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

by Alan Weisman

  It was mid-July, and the humid air already felt chewable. Two grad students, Jane Cowles and Peter Wragg, took me to see experimental plots planted in combinations of annuals and perennials—swift grass, couch grass, Arctic brome, big and little bluestem, and blue grama grass—along with forbs and legumes such as yarrow, prairie clover, milkweed, goldenrod, and lupine. Infrared heat lamps were warming each plot 2° to 5°C above the already sweltering morning. In the elevated heat, everything was growing taller and faster. Several plants were already flowering. Did this mean, I asked, that global warming is good for crops?

  “Not really,” said Cowles. “Unless insects change their life-cycle timing, there will be a mismatch between the pollinators and the flowers.”

  Even with forced warming, growth was significantly more robust in the most biodiverse plots. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of our crops are monocultures.

  In the elevated CO2 experiment, three circular fields, each containing fifty plots sown with various combinations of plants and fertilizer applications, were ringed by perforated vertical PVC poles that blew carbon dioxide. A sensor in the middle of each ring, Wragg explained, constantly adjusted the flow to maintain a steady 550 parts per million of CO2, expected to be the atmospheric concentration in 2050.1 During the initial years of the experiment, heightened CO2 had enhanced plant growth, much as increased oxygen invigorates us—until it becomes toxic. Likewise, at a certain point the plants’ productivity stopped increasing unless extra nitrogen fertilizer was added—a demand that will keep spiraling, as overuse of nitrogen is itself one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases.

  As in the elevated temperature experiment, plots with the highest biodiversity did the best. We were driving next to see an enhanced nitrogen experiment, but suddenly the heavens darkened as though by an unscheduled eclipse. From the south, a phalanx of black cumulonimbus was slamming the sky shut. As we passed through a wooded copse, a birch tree blew down across the road, cutting short my visit.

  Heading back, I heard tornado warning sirens. Gripping the steering wheel against wind gusts, watching the sky for funnels, I wondered, as everyone now does, if the dramatic weather was due to our rejiggered climate. On the one hand, having grown up in this northern stretch of Tornado Alley, this felt familiar. On the other, the radio reported that although it was only midsummer, the heat wave had already killed a million dollars’ worth of cattle in Minnesota.

  Only over time, scientists caution, can we know if mounting violent weather events add up to a trend that means the climate has entered a phase shift. But if we wait to act until all the numbers are in, we’ll have waited too long, which is why scientists keep jamming every possible variable into models that predict our likely future. Because technically they’re speculative, their credibility is attacked by whoever profits from business as usual. But thus far, the main failing in climate change models has been timidity: the worst possible case for an ice-free Arctic summer, predicted for 2050 back in 2008, has now been moved to as early as 2016.

  At what point, and with what proof or words, might politicians and industry be convinced that drastic change is already upon us, and will only worsen—perhaps fatally—if we don’t respond accordingly? Later that year, I would be asked by a prominent Japanese business magazine if I thought that people were being hysterical to demand an end to nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima tragedy.

  “I wouldn’t call it hysteria,” I answered, “given that all your nuclear plants are in seismic zones or on seacoasts, exposed to typhoons and tsunamis.”

  “But people will suffer even more if productivity drops. Isn’t it hysterical not to take that into account?” the interviewer countered. Over the next half-hour, he kept rephrasing his question, hoping for a more satisfying response—until, during his fourth try, the coffee shop where we sat shook as a tremor struck central Tokyo, rendering my reply unnecessary.

  No twisters had dropped from the roiling black clouds into the Twin Cities, but the university’s St. Paul campus, where Jon Foley teaches, was littered with broken tree limbs. In his early forties, Foley has a lean, boyish face that smiles far more than you’d expect from someone who knows as much as he does about what we’re up against. He showed me a map of the world, color-coded in green and brown.

  “All the world’s cropland lumped together,” he said, indicating the green splotches, “adds up to about the size of South America. All our pastureland”—the brown—“equals the continent of Africa.” My shock over urban sprawl was misplaced, he said. Humans use sixty times the amount of land that’s paved to feed ourselves. Everything else is either desert or mountains too dry or craggy to cultivate, or forests that we need to soak up carbon.

  “We’re already using all the cropland we’ll ever have. In the coming years, we have to feed two billion more people, using the same land. Add the affluence of Asia’s growing middle class, and it means we have to double the world’s food supply by mid-century. We’re already failing a billion undernourished people now. By the end of the century, there’ll be at least a billion more. We’ll need to triple today’s yields. How we do that is the biggest challenge humanity’s ever faced.”

  I’d heard this all before, but coming from the man who’d gathered more information than anyone about food we coax from the Earth, this felt like a definitive verdict. So I was surprised when he said, “The good news is that I think it’s possible.”

  How?

  “Only if everything works perfectly—and so far, we’re not emphasizing the right things. If we stabilize populations, as quickly and humanely as possible. Also, if we rethink the diets that are shifting to more meat. Eight or ten billion people can’t all eat hamburgers. If we reduce the waste of at least a third of the world’s food. In rich countries, we waste it in restaurants or it spoils in refrigerators, at the consumer end of the supply chain.”

  We were having lunch in a bright, airy St. Paul eatery named Bread & Chocolate, the kind of place where food is a festive subject. Guiltily, I ate the parsley garnish on my plate. “In poor countries,” Foley continued, “it’s usually at the farmer’s end. They can’t store grain without losses to disease or pests. Or they can’t get it to market in time. Or it’s simply lost somewhere.”

  He paused for a breath. There were more, and even bigger, ifs coming.

  “If we—” He stopped and corrected himself. “We have to hit the sweet spot of growing the most food with the least water and the least nitrogen. They’re both so big it’s extraordinary. It requires so much departure from business as usual, it’s pretty frightening.”

  Humans were already fighting over water in Old Testament times. But synthetic nitrogen wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s. Since then, Foley said, “Agriculture has become the single biggest hammer we’re smashing the planet with. It’s the biggest source of greenhouse gases, emitting more than all the factories and power plants together, and more than all our cars, trains, boats, and airplanes combined.”

  The culprits are deforestation, methane belched by cattle and rice paddies, fertilizer manufacture, and an insidious by-product of overfertilization: nitrous oxide, a heat-trapping gas three hundred times as potent as CO2.

  “It’s a Goldilocks parable,” said Foley. “Half the world has too little nitrogen. Half the world has too much. Nobody’s just right. Here in the U.S., and especially in China and India, we use way too much. Only a quarter to half is taken up by plants. The rest is pollution. But in a place like Malawi, a small application of fertilizer to maize fields could triple their productivity. Again, it’s a matter of hitting the sweet spot, for every place and climate and soil and culture.”

  The path to a happy future was looking very narrow. Especially from my vantage point, back where I’d started. Minneapolis and St. Paul were prosperous milling and railroad cities whose founders deeply valued and endowed education, arts, and culture. Set in a fertile landscape ribboned with plentiful rivers, blessed with rich soils and clear lakes brimm
ing with fish, these graceful cities were lovely but deceptive places to grow up: Until I left and discovered otherwise, I assumed that this was normal. Back in this comforting womb, I struggled to see the big global picture.

  “What if Haber-Bosch were never invented,” I asked Foley, “and we never had artificially fixed nitrogen? We’d have a lot fewer people with our food supply limited by the ability of bacteria on legume roots to fix nitrogen. Instead, we’re hogging half the planet’s photosynthesis and stealing 70 percent of the freshwater for crops. If we’d never invented fertilizer, would we have even needed a Green Revolution?”

  He winced. “The twentieth century would have been really ugly—uglier than it was—if we hadn’t done that. Admittedly, we now need a second Green Revolution, one that’s much greener. But by avoiding catastrophic food shortages and the Malthusian crisis we’re now headed towards, the Green Revolution allowed us to humanely go through the demographic transition.”

  The demographic transition—a country’s passage from high birth and death rates to low—is considered both an indicator and a result of becoming developed. “Imagine if we’d had a world armed with nuclear weapons and billions of starving people. That’s a powder keg that we avoided.”

  Yet another University of Minnesota scientist, Green Revolution founder Norman Borlaug, warned that we’d really avoided nothing: we’d merely postponed the inevitable population crush. And now Pakistan, a nuclear power and initial Green Revolution beneficiary, is bursting with people headed toward hunger, unless some miracle restores their diminishing water supplies. Israel and India, also nuclear powers, also have water shortages and burgeoning masses.

  By Foley’s own amazing compilation of numbers, unless we marshaled all the world’s unruly minions into exquisitely disciplined resource management, using fertilizer with pinpoint precision and minimizing the tasty, lucrative, status-affirming overconsumption of meat, we were hell-bent on fulfilling Malthus’s prophecy.

  Wouldn’t trying to manage our numbers be a more realistic target than trying to squeeze three times the food from the same, already exhausted land?

  Foley pinched the bridge of his long Irish nose. “We were given this amazing planet,” he replied, “with huge resources and incredible endowments of energy, biology, and water. Now all the trajectories are in the wrong direction. We’ve got too many people wanting too much stuff on a planet whose resource base is getting smaller. Those things will continue unfolding for a long time, and the endgame’s going to be something radically different. Sometime in the future, the endgame will be for us to survive as a civilization on a planet with fewer people. I don’t know how many. A billion or two. Who knows?”

  Outside, it was now a calm July afternoon. “We’re caught in a sweep of history with much inertia behind it,” Foley said as we shook hands. “We can’t solve this problem in our lifetime. It’s going to take several generations of work. But that doesn’t make me feel hopeless; it actually makes me feel kind of empowered. It’s like, great: I’ve got the next couple of generations to work with. I need to get them the best tools to fight with as possible. Maybe one lever we can push is seeing if we can stop at eight instead of ten billion. Instead of only 30 percent of the world’s rainforest left, let’s give them 41 percent.”

  Driving across the Mississippi River, I thought about his determination. Like his colleague Gretchen Daily, Jon Foley pulled no punches on what we were facing, yet still managed to inspire hope.

  A passage in the landmark ecological boundary paper he coauthored referred to exponential growth of human activities that could destabilize systems and trigger abrupt, irreversible environmental changes that could be catastrophic for human well-being. “This is a profound dilemma,” it concluded, “because the predominant paradigm of social and economic development remains largely oblivious to the risk of human induced environmental disasters at continental to planetary scales.” Muffled in the neutral scientific tone of that turgid sentence was a scream: We don’t even realize what we’re doing!

  As Interstate 94 curved past gleaming downtown Minneapolis, I looked for the parking lot where the original Minneapolis Public Library once stood, a nineteenth-century brownstone where I’d passed much of my boyhood. I would visit the small museum on its top floor and stare at the stuffed remains of a passenger pigeon, once the most abundant bird on Earth. Humans wiped them out by 1914—yet as I later read, even when there were a million left, they were already functionally extinct, because the pattern that doomed their critical habitat and food supply was already set. Was it possible, I now wondered, that my own species might also already be the living dead?

  The week before, in Washington, DC, I’d met with Reverend Richard Cizik, a former Washington lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals. In 2008 he left them and founded the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a Christian organization with an environmental mission he calls “Creation Care.” For the past three years, he told me, “I’ve been laying theological groundwork for interpreting how the mandate to be fruitful and multiply applies to today, in light of the current crisis of the planet.” A thin, intense man with straight, receding blond hair, he’d just come out publicly in support of family-planning funding a few weeks earlier in a piece for the Washington Post’s faith blog.

  “Family planning is not only moral: it’s what we should be doing. Be fruitful and multiply was superseded by a post-flood mandate to live peacefully with all of God’s creatures.”

  He was undaunted by the pushback from conservative evangelicals, he said, and encouraged by the response of a new generation of concerned young Christians.

  “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven, Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer. If that’s the case, then we should bring the values of heaven to Earth. In heaven things don’t go extinct. Sustainability means you don’t make things go extinct. Yet that’s what we’re doing, to entire species. We just don’t realize it, unless we listen to the scientists who help explain what Creation can’t say to us, but is speaking to us. That’s the value of science—to help us understand what Creation is saying about itself.”

  In parting, he directed me to Revelation 11:18.

  “In his vision of the end times, the apostle John foresees God destroying those who destroy the Earth,” he said. “So we have a moral obligation to care for it, and live as if our very lives and futures all depended on it.”

  As a boy, I learned to fish and to swim in Minneapolis lakes. During college, I lifeguarded them, and canoed and sailed and jogged around them during off-hours. Now I stopped at one of the loveliest, Lake of the Isles. Pairs of mallards and blue-winged teals floated near stands of cattails along the shore. Couples of my own species were also present, along with young mothers pushing strollers on the paths beneath weeping willows. So much of this planet was still as beautiful as I always remembered it, and I hoped that Cizik was right about another thing he’d said: that the Scriptures don’t predict a world that burns up and disappears, but a refined, purified Earth.

  The demographic transition is a reality: among the fruits of development are longevity and a reduced need for parents to make extra copies of themselves, in hopes that at least some survive. Except in poorest Africa or south Asia, or in enclaves of religious extremism such as in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and haredi Israel, the momentum of our increase has declined. The question now, as our species presses against the limits of nature’s tolerance, is if it’s in the best interest of ourselves and our kindred species on this planet to hasten that process.

  In other words: Are we bringing down our numbers fast enough to save us from the irreversible, possibly calamitous change of which our finest scientists are trying to warn us?

  “Demography isn’t destiny,” Rockefeller University population mathematician Joel Cohen told a 2012 gathering at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “We can influence the world of our children and grandchildren by what we do right now.” Concurring with population specialist Dr. Malcol
m Potts, just a half-child-per-woman decrease in the world’s fertility rate, Cohen said, could bring us back to 6 billion by the end of the century—or half a child in the other direction could take us to 16 billion.

  Not that we would ever get there, because we would collapse over multiple thresholds first, possibly never to crawl back. Or we might lower our numbers even faster, with families around the globe bearing just one or two, until we bring our species back from the brink we hadn’t realized we were approaching, until now.

  As I slowly walked around Lake of the Isles, I noted that several of the grand houses along the lakeside parkway, once the address of milling families and cereal magnates, were now for sale. Toward the end of the previous decade, the housing market, that sacrosanct standard of economic health, proved to be a delusion akin to chain letters and Ponzi schemes. We all know what happened next: The ripples are still shaking the underpinnings of the European Union and world banking systems.

  But say you owned a corporation, and you hired as a consultant one of those economists who failed to see the inevitable mortgage debacle coming. Even though they obsess about growth as the measure of a company’s strength—the mantra they never question—you already know what they’re going to tell you to do to make your corporation healthy:

  “You need to get lean. You’ve got to cut out the fat.”

  So when your employees arrive the following week, 25 percent find pink slips waiting for them. Rather brutally, your corporation has just cut itself down to a healthier size. That is, unless you run a humane corporation. Instead of culling a quarter of your personnel as though they were excess deer, you use a gentler method: attrition. Each year, as some employees retire or move on or pass away, you simply recruit fewer to take their places. Those who remain learn new technologies to efficiently accomplish what previously took many more to do, and gradually the company reaches a nice, sustainable size.