To respect nature is to respect ourselves

Spider web at Torfolk Gård 2007

Nothing human beings do can compete with a piece of nature in complexity. A square metre of land contains so many organisms with so complicated and complex relationships that one can’t understand them. A gramme of forest soil may contain over a million bacteria colonies. It is estimated that several million individual animals and over a thousand different species may reside beneath a square metre of soil surface (Perry 1994); all of them are constituted by many, many cells and there is interaction between them, an exchange of energy and nutrients. Most likely, a square metre of nature is more complex and contains more information than the whole Internet.

Apart from the direct and indirect services obtained from nature, nature also has great aesthetical and cultural value. It gives another perspective, many reference points; it is an unprecedented piece of art. Natural environments have, for centuries, been known for their healing properties for people in spiritual need or mental stress. It is good to have respect for nature. The respect should be based on what it is; for its beauty and for its value, both apparent values and those not discovered. This respect should of course also include ourselves. A level of development has been reached where we are already managing most of the terrestrial ecosystems. This gives human beings unique powers among the creatures on the planet and unique responsibility too. We can’t pretend that we don’t have that power or that responsibility; both have to be exercised with due diligence, humbly realizing that there are so many things we don’t know.

Whose nature?
It should be kept in mind that exploitation of nature is also a question of whose nature. Different groups are affected by destruction of nature in different ways, and normally the nature of the weaker group is destroyed while the nature of the rich is preserved. This leads some to believe that the rich ‘care more’ for the environment or that only when there is a certain wealth that human beings ‘can afford’ to care about nature, but this mixes up cause and effect to a large extent. The rich can exploit the nature of the poor and even export their waste to the nature of the poor, whereas the poor has no other option than the exploitation of nature, be it in the form or natural resources or in the form of their own labour. To some extent, the whole trick of modern civilization is about exploitation of nature; exploitation of historical production, of which fossil fuel is the primary example; exploitation of the future nature, by dumping waste. But it is also the history of a few people exploiting many other people. At the centre, apart from nature and energy, are technology and society.

Society has four big challenges regarding the use of natural resources; well perhaps using the term ‘challenges’ is an understatement, ‘system errors’ is perhaps a more suitable term. First, humankind uses already too much of the planet’s resources; the capital is being consumed and it is not a question of whether society will go bankrupt[1] but when it will do so. Second, the distribution of these resources is extremely inequitable, between countries and within countries; rich countries and rich people use a totally disproportionate share of the resources (and rich people in rich countries are apparently the worst). Third, economic growth is continuing and seems to be hard-wired into society, which means that resource use will also continue to grow. Fourth, the world’s population is primed to grow for at least 40 more years, perhaps longer. We can’t negotiate with nature and no less can we expect that the poor will, or should, accept that common assets are wasted.

[1] The term is a bit unfortunate, the repercussions of an exhaustion of the natural capital is a lot more dramatic than a financial bankruptcy, which in essence only means a redistribution of money. The terms for bankruptcy with nature can’t be negotiated. There is no bailout.

The text is an extract from Garden Earth

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

increasing shortages and growing inequality - a lethal mix

“We just want to get enough money to get the bank off our back,” he said. “We would love to stay here because this is some of the best dirt in the world. But I can’t farm myself out of this water problem.” says an American farmer who has to let his land be converted into a solar power field. read more. 

It is astonishing that there are still so many who seem to believe that human ideas are the only limitations we have. In area after area, there are clear indications of that resources are getting shorter in supply. Some resources can be traded globally and therefore it is a matter of money, who gets them. And those that are too poor can't pay for them. That is why some people strave to death while others are obese and why 2 billion don't have electricity while others use it even for brushing the teeth of their dogs. Other resources are not possible to trade, because of their nature, such as land and water and solar radiation. For them competition is already fierce, as the examples from the US shows. In a recent posting I told about how the Chinese government had to order water into the fields from the Three Gorges Dam, instead of using it for food.

In a market economy, there will of course, by definition, always be a balance. There simply can't be any "shortages", because demand and supply are regulated by price. That is why starvation is not real issue, perhaps just a "market failure" in the view of neo-liberals (I know irony is hard to use on the web, I hope the reader can appreciate that these are not my views).

The combination of increasing shortages and the massive inequalities - which are increasing (see more here) in the world makes it clear that the market economy totally lacks instruments for any kind of sustainable and fair distribution of resources. And isn't that what we need?

The fight over resources

For every day the neo-liberal myth, that there is simply no shortages of resources is exposed as a scam. They say that human creativity is the limit for economic growth, or rather that human creativity means that there will be no limits. And because there are no limits, and an abundance, there is no connection between some peoples' enormous use of resources and others poverty. There is nothing such as "over-consumption". on the contrary, by consuming more we help the poor.


The Three Gorges Dam in Xiling, Hubei province, China. Photographer: Olli Geibel/AFP/Getty Images

Today we can read that China has to make the tough choice between using water in the Three Gorges Dam for irrigation of food crops or for energy.

The Three Gorges Dam will discharge enough water to fill 2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools by June 10, according to a government statement. Lower water levels on the 6,264-kilometer (3,915-mile) river may increase China’s oil demand by 300,000 barrels a day to make up for lost hydropower generation, Barclays Capital said last week.

This is a very vivid illustration of that shortages of resources will be a permanent feature in the future. 
And it also shows that when a resource is used for one purpose it is withdrawn from some other place, something that is self-evident for everybody except a special breed of humans that have total faith in the market and technology to solve all problems.  In a "free" market economy a choice like this is simple. Has the potential energy in the water a higher market price than the food that is produced; well use it for energy production and let people starve. This is just another version of the debate around bio-energy....

The tragedy of the tragedy of commons

(what is tragic with this forest?)

The expression “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) was coined by the ecologist Garret Hardin (1915-2003) to describe that common resources need to be protected and monitored to be protected from over-exploitation. Many, in particular neo-liberals have used his article, or at least the catchy phrase to argue that common resources should be privatised because that would mean that they will be taken care of; sustainability would be guaranteed through the profit interest of the individual. It has also been used against common management or public management of resources. Hardin himself clarified in a later article 2003 that what is needed is that the commons are managed: "A 'managed commons' describes either socialism or the privatism of free enterprise. Either one may work; either one may fail: 'The devil is in the details.' But with an unmanaged commons, you can forget about the devil: As overuse of resources reduces carrying capacity, ruin is inevitable." He also stated that:

The more the population exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, the more freedoms must be given up. As cities grow, the freedom to park is restricted by the number of parking meters or fee-charging garages. Traffic is rigidly controlled. On the global scale, nations are abandoning not only the freedom of the seas, but the freedom of the atmosphere, which acts as a common sink for aerial garbage. Yet to come are many other restrictions as the world's population continues to grow. (Hardin 2003)[1]

Very seldom do we hear those that babble about the tragedy of the commons quote this statement.

Privatization of commons played a big role for the development of capitalism in England. It is worth noting that there is no indication of that those commons, before they were privatized, represented any tragedy, i.e. that they were mismanaged in any way. They were common in order to protect them from over-use rather than the opposite (Montgomery 2007). On the Solomon Islands, the white beech is a rare tree essential for constructions of canoes. When someone knows they will need a new canoe in the future, they mark a young tree to inform the others of its future use, and still ask the chief for permission before finally cutting it (Satoyama 2010). The same is reported from many other places: ”well-organized village communities were frequently in a better position to care for the common forest in keeping with their needs than money-hungry lords who wished to fill their coffers with the forest and who often did not even know the woods they were supposedly protecting”. It was precisely the division of the commons that was often followed by the cutting of the forest (Radkau 2008). Our society institutions are also a kind of commons, created by ourselves. Last decades have experienced a wide-spread battle over how to manage resources like schools, hospitals, utilities, postal service and water works just to mention a few.

Experiences of how to manage common resources point in different directions and we should not jump into conclusions how they should be managed in order not to be destroyed. There are other options than privatization and state control; many common resources, probably most, have been managed by local communities, and it is rather recent that they have been either privatised or taken over by the state. Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in economy, has shown how cooperation in the management of common resources is the rule rather than an exception (Ostrom 2009). What is of critical importance is that the users have real say in the arrangements. This is hardly anything new; Kropotkin said the same almost 150 years earlier. For sure there will still be no guarantee that the management will be perfect, people can act egoistically or foolishly both as individual owners and members of a community. The difference is that in a community, the majority must act egoistically and foolishly for it to dominate.

(More extracts from Garden Earth)

[1] My references to Hardin here should not be seen as an endorsement of his ethics regarding how to behave in an overstretched world, some of which I find questionable to say the least.