene. That way of life lasted tens of thousands of years; and hunting peoples regularly burned forests and grasslands, hunted some animals to extinction, ditched swamps to favor certain trees or fish, affected the evolution of herbivores. The effect of people on the natural world runs along a continuum. Geographers use ways to measure it, such as energy use per capita (the more, the more the environmental impact), the size of the American corn crop (the greater the crop, the greater the effect on farmland, rivers, estuaries), the rate of growth of population, or of economic output; the land required to support each person (the ‘ecological footprint’). Technological development is not necessary for the destruction of an environment or the collapse of the population that depends on it. A rise in population of microbes, sheep or people beyond the carrying capacity of their environments will do that, though the long term damage to the environment is likely (but not necessarily) less than that of a technologically advanced civilization with its mines, waste dumps, ubiquitous chemical contamination. (The banned industrial chemicals released by melting glaciers are once again accumulating in Swiss alpine lakes.) An agricultural population that puts too much pressure on its soils can collapse as easily as a technologically advanced one that overwhelms many natural systems at once.
A focus on nature is totally new for us; it means giving nature room to work. Modern people can consolidate their lives into linear cities, and recycle their biological and manufactured wastes into resources, but the natural world needs room to work: 40% of any ecosystem left to itself was Eugene Odum’s estimate, not a bad one. Letting nature work means the end of expansive growth. It means halving the size of the American corn crop, as a quarter of cornland goes into hayfields and another quarter into annual grasses like rye and wheat. Crop rotation reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, greatly reduces soil erosion and helps control runoff of nutrients and pesticides into streams. A focus on nature means putting enough land, farmland or suburbs, into unused (or lightly used) habitat to reduce the runoff of soil, water and nutrients into streams to something near aboriginal levels (that 40% of the landscape in natural habitat, some of which can be in one’s back yard). It means recreating riverside wetlands and connecting separated natural habitats so plants and animals can move around us. It means reducing energy use in the US by 75-90% and keeping carbon emissions per person to a fraction of what they are now. It means opening up streamside wetlands (buying farmland, moving houses) so rivers can flood and fish can spawn. It means moving permanent structures back from the river or the beach (at least 20-30 feet above flood level or mean high tide; beyond the surges of storms or hurricanes) and being ready to move riverbank and coastal settlements back further as the sea rises (7 feet by 2100 is a reasonable planning figure). It means banning hormone-mimicking chemicals that accumulate in animals, plants and people; controlling the use of heavy metals like lead and mercury; and phasing out the industrial chemistry of chlorine. It means falling human populations, at least until their footprints match their environments. It means a more egalitarian world, less third world poverty, more women with control over their lives
Little of this seems likely, some, such as drinkable rivers, is probably impossible. Wars over resources, over Australian iron ore or North American water, are much more likely our future.
* * *
For the last few hundred years westerners have lived with the idea of progress. In the west, progress in understanding the world (a scientific outlook) became part of controlling and exploiting it (a capitalist impulse? this was less so, say, in China) and coincided with the west’s beginning to dominate the rest of the planet. As agricultural practices improved and industrialization revolutionized the production of soil nutrients and the transportation of crops, people ate more, and as public health measures (such as vaccination and better sewage disposal) improved human health, progress in ‘scientific’ understanding coincided with a tremendous growth in human population. Growth and progress were intertwined. Progress meant growth, in population, land area, military power, personal income. The idea of progress replaced the notion that human societies are cyclical: that societies rise and fall, like the prosperity of the individual, while the human heart remains the same. We think of moderns as rising above racism, sexism and homophobia and while there is a progressive strain in modern western thought, other strains, usually associated with fundamentalist interpretations of the traditional near-eastern religions of the west, are quite reactionary; and despite the tremendous sentimental streak in western culture (a product of our wealth, that insulates us from biological realities), we seem as capable of cruelty to each other as any Assyrian or Roman. But progress in understanding the earth, or in human relations, and growth are not the same; and a society can advance in understanding of the world and not (or not necessarily) grow in overall income; for instance, it might use new knowledge to modify its environmental impact. The idea of the usefulness of science is very old—think of Ariadne showing Theseus how to escape from the Minotaur’s cave—and I am not arguing against it. ‘Progress’ in the future may mean a different, perhaps ’better,’ more comfortable life with less use of natural space or of materials; some say for more people, some for fewer. (But aren’t we comfortable enough, when we must schedule exercise at the gym?) ‘Better’ is a normative word and depends on point of view. I fail to see the advantage, except militarily, of more people—one or one-and-a-half billion are enough. I would prefer some jungle with tigers to remain and some old deciduous forest with elk and wolves, out beyond the suburban edge. While the human heart remains mysterious, the end of growth is not the end of rational thought. Still, it raises some practical problems.
These are being faced by declining industrial cities in the American Middle West. The Middle West has been losing jobs for decades as industrial production becomes more efficient or moves to lower cost labor markets. As people leave and housing deteriorates, neighborhoods fall apart. Some cities attempt to consolidate neighborhoods, some of which remain viable, in order to maintain services (water, roads, police, sewers) which otherwise become unaffordable. Ideally, many abandoned neighborhoods would become parkland, their houses dis-assembled, the lumber and metals in them sold, their roof shingles and wallboard recycled, their foundations crushed and filled in. The parks would be planted with native, or more or less native species (perhaps, with an eye on the future, those from 300-500 miles to the south), and so be more or less self-maintaining—not Mr. Olmstead’s charming vistas of green slopes and groves, whose meadows require constant input. Neighborhood associations could maintain playing fields fertilized with urban composts provided by the city. Double or triple size lots would have vegetable gardens and orchards. Geese or sheep would mow the Olmsteadian meadows, the availability of the grass the shepherd’s payment. Such parks, if well designed, let nature back into the city, reclaim natural habitat, let people inhabit the more geographically desirable areas (such as breezy ridgelines), and protect aquifer recharge areas and streams. Decline is turned into something positive, letting cities adapt themselves to the landscape in a way the pressures of development (that is, shortsighted profit taking and greed) prevented when they were growing. The hopefulness of this sort of consolidation may be difficult to grasp amidst an ideology that growth is good. It requires accepting the place demanded by nature and some unpleasant realities. Such matters were not grasped after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Much (probably most) of New Orleans is indefensible in the modern world. Relative sea level has risen three feet in southern Louisiana in the last century, a product of rising seas and the subsidence of delta muds. The muds subside from their own weight, from being starved of annual replenishment in floods by dams and levees, and from slow collapse caused by the pumping out of underground oil and water. That is, the subsidence is largely manmade and could be slowed, but at a cost in lost real estate and in oil company profits. Low-lying areas in New Orleans that flooded once will flood again. Such areas should be turned into parks and their inhabitants (largely poor and black) offered a stake on higher ground, financed by a tax on those who benefit from the subsidence. But doing something like this requires accepting that some things can’t be fixed—that a rising sea on a sinking coast can’t be held back—with a disastrous racial twist in the United States. The whole management of the Mississippi Delta and of low-lying coasts everywhere is a disaster. The mangroves, marshes and coral reefs of sea coasts are important for coastal protection and marine fisheries. Coastal areas should not have permanent structures within the reach of high tides or storm surges but—rich or poor—everywhere in the world they do. In general, planning for a rise in sea level of seven feet by 2100 is a reasonable goal for coastal development, but much more in southern Louisiana because of accelerated subsidence caused by the erosive power (eroding the delta marshes) of the rising seas.
An economy that does not grow supporting a population that does is not a good thing, though the current American economy could probably support a billion people with a comfortable standard of living: an adequate diet, education, warmed or cooled houses, running water, transportation, communication, medical care, a room of one’s own. Income would be radically redistributed. What environmentalists want is not necessarily an economy that doesn’t grow in income but one that doesn’t grow in materials use or in the use of space—so one in which the wastes of one process become the resources of another; the natural world is not assaulted with bioaccumulating chemicals; and nature is left room to work. The process of getting more from less is probably self-limiting, and always requires energy, but who can tell—that is a matter of human ingenuity.
While nature, and the growing of fresh food, require space, industrial production and human housing don’t require much of it. Unfortunately, both settlement and industry are usually located in the wrong places, along coasts, on river banks, on major estuaries. Photo-voltaic panels and ground source heat pumps set certain lower limits (both require more space than oil fired burners or fossil fuelled power plants). A world that produces its food without harmful chemicals, without eroding its soils, or degrading its streams or rivers (a so-called regenerative agriculture) and leaves half the landscape alone for nature to work, is probably already at its limits of population. In much of South Asia, Europe and coastal North America, the print of human settlement is too large for the natural world to function properly.
A population that is falling should be able to manage a falling economy. The initial period is difficult because of the increased proportion of old people. This can be partly managed by letting people work longer, partly by better preparing young people (abandoning fewer of them to poverty and prison), partly by a universal military draft with an option to do other work. Many growing economies depend on growth to raise the income of the poorer parts of the population. A shrinking or steady state economy would have to redistribute income to maintain some sense of fairness, and popular support. Egalitarianism has its advantages. The less the gap between rich and poor in a society, the better the quality of life for the average person. To an extent, quality of life is determined less by income itself than by income equality. Thus children from the highest social group, the richest 20%, in (richer) England and Wales are more likely to die than those in the lowest social group (the poorest 20%) in poorer, more egalitarian Sweden. Similarly, wealthy English schoolchildren have poorer test scores than wealthy Finnish children—though better than poor Finnish children. At any rate, an economy that shrinks in accordance with its population should be able (more or less) to maintain its level of personal income.
Whatever that means. Beyond an (easily reachable) point, human happiness and wellbeing have little to do with income. Human needs are few, wants infinite. Most of what we buy and expect is culturally determined. American houses in 2008 are more than twice the size of those 50 years ago, while families are smaller. Western societies in the 1960s used a fraction of the energy of today (one-seventh of today in France and Japan) and were ‘modern.’ We buy to meet our cultural expectations, to soothe our anxieties or to impress or neighbors, less than to satisfy our material needs or provide for our comfort. (‘Comfort’ in terms of modern levels of heat, living space, running hot water and personal hygiene arrived for the mass of people in the 1950s.) Our public priorities suffer from the same lack of perspective. Much of the money the US spends on its armed forces could be spent elsewhere, and the soldiers, many of whom sign up because of lack of economic opportunity in their towns, employed in doing something socially useful. (The two trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have solarized our energy supply and changed our health care system but we wouldn’t have spent the money for that.) Our hired military forces don’t keep us safe, they bring us prestige and let us engage in expensive and unwise military adventures, that would never be undertaken with a people’s army of draftees, trained by a small core of professionals, the proper army for a democracy, since it brings the implications of foreign policy home. I see nothing to fear and much to hope for in a shrinking population and a shrinking economy—better food, a working natural environment, more open space in cities, cleaner rivers, fish runs, birds moving through the trees and migrating over our heads.
Environmentalists and economists view the natural landscape differently. One sees it as something to be turned into saleable goods (grain, timber, furs, building lots), one sees it as something good in itself, connected to other ecosystems, and maintaining a growing, cyclical or simply varying state of biological production. Their differences are for the most part irreconcilable, despite recent attempts, over the last two or three decades, to place a dollar value on the work of nature. Farmland, a necessary use for most civilizations, provides a good example. In a growing agricultural society farmland, partly because of its extent, changes the natural environment considerably, reducing some species, increasing others, changing the state of water courses, changing farmed soils. Such changes in the natural landscape can be minimized, farmed soils conserved or improved, nutrients kept on the farm (and out of rivers and lakes), and some of the natural biota maintained, by using regenerative agricultural practices and giving nature room to work (that is, leaving large parts of the landscape unfarmed). The natural productivity of the ecosystem, and the work it does, will be reduced, some parts of it eliminated. For instance, large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions) rarely survive in agricultural regions, partly because they compete with humans by eating domestic animals, partly because their prey animals (deer, moose, beaver) are too few for them to maintain viable populations. The connections among patches of suitable habitat are too few. But if agricultural practice is enlightened and takes into account the needs of the natural world (rarely the case now because regenerative practices are seen as limiting profits) and limits itself to a proportion of the landscape (say, 60-70% of any ecosystem, which is seen as limiting real estate profits), both the natural world and the agricultural/industrial society can survive.
In a capitalist world, land tries to maximize its value. So farmland is over fertilized to grow more crops, polluting ground water and waterways, and takes over as much of the landscape as it can. River floodplains, with their connected swampland—land eminently useful as natural habitat but of no value in a capitalist economy—tries to become dry, saleable land. Controlling a river with dams and levees creates new dry land in the river’s floodplain; and also hydroelectricity; water for drinking, irrigation and industry; a mode of transportation. The amount spent on controlling the river, which continues for as long as the riverworks are maintained, raises the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of all these uses, hydroelectricity is the only one that comes close to paying the costs of river development, which is—in terms of costs and benefits—a loss funded by the state, whose benefits such as transportation and water supply could have been provided otherwise, if one ignores the value of the newly created dry land (its value growing daily as farmland becomes factory or subdivision). River development is a windfall to riverside landowners and land speculators, whose profits also add to the GDP. What are lost are the fisheries the river provided, the timber and collectable mushrooms, the habitat for migratory birds, for fur bearing and game animals, for spawning fish, the work of the floodplain in storing and cleaning water, in controlling flooding downstream, in removing nutrients (and using them to grow fish, animals and trees), in regulating the pulse of fresh water to the marine estuary to which the river flows, and to which the spawning fish of the estuary (many of them commercial species) are adapted: the whole seasonal background of human life. These values require no human input and the most valuable of them (nutrient removal, flood control) are not counted as part of the GDP. Income—from harvested fish, recreational hunting and fishing, harvested timber—count in the GDP. Adding things up, the additional cost of purifying water by communities all along the river, of flood control, of lost fisheries and timber, of collectable mushrooms, of recreational use, of lost marine fisheries often exceeds the value of the hydroelectricity, the production of floodplain farmlands, the navigational use. In some streams the loss becomes clear and dams are removed. In rivers with great hydroelectric potential like the Columbia, development is probably profitable on a cost-benefit analysis, though even there, a healthy salmon fishery would, at current prices for fish (and the increased value of recreational fishing), rival the value of the power. Without the dams the whole pattern of settlement along the river and its industrial evolution would have been different. (No aluminum industry, for instance, and thus no manufacturer of aircraft like Boeing.) Nowadays the power could be generated by solar thermal collectors in the deserts west of the Cascades, or by photo-voltaic panels on roofs of houses, parking lots and warehouses anywhere in the Columbia valley. With solar systems, the power from water stored behind dams provides a useful backup for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind blow; but less water is required and the dams have more flexibility of operation—they can make more concessions to the needs of fish. On the other hand, power from dams in flatland streams (the Mississippi valley, the lower Amazon basin) doesn’t pay the costs of construction and maintenance. Such dams require more land per watt than photo-voltaic collectors (often criticized for the land they take up). Half the power reservoirs in the Amazon emit more carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane from decaying vegetation left in the reservoir during construction, or growing and dying in it, and washed into it from above, than a coal-burning power plant producing the same amount of electricity.
* * *
The push for development comes partly from population growth: more people need more farms, more land to be turned into saleable real estate. The idea of living within nature has not applied to human settlement in any serious way since the adoptions of agriculture 7-10,000 years ago. (All this time I am sure some people mourned the end of fish runs, of migrations of gazelles, of great trees—for instance, of the cedars of Lebanon, their wood prized by the Egyptians for its durability and sweet smell.) Agricultural peoples carved out their niche from nature: fields from forests, irrigated fields from deserts, floodplain fields from diked rivers. Forests provided wood for brickyards, iron foundries, buildings, ships, cookfires; rivers provided water and power and took away waste. The corn that could be grown on a floodplain field in the Middle West was marketable and edible, more desirable than a hatful of wild mushrooms or a dozen muskrat pelts.
Much of the problem with modern human settlement patterns is their extent. Temperate forest recovers rapidly from logging (full recovery can take 300-2000 years, depending on the forest—redwoods take the longest) and the berries and shrubs that colonize the bare ground make habitat for the animals of the edge. So a watershed’s forests could be logged on a long rotation (300-500 years in the eastern United States, 150 in some environments), with some areas (steep slopes, stream edges out 100 feet) left uncut, or cut more lightly (light, infrequent selective cuts). Such cutting would preserve the different ages of forest habitat in the watershed (old growth, edge, young forest) and the mix of tolerant and intolerant, deciduous and coniferous, trees; minimize loss of nutrients and water; protect fisheries and streams (and thus the land downstream). Such forests would be managed for their place in the water cycle and as habitat for their plants and animals as well as for their marketable timber. How can this be done? The timber after 50 or 80 years is too valuable, the time too long, the need to make a mark on the land too great.
Capitalism has successfully harnessed human greed, which is unstoppable. People build up to the banks of rivers or the shores of the sea and are driven out in floods, and expect the government to correct the problem. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries milldams were built every few hundred yards on northeastern rivers (low dams, often passable by fish), turning them into a series of ponds. The edges of the ponds silted in from erosion from agriculture in the watershed and the dams were finally abandoned for steam or electrical power. The freed rivers downcut through the silt to form single channel streams, unconnected with their former floodplains and wetlands: a loss no one foresaw. Homemade levees at the mouths of small salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest destroy the nursery habitat for the fish but carve out a few flat acres for a homestead. The millions of acres of the Mississippi valley that were drained and developed under the nineteenth century Swampland Act would be immensely valuable today in maintaining the flow and fisheries of the river, and in reducing the nutrients that reach the Gulf. The need to grow—the existence of land that could potentially be used—made preserving them impossible. The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century rationalized such use as turning the environment to maximum human benefit (to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, a Benthamian proposition). Farmers living near rail lines who sued railroads for the fires that resulted from the sparks flying from locomotive smokestacks that burned down their haystacks and barns found a similar rationale less benevolent. They invariably lost their suits—progress, in the form of railroads, was regarded as the greater good. Perhaps this argument started to weaken with the regulation of contaminants in food and drugs under Teddy Roosevelt.
* * *
Our current effect on the environment (especially the changing climate) forces us to look at nature as a good in itself, not as something to be manipulated for human use. But how can we live in nature? We haven’t done it since people lived among the great herds of animals in the Pleistocene. That way of life lasted tens of thousands of years; and hunting peoples regularly burned forests and grasslands, hunted some animals to extinction, ditched swamps to favor certain trees or fish, affected the evolution of herbivores. The effect of people on the natural world runs along a continuum. Geographers use ways to measure it, such as energy use per capita (the more, the more the environmental impact), the size of the American corn crop (the greater the crop, the greater the effect on farmland, rivers, estuaries), the rate of growth of population, or of economic output; the land required to support each person (the ‘ecological footprint’). Technological development is not necessary for the destruction of an environment or the collapse of the population that depends on it. A rise in population of microbes, sheep or people beyond the carrying capacity of their environments will do that, though the long term damage to the environment is likely (but not necessarily) less than that of a technologically advanced civilization with its mines, waste dumps, ubiquitous chemical contamination. (The banned industrial chemicals released by melting glaciers are once again accumulating in Swiss alpine lakes.) An agricultural population that puts too much pressure on its soils can collapse as easily as a technologically advanced one that overwhelms many natural systems at once.
A focus on nature is totally new for us; it means giving nature room to work. Modern people can consolidate their lives into linear cities, and recycle their biological and manufactured wastes into resources, but the natural world needs room to work: 40% of any ecosystem left to itself was Eugene Odum’s estimate, not a bad one. Letting nature work means the end of expansive growth. It means halving the size of the American corn crop, as a quarter of cornland goes into hayfields and another quarter into annual grasses like rye and wheat. Crop rotation reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, greatly reduces soil erosion and helps control runoff of nutrients and pesticides into streams. A focus on nature means putting enough land, farmland or suburbs, into unused (or lightly used) habitat to reduce the runoff of soil, water and nutrients into streams to something near aboriginal levels (that 40% of the landscape in natural habitat, some of which can be in one’s back yard). It means recreating riverside wetlands and connecting separated natural habitats so plants and animals can move around us. It means reducing energy use in the US by 75-90% and keeping carbon emissions per person to a fraction of what they are now. It means opening up streamside wetlands (buying farmland, moving houses) so rivers can flood and fish can spawn. It means moving permanent structures back from the river or the beach (at least 20-30 feet above flood level or mean high tide; beyond the surges of storms or hurricanes) and being ready to move riverbank and coastal settlements back further as the sea rises (7 feet by 2100 is a reasonable planning figure). It means banning hormone-mimicking chemicals that accumulate in animals, plants and people; controlling the use of heavy metals like lead and mercury; and phasing out the industrial chemistry of chlorine. It means falling human populations, at least until their footprints match their environments. It means a more egalitarian world, less third world poverty, more women with control over their lives
Little of this seems likely, some, such as drinkable rivers, is probably impossible. Wars over resources, over Australian iron ore or North American water, are much more likely our future.
* * *
For the last few hundred years westerners have lived with the idea of progress. In the west, progress in understanding the world (a scientific outlook) became part of controlling and exploiting it (a capitalist impulse? this was less so, say, in China) and coincided with the west’s beginning to dominate the rest of the planet. As agricultural practices improved and industrialization revolutionized the production of soil nutrients and the transportation of crops, people ate more, and as public health measures (such as vaccination and better sewage disposal) improved human health, progress in ‘scientific’ understanding coincided with a tremendous growth in human population. Growth and progress were intertwined. Progress meant growth, in population, land area, military power, personal income. The idea of progress replaced the notion that human societies are cyclical: that societies rise and fall, like the prosperity of the individual, while the human heart remains the same. We think of moderns as rising above racism, sexism and homophobia and while there is a progressive strain in modern western thought, other strains, usually associated with fundamentalist interpretations of the traditional near-eastern religions of the west, are quite reactionary; and despite the tremendous sentimental streak in western culture (a product of our wealth, that insulates us from biological realities), we seem as capable of cruelty to each other as any Assyrian or Roman. But progress in understanding the earth, or in human relations, and growth are not the same; and a society can advance in understanding of the world and not (or not necessarily) grow in overall income; for instance, it might use new knowledge to modify its environmental impact. The idea of the usefulness of science is very old—think of Ariadne showing Theseus how to escape from the Minotaur’s cave—and I am not arguing against it. ‘Progress’ in the future may mean a different, perhaps ’better,’ more comfortable life with less use of natural space or of materials; some say for more people, some for fewer. (But aren’t we comfortable enough, when we must schedule exercise at the gym?) ‘Better’ is a normative word and depends on point of view. I fail to see the advantage, except militarily, of more people—one or one-and-a-half billion are enough. I would prefer some jungle with tigers to remain and some old deciduous forest with elk and wolves, out beyond the suburban edge. While the human heart remains mysterious, the end of growth is not the end of rational thought. Still, it raises some practical problems.
These are being faced by declining industrial cities in the American Middle West. The Middle West has been losing jobs for decades as industrial production becomes more efficient or moves to lower cost labor markets. As people leave and housing deteriorates, neighborhoods fall apart. Some cities attempt to consolidate neighborhoods, some of which remain viable, in order to maintain services (water, roads, police, sewers) which otherwise become unaffordable. Ideally, many abandoned neighborhoods would become parkland, their houses dis-assembled, the lumber and metals in them sold, their roof shingles and wallboard recycled, their foundations crushed and filled in. The parks would be planted with native, or more or less native species (perhaps, with an eye on the future, those from 300-500 miles to the south), and so be more or less self-maintaining—not Mr. Olmstead’s charming vistas of green slopes and groves, whose meadows require constant input. Neighborhood associations could maintain playing fields fertilized with urban composts provided by the city. Double or triple size lots would have vegetable gardens and orchards. Geese or sheep would mow the Olmsteadian meadows, the availability of the grass the shepherd’s payment. Such parks, if well designed, let nature back into the city, reclaim natural habitat, let people inhabit the more geographically desirable areas (such as breezy ridgelines), and protect aquifer recharge areas and streams. Decline is turned into something positive, letting cities adapt themselves to the landscape in a way the pressures of development (that is, shortsighted profit taking and greed) prevented when they were growing. The hopefulness of this sort of consolidation may be difficult to grasp amidst an ideology that growth is good. It requires accepting the place demanded by nature and some unpleasant realities. Such matters were not grasped after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Much (probably most) of New Orleans is indefensible in the modern world. Relative sea level has risen three feet in southern Louisiana in the last century, a product of rising seas and the subsidence of delta muds. The muds subside from their own weight, from being starved of annual replenishment in floods by dams and levees, and from slow collapse caused by the pumping out of underground oil and water. That is, the subsidence is largely manmade and could be slowed, but at a cost in lost real estate and in oil company profits. Low-lying areas in New Orleans that flooded once will flood again. Such areas should be turned into parks and their inhabitants (largely poor and black) offered a stake on higher ground, financed by a tax on those who benefit from the subsidence. But doing something like this requires accepting that some things can’t be fixed—that a rising sea on a sinking coast can’t be held back—with a disastrous racial twist in the United States. The whole management of the Mississippi Delta and of low-lying coasts everywhere is a disaster. The mangroves, marshes and coral reefs of sea coasts are important for coastal protection and marine fisheries. Coastal areas should not have permanent structures within the reach of high tides or storm surges but—rich or poor—everywhere in the world they do. In general, planning for a rise in sea level of seven feet by 2100 is a reasonable goal for coastal development, but much more in southern Louisiana because of accelerated subsidence caused by the erosive power (eroding the delta marshes) of the rising seas.
An economy that does not grow supporting a population that does is not a good thing, though the current American economy could probably support a billion people with a comfortable standard of living: an adequate diet, education, warmed or cooled houses, running water, transportation, communication, medical care, a room of one’s own. Income would be radically redistributed. What environmentalists want is not necessarily an economy that doesn’t grow in income but one that doesn’t grow in materials use or in the use of space—so one in which the wastes of one process become the resources of another; the natural world is not assaulted with bioaccumulating chemicals; and nature is left room to work. The process of getting more from less is probably self-limiting, and always requires energy, but who can tell—that is a matter of human ingenuity.
While nature, and the growing of fresh food, require space, industrial production and human housing don’t require much of it. Unfortunately, both settlement and industry are usually located in the wrong places, along coasts, on river banks, on major estuaries. Photo-voltaic panels and ground source heat pumps set certain lower limits (both require more space than oil fired burners or fossil fuelled power plants). A world that produces its food without harmful chemicals, without eroding its soils, or degrading its streams or rivers (a so-called regenerative agriculture) and leaves half the landscape alone for nature to work, is probably already at its limits of population. In much of South Asia, Europe and coastal North America, the print of human settlement is too large for the natural world to function properly.
A population that is falling should be able to manage a falling economy. The initial period is difficult because of the increased proportion of old people. This can be partly managed by letting people work longer, partly by better preparing young people (abandoning fewer of them to poverty and prison), partly by a universal military draft with an option to do other work. Many growing economies depend on growth to raise the income of the poorer parts of the population. A shrinking or steady state economy would have to redistribute income to maintain some sense of fairness, and popular support. Egalitarianism has its advantages. The less the gap between rich and poor in a society, the better the quality of life for the average person. To an extent, quality of life is determined less by income itself than by income equality. Thus children from the highest social group, the richest 20%, in (richer) England and Wales are more likely to die than those in the lowest social group (the poorest 20%) in poorer, more egalitarian Sweden. Similarly, wealthy English schoolchildren have poorer test scores than wealthy Finnish children—though better than poor Finnish children. At any rate, an economy that shrinks in accordance with its population should be able (more or less) to maintain its level of personal income.
Whatever that means. Beyond an (easily reachable) point, human happiness and wellbeing have little to do with income. Human needs are few, wants infinite. Most of what we buy and expect is culturally determined. American houses in 2008 are more than twice the size of those 50 years ago, while families are smaller. Western societies in the 1960s used a fraction of the energy of today (one-seventh of today in France and Japan) and were ‘modern.’ We buy to meet our cultural expectations, to soothe our anxieties or to impress or neighbors, less than to satisfy our material needs or provide for our comfort. (‘Comfort’ in terms of modern levels of heat, living space, running hot water and personal hygiene arrived for the mass of people in the 1950s.) Our public priorities suffer from the same lack of perspective. Much of the money the US spends on its armed forces could be spent elsewhere, and the soldiers, many of whom sign up because of lack of economic opportunity in their towns, employed in doing something socially useful. (The two trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have solarized our energy supply and changed our health care system but we wouldn’t have spent the money for that.) Our hired military forces don’t keep us safe, they bring us prestige and let us engage in expensive and unwise military adventures, that would never be undertaken with a people’s army of draftees, trained by a small core of professionals, the proper army for a democracy, since it brings the implications of foreign policy home. I see nothing to fear and much to hope for in a shrinking population and a shrinking economy—better food, a working natural environment, more open space in cities, cleaner rivers, fish runs, birds moving through the trees and migrating over our heads.
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