A Flat Tire and a Dead Battery
7/21/22 – The climate and biodiversity crises are inseparable, and can only be solved together
Hello everyone:
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the post to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
Let’s pick up where I left off last week, where I spun a thread to connect the limitations of the human umwelt (the ways we sense the world) to our ecological amnesia and human self-interest. It all led up to my point for this week, that the global climate and biodiversity crises are inextricable from each other, and must be dealt with together.
This simple but incredibly important idea – that we need to stop erasing plant and animal communities at the same time we decarbonize civilization – has haunted me for some time. I think it’s one of the reasons I finally started writing this Field Guide. Watching nature diminish by the day and knowing the planet is also warming dangerously is bad enough; watching policy-makers focus (sort of) on the warming but not on the loss of species and ecosystems is even worse.
The title of this week’s writing comes from Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature (CFN), in an October 2021 New York Times article on the 15th U.N. Biodiversity Conference. The Campaign for Nature has at the heart of its mission a recognition that our heating of the Earth’s atmosphere (and oceans) is inseparable from all the other ways we’re rapidly erasing plants and animals. Here’s part of what O’Donnell said to the Times:
When you have two concurrent existential crises, you don’t get to pick only one to focus on – you must address both no matter how challenging… This is the equivalent of having a flat tire and a dead battery in your car at the same time. You’re still stuck if you only fix one.
The Times article opens with the observation that the Biodiversity Conference (“The Most Important Global Meeting You’ve Probably Never Heard Of,” as they called it) was occurring in the same month as the massive COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but receiving little of its fanfare. It’s clear that scientists understand the biodiversity crisis is just as important as the climate crisis but know that it isn’t getting the attention it deserves. There’s so much activist effort to wake up the global community to the realities of climate change that the “rapid collapse of species and systems that collectively sustain life on earth” isn’t getting equal time in public discussion or equal attention in government policy. I’m not suggesting we work less hard at the climate conundrum; I’m saying instead that both are necessary:
“If the global community continues to see it as a side event, and they continue thinking that climate change is now the thing to really listen to, by the time they wake up on biodiversity it might be too late,” said Francis Ogwal, one of the leaders of the working group charged with shaping an agreement among nations.
Simply put, biodiversity is a fundamental measure of health within natural communities. The threads that weave the fabric of biodiversity are a) diversity of ecosystems (a full variety of healthy habitats), b) diversity of species (a healthy array of the species that make up each ecosystem), and c) diversity of genetics (provided by a healthy population within each species). The more diverse these interwoven natural systems are, the more resilient they are to disturbances, whether fire, flood, or human interference.
But as we’ve erased or decimated habitats and reduced the number and populations of species, especially keystone species, the ecological fabric has torn and frayed until many of the landscapes we or our ancestors knew well became unrecognizable. “Lose too many players in an ecosystem,” as the Times notes, “and it will stop working.”
We have somehow forgotten that we rely entirely on local and global biodiversity for our very existence. It’s a measure of how bizarre our modern world has become that such a basic fact of life is little known or rarely discussed. As 20th century British naturalist Gerald Durrell put it,
You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that you have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is not only vital for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself -- a point that seems to escape many people.
A new Times article out last week discusses the latest report from Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (you can read the draft summary for policymakers here), which reminds us that half of humanity relies daily on wild plants and animals for our survival:
Billions of people worldwide rely on some 50,000 wild species for food, energy, medicine and income, according to a sweeping new scientific report that concluded humans must make dramatic changes… to address an accelerating biodiversity crisis.
This is the same group, by the way, that reminded us in a landmark 2019 report that at this early stage of the Anthropocene nearly a million species are at risk of extinction.
As I’ve written from the beginning of this Field Guide, while climate change is an existential threat to the current array of life on Earth, it is only one symptom of the Anthropocene. It is arguably the greatest single threat to life in the litany of planetary changes we’re making – though a good case could be made for the size of our population and its multiple impacts, which include climate change and habitat loss – but there’s really no rational way to isolate climate change from our broader habit of ecological destruction. As massive as the greenhouse gas problem is, we have to see it and approach it through the larger lens of protecting life on Earth.
As a quick thought experiment, imagine that all of a sudden – poof! – we flicked a switch to stop overheating the Earth and flicked another to suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere. While we’d lose the terrifying multiplier effects of a hotter, drier, more turbulent planet on the already increased rate of extinctions, that increased extinction rate would still be there because all of its other causes would still be there: industrial agriculture, chemical and plastic and nutrient pollution, ocean acidification and deoxygenation, destruction of habitats, invasive species we’ve introduced around the world, and much more. As just one example, North American grassland birds have lost over 50% of their breeding population in the last fifty years because of habitat loss and pesticide use. Keeping global warming below 1.5°C will help the remaining birds, but it won’t slow the loss from the main causes.
The reverse is also true. If poof!, we suddenly all engaged in a civilizational nature-loving project to rewild the majority of the globe’s habitats – which we really, really should – and resuscitated tens of thousands of species living on the edge of extinction, but did so while still pumping out a supervolcano’s worth of CO2 every year, much of that rewilding would be for nothing. We cannot successfully revitalize the familiar and beloved wetlands, forests, and coastal waters that surround us without also turning down the heat on the kettle.
Before talking about the wrong and right ways to address the climate/biodiversity conundrum, I should back up for a moment and describe the three fundamental ways in which climate change and other human-caused harm to natural communities are entwined:
The millions of years of accumulated fossil fuels we’ve been burning over the last few centuries are not only the source of the greenhouse gases upending the atmosphere and oceans. They’re also the source of the plastics and other toxins now ubiquitous in habitats across the globe. They’re the source of the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that have decimated bird, insect, and soil microbe populations on land and fish/invertebrate populations in waterways and in oceanic dead zones. They’re the source, more generally, of what has been called the Great Acceleration, a cheerful-sounding name for the 20th century explosion in human impacts which many scientists believe should be identified as the start of the Anthropocene.
Climate change is rapidly worsening the prospects of plant and animal communities already suffering from the impacts of biodiversity loss. Think, for example, of heavily logged forests or overfished waters now also dealing with heat-induced changes that force species to move or die. Unnaturally prolonged fire seasons or intensified drought on land and increasingly warmer, oxygen-deprived waters diminish even the most biodiverse wetlands or coral reefs. Thanks to our supervolcanic CO2 production, the oceans haven’t been this acidic in 26,000 years or this warm for 100,000 years, which means an untold number of species will have trouble adapting to such rapid change if it continues.
Conversely, the destruction of ecosystems has made it much harder for the planet to cope with our excess production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Every day that we further reduce plant communities on land (forests at all latitudes, peatlands, grasslands, etc.) and at sea (kelp and mangrove forests, for example) is another day making the future less stable.
If you want to read more sources on the interconnectedness of the two crises, which I recommend, here is some good diverse reading, with lots of solution-based discussion, from the U.N., the Climate Reality Project, the Good Food Institute, The Conversation, and the Guardian. The Guardian also provides excellent comprehensive biodiversity-focused coverage of the Anthropocene in their “Age of Extinction” section.
For the ultimate source, though, take a look at the 2021 report from the joint session of the IPBES (The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which focused on the intersection of climate and biodiversity. This is the scientific epicenter of the shift in focus to a two-pronged approach to mending the Anthropocene.
So, yes, we have to tackle all of this at once. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Norway’s climate and environment minister.
The good news is that there are so many ways to move the needle on both at the same time that we can all get busy helping right now.
And that’s what I’ll talk about next week…
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
The “Manchinian Candidate,” from Bill McKibben’s The Crucial Years here on Substack, is a concise assessment of the remarkable damage done by Joe Manchin to Joe Biden’s climate agenda – and to our climate future – at the behest of the fossil fuel industry.
From The Ecological Citizen, a personal/scientific essay on the importance of dead or decaying wood for biodiversity in forests. Whole communities of species rely on this key feature of a healthy forest, but decades of emptying the forest of old trees, dead branches, and rotten logs are leading many of these species toward extinction.
Also from The Ecological Citizen, a long essay/summary of a conference on the question of invertebrate sentience. It’s an impassioned and thoughtful piece, and well worth your time if you want to think hard about our generally negative and ill-informed relationship with insects and other invertebrates.
From The Atlantic, a thoughtful essay on the dilemma of electrifying everything, particularly cars. On one hand, for the sake of life on Earth, fossil fuel usage needs to largely disappear as quickly as possible, but on the other hand the mining required to build the batteries for a planet full of vehicles will be incredibly destructive. The good news is that once enough batteries are in circulation, their rare metal ingredients can theoretically be recycled forever. The bad news is that it will take decades of intensive mining before we get there.
If you’re willing to take a deep dive into the world of renewable energy, I recommend Volts, an incredibly comprehensive but generally accessible blog and podcast from David Roberts. He covers the topic in all its technical, political, and philosophical glory. Here’s a fascinating if wonky piece from 2021 on the many, many benefits of rooftop solar and local energy storage in a world that also needs a massive transmission grid powered by huge centralized renewable sources.
