1/3/10

1/3/10

How awful to read of the University of California cutting its budget by hundreds of millions of dollars! The American Empire is such a bore! What happened to the American Republic of which we were all part? Would we have such useless, dehumanizing wars if we had a universal draft? Instead of public education, a decarbonizing economy and affordable medical care we have gated communities, a “volunteer” army, the merrily partying super-rich, floating above a sea of poverty, drugs, abused prisoners and abused illegal immigrants. Every man for himself! So we have community restrictions on rooftop solar collectors and hanging laundry out to dry. Those drafted kids could be working in hospitals and planting trees. Instead we throw our money away on wars and the “war on drugs.”
Then it occurs to me, what is the carbon footprint of a dollar? If we divide the U.S. GDP of about $14.2 trillion into the carbon dioxide emissions of about 5.8 billion metric tons, we get about .8 pound. (Thanks, Jimmy Wales!) This is a measure of the carbon intensity of the economy. But there are only about $400 billion (bills and coins) in circulation. So the dollar in your pocket weighs about 35 times that, or 28 pounds, about 8 pounds in pure carbon. Or if you take account 200 years of fossil fuel combustion, many tens of times that.
I hope I got the zeros right. It’s hard carrying around 230 pounds in my wallet.

The Public Good

The Public Good

Capitalism works because people strive to become rich. Who knows why they do this? Perhaps people are naturally greedy and competitive, perhaps they learn to be so. But a state whose sole motivation was to enable its citizens to become wealthy would be sorry and short lived. Maintaining a citizen’s liberties (against the state), taking some concern for a citizen’s economic well being, and maintaining the health of the ecosystems without which the state and society would collapse, must be part of any successful state. As Keynes pointed out, the state should not do what individuals can do but it must do what they cannot do. Such things include running public education systems, public transportation systems, prisons, the postal service and probably hospitals and clinics (none of which can be run affordably at a profit), regulating the electrical grid, regulating the use of waterways, regulating land use. Well run public transportation systems, public education systems and systems of medical care provide social goods worth much more (morally speaking, and often economically speaking) than their cost. Most elements of a social safety net (education, unemployment insurance, pensions, medical care) lead to a more prosperous society, and its various monetary benefits (unemployment payments, pensions), as well as its support of parts of the economy through the funding of education, transportation infrastructure and medical care help the economy survive downturns by providing a continuing flow of income from the state.

From this point of view, complaints about the bonuses being handed out by banks that were recently rescued with government loans, and later overpaid, also by the government, for bad debt they had amassed, seem to me disingenuous. The spread in incomes in the United States now (the difference between the richest and the poorest) is similar to that in China or Brazil. High incomes should be taxed and the money redistributed (one way or another) to those who need it (their incomes don’t pay for food, shelter and gas). Similarly, why complain that many of the people who profited by granting and reselling subprime (bound-to-fail) mortgages, are now making money by buying up those same distressed mortgages from banks at substantial discounts, refinancing the mortgages, and selling the new (solvent?) mortgages to entities guaranteed by the government. While it is repugnant that the same people who helped create, and who profited hugely from, the debt crisis, should profit from its resolution, its resolution is a good thing. (Of course, people guilty of fraud should be prosecuted.) For much the same reasons, I find the uproar over very short term trading (trades measured in seconds), being done by those same trading banks the government rescued, also disingenuous. Very short term trades take advantage of technical anomalies in the market and have nothing to do with “value investing” or choosing companies likely to succeed. They are a way of squeezing more money out of the system. Most capital gains (50% 75% ? 90%?) from trades that last less than a second? A minute? A day? should be taken by the government. Or, less punitively, one could tax each short term transaction, as one should tax any transaction of dubious financial value, such as currency hedges, mortgage resales and credit default swaps. A small tax on each transaction, a very small percent of the transaction’s value, payable no matter what happens, makes traders think twice.

Judicious taxing, like regulation, is a way of promoting the public good. We live under a social contract. Do we want a wise government or do we only want to become rich? Redistributing income through taxation is a way of compensating for the social effects of capitalism, a system which tends to create a wide separation between rich and poor, is inherently unjust (the playing field is never level), and if allowed to go on unchecked, tends to destroy democratic government, its own environment and the rule of law. A rule of thumb in Scandinavian countries is that the rich should make no more than ten times the poor. That would never work here, where the rich now make hundreds or thousands of times the poor, but we could aim at 50-100 times. So if a poor family made $25,000, a rich one would find it hard to make more than $1-$2 million.

The point is to use the tax system to support moral values without restraining the activity of the economic society. People will constantly and successfully find ways around any system. Thus clear and simple ways of taxing are better than complex ones.


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Capitalism’s profit motive, properly directed, can be used to solve environmental problems. The cutting and draining of its tropical peat swamp forests for plantations of palm oil and paper pulp trees make Indonesia the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. (The swamps are cut, burned and drained before planting and emit enormous amounts of carbon as they continue to sink and dry out.) The agricultural system is successful. Yields from palm oil plantations compare well with yields from grain fields. The oil from the palms is used for food and for biodiesel, a one-time environmentally correct fuel. One result is that per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in Indonesia, a relatively poor country, are close to those in the developed world. An Indonesian pulp company, one of the developers of natural forests, recently offered to protect a large area of untouched swamp forest that adjoins its drained lands. The company knows how to do this; it has the manpower and expertise; it wants to be paid enough to make the effort profitable. To charge for carbon that is emitted by the practice of forestry or agriculture (a carbon tax) is one thing. To pay for carbon that is not emitted, by not cutting a forest or plowing a field, is another. But some method must be worked out for this if carbon put into the atmosphere by people is to be reduced; and if any natural forests are to be left uncut. Perhaps the carbon saved from the atmosphere by not draining this piece could be subtracted from the carbon lost from the drained lands, for which the company should be charged, so much a ton per year. Of course, there are other, better reasons, for saving tropical forests: their habitat is invaluable, and through their transpiration of moisture and their solar reflectivity they have large effects on local and global climate; but their storage of carbon (and thus their effect on climate) is a more commonly accepted value, perhaps more easily expressible in dollars.

In the United States, new extraction techniques have made the methane in the Marcellus Shale available. The Marcellus Shale underlies parts of the Appalachian range in the eastern United States from south central New York State through much of Pennsylvania to eastern Ohio and West Virginia. This hilly landscape consists of cities, small woodlots and farms, and is cut by many roads. It has been logged, farmed, burned; there are extensive areas of lightly settled logged forest, managed as forest; in parts of the anthracite region of Pennsylvania fires and logging have reduced the vegetation to heath and scrub, an industrial recreation of the heath hen habitat that was turned into forest and farm in New England (this resulted in that bird’s extinction): perhaps prairie chickens transplanted from the Middle West would thrive in the new industrial scrublands. Drilling rigs and gas wells here are not interrupting a virgin landscape, though (each the size of a football field) they will be disturbing a bucolic one. Much of the rural landscape is relatively poor. Drilling for gas represents a windfall of thousands of dollars a year, comparable to the payments dairy farmers in flat windy Saint Lawrence valley of northern New York receive for windmills, which have helped revive the region, and which, despite their effects on birds and bats, are a somewhat less objectionable source of energy. Extracting the gas involves fracturing the rock by pumping in huge volumes of water together with chemicals (a cocktail of 100 or more) like benzene. So extracting methane from the Marcellus shale has the capacity to pollute the groundwaters under the whole region essentially forever, with fracturing fluids and also methane. That the companies have agreed not to drill in the New York City watersheds should tell us something. Taxes might work here. For instance, industrial water use should be taxed. There are many complaints about bottled water plants depleting local ground waters; and the huge volumes of water needed to cool power plants destroy rivers. Toxic chemicals like benzene should be taxed, for whatever use (all questionable bioaccumulating chemicals should be taxed). Such taxes force alternatives: cooling towers that use less water (90% less in some cases, for a small increase in the cost of the plant); nontoxic chemicals to extract gas. For the time being, if the gas can’t be extracted safely, it shouldn’t be. The product of bacteria working on ancient ocean sediments, it isn’t going away. There are alternative energy supplies, such as conservation (insulating houses, more efficient lights, pipelines motors), windmills or photo-voltaic panels. The public good represented by the long term habitability of the landscape is greater than that represented by the income from the gas. Of course this is precisely what capitalist fundamentalists, with their focus on the good produced by each person acting in his immediate self interest, would deny. They say that acting in one’s self interest makes the economy stronger and a stronger economy lets us deal with that polluted groundwater, if it turns out to be a problem. Does evil wear a smiling salesman’s face?


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Forty years ago the Danish geochemist Willi Dansgaard found evidence of long climate cycles and rapid climate change in the Greenland ice. By the early 1970s anyone who knew carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and was aware of the Keeling curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suspected we were in trouble. It took another thirty years and several more ice cores to confirm Dansgaard’s results. Along the way, a rather good idea of the climate over the last 100,000 years was drawn out of ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, changing isotopes of oxygen in sea shells. With the present configuration of ocean currents and ice sheets, what happens to the Greenland ice sheet seems to be closely linked to global climate. Rapid warmings or coolings in climate terms are those that occur in three years or a decade rather than centuries and involve changes in temperature of several degrees (up to 15º Fahrenheit or 8.5º Centigrade during the Younger Dryas of 12,800 to 11,500 years ago). The more extreme of those that occurred during the last 90,000 years (the last ice age) seem to have been related to the periodic breakdown of the ice lobes from the ice sheet over Labrador that filled Hudson’s Bay. The earth is very slightly heated from below by the decay of radioactive elements at its core. Hudson’s Bay is shallow. As the ice ground into the bay from the northeast it froze to the rocks and mud of its bottom. But ice is an insulator, thicker ice a better insulator. As the ice thickened over the bay it kept in more and more of the earth’s heat, the heat eventually melted the bottom of the ice, which lost its hold on the mud and rocks of the bay. The whole ice sheet then began to thin and slide. Its seaward sides at the entrance of the bay broke up and sailed as armadas of icebergs across the North Atlantic. After the ice sheet had thinned sufficiently, it froze once again to the bay’s bottom and (since the climate was still, overall, cooling) began to build up once again. The immense release of ice and the thinning of the ice sheet itself, let the climate warm. The melting icebergs chilled the sea and eventually their fresh water, diluting the salty water of the north Atlantic, began to shut down the currents bringing warm tropical water north. The shutdown caused an abrupt cooling (among them, the Oldest, Older and Younger Dryas, though these occurred during a period of general warming, as the ice sheets of the last continental glaciation were breaking up). As the fresh water on the surface of the sea froze and tropical water no longer moved north, warm westerlies stopped blowing across the British Isles and northern Europe. The climate worldwide turned cold, windy and dry. Then as the flow of icebergs stopped and the ice sheet over Labrador rebuilt (its accumulating snows taking water from the north Atlantic) the cold ocean turned saltier, the sea ice was less extensive and the ocean circulation that draws tropical water north started once again. The climate warmed. Such fluctuations are recorded every 1500 years over the last 100,000 years in ice sheets and further back in ocean cores. The basic cause of the 1500 year oscillations are unknown but probably has to do with changing patterns of sea surface temperatures in the tropics. The behavior of ice sheets, such as the flow of icebergs from the sheet over Labrador (Heinrich Events) magnify them. In the last 10,000 years, with no glacial meltwaters to amplify them, the oscillations have been much muted. (The Little Ice Age was one.) Such abrupt fluctuations in temperature and rainfall would have made agriculture a bad (perhaps impossible) adaptation compared with (more mobile) hunting and gathering. Today a large meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet is poised to cool the (warming) climate on the same massive scale.

A tax on carbon would help. Of course a sufficiently powerful economy could organize itself to reverse the warming of the globe. Some proposals are not entirely nuts. (For instance, machines that filter carbon dioxide from the air and convert it, in a more or less energetically neutral way, to inert minerals: several million of them.) This job might be easier than filtering trillions of gallons of groundwater; or removing DDT from the bottom of Lake Michigan.


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How would people live in a new world? Eugene Odum said 40% of any ecosystem should be left alone. Is this enough? Large predators (wolves, jaguars, mountain lions, great horned owls, peregrine falcons, walrus, whales, cod, tuna) have large effects on their ecosystems. Wolves reduce the number of mid-level predators (coyotes, raccoons). Their removal reduces the predation pressure on many songbirds, especially the neotropical migrants, which come north to feed on the abundant insect life of the northern summer. These birds help control the insects that defoliate shrubs and trees, they also eat seeds and the invertebrates of the forest floor. The effects of their predation radiate down through the invertebrate and vegetative world. Similarly great horned owls and goshawks kill crows, another nest predator. (One reason crows pick well lighted roadsides and city parks, and starlings downtown buildings, for roosts, is to escape night hunting owls.) The smaller bird-eating accipiters and falcons eat jays, another devourer of songbird eggs and nestlings. Wolves and mountain lions eat deer. Deer, and other herbivores, influence forest succession by their browsing habits (favoring some species, ignoring others). Seed and seedling eating mice also influence forest succession and are eaten by weasels, foxes, coyotes, hawks and owls. Abundant deer and mice increase the incidence of Lyme disease. Changes in the abundance of large predators cascade through the ecosystem.

Large predators also eat people, though very rarely if they are hunted (and therefore probably not abundant enough to influence the ecosystem, though there is a continuum of influence here). Moose, white tailed deer and dogs also kill people. Mountain lions kill people occasionally, black bears and grizzlies now and then, wolves almost never. Many more people are killed by people, cars and lightning than mountain lions but I think it unlikely large predators will be let inhabit their former ranges in the United States. But who knows? Black bears moved into Las Vegas during a drought in Nevada a few decades ago and a large population now inhabits the city, growing larger (like urban raccoons) on abundant dumpster edibles than country bears and bearing more young. The population is held down by heavy predation by cars. Eurasian wolves, more used to people than North American ones, who move out when people number more than a few per square mile, live among the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany. Eastern coyotes, a new species, part western coyote, part eastern timber wolf, have colonized the suburban northeast (one was seen in New York’s Central Park). They are doing well among the suburbs and farms, living on rabbits, mice, grasshoppers, cats and deer (mostly fawns). A focus on deer may turn them into a larger animal.

Of course people could perform the part of a large predator by hunting deer (where this isn’t done deer become a problem) and trapping (humanely) mid level predators for their fur (at a profit to themselves)

In formerly forested landscapes (much of humid temperate and tropical earth), large areas of the new forest would be edge. The better soils that once produced tall trees and great numbers of wild animals would be occupied by farms, while forestland would occupy the swamps, steeper hills, poorer soils. Edge environments are favored by hunters. Their berries and browse make them haunts of game (rabbits, grouse, deer) but because they are also haunts of coyotes, foxes, opossum, skunks, crows, jays and raccoons many nesting songbirds reproduce poorly. Edge environments tend to be sinks rather than sources of birdlife. Wide edges are created by frequently logging (or occasionally brush hogging) the border of a forest in a band 100-300 feet wide. The effects of the edge in terms of bird nest predation and a drier microclimate go 100 yards or more into the forest (some claim ten times that) so in a fragmented landscape, even if 40% of it is forest, much of it will be effectively edge. Thus fat clumps of forest are better than skinny ones. In the new world, skinny lines of forest following watercourses connect fat ones, with farms and towns among the woods. But skinny forests can be allowed to mature. Clumps of old evergreens make nesting habitat for predatory birds (cooper’s hawks, sharpshins, merlins, great horned owls) that control the nest predators. Tall deciduous trees hold nests of goshawks. Large coyotes will hunt some of the smaller predatory mammals. The forest will be different from the natural primary forest but modern forests have been manipulated by humans for thousands of years, north temperate forests since people and trees followed the ice north several thousand years ago. The point is to maintain the processes and wildlife essential for the forest’s health; and regard timber as one result of those processes.

A new landscape would also focus on streams. Wide borders of forest (100-300 feet wide), or grassland in the prairie and savannah, would follow streams, taking up some farmland, shading and cooling the water in summer, providing fallen trees to help the current dig pools, letting fertilizing spring and winter floods spread further, absorbing the nutrients running off farmland. Mature forests would cover the steep valleys of tributary brooks. Small streams in farmland would have a buffer of unmowed grassland to catch the soil and nutrients coming off the fields. Green swales would follow the drainage centers of large sloping fields. Aquifer recharge areas would be permanently vegetated. (They could be mowed or lightly grazed.) After 1000 years of dams and streamside cultivation many European streams may be unrestorable (at least culturally) but the memory of the wilderness might let many eastern and middle western American ones can regain their populations of migratory and cold water fish (shad, river herring, alewives, sturgeon, trout). This requires the restoration of river habitat, the removal of some dams, the provision of fish ladders around others, letting rivers flood and allowing patterns of river flow that favor fish.

In regions of good farmland in the American Middle West, 40% of the land will never be left to nature. (Over 90% of Illinois is farmed.) But 15-20% of the landscape in permanent natural vegetation, some of that in lightly grazed pasture, much of it too sloping to plow without the soil eroding anyway, would protect streams, catch the soil drifting off farmland, absorb farmland nutrients and turn them into trees, birds and grass, let runoff water become groundwater and slowly seep downhill into streams. One doesn’t have to restore all the original wetlands along rivers to restore fisheries but can choose the obvious ones: those useful in reducing flooding in populated areas downstream, those needing constant pumping to remain dry enough to farm. Replacing river transport with rail corridors, and thus eliminating locks, dams and much of the levee system on large rivers, would restore native fisheries, reduce nutrients flowing downstream into estuaries, where excess nitrogen is destroying these breeding habitats for marine fish, and eliminate most of the cost of maintaining the river. Given space, rivers maintain themselves.

Human settlements would be more compact, moved back from the riverbank and the shore. This allows rivers to flood, beaches to migrate, seas to rise. A third to a half of the continental shelves would be off limits to fishing, along with much of the open ocean, places where fish congregate to breed, the currents along which sea turtles migrate. Most bottom trawling, which destroys the life of the sea floor, and long drift nets, which catch everything, and which, when lost, continue to fish for decades, filling with fish bones, would be banned. So, probably, would be long lines, which also catch everything (fish, birds, turtles). The top marine predators (seals, whales, porpoises, bluefin tuna, rays, sharks) would be let recover. So would the forage fish on the bottom of the food chain, now fished industrially for meal and oil. More fishermen, in smaller boats, using traps, small nets, hook and line, would catch fewer, more valuable fish.

On land, factories would imitate ecosystems: the waste of one becoming the resources of another in an endless loop. Process water would be recycled, which lets paper mills locate in cities, with their tremendous resources of waste paper, greater than that of tropical forests. (Each sheet of paper reusable 9 times.) Dangerous industrial chemistries such as the chemistry of chlorine and its allies and the industrial use of poisonous metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead and mercury would disappear (or be much more controlled) and with them the accumulation of chlorinated hydrocarbons and metals in human fat (and with that, the growing incidences of mental instability and cancer). Populations would slowly fall, to a quarter of those today—this would take a century or two—and in 50 years those people would use 10% of the energy per capita we do today be comfortable. (So in 200 years total energy use would be 2.5% of today.)Farmers would farm so as to keep soil and nutrients on their fields, which then remain farmable indefinitely, and would think of their farms as part of the larger biological landscape.

The development of rational western society, of which modern capitalism, modern medicine and modern war, are part, has let human populations increase tremendously in the last 200 years (especially the last 50) and made us much more prosperous. For the last century we westerners have been cradled in the strong arms of endless electricity and oil. I have enjoyed it as much as anyone. But the result is that the real biological world is disappearing. We are also poking the climate beast with a sharp stick. Modern capitalism believes in endless growth, it discounts the future for the present, and uses up natural resources as fast as the market (encouraged by advertising) can absorb them. It is totally nuts. We need a capitalism that can deal with economic contraction, a shrinking population, and a natural world that is restorable to provide a constant and limited source of material and an unlimited sense of joy. A capitalism of contraction gets more from less. It would probably require a policy of national savings (to get through the period of a declining work force), taxes on materials rather than wages, long term investments that reduce yearly maintenance costs (efficient houses, cars, machinery; rivers that maintain themselves), a more compact and efficient organization of society (New Yorkers use a fraction of the energy of suburbanites), seeing the past, present and future as connected. Are such ideas antiwestern? They constitute the public good.

Our New World

Our New World

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

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

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

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

More Grim Matters

More Grim Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growth

Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sustainability?

Sustainability ?

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short History of the End of our World


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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