[Vision2020] Interesting report on environmental decline

[ttrail at moscow.com]

Constituents:

This is an enlightening report from the book, The Nature of the New World
by Lester R. Brown.  The fact that economic decline of past civilizations
is linked to environmental decline is well brought out by Brown.

Rep. Tom Trail
Earth Policy Institute
Plan B 2.0 Book Byte
For Immediate Release
October 2, 2007

THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD

http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch01_ss2.htm

Lester R. Brown

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new 
world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s 
capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another 
crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading 
sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to 
reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and 
more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being 
consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds 
that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. 
These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. 
In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only 
after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we 
exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. 
Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back 
off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding 
populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it 
collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic 
decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then 
the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the 
sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to 
shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water 
tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, 
expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting 
glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, 
soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive 
trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at 
the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an 
“overshoot-and-collapse”
mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at 
the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, 
it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world 
as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are 
deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many 
countries. Carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads 
the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective 
demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. 
Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 
estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 
percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. 
We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, 
setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical 
presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of 
AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has 
calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He 
notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets 
together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he 
estimates, this group  accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total 
vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the 
latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, 
birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse 
phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the 
Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St.
Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for 
the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year 
later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish 
and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, 
he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the 
thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer
(128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the 
population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to 
St.
Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons 
and not much lichen.
Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and
1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the 
remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our 
natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes 
to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the 
former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a 
resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental 
resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its 
population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to 
today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old 
Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing 
entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s 
environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping 
oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production 
may soon peak and turn downward.
Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is 
already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers 
will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to 
produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. 
Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this 
effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new 
threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of 
international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured 
access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries 
heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry 
that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil 
security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be 
reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the 
last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with 
the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle 
East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, 
and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the 
localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which 
is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other 
developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the 
future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern 
oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on 
land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will 
intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics 
of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an 
overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the 
Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental 
trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. 
It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national 
governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before 
time runs out.

#     #     #

Adapted from Chapter 1, “Entering a New World,” 
in Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a 
Civilization in Trouble (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 
available on-line at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm

Additional information at www.earthpolicy.org

Media & Permissions to Reprint Contact:
Reah Janise Kauffman
Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 12
E-mail: rjk (at) earthpolicy.org

Research Contact:
Janet Larsen
Tel: (202) 496-9290 x 14
E-mail: jlarsen (at) earthpolicy.org

Earth Policy Institute
1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 403                      
Washington, DC  20036        
Web: www.earthpolicy.org



---------------------------------------------
This message was sent by First Step Internet.
           http://www.fsr.com/