Making Eden

by David Beerling

  finite amount of raw materials, like wood from trees, crops, fish, and so on, and, in return, absorb a finite amount of waste, like carbon dioxide. The ecological

  footprint measures humanity’s demand on nature as the balance between these

  two. It asks the question: how fast are we consuming resources compared to the

  capacity of nature to absorb our waste and regenerate them? An ecological foot-

  print is the area of the Earth’s surface needed to produce all the resources that a population of humans consumes, and to absorb the waste they generate. The concept is hugely influential, with governments, businesses, and institutes worldwide adopting it to monitor resource use and advance sustainable development.

  As an environmental accounting tool, ecological footprint calculations have

  much to recommend them. They are versatile and scalable for individuals, busi-

  nesses, cities, nations, barrels of oil, or even the globe. You can estimate how

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  much land it takes to support your own personal lifestyle by visiting the on-line ecological footprint calculator and answering a series of questions about how

  you live your life.71 Take the challenge and you may discover it can be a sobering experience. If everyone had the same sybaritic lifestyle as affluent western

  Europeans, we would require the regenerative capacity of 2.6 planet Earths per

  year to support ourselves.72 The calculator also forcefully brings home to us the point that our personal decisions matter to the environment. Individuals can

  make a difference. How much do you drive your car or opt to use public trans-

  port? How fuel-efficient is your car? Do you diligently recycle products? Have you insulated your home effectively to conserve energy? These types of questions

  highlight opportunities for re-orientating our lifestyles and reducing our negative impacts on the environment.

  Across the world, not enough of us are making, or having the opportunity to

  make, the right choices. In consequence, the ecological footprint for the human

  population, all 7.6 billion of us, is substantial. Advances in science, technology, and medicine, and our merciless overexploitation of Earth’s natural resources,

  ensure humanity currently uses the equivalent of 1.5 planet Earths to provide the resources consumed and to absorb our waste. It now takes the Earth one and half

  years to regenerate what we use in a year. Human demands on nature exceed the

  capacity of photosynthesizing ecosystems on land and in the sea to supply them

  or regenerate. Without immediate action, this overshoot will get worse. Moderate

  United Nations scenarios suggest that, if current population and consumption

  trends continue along the ‘business as usual’ trajectory, by the 2030s we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us. That is a major problem. It means

  humanity is systematically liquidating the Earth’s assets, turning valuable natural resources into waste much faster than nature can regenerate them. The only way

  to avoid such a dramatic overshoot in demand relative to supply is to take action by shrinking the aggregate demands of humans on the environment, and moving

  towards a sustainable future.

  Stark visions of a grim future haunted by depauperate biodiversity and dimin-

  ished ecosystem services raise the pressing question of how we address the root

  causes of the problem: rapid human population growth, secure food production,

  per capita consumption and production, and climate change. Developing sustain-

  able food and energy sources that safeguard biodiversity and climate by shrinking humanity’s ecological footprint are key challenges. Jon Foley, current Director of

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  the California Academy of Sciences, spends more time than most thinking about

  how we might resolve the dilemma of enhancing sustainable food production,

  without further collateral degradation of the environment.73 He argues that we

  have to transform global agriculture fundamentally to deliver food security. At

  the same time, we must improve distribution and access to food given the tragic

  irony that we could already feed everyone on the planet even without increasing

  crop productivity. Approximately a billion people go to bed at night hungry,

  chronically malnourished, not because we cannot produce enough food, but

  because of failures by society to solve its effective distribution.74 In a just and fair world where there is enough food to go around, no one should be undernour-ished. Most of these hungry people live in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the only

  regions where over 30% of people are malnourished, and the numbers are increas-

  ing. Non-governmental organizations such as Oxfam continue to lobby govern-

  ments, expose bad business practices, and generate media interest about this

  critical issue, whilst supporting grassroots movements for change. The bottom

  line is that the global food system needs fixing with investment, political will, and a coalition of stakeholders to promote trade.75

  Ways forward to protect biodiversity are easy to identify in principle, but difficult to achieve in practice. Halting our relentless expansion of agricultural land into biodiverse tropical forests is an obvious place to start. Many regions cleared for agriculture in the tropics have crop yields well below those planted in temperate regions anyway.76 High-yielding tropical crops like sugarcane, oil palm, and

  soybean do not contribute much to the world’s total food production. Given UN

  forecasts of world population growth, agricultural yields will need to increase

  with a changing global climate. Could this be achieved with existing croplands

  without deforestation? Existing croplands are not being used efficiently; many

  regions are underperforming landscapes with below-average crop yields.

  Opportunities exist in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe for boosting

  productivity by improving irrigation and road networks that transport labour

  and inputs to farmland, as well as the cultivation of improved crop varieties.

  According to Foley, if we could raise the yields of just 16 key food and animal feed crops in these regions to within 75% of their full potential, global food production would increase by 58%. If we raise crop yields to within 95% of their full potential, food production would increase by an additional 2.3 billion tonnes. Radical adaptation of agricultural practices is part of this solution. Precision irrigation and

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  organic farming systems that recycle crucial nutrients have to be part of the mix (Chapter Seven). Organic farming, once thought to be the wrong call,77 may yet

  play its part in an integrated solution. Critics have argued that lower yields means organic farming requires more land to produce the same amount of food as conventional agriculture and that this undoes environmental benefits.78 But yields of well-managed organically grown crops average 75–80% of the same crops under

  conventional management.79 Opportunities exist for improving water and nutri-

  ent efficiency of agriculture, without reducing food production, by reducing

  excessive fertilizer use, improving manure management, and capturing excess

  nutrients through recycling. Worldwide, 10% of the world’s crop lands account

  for 32% of the excess nitrogen surplus and 40% of the phosphorus surplus.

  Resolving what is called the Goldilocks nutrient problem—many regions of the

  world have too much or too little fertilizer, few are just right—would improve the efficiency of nutrient use and reduce agriculture’s damaging environmental

  impacts.80

  Improving yields will require genetic improvements in
crops. This is nothing

  new. We have been breeding for increased yields and disease resistance in crops

  for centuries, by crossing crop varieties with each other and related species. There is no panacea for solving the global challenge of sustainable and secure food production in a changing climate and rising population, but genetic technologies can help meet future needs.81 They offer ways of producing higher-yielding crops,

  crops with added nutrients (including ‘golden rice’ with added beta carotene,

  from which our bodies make vitamin A), and crops that are resistant to drought,

  pests, and herbicides. Objections raised by campaigners to transfer of non-plant

  genes to crops to provide herbicide resistance lack solid scientific evidence, and there are few situations where genetically modified crops pose a threat to

  biodiversity or the environment.82 In fact, the opposite is true. Traditional farming systems with high applications of chemicals to crops often pose a greater threat.

  Revolutionary changes in our diet will also be necessary, no matter how unpal-

  atable. If we all ate less meat, it would dramatically reduce the agricultural land area put to the plough, and improve our health by lowering our risk of obesity,

  coronary heart disease, and intestinal cancers.83 Shifting from grain-fed beef to pasture-fed beef or poultry could enhance crop capture of sunlight by freeing up

  land. Chickens convert grain into protein three times more efficiently than cattle.

  Weaning ourselves off meat altogether could release over 2700 million hectares

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  of pasture, and a hundred million hectares of cropland.84 Although unlikely to be popular, that scenario is a win–win situation. Abandoned land could become

  revegetated, ideally with diverse forests that sequester carbon, and the abandon-

  ment of livestock farming would reduce the release of potent greenhouse gases—

  methane and nitrous oxide—into the atmosphere.

  Transforming agricultural practices and dietary habits are necessary steps for

  alleviating pressures on global ecosystems of plants and animals, but are unlikely to be sufficient. We urgently need to address the climate change issue. Nations of the world agreed and recognized the need to limit fossil fuel emissions to avoid

  dangerous climate change by signing up to the UN 1992 Framework Convention

  on Climate Change. Curbing greenhouse gas emissions will not only help avoid

  seeding irreversible climate change but will also help avoid seeding irreversible loss of species diversity. James Hansen, former Director of NASA’s Goddard

  Institute of Space Studies, New York, and a tireless advocate of the need for action on climate change, has shown that the UN’s poorly defined objectives are already

  out of date. Atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and global tempera-

  ture rise since the 1970s have overshot safe limits.85 Earth is now warmer than the last interglacial interval in Earth’s history. Called the Eemian period, this interglacial occurred 130 000 to 115 000 years ago, when sea level was 6–9 metres (20–30

  feet) higher than today. Accelerated melting of the major ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland is already underway and substantial, multi-metre sea-level rise

  might be on the cards in the coming century.86 The consequences of future sea-

  level rise worsen as population sizes in coastal regions increase. Bangladesh, for example, is smaller than Washington State but has a population half that of the

  USA. Its population doubled from 80 million in 1975 to 160 million in 2013, and is forecast to increase further to 200 million by 2050. Ice-sheet melt and sea-level rise are amongst the most threatening features of climate change. Even if we follow a medium-level mitigation scenario, which right now feels optimistic, the

  long-term consequences for sea-level rise could be disastrous. Mass migration of

  hundreds of millions of people may result from the flooding of coastal megacities (those with a population of 10 million or greater), and submergence of heavily

  populated low-lying regions, creating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis

  within the next century or two.87

  The bottom line is that meeting UN climate targets and protecting nature means

  leaving fossil fuels in the ground. We have extracted and burned only a small fraction

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  of the total available fossil fuel resources. Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, this amounts to 374 billion metric tonnes of carbon from fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) extracted from easily accessible reserves. Continued exploitation of less-accessible unconventional fossil fuels will prove more costly to planetary ecology, with a larger ecological footprint. Extraction will require more inputs, more land, more water, and more energy, and produce more waste. Coal mining is shifting

  from predominantly subsurface to surface mining, with forest cover and topsoil

  destroyed and excess rock removed with explosives. Oil mining is exploiting

  fields of decreasing size that are more widely geographically dispersed, leading to greater fragmentation of ecosystems by road and rail networks and pipelines. In

  Canada, the area of land required per barrel of oil produced increased 12-fold

  between 1955 and 2005.88 Gas mining is being pursued by unconventional means

  through fracking, with only a rudimentary understanding of the environmental

  and ecological consequences.

  The urgency of the situation is real and understood.89 Carbon dioxide emis-

  sions from burning fossil fuels are locking in our inevitable rendezvous with a

  warmer planet, diminished in diversity. Left unchecked, global temperatures

  could eventually increase by 3–4°C or more by 2100, increasing extinction risks

  for plants and animals, which climb with every degree of warming. Yet despite

  widespread recognition of the risks, high fossil fuel emissions continue; emis-

  sions in 2014–2016 were the highest in human history.90 The major problem is

  that governments subsidize heavily the costs of fossil fuels, making them the

  cheapest reliable source of energy. So-called ‘cap and trade’ schemes fail because they simply allow developed nations to pay developing nations to continue their

  emissions. Hansen and others91 argue that the most effective way to slow emis-

  sions is a steadily rising carbon fee that makes fossil fuels pay their true cost to society with proceeds from this carbon tax returned to citizens. Dividends generated by the tax would reward people for reducing their collective carbon foot-

  print. Economists suggest the carbon dividend would grow over time as the

  carbon tax rate increases, creating a positive feedback loop: greater climate protection → greater individual dividend payments → less fossil fuel use → greater

  climate protection. Implemented by a few major powers, a transparent rising tax

  on fossil fuels represents a policy instrument that could refocus efforts to

  improve energy conservation, and drive government support for the develop-

  ment of clean energy technologies. The idea is gaining support, with citizens’

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  groups advocating implementation to create the political will to build climate

  solutions.92

  Unfortunately, political leaders and policymakers are not listening. If govern-

  ments fail to show strong leadership in transforming food and energy systems,

  climate change and locked-in extinction debts guarantee future generations will

  inherit a planet in peril. This raises profound moral questions about intergenerational justice and the fundamental rights of young people to inherit a habitable

  planet whose biodiversity is not threatened with
mass extinction and whose cli-

  mate is not unstable. The possibility is not remote. It is already on our doorstep.

  Given what is at stake, society’s attitude to nature has to change, with a greater emphasis on the urgent need for action. The headline message—sustainable food

  and energy production, without collateral damage to the planet—has to resonate

  with young minds. We have to inspire young people to get involved with decisive

  actions to change the future course of the Anthropocene.

  Raven (Figure 27) provides a case study for how engaging young people can

  successfully play out in the long run. Not long after moving to San Francisco from Shanghai in 1937, he became hooked on the natural world. ‘I always say that all

  children are interested in nature through observing nature and collecting, and we mustn’t knock it out of them.’ By the age of five, he had joined a local natural

  Figure 27 Peter H. Raven, former Director of the

  Missouri Botanic Garden and pioneering plant

  conservationist.

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  history club, read about butterflies and beetles, and made the great discovery that male and female house sparrows were the same species. Between 1950 and 1956,

  aged 14 to 20, he spent six weeks every summer camping in the Sierra Nevada

  Mountains of western North America working with naturalists and developing

  his knowledge of the natural world. After moving through the academic system

  he arrived at Stanford University, before becoming the Director of the Missouri

  Botanic Garden in 1971. Thirty years later, President Clinton awarded him the

  National Medal of Science for his contributions to the fields of biodiversity and the environment.

  How do we get their attention? Raven suggests, ‘We could emphasize that two

  thirds of the people of the world depend directly on plants for their medicines;

  and for the rest of us, plants supply about a quarter of our drugs, either directly or through manufacturing the compounds they produce naturally, [and] another

  quarter come from microbes and fungi. Or we could point out that biodiversity

  collectively makes possible our continued existence on Earth; it makes our lives