PART IV
Earth and Edges
EDGES ARE WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS,” THOM HARTMANN WROTE in his book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture. He was talking about natural edges—forests and seashores—as well as human edges like war zones and the borders between countries. In these kinds of places, he says, “we find the most visible truths about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. When we look closely at our planet, we can easily see the truth about where we’re going.”
These days we are all living on the edge. A confluence of environmental breaking points—deforestation, the collapse of ocean fisheries, the depletion of ancient aquifers, mass extinctions, and the deterioration of our atmosphere—are leading us to the precipice of disaster. With the United Nations predicting that the world’s peak population will reach 9 billion by 2050—an increase equal to the entire population of the world in 1950—it’s vital that we confront the fact of our burgeoning human population, which is driving this ecological crisis. Truthfully, Planet Earth may survive all of these threats, but human civilization as we know it will not. All the signs point to the inescapable conclusion that we’d better change our ways and soon.
Despite what the climate deniers would have you believe, climate change is not a matter of opinion; it’s hard science, as Hartmann persuasively shows in “The Atmosphere.” It’s going to take a collective effort to overcome our addiction to oil and rein in the corporations and the billionaires who are making fortunes pumping carbon into our atmosphere. We are so accustomed to thinking that for every problem, we can buy something to solve it; that technology, or some technology yet to be invented, will save us. While Hartmann doesn’t believe that technology is the answer to our problems, he is no Luddite, and he is enthusiastic about wise uses of technology.
“Cool Our Fever” chronicles the remarkable German experiment in solar energy. Germany’s investment in solar roof panels—in a country that is cloudy much of the year—has drastically reduced its reliance on fossil fuels and provided its citizens with a clean, renewable form of energy. More solar panels cover rooftops in Germany than in the US and Japan combined. If it can happen there, why not here?
Hartmann has long held that our attitudes are just as damaging to the world’s ecosystems as our behavior. By disconnecting ourselves from the natural world, “shrinking into separateness” as we watch the glowing boxes in our living rooms, we have brought about our own destruction. The answer to our global dilemma is simple and obvious: If we want to change our world, we must change our worldview. We must return to an older-culture way of being, a perspective that has been buried and forgotten. As we reestablish the links to what we knew in the past, we can reclaim our future. We can live well without destroying the world around us.
The older-culture worldview is a close cousin to deep ecology and to the Buddhist principle of interdependence. It highlights the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life, holding that all life forms have an inherent right to life and are not here on earth to serve and supply us. As Hartmann illustrates in “The Death of the Trees” and “Something Will Save Us,” this is a powerfully transformative viewpoint.
People often hear that our way of life is unsustainable, but at the same time they must not really hear it because they don’t change their behavior. That’s because they are stuck in the rut of younger-culture thinking, a blindly adolescent mindset that feels it is entitled to everything it has and more. What Hartmann proposes is an evolution of consciousness, the collective awakening we so desperately need: “If we were to set aside our assumption of supremacy and instead adopt the older-culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet.”
The Atmosphere
From Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture
ON FEBRUARY 24, 2007, AN EXPEDITION ACROSS THE POLAR NORTH funded in part by the National Geographic Society and Sir Richard Branson set out on 78-day journey.1 Guided by local Inuit hunters and trackers, they found that the environment there was changing—warming—at about twice the rate of the more temperate and equatorial regions of the world. The result was multifold.
Landmarks—usually giant mountains of ice that had been known by the Inuit people (and even named and the subject of folklore) for tens of thousands of years—are moving, changing, and in many cases vanishing altogether. The open sea (which absorbs about 70 percent of the solar radiation that hits it) is quickly replacing polar ice (which reflects back out into space about 70 percent of the solar radiation that hits it). Animals never before seen in the region—finches, dolphins, and robins, for example—are moving farther north as their migratory patterns are pushed by global climate change, while animals that have lived in the region for tens of thousands of years (most notably the polar bear) are facing extinction, as there is no place “farther north” for them to go to find the environment to which millions of years of evolution have adapted them.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the collapse of two massive ice sheets, the Larsen A and B shelves, on the edge of the Antarctic continent have provided National Geographic Society and other scientists a glimpse of previously unknown species.2 For millennia the Larsen A and B shelves provided a ceiling to a unique undersea environment, and the loss of these two shelves, totaling more than 3,900 square miles of polar ice, has exposed this world to man for the first time. Marine biologists found, for example, a poisonous sea anemone that attaches itself to the back of a snail, protecting it from predators; meanwhile the snail provides the movement necessary for the anemone to find food. Biologists also found a giant barnacle and a shrimplike crustacean.
It remains to be seen if the changes in the temperatures and the levels of light reaching the area will now also cause the extinction of these and other newly discovered species.
How Much Power Is a Watt?
When I was 13 years old, I got my novice and then my general amateur radio operator’s license from the Federal Communications Commission. It required passing what was, in 1964, a pretty hefty test on electronics; and one of the formulas I remember from the test is that 1 ampere (a measure of the “volume” of electricity) passing through a wire at 1 volt (a measure of the “pressure” of electricity) can do the amount of “work” (e.g., heat a wire, turn a motor, light a bulb) of 1 watt (W). The math is pretty simple: W = EI, where W is watts, E is volts, and I is amperes.
One watt of “work,” or “heat,” may not seem like a lot. After all, a typical electric room heater runs between 1,000 W and 1,500 W (the maximum capacity of a typical American household electrical outlet is 110 volts at 20 amperes, or 2,200 W). A toaster may run as much as 1,800 W. And a 60 W light bulb, while it can throw enough light to illuminate a room, as well as get hot enough to burn your hand, doesn’t seem like it’s going to melt the seas or change the face of the earth.
Yet in June 2005, the top climate scientist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, along with 14 other scientists representing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and its Earth Institute, and SGT Incorporated published such a startling research paper3 in the journal Science that it shook the scientific community of the entire world.
They were looking at how much more “power”—expressed in watts per square meter (W/m2)—the surface of the earth was absorbing from the sun versus the amount it lost to radiation into outer space. Historically, the two numbers have been in balance, leaving the surface of the earth at a relatively even temperature over millions of years. Their concern was that if the earth began absorbing significantly more energy than in times past, this extra heat would drive a “climate forcing” that could produce radical changes in the world in which we live—changes that could even render it unfit for human habitation over a period as short as a few decades or centuries.
Looking at measu
rements of gases in the atmosphere, and thousands of temperature-measurement points, from 1880 to today, they found that during this time the “thermal inertia”—the movement toward global warming—is now about 1.8 W/m2 over the entire surface of the earth. This means that every square meter—roughly the surface size of the desk I’m working on right now—of the planet is absorbing 1.8 W more energy than it was in 1880.
A quarter-acre house lot (a pretty good-sized lot these days) represents 1,012 square meters of planet surface. At 1.8 W per square meter, that’s roughly 1,800 W of energy—about the same as is produced by the toaster referenced earlier—for every quarter acre of the planet.
As Hansen and his colleagues point out in the Science article, until recently (the past 150 years) the earth had largely been stable in the amount of heat it absorbed. The increase wasn’t 1.8 W/m2 over a 128-year period but 0 W/m2 over at least a 10,000-year period. If the past 10,000 years had simply been 1 W/m2 higher (not the 1.8 W/m2 we’re seeing today), the surface temperature of the world’s oceans today would not be roughly 59 degrees Fahrenheit (F) but instead be 271 degrees F. Water boils at 212 degrees F, which means that much of our oceans would simply have boiled off into the atmosphere, increasing heat-trapping atmospheric moisture and thus increasing the temperature even more. Our planet would not be even remotely habitable by humans—or most life forms alive today.
Since 1880 we’ve been throwing greenhouse gases—particularly carbon dioxide and methane—into the atmosphere at rates the planet hasn’t seen since the early, heavily volcanic days prior to the dinosaurs. Thus the sea ice is melting, corals are dying/bleaching, sea life is dying/ moving, and the ocean’s currents are changing (which alters our weather—seen a good-sized tornado, cyclone, or hurricane recently?). And eventually—and maybe soon—that energy will begin to spill out of what Hansen refers to as the storage “pipeline” of the oceans, and the killing of life on land—the expanding deserts, vanishing glaciers, and drying rivers and lakes—will speed up to astonishing and human-life-threatening levels.
Back in 2005—before the massive ice sheet breakups and the open water of the Arctic were visible—Hansen suggested that we look at these effects as signs that the added wattage the planet was absorbing might be tipping us into a forward-crash of spiraling temperatures that would be impossible to stop. In the cold language of science, he and his colleagues wrote:4
The destabilizing effect of comparable ocean and ice sheet response times is apparent. Assume that initial stages of ice sheet disintegration are detected. Before action to counter this trend could be effective, it would be necessary to eliminate the positive planetary energy imbalance, now 0.85 W/m2, which exists as a result of the oceans’ thermal inertia. Given energy infrastructure inertia and trends in energy use, that task could require on the order of a century to complete. If the time for a substantial ice response is as short as a century, the positive ice-climate feedbacks imply the possibility of a system out of our control.
Three years later, on April 7, 2008, in a statement that went way beyond anything even Al Gore was predicting in his 2005 book and movie An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Hansen and a group of scientists submitted a new article. While Gore was largely concerned with rising oceans and spreading deserts, Hansen and his colleagues were looking at the possibility of the extinction of most complex life forms on the planet if we don’t quickly get our atmospheric CO2 levels down below where they were 25 years ago. The article, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?,” though written in dense scientific jargon, included two frighteningly important sentences, in language any average nonscientist could understand:5
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm … If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.
We are, Hansen and his colleagues suggest, near the point where our use of carbon-based fossil fuels could throw the planet so out of balance that eventually the oceans will heat up to the point that they’re uninhabitable for current complex life forms, and much of the complex life as we know it will vanish. If this drastic worst-case scenario event were to happen, it could take billions of years of evolution for the deep-sea and single-cell organisms that survived to evolve back into anything resembling the complex life forms we’re familiar with (including ourselves).
The article concludes:6
Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.
The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20–25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.
In 2000, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 6.4 billion tons of CO2 were poured into our atmosphere by human activity. Just five years later, that 6.4 billion tons had jumped to 7.2 billion tons, with about 5.5 billion tons coming from burning fossil fuels and 1.7 billion tons from the destruction of forests and rain forests worldwide. All along, the oceans and the land seem to be able to “sink out” or absorb only about 3.9 billion tons combined, leaving a net increase in CO2 in 2005 of around 3.3 billion tons.
As Hansen and his colleagues point out in their 2008 article, unless we can reverse these numbers—turn them negative—long enough to go back down below 350 ppm, the human race (and most other mammals) may crash into a dead-end wall.
Other Greenhouse Gases
And that’s just carbon dioxide. A methane molecule, like carbon dioxide, contains a single atom of carbon, but instead of attaching to it two atoms of oxygen (as with CO2), it attaches to it four atoms of hydrogen (CH4). The molecule is somewhat unstable: it will oxidize rapidly (burn) when exposed to high temperatures and will oxidize slowly (decompose into CO2 and H2O) in the atmosphere at a rate of about half of the total methane every seven years. (That’s the good news: methane will eventually wring itself out if we stop pushing it into the atmosphere.)
Natural gas is about 78 percent methane. The biggest sources of it are decomposing vegetation and, literally, animal flatulence. And we have a lot of very flatulent animals that we grow for human food.
For example, while there are more than 6 billion humans, there are more than 20 billion livestock mammals (pigs, cows, goats, sheep) and about 16 billion chickens in the world—more than 99 percent of them grown by humans as food for humans. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in a 2007 report7 noted that 37 percent of the world’s total methane production (and 9 percent of all CO2 and 65 percent of all nitrous oxide emissions) comes from our livestock. Because nitrous oxide is 296 times stronger than CO2 at global warming, and methane is about 23 times as potent as CO2, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all our cars, trains, buses, trucks, ships, airplanes, and jets.
A sudden and worldwide shift to vegetarianism (or even close to vegetarianism—most indigenous societies historically have used meat as a flavoring rather than a staple, eating less than one-fifth of the meat and dairy products that Americans do) would have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world were to fall silent forever.
University of Chicago research8 found that simply goi
ng vegetarian would reduce the average American’s carbon footprint by more than 1.5 tons of carbon per year. That’s half again more than doubling the gas mileage of your car by moving from a big sedan to a small hybrid (which typically saves about 1 ton of carbon per year).
For hundreds of thousands of years, methane concentrations in the atmosphere were pretty stable (again, varying with solar cycles), at 715 parts per billion (ppb) around the time, for example, of the Civil War. Today they’re more than 1,774 ppb. Nitrous oxide has also gone up, from 270 ppb in pre-industrial times to more than 320 ppb now. Almost all of both increases tie back to agriculture.
So, here we have four colliding “linear” systems, all pushing against the “circle” of our blue marble floating through space, Planet Earth: human population exploding; increasing levels of fossilized carbon being consumed, with its waste (mostly CO2) put into our atmosphere; increasing numbers of food animals for all us humans, producing unsustainable levels of waste that is also altering our environment; and an atmosphere absorbing all of this about to tip over into an unstable state, which could render the planet uninhabitable for us and most other complex life forms.
Rebooting Evolution
The word unsustainable is vastly underrated, probably because it’s so overused. But it’s not a “maybe” word. It doesn’t refer to a process. It refers directly to an end point and says that when that point is reached, whatever behavior or process it’s referencing must change or end.
Our polluting our atmosphere is unsustainable. Our agricultural techniques are unsustainable. Our fossil fuel consumption is unsustainable. Our consumption of raw materials and our production of toxic waste that can’t be eaten by anything else are unsustainable. Our consumption of water is unsustainable. Our population growth is unsustainable. Our way of life is unsustainable.
The Thom Hartmann Reader Page 18
