An Ecological Ponzi Scheme

5/20/21

May 21, 2021

I promised a few weeks ago to revisit the “Ghastly” report, as I called it, from a group of the world’s top ecologists. The report came out around the same time as a massive document called “Making Peace with Nature: A scientific blueprint to tackle the climate, biodiversity and pollution emergencies,” from the U.N. Environment Program. Both were published this year, 2021, and both were written by experts who have no illusions about the scale of the challenge before us. The difference between reports is in length and tone. The UNEP report, at 168 pages, defines in detail the multiple problems facing humanity because of environmental degradation and describes wide-ranging methods to simultaneously address those problems. As you might expect from the U.N., the tone is serious, the articulation is comprehensive, and the crisis is framed by a statement of hope that humanity can act appropriately and quickly.

In contrast, the Ghastly report’s efficiency is as brutal as its message. In a mere six pages (plus four pages of references) the authors lay out an extraordinarily effective description of what’s changed, what’s been lost, how little is being done, and how much more will be lost if radical shifts in the civilizational program don’t occur quickly.

I think of the Ghastly report as an alarm clock and the U.N. report as a multi-generational to-do list waiting on the kitchen table.

The proper name for the Ghastly report is “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” published in Frontiers in Conservation Science. I highly recommend you read it (link below, as usual) if you’re at all interested in a concise, articulate, rational yet intense account of the world you’ve inherited and are passing on.

This alarm clock was set not because this highly qualified group of ecologists had new data about specific threats, but because they had three points to make about this moment in the Anthropocene crisis: 1) The threats to life on Earth, including us, are far greater than most people realize; 2) Political and economic powers are either unprepared or unwilling (or both) to make the necessary changes at the necessary scale; 3) As a result, scientists have an “extraordinary responsibility” to “speak candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public.”

In introducing these three points, the authors make what I think are two equally important observations. First, the scale of what’s coming (if we don’t change direction) is difficult even for experts to imagine. That is, it’s hard to grasp how bad things might get, even for the scientists who are telling us how bad things might get. No one has seen anything like what’s coming except as sad puzzle pieces in the fossil record. Second, the further down the slippery Anthropocene slope we go, the harder it will be for governments and societies to respond, because they’ll be mired in serious, entwined problems such as climate-related mass migration, food insecurity, natural disasters, public health crises, water shortages, and resource-driven armed conflicts. Imagine the political infighting and nationalist rhetoric in any country if any one of those problems ramped up. The authors note that despite years of goal-setting by the U.N. and various international agreements to address “the ominous erosion of Earth's life-support system,” little has been accomplished. Even if those goals had been met, they point out, the rate of biodiversity loss and extinctions would be little changed.

A mass extinction is defined as the loss of more than 75% of the planet’s species in a short geologic time span – less than three million years. That’s a very long time for our primate minds to grasp, and so we might imagine these mass extinctions appear fairly often in the geologic record, but in fact we know of only five in the last half billion years. So when I read the Ghastly report and tell you that we (mostly the wealthy among us, but still “we”) have transformed over 70% of the Earth’s surface for our own purposes, compromised two thirds of the oceans, eliminated 85% of the planet’s wetlands, halved the Earth’s vegetative biomass, killed off over 20% of plant biodiversity, reduced vertebrate populations by about 70%, dammed over 75% of rivers longer than 1000 km, reduced coral life by half, and accelerated the global extinction rate a thousand-fold, it should sound to you like the start of a mass extinction. And when I tell you that most of this has occurred in the last fifty to one hundred years, you should probably start to sweat a little.

This graphic from the Ghastly report quantifies some of the habitat losses on a sliding scale of toast (red) to still around (blue):

(Side note: Two related books I highly recommend are Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and Craig Childs’ Apocalyptic Planet. Kolbert’s book is solid, articulate narrative journalism that investigates the world we’re making as we unmake the world we live in, and Childs’ book is a brilliant, lyrical, personal travelogue in the most desolate parts of the Earth where he sought to understand the upheavals in Earth history and the upheaval ahead of us.)

The most recent mass extinction occurred about 66 million years ago, marking the end of the Cretaceous period. Initiated by a massive asteroid strike, this was the end of the line for the dinosaurs, other than birds, but it also wiped out about 90% of mammal species. (A truly spectacular 2019 New Yorker piece by Richard Preston tells that story.) Those mammals that survived, little rodent-like things, spent the next 66 million years diversifying into all the wondrous mammals alive today, from elephants to pygmy shrews, whales to Uncle Fred. And you. But you and I and Uncle Fred, and our nearly eight billion relatives, have begun to smell like an asteroid, as it were, as the Anthropocene threatens to push a million species (out of an estimated 8.7 million plants and animals, 80% of which are still undiscovered) into extinction in this century.

The Ghastly report spends some time on a section called “Ecological Overshoot: Population Size and Overconsumption,” which offers rapid-fire assessments of the many impacts our burgeoning population – and its growing rate of consumption – has on the crisis. I’ll certainly be talking about the complex interaction of population, climate, biodiversity loss, etc., in the weeks and months to come, so will just spend a moment here talking about the term “overshoot.” It’s an odd metaphorical bit of jargon for a mind-boggling problem: Humanity consumes far more than what the Earth produces (its regenerative capacity) per year. In 1960 (when population was 3.1 billion), we used about 76%, which already seems like the behavior of the bully in the garden: one species claiming three quarters of planetary production. By 2016, we were using 170%. (In case you were wondering, that percentage dropped during the Covid-related economic shrinkage of 2020 to 156%.)

I can’t think of a better example of “unsustainable.” To give it something of a cartoon analogy, what does the castaway think will happen if he keeps eating more crabs and coconuts than his little island paradise can produce per year? You can visualize this another way at Overshootday.org, which plugs our excess consumption figure into the calendar and counts back to the day when we hit 100%. In 2020, it was August 22nd. The rest of the year was all theft. Overshoot.org seeks to motivate us to reduce consumption with their slogan “Move the Date,” a clever technique to incrementalize the effort against something large, scary, and abstract.

The authors of the Ghastly report offer yet another metaphor: “…humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term.” But there’s no authority to jail political or corporate leaders for defrauding our descendants. To the contrary, it’s far more likely that the environmental activists working to stop the worst offenses against biodiversity are criminalized, labeled “terrorists,” or murdered (at least 212 were killed in 2019).

That last fact I borrowed from Carl Safina’s excellent essay on the Ghastly report online in Yale Environment 360 magazine. (I mentioned this a few weeks ago too, but it’s worth recommending again. And visit his site to take a look at his books and other writings on animal consciousness and the natural world.) Among the many deft touches in Safina’s essay, he picks up the population theme in the Ghastly report before segueing nicely into a fundamental problem with the response from government:

[P]opulation growth and its effects are uneven around the globe. Some nations are stable or even declining slightly in numbers; some consume vastly less per person. But even the poorest, lightest-living people need land, food, and water, and the results are stark to anyone who has known and loved a place over several decades.

Just as population growth and consumption are not uniform, neither is the misery created. An estimated three-quarters of a billion people are slowly starving and 1 to 2 billion don’t get enough food to fully function as human beings. Population growth causes crowding, joblessness, friction, and conflict. Managing the heat of friction as population grows and the economy is under pressure to keep up makes it more difficult to cool it. It becomes less likely that leaders will recognize cooling, rather than fueling, as the more urgent need. This is evident as near-universal policies focus on getting “more” — more food for more people, for instance, rather than easing the crises by policies incentivizing population flattening and de-growth.

But most economists and politicians and their policies catastrophically confuse growth and improvement as synonymous. The fundamental difference is that growth means getting larger by pushing more material into the system. Improvement means more effective outcomes… Improved health care, education, and compassion do not require growth as a necessary condition. It seems, conversely, that a focus on growth often obstructs improvement.

The other central problem with a government’s irrational focus on constant economic growth is that it pushes environmental crises down the to-do list. As the report points out in a section called Political Impotence, “Stopping biodiversity loss is nowhere close to the top of any country's priorities, trailing far behind other concerns such as employment, healthcare, economic growth, or currency stability.” And it gets worse, they point out, as anti-environmentalist agendas by right-wing populist movements have gained traction in key countries: Brazil, the U.S., and Australia. It’s not hard to imagine those movements spreading as pressure mounts to transform economic and regulatory policy in the face of the Anthropocene. Which means, unsurprisingly, that politicians around the world are afraid (or at least slow) to act – to rewrite global economics, eliminate fossil fuels, limit corporate lobbying, and empower women – because they fear a backlash. Thus, the authors say, the current state of affairs means “it is doubtful that any needed shift in economic investments of sufficient scale will be made in time.”

The report doesn’t address this, but it may well be that reticent or self-interested governments will follow as often as they lead in this transformative era. The insurance companies and some militaries and many of the world’s largest businesses are preparing for climate change already. A few now understand the accelerating loss of biodiversity as an equally catastrophic threat to both local and global economies. Youth-led movements and indigenous rights groups and many more are working to push government forward (or push it aside) in the search for solutions to maintaining a liveable, vibrant Earth.

As they wrap up, the Ghastly authors make a key observation: We know what to do to fix this mess, more or less, but not how to maneuver around the societal obstacles. Not that there’s a lack of ideas, or “evidence-based literature proposing ways to change human behavior for the benefit of all extant life,” but their application has been limited. The good news is that there are plenty of organizations devoted to getting it done. (The authors name these as examples: ipbes.org, goodanthropocenes.net, overshootday.org, mahb.stanford.edu, populationmatters.org, clubofrome.org, steadystate.org.) Many of these websites are the public-facing media of wonky organizations at the intersection of science, academics, and policy, staffed by brilliant people trying to shift the political dialogue behind the scenes.

Which brings us to the Ghastly authors’ final point: Scientists and other “experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being” should speak the truth loudly and clearly. “Anything else,” they worry, “is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst.” The trick, though, is to lay out enough ghastly truth to undermine our optimism bias but “without inducing disproportionate feelings of fear and despair.” What exactly, though, is a “disproportionate” amount of fear and despair at the dawn of a mass extinction? I suppose it’s whatever amount keeps us from getting something done.

So where are you on the spectrum between optimism and despair? If you can’t get the ringing sound of the Ghastly alarm out of your head, you might check out the UNEP report for its constructive to-do list, and you might dig into some of the sites I just listed for their ideas.

For now, I have a good idea you can check out. Keep reading…

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A Good Idea: A Human Right to a Healthy Environment

I’ve talked about the importance of changing culture through rewriting policy/regulation/law, and one very promising under-the-radar development here in the U.S. takes this one step further: Amending the “bill of rights” section of state constitutions to declare that everyone in that state has a right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment.

I think we all believe on some level that we have such a basic right already. We do not. In the U.S. there are regulations protecting water and air quality, but like all regulations they suffer from problems with enforcement or funding. As we’ve seen recently, what one administration protects another may abandon. The solution to such variability is constitutional protection, which is enormously effective as a legal shield. Just as a state or business interest cannot (usually) infringe your right to free speech, they would not be able to take away your right to a healthy environment. A constitutional right, once established, is unlikely to be undone.

Establishing a right to a healthy environment on par with the rights to free speech, assembly, and practice of religion is a major step with far-reaching benefits. What fascinates me about this is that there’s still a very small body of law built around this right. What happens down the road as the definition of the right develops and rulings are made regarding how the state or corporations must act so as not to violate it? What will government be obliged to do to protect its citizens’ access to a healthy environment? What is a healthy environment, especially in the context of the Anthropocene? Regardless, when the courts and the state and the developers all start wrestling with the definition and worrying about human rights rather than talking about how much harm the state may permit, we’ll be on a better path.

In the U.S. the force behind this effort is Maya von Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, who with a team of lawyers in 2013 used a long-ignored amendment to the Pennsylvania constitution to convince the PA Supreme Court to reverse legislation passed by the legislature that gave the fracking industry carte blanche to wreak havoc in the state. The amendment had been on the books since the 1970s, those heady years when the EPA was established and the Clean Air and Clean Water regulations began to reverse decades of unregulated pollution, but had rarely been used. (A similar amendment was passed in Montana at that time too.) Maya’s success lit a fuse that has now spread to a long list of states where active efforts to establish the amendment are underway. It began with Maya’s book, The Green Amendment: Securing the Right to a Healthy Environment, and now has her consulting with folks in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia.

Here in Maine the legislation is called the Pine Tree Amendment, and has recently received conditional approval from the legislature. A vote in both houses will happen soon and, if passed by a 2/3 vote in both houses, will go to the voters in November. The bill has Republican co-sponsors, because even in a divided electorate people can agree on protecting our rights to a healthy environment. It appeals to liberals who want nature protected from corporate profiteering and state neglect, to libertarians and independents who want protection from state overreach, to conservatives who want to protect access to a healthy environment for rural uses (hunting, fishing), and to the sovereign tribes of Maine who would like to see their lands and waters kept from harm.

I’ve focused on U.S. states here, but in fact this is a global push, adopted (to various effect) in 110 countries, with the bulk of them in the Global South. An excellent BBC article back in March of this year explains the history of the movement and the benefits in those countries where the idea has been taken seriously by the courts. If the courts understand human health and dignity to rely in part on a healthy environment, then that environment must be taken into account when protecting the rights of citizens. If constitutionally consecrating the human right to a healthy environment is interpreted to mean protecting ecosystems and biodiversity, keeping air and waters clean, and perhaps even reducing CO2 emissions, then suddenly we have a legal framework for shifting society toward a much more sustainable future.

It’s not that simple, of course, not least because it’s unclear what courts might do. Yet judging by how a dormant amendment in Pennsylvania became a tool to knock back the fracking industry, and how Costa Rica’s amended constitution has led to a moratorium on open pit mining and oil exploration, a decision to conserve 25% of the country’s land and to source 98% of its energy from renewable sources, and an effort to reforest large areas of degraded land, the idea seems promising.

Once it’s articulated – we have a right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment – it feels indisputable. (The idea is a bit tainted by the unstated notion that we own the environment, but so is everything else we do.) Who wants to be on the wrong side of that debate, claiming that you or anyone else doesn’t have that right?

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

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