The market is not a management system for the planet

Even the most convinced proponents of a free market realise that there are things that can't be left to the market to sort out. Human rights, law and order, security, basic social security have, in almost all societies, been regulated by some other institution than the market, often by a state. Most of our social relations are within the context of family, kinship, communities, etc. and thus also are not regulated by markets. And even for those things that are, mostly, regulated by markets there are many government rules. Even in the market-oriented United States there are supposedly 130,000 regulations for how economic agents may, or may not, behave. And the more central an issue is to our society, the more regulations there are. For example, all countries have labour regulations. They are there because we realize that the workers are a weaker party in an alleged "free" labour market: they need some kind of protection. There is no doubt, in my view, that some market regulations go too far, and that governments should refrain from micro-managing economic activity. A bigger threat, however, is when governments want markets to regulate things that are not at all suitable for market regulation.

Agriculture is a very complex activity. It provides us with our most essential need, food.  Throughout history, food supply has always been subject to political intervention. The Romans tried to regulate prices, although they failed, like most other subsequent efforts; the record of government interventions in food markets is rather poor. Faced with the prospect of food shortages, we now see country after country making bilateral food deals. They no longer trust the global trading system to safeguard their food supplies. The fact that we have major famine, e.g. in the Horn of Africa, while lots of food is wasted in other parts of the world is also an indication that markets in food don't work very well in safeguarding the survival of fellow humans. Agriculture is also largely the foundation of society. Human relations in the farming system shaped social structures over millennia. Even modern industrial societies have grown out of a context where agriculture played a pivotal role. The preservation of farming is not only about food production but also about culture, society and heritage.

Scientists now speak about the Anthropcene, the era in which planet Earth's big systems, hydrological, biological, climatic and even geological, are mainly shaped by humans. Farming already occupies around forty percent of the planet's terrestrial surface and with the urban and peri-urban areas, human activity covers perhaps sixty percent. We also know that farming and land-use accounts for around one third of the greenhouse gas emissions, the second largest source after fossil fuels. This means that farming is the most significant human management system of the planet; that the future of humans on the planet largely rests upon how we manage the farmscape. And markets are not the right tool for managing the planet. 

published as a column in Ecology and Farming  #4 2011. 

BioChar - a bit of modesty would be advisable...

Just came back from a seminar with William I. Woods of the University of Kansas about Terra Preta. He has spent a lot of time on this and the seminar was very interesting. William was rather provocative and made a number of bold statements such as
- all the fertile steppes (pampas, the Norh American prairies and the Pontic steppe, i.e. are of man-made origin, having been forests burnt down by people
- composting is very bad as most of the carbon is lost
- the best strategy to deal with climate change is to cut down the Amazon forests and to make bio char from it, let it grow again - and make more bio char etc.

The latter statement is closely linked to his research which states that contrary to what most believe the Amazon was rather populated in the history AND it was to a large extent deforested. He stated that the "little ice age" partly was caused by the return of forests in the Amazon (gulping up the carbon in the atmosphere) as a result of post 1491 decline in population. Interesting thought-I do agree with him to some degree. We tend to overlook how much humans have transformed ecosystems in the past. The fact is that also large scale transformation took place long before "modern" society and industrialism. Ruddiman has also pointed that out in a good way.

I have written before about that the relationship between man and nature is a bit more complex than we mostly beleive:

Climate; doing the things right or doing the right thing?

Nitrogen fertilisers destroy organic carbon

we are part of nature

http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-separation-of-humans-from-nature-is.html 

http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2010/04/reminder_17.html
http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/we-are-part-of-nature.html

 
How fertile are terra preta soils?
When it comes to the power of Bio Char I am less convinced. There is a lot of promotion of BioChar today and like many other techno-fixes it seems somewhat over-promoted in my view. We now have multi-million research programs and (of course) biochar standards and certification.

From the presentation of William Woods, I realise that the terra preta soils of the Amazon are not only a result of charcoal use and making, but perhaps even more of a large scale import of nutrients from a hinterland, not much different from the infield-outfield system of Sweden or Plaggen soils of Germany. It is not difficult to maintain high productivity of soils when there is a constant import of nutrients. Also the soils will improve over the years. For me, it appears as if this aspect is more important to understand the fertility of terra preta soils than charcoal. I might be wrong, but I am still waiting for the evidence of the opposite. In addition, the fertility of the terra preta soils as measured by professor Woods wasn't really too impressive.

As a carbon sequestration technology I am sure it works quite well, having the possibility to sequester carbon as the only parameter for measuring success - but I don't think we can manage our world with such one-dimensional criteria.  In general, I am afraid about all messianic ideas of simple solutions to climate change - allowing us to continue with "business as usual" as expressed by professor Woods.

Svensk källa för biokol: http://www.geo.uu.se/biokol/

Man: more dependent on nature than ever

"Production in the future will be more limited by the availability of fish than of boats or nets, by trees rather than chain saws and by the availability of topsoil rather than ploughs or genetically modified organism"

Conscious man, as a changer of his environment, is now fully able to wreck himself and that environment, with the very best of conscious intentions (Gregory Bateson[2])

 

Our growing population, market economy, capitalism, industrial technology and fossil fuel together form a force of such dignity that we can now speak about Antropocene, a development stage of the planet, where human influence has become a determining power for the whole planet, for the biosphere, for the atmosphere and even to the geosphere.  Despite industrialism, farming and other uses of landscape is at the core of almost all important debates, including those about global development. Many, yes most, environmental issues are multifaceted and can’t be properly understood in isolation. For instance, because of the bleaching impact of warmer water, elevated nutrient levels from pollution, over-fishing, sediment deposition arising from inland deforestation, acidification and other pressures, tropical coral reefs worldwide increasingly become algae-dominated with catastrophic loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, threatening the livelihoods and food security of hundreds of millions of people (CBD 2010).

Many people say, or think, that industrialism has made us less dependent on nature. That is an illusion. On the contrary, current society is dependent on much bigger parts of nature than any previous society was. Hunter and gatherers were certainly dependent on nature, but they foraged on the surplus of limited parts of the ecosystems. They didn't use all the mineral and fossil resources that we do today; they were not dependent on a lot of physical infrastructure like we are and they used less of the ecosystem services. Even compared to the agriculture civilization that preceded us, we are as or more dependent on supply of product and services from nature. True, we produce a lot more per square meter, but we have increased the population so that the entire surplus is needed. There is no more food surplus today than before, rather the opposite. One difference is perhaps that we can today ship food from surplus areas to deficiency areas with the help of cheap fossil fuel and modern technology meaning that local food shortages should be less devastating. But the fact is that we don't do that. 1 billion is short of food despite all our progress. 

The illusion of that we are less dependent on nature is caused by that we live further away from nature. But that is distorting our perspective. The fact that we get electricity in cables and petrol from tubes in the petrol station doesn't mean that we are less dependent on nature for energy than the hunter sitting around the camp fire or the farmer putting another log on his hearth. 

Industrialism was introduced in order to profit from the labour embedded in manufacturing, and later moved into agriculture, fisheries and other nature resource based industries. There is a contradiction, however, that while the population goes through the ceiling; nature resources are getting scarcer and ecosystem services are stressed, we still act as if man-power is the most limiting resource that we need to save on, while wasting the others. The flaw of that perspective starts to show, first in the sectors that are directly using nature resources.  

Production in the future will be more limited by the availability of fish than of boats or nets, by trees rather than chain saws and by the availability of topsoil rather than ploughs or genetically modified organisms. The fact that things have “worked out well” so far should not be a big comfort. Even if industrialism has been around for 250 years and some of us believe (I don't) we live in a post-industrial society, the fact is that this explosion of resource use is fairly recent. In 1961 we used a little more than the earth's bio-capacity; in 2006 we used more 44 percent more than was available. The estimated annual environmental costs from global human activity is equating to 11% of global GDP in 2008 (UNEP-FI 2010). And at the same time we use so called environmental services provided by nature valued to two times the volume of the economy. The third part of what nature does for us, the real value of minerals and fossil fuel, has not been estimated at all[3]. An overall question is of course how do we calculate this and what do we want to accomplish by doing it.

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[2]       Gregory Bateson (1904 – 1980), British social scientist and communication theoretician.

[3]       Ecologist Jeff Dukes calculates that there is 98 tons of biological material embedded in one gallon of oil. Expressed in another way, the daily use of fossil fuel in the world corresponds to the total biomass growth in a year  (Siegel 2003). 

Extract from Garden Earth

Why the separation of "Humans" from "Nature" is a dangerous one

"When the choice is framed as Humans versus Nature, it turns out that most people will choose Humans." wtites James K Boyce in http://triplecrisis.com/environmentalisms-original-sin/
It is an excellent post with ides that coincides with many of my previous posts.

Today, more than ever, we need to realise that there is no nature separate from humans, all we do change nature much more than people understand, and have been doing it for millennia. I wrote:
“While most ecologists classify the biomes (nature types or ecosystems) of the world largely as if they were not touched by humans, the truth is that humans now influence most parts of the world, even to the extent that some scientists speak about the Antropocene as a geological era; that we actually change both the geology and climate”
in a recent blog post, http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2011/04/welcome-to-antropocene-and.html
Other posts on similar themes are:
http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2010/04/reminder_17.html
http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/we-are-part-of-nature.html
The solution to our ecological crisis is to further develop the human nature in intelligent ways, something I promote in the book Garden Earth, http://gardenearth.blogspot.com/2011/05/finally-satisfied-with-garden-earth.html

Welcome to Antropocene and the anthropogenic Biomes

While most ecologists classify the biomes (nature types or ecosystems) of the world largely as if they were not touched by humans, the truth is that humans now influence most parts of the world, even to the extent that some scientists speak about the Antropocene as a geological era; that we actually change both the geology and climate. Ellis and Ramankutty (2008) identify eighteen anthropogenic biomes and only three biomes that could be considered ”wildlands”, most of them barren, permafrost or sparsely forested. The wildlands represents around 22 percent of the terrestrial land, but only 11 percent of the net primary production (the photosynthesis) because they are cold or dry, or both. All other nature type have been so heavily influenced by humans that they can be called man-made landscapes. Of course, even in those landscapes there are patches of land that is less influenced and even in a field, there are weeds and wild life, but they are all there under conditions created by us; ”human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within then”. It is assessed that we control at least one third of the all terrestrial primary production (i.e. the biological production emerging from the photosynthesis). Rangelands are with this classification the most common landscapes, covering nearly one third of the ice-free lands. Due to arid conditions, the primary production is low, only 15 % of the worlds total and only 5% of the population lives in those landscapes (Ellis and Ramankutty 2008). The value of marginal land is changing. In the past livestock occupied vast territories because there was no possible – or profitable alternative use. It might actually be better to have wild animals roam those plains – as they did long before we tamed our animal companions.

Area, population and primary production of the world

	Area (%)	Net Primary Production (%)	Population (billion)
Dense settlements	1.11%	1.4%	2.57
Villages	5.9%	7.7%	2.56
Croplands	20.8%	32%	0.93
Rangelands	30.4%	15.5%	0.28
Forests	19.4%	32.8%	0.04
Wildlands	22.5%	10.7%	0

Source: adapted from Ellis and Ramankutty 2008.