Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  After dark, in a remnant stand of teak and mahogany on the island of Bohol in the Philippine archipelago’s midriff, five hundred kilometers southeast of Manila, tarsiers crawl over tree trunks on their chameleon-like, spaded toes, hunting crickets. Nocturnal insectivores, their big ears and eyes—plus a neck that rotates 180 degrees—allow them to pounce on the bugs that compose their diet in the few remaining Southeast Asian islands where there’s still enough standing hardwood to support them.

  With intense biodiversity and equally intense humanity, Bohol became a pilot region for the IPOPCORM project. A lopsided oval, Bohol is about the size of Rhode Island in the United States and, with 1.3 million people, has nearly the same population. But few Rhode Islanders catch or grow all their food, while nearly everyone on Bohol feeds themselves directly from the land and surrounding seas.

  Under a tin sky, Geri Miasco, a stocky woman of thirty-five, drives along Bohol’s northern coastal road in late October 2010, watching the weather. A former kindergarten teacher, she was recruited by the PATH Foundation in 2004. She is one of nine children, and several of her fisherman uncles and cousins here have lost boats, limbs, eyes, or their lives when the dynamite they were using exploded too fast.

  A practicing Catholic, she dismisses the idea of any conflict between her faith and family planning. “Population goes up, resources come down. If population goes too high, they’re gone—and then, so are we. God doesn’t want us to kill ourselves.” So while her husband goes to sea to fish, she works on land to ensure there will still be something to catch.

  On her way to lunch with the mayor of the coastal town of Ubay, Geri stops by a “Pop Shop”—one of several family-planning convenience stores that PATH opened around the island. By its entrance is a whiteboard listing the local women expecting babies, their number of pregnancies and living children, and their due date. One is on her fourth pregnancy, but the others range from zero to two.

  Tarsier, Bohol Island, Philippines

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JASPER GREEK LAO GOLANGCO

  Inside are cheerful displays of pills, injectables, and condoms (in plain, banana, or strawberry) with a wood carving of an erect, circumcised penis to demonstrate proper application. A box of three rubbers costs the peso equivalent of 45 US cents; a month’s supply of pills varies from 50-cent Yellow Ladies to 83-cent Altheas and 90-cent Trusts, the more expensive ones containing acne suppressants and supposedly causing fewer side effects. After IPOPCORM ended, the community took over the project, which the PATH Foundation continues to monitor and the Pop Shops help to finance. No one’s need goes unmet: subsidies for whoever can’t afford birth control are in the municipal budget. At first, women were told in church that pills and Depo-Provera provoke abortion at the instant of insemination. After Geri explained a few times how the chemistry simply prevents insemination in the first place, word spread and a daily stream of women commenced.

  A slim young woman enters. She is from Mindanao, the southernmost Philippine island, home to a large Muslim minority already present when the Spanish arrived, and in nearly constant rebellion against the ruling Catholic majority ever since. Her husband, a soldier, is now stationed in Bohol, she says, sounding relieved. She explains that she had her first child, a son, two months earlier, earning praise from the midwife who runs the shop for her impressive recovery. She smiles, saying that they want to plan now until they’re ready for another, if ever. The midwife weighs her, checks her blood pressure, and hands her a questionnaire that they fill out together. The new mother works for a community lending agency, and can afford the Trust pills she decides to try.

  More clients arrive, so Geri goes on to Ubay, one of the first towns to sign onto IPOPCORM after the disappearance of sailfish and black marlin here got everyone’s attention. She has a working lunch of broiled snapper, squid cooked in their ink, and a pile of blue crabs with Mayor Eutiquio Bernales and Ubay’s coastal resource manager, Alpios Delima. The trick, says Delima, is balancing the amount of fish, squid, and crabs they sell to Hong Kong and Japan; how much they keep to eat themselves; and how much stays in the water to maintain the stock.

  “The only way we can do that is by controlling the number of people doing the selling and eating,” says Bernales. “It just makes sense. If you like mangoes, don’t cut the tree: gather the fruit.”

  He’s even gotten Ubay’s priest on board. “He realized that it wasn’t in his best interest for his congregation to starve. We’ll make a deal, I told him. You take care of the spirit and I’ll take care of the bodies.”

  Bernales, now seventy-five, grew up fishing with dynamite. They’d toss in a bundle of two or three sticks; the shock waves would stun big groupers and snappers, and kill the smaller ones by bursting their internal organs. He would have to dive to twelve fathoms to collect the ones with ruptured swim bladders before they sank out of sight.

  “It was quick, cheap, and dangerous.” A well-placed charge could yield ten tons of fish, which were so abundant back then that people could afford to send their kids to college. “Me included—to medical school.”

  “Today it’s all high-tech,” grumbles Delima. “They have air compressors and go down twenty fathoms. They use depth charges with remote detonators, so we don’t hear the explosion or see the geyser. They use sinkers and waterproof plastic mining fuses that get smuggled in. For inspection, we have to do fish forensics: slash them open to see if the intestines are blown apart.”

  But most of the dynamiters are now from somewhere else: along with family planning, IPOPCORM blitzed the island with advertising about what dynamite does to the reef that supports them. Delima’s men patrol round-the-clock, but it’s hard when illegal fishermen use cyanide—which, being volatile, is usually impossible to detect by the time they get to the lab. Lately people are dipping bait in Zonrox, a chlorine-based bathroom cleaner that’s far cheaper and just as toxic, squirting it on the reef with baby bottles, then scooping up fish that float up.

  “Or they set mist nets that catch everything, including juveniles before they’ve had a chance to reproduce. Or they mix ammonium nitrate fertilizer with gasoline in bottles filled with enough sand to sink, topped with blasting caps.”

  “Filipino ingenuity,” laughs Bernales. “But we’re staying ahead of them. Young fishermen and their wives all understand now.”

  They see the numbers of kids dropping. They see people looking for alternatives to fishing: sweet potato farming, seaweed farming, catfish and tilapia ranching, oyster culture—they’re even trying to grow one of their money species, milkfish, in cages. Filipino ingenuity works to their advantage, but the thread binding the socio-econ-eco web here is family planning. With no national program, that has always depended on foundation money and USAID for condoms and contraceptives. They saw what happened when things began drying up during the George W. Bush presidency, how PATH had to scramble for grants, and it’s scary to think of what they’ll do if that ever happens again, and how much of their fate hangs on politics halfway around the globe.

  Bernales and Delima take Geri for a spin in their patrol boat to see one of Ubay’s two off-limits fish reserves. It’s a fifty-foot outrigger painted battleship gray, powered by a cast-iron diesel engine cannibalized from a dump truck, its cooling system converted to seawater. With a carpet of four kinds of sea grass, the transparent bay is a shimmering green. By night, it sparkles with luminescence. This was once habitat to a delicious, abalone-like conch that they hope will return. They hope their reef hangs on: the dreaded climate-driven bleaching has reduced parts of many reefs to coral skeletons in the Philippines, but a few actually show signs of growth. They’re hoping, too, that the shoreline’s thin border of mangroves, remnants of a forest ripped out decades earlier for an ill-conceived tiger shrimp farm, will spread anew. But mangrove makes good firewood, burning hot and steady like coal, so it’s hard to stay ahead of the poachers.

  In Talibon, Bohol’s northernmost town, Geri meets with the municipal health officer, Dr. Frank Lobo. He’s
just been with a United Nations official who was following up on a UNFPA program that built women’s health and birthing centers in the poorest towns in the Philippines, leveraged with funds from USAID. “In a country where eleven women die in childbirth daily, one of the riskiest things a woman can do is get pregnant. Our goal,” Lobo says, “is to lower maternal and infant deaths through clinic deliveries, and to reduce the population 35 percent. It’s working: Mothers are surviving; so are their babies. We’re down to three hundred deliveries a year from eighteen hundred. We’ve gone from zero to two hundred vasectomies.”

  Reducing population pressure here is urgent, he says, because one of only six double barrier reefs on Earth lies just offshore, encrusted with an extravagant array of sponges, soft corals, brain corals, and encrusting, branching, and table corals.

  “It is priceless,” says Lobo, “and it is our life. We have one fish stock, and ten thousand fishermen that want to catch it. The number of fish directly depends on the number of humans. We don’t talk about population explosion here. We talk about jobs—one job, ten thousand applicants. That’s the way to get people to appreciate the environment.”

  With the UNFPA project over, and with USAID funding always teetering on the vagaries of American politics, the Philippines must finally pass a reproductive health bill, he adds. At least they’ve disarmed the local church. “All of us in family planning are its most faithful donors. They don’t want to alienate us.”

  It’s only ten minutes by outrigger out to the double reef and to tiny, triangular Guindacpan Island, its sides just a quarter-mile long. Once covered by mangroves, they’re long gone. A small stand of coconut palms remains amid the 432 houses of Guindacpan’s fisherfolk.

  Zephyrs from another typhoon to the north are bending the palms. Arriving in blowing rain, Geri is met by Estrella Torrevillas, the public health nurse here for twenty-five years. Her green khaki pants are rolled above her calves, and it’s immediately clear why. Except in a few high spots near the palms, much of the island is under water. They slosh down narrow, sandy lanes, joined by the village nutritionist, Perla Pañares, whose blue jeans are soaked halfway to her knees. People with brooms are pushing water out the doorways of bamboo houses. Their seawater toilets, says Estrella, aren’t flushing well anymore. “So people are using the shore.”

  They pass the island’s single well, its water now too saline to drink. Houses have rain catches, says Perla. “But it’s never enough with this many people. The ones who can afford it are buying bottled water.”

  “Bad,” Geri says. “What about food?”

  “It’s lucky we like fish,” says Perla. The reef and sea grass have always provided crab, shrimp, black-lipped oysters, squid, anchovies, and sea cucumbers. People jig from the docks with drop lines for rabbitfish, garfish, and cardinalfish. They gather flower crabs, mud crabs, and Venus clams. “But for how long?” she wonders. The fish are getting smaller and fewer. “The big problem is vegetables: We have to buy them on Bohol. Now that salt water covers everything at high tide, nothing grows in the gardens. Except for seaweed.”

  Plastic windowsill pots filled with soil brought from Bohol grow onions, tomatoes, peppers, and spices. They come to a cement basketball court, where shirtless children splash barefoot, trying to dribble a blue basketball over a skin of water. Perla frowns, hearing three of them coughing. Fruit is scarcest of all. Many children only get it at Christmas.

  “None of these kids gets enough vitamin C.” She has four herself; Estrella has three. “That’s low: most families range from five to nine.” Perla has recently weighed every child five years old and under—a quarter of Guindacpan’s population—and noticed that the ten most severely malnourished kids all have either six or seven siblings.

  “Contraception used to be free here. Then UNFPA put in birthing clinics that charge.”

  Except, Estrella reminds her, it wasn’t really free—a donation was always required, however small. The real problem is that family-planning supplies run thin in remote places like this. Even PATH has been able to reach only half the people in the country’s extremely imperiled marine hot spots. Estrella distributes whatever she can get. “But it’s never enough.”

  iii. Inland

  Should seas continue to rise and cover the world’s lowest islands, family planning on Guindacpan may become a moot issue. But higher elevations aren’t exempt from changes that will affect their carrying capacity for human beings.

  A day later, back on Luzon, the typhoon has passed, leaving a deep blue sky laced with wispy cirrus veils. Sunshine is welcome at the International Rice Research Institute, halfway between Verde Island Passage and Manila, where concern is mounting over one particular variable in the longest-running rice experiment in the world. In 1963, when IRRI was founded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, scientists set aside a one-hectare test plot to see how long rice can grow continuously on the same piece of land. One hundred forty crops later—their hybrids get three harvests per year—the results are encouraging. Even in areas with no nitrogen application, they get production. The goal now is to bring production up and artificial nitrogen down to meet at an optimum level.

  They can manipulate fertilizer inputs and crop breeds. They’ve already cut back to just 2 percent of the insecticides they used fifteen years ago: egrets and plovers now root for snails and frogs in their test paddies; flycatchers hunt above them for buzzing insects missing from silent, pesticide-drenched fields elsewhere. But what they can’t control is the heat. For years, they’ve been charting yields against climate data. Since 2000, there is more cloudiness, less solar radiation, and rising nighttime temperatures. The higher the temperature at night, the more energy a plant burns to convert sugars—energy it otherwise would apply to growth. This has coincided with a 15 percent average drop in yields of IRRI’s “miracle rice” variety, IR8, that helped avert famine in Asia during the 1960s.

  If the warming trend continues, at this point there’s not much more rice breeders can do. Current hybrids were developed to maximize fertilizer uptake, resist pests and disease, grow faster (and as with daffodil-gene-manipulated golden rice, deliver extra vitamins). But temperature tolerance was never an issue—that is, until now.

  IRRI is the tropical analog of CIMMYT, Mexico’s wheat and maize improvement center—but hybridizing rice proved tricky. Rice, whose florets are hermaphrodites, pollinates itself. It was impossible to breed high-yield rice strains until, in 1970, a Hunan agronomist named Yuan Longping found a wild rice mutation on Hainan Island whose male half was sterile. That meant that its fertile female side could be crossed with male pollen from another variety, producing a hybrid with the best qualities of both. His discovery changed the world just in time: production from previous improvements—semidwarf, high-yield Green Revolution strains—had plateaued, just as the population of Asia, where half the planet’s people grow 90 percent of the world’s rice, was making a quantum leap upward. Today, China’s entire hybrid rice industry is based on those wild rice genes.

  But the more successful a rice variety, the more vulnerable it is. After arriving at a desired hybrid, the subsequent self-pollinating crops, like clones, can all catch the same flu. A disease infecting one plant will roar like wildfire through the whole lot. It’s a precarious base on which to balance humanity’s most widely consumed foodstuff. IRRI scientists have learned to chemically force male sterility, allowing them to crossbreed new strains to keep pace with new diseases. But today’s best hybrids for today’s climate, diseases, and pests won’t be tomorrow’s, because everything constantly changes.

  In a world where massive monocultures of the most profitable strains replace natural crop diversity, old strains must be preserved so that agronomists will always have something with which to crossbreed. Outside the refrigerated vault of IRRI’s gene bank, women sit at a long table in an air-conditioned room lined with hundreds of green file drawers, sorting through piles of seeds from hybrids and their wild relatives, selecting the healthie
st kernels to preserve. After pausing to examine a new batch of Bangladeshi rice the women have just received, Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, a sandy-haired, Cambridge-trained evolutionary ecologist who heads IRRI’s Genetic Resources Center, enters the gene bank.

  It’s a 3,650-square-foot, two-story refrigerator, furnished in tall brushed-stainless-steel racks and movable shelves. The active collection is stored in sealed aluminum foil packets at +2°C (35.6°F). It contains seeds from 117,000 known strains, which are given to any grower who asks, ten grams at a time. Belowdecks, an identical “base” collection is kept at –20°C—frigid enough to preserve seeds stored in vacuum-sealed aluminum cans for at least a century, assuming the electricity stays on or backup generators don’t run out of diesel.

  “These are for our great-grandchildren,” says Sackville Hamilton. As with CIMMYT’s maize and wheat, there’s an additional set of IRRI’s collection at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation at Fort Collins, Colorado. Yet another is buried in the Svalbard Global Seed “Doomsday” Vault in the Norwegian Arctic.

  This facility is flood-proof, typhoon-proof, and earthquake-proof up to 4.7 on the Richter scale. However, should one of Luzon’s nearby active volcanoes awaken and cover them with lava, “We wouldn’t survive,” Hamilton acknowledges.

  As steward of this anthropocentric botany collection, Sackville Hamilton doesn’t see the human-cultivated varieties as unnatural, but rather as part of evolution in which Homo sapiens are players, rearranging nature to improve our chances at survival, just as beavers do with riverbanks. He agrees that placing our bets on vast monocultures is something that nature shows us repeatedly not to do: they lack all the robustness of diverse ecosystems. So why do we do it?