[Vision2020] Interesting report on environmental decline

[Ted Moffett]

All:

An excellent book exploring both the decline of previous civilizations due
to catastrophic climate change, along with the complex science of climate
theory, is "Winds of Change" by Eugene Linden.  Both the U of I main library
and the Moscow Public Library have copies... The U of I library has several
copies... Sitting on the shelf being ignored.

Ted Moffett


On 10/4/07, Garrett Clevenger <garrettmc at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Tom, for bringing this to our attention.  I
> appreciate having Representatives who understand the
> implications human activity is having on our planet
> Earth, which, unfortunately, happens to be our only
> home.
>
> It's refreshing in a state where those in power
> overwhelmingly disregard ecology, which in turn
> affects water quality, air quality, wildlife habitat
> and overall health of the environment we humans have
> to live in.
>
> Mostly all for $$$ that we'll never see, yet have to
> pay for.
>
> It saddens me to think where we are headed...
>
> Take care,
>
> Garret Clevenger
>
>
> [Vision2020] Interesting report on environmental
> decline
>
> ttrail at moscow.com ttrail at moscow.com
> Thu Oct 4 19:27:16 PDT 2007
> Previous message: [Vision2020] Oppose Noise Ordinance
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> author ]
> 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
>
>
>
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