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Climate change is only one symptom of a broader ecological crisis; the rapid loss of wild life is equally critical. Most species other than humans and our livestock, (and pets and pests) have had horrifying drops in population within the last 70 years or so, even if they are not yet threatened with extinction. We and our livestock are now 96% of the mass of land vertebrates, leaving all wild creatures together to comprise a mere 4%. At this rate within another generation there may be virtually nothing left but us and our coterie—and we would not survive that, as we depend on a network of life more complex than we can imagine. We’re also seeing the oceans acidifying, filling with plastic and toxins, and warming; topsoil depleted, rivers and aquifers running dry; and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and power plants leaving sites potentially dangerous for thousands or even millions of years. Various toxins are infiltrating our water, our food and our bodies.

All these threats are related—there are simply too many humans, and the richest segment are consuming and wasting too much per capita. Solutions to climate change will generally solve the other environmental problems as well. Real solutions that is, not the magic tricks of entrenched industrial interests, the dependence on technical breakthroughs unlikely to happen…the greenwashing. Real solutions involve drastic change in the lifestyles of we who live in the “developed” nations.

How drastic? That’s the crux of this essay. We’re caught in an energy trap, the consequences of which keep building. If we had taken sensible and responsible steps when the first signs of depletion and overshoot became apparent around 1980, we could probably have transitioned in the way many proponents of a Green New Deal imagine…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

December 2, 2021

Blah, blah, blah, yay: Another epic fail for the COP, but seeds of growth for our movements

Introduction

As COP 26 began, Greta Thunberg summed up the whole thing quite succinctly using just one word, three times: Blah blah blah.

And as it ended two weeks later, she tweeted:

The #COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, blah, blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever [emphasis added].

And indeed, COP 26 was an epic fail, even by the dismal standards of the 25 COPs that preceded it, but at the same time, the global climate justice movement made some much needed forward progress.

COP26

Source: Flickr

Why this COP was an epic fail

The process leading up to the COP was a blatant act of climate injustice

Starting with the process leading up till COP 26, we might well ask why was it held at all, under the conditions of COVID?

Large numbers of delegates and civil society, in its attempts to presence the world’s people, could not get to this summit, and this is beyond the usual exclusiveness of all COPs due to ordinary people and activists not having the means to travel, to be lodged, to miss work and income, and so on. This was built in by the ineptitude and lack of sincerity of the UK hosts, who had promised to make vaccines and entry requirements doable for those who wished to attend. So this can be called the COVID COP, to connect two of the many global crises that beset us.

Or we might call it the apartheid COP, to connect the climate crisis to the existing cultures of violence the world suffers, from local policing to national-level militarism (both led by the U.S., of course, the undisputed world number one in military spending and murderous police forces).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can the Green New Deal save us? No it can’t.

November 22, 2021

Can the Green New Deal save us? No it can’t.

Advocates for a Green New Deal are for a collection of admirable goals which it is usually taken for granted can be achieved within a capitalist economy and while the pursuit of economic growth continues. Here is an indication of the main reasons why these assumptions are totally mistaken.

The fundamental assumption underlying these beliefs is that economic growth can be “decoupled” from resource and ecological demands and impacts. That is, it is claimed that the rate of production and consumption can continue to increase while the resources needed to do this can be reduced to sustainable levels, along with the environmental damage it causes. This comforting faith is widely held, including by major global institutions.

It is disturbing that this tech-fix faith persists despite the mountain of evidence that it is wrong. Anyone still unaware of this should consult the massive studies by Hickel and Kallis, Parrique et al., and Haberle et al. The second lists over 300 studies and the third lists over 850.

There are some areas in which production is being achieved and/or could be with reduced impacts, and transition to renewable energy is an important instance. But what matters is whether the overall output of an economy can be reduced as its GDP rises, which is “absolute” decoupling. The above reviews conclude emphatically that despite constant effort to increase efficiency and cut costs absolute de-coupling of resource use and environmental impact from GDP growth is not occurring, and that greater recycling effort and transition to “service and information economies” are not at all likely to achieve it. Despite constant effort to improve productivity and efficiency, in general growth of GDP is accompanied by growth in resource use.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of Growth: ten years after

November 22, 2021

The End of Growth: ten years after

Fifty years ago the authors of the groundbreaking book The Limits to Growth showed that, in any of a series of computer-generated scenarios, world economic growth would end sometime during the 21^st century. Using simple math and logic, they pointed out that growth in any material input or output cannot continue indefinitely within a finite system. Since the Earth is a finite system, the effort to perpetually grow human economies (which, by their very nature, extract resources and produce wastes) is doomed to eventual failure, leading to significant declines in resources, industrial output, food production, and population. Despite the fact that the book was a bestseller and its conclusions were well supported, world political and business leaders ignored it and persevered in their efforts to expand resource extraction, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Around the year 2010, it appeared to me that signs of growth’s slowing and approaching reversal were accumulating to the point that a new book on the subject might be timely and helpful. The End of Growth was published in 2011, and attracted healthy sales but few reviews.

Today, indications of impending economic stagnation and retrenchment are arguably stronger still. There will be many articles this semicentennial anniversary year discussing the 1972 Limits to Growth study; I thought it might also be informative to look back at my book, reflecting on whether its message is useful today.

In the book, I argued that modern economic growth is largely attributable to fossil fuels. Energy is essential to all activity, and the availability of vast amounts of energy from tens of millions of years’ worth of ancient sunlight, captured and transformed by natural processes into portable and storable fuels, has made it possible to speed up and expand nearly every human enterprise…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why 4°C?

November 7, 2021

Why 4°C?

Climatologists say that civilization can’t survive global warming of 4^oC over the pre-industrial average. Some climatologists even say that civilization can’t survive 3^oC. A temperature increase of 4^oC over the pre-industrial average sounds fairly trivial so why would that cause civilization to collapse?

First, for Americans, a 4.0^oC temperature increase corresponds to a 7.2^oF temperature increase. Maybe that still doesn’t sound too bad but it’s a big problem because the 7.2^oF increase is an average over the globe and the temperature increase will not be homogeneous.

Some places will warm more than 7.2^oF and some places less than 7.2^oF. The regions that will warm substantially more than 7.2^oF include high latitude regions and large landmasses. We can see that happening already with the global temperature change over the last 50 years (See Figure 1):

chart1

Figure 1: Global Temperature Change from 1951-1980 to 2011-2020 (From NASA)

Figures II and III are projections of future warming across the globe:

chart2

Figure II: Average annual air temperature change (°C) at the Earth surface for two scenarios of future climate relative to the average of temperature between 1980 to 1999

chart3

Figure III-Warming during days and nights (Maps from NASA)

Not only will temperatures be higher in the future, but precipitation patterns will change over time, illustrated by predictions from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research shown in Figure IV:

chart4

Figure IV-Predictions of future precipitation changes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research

Hotter and drier conditions will make growing food more challenging. As it is now, a substantial amount of agricultural production in the U.S., as well as in other countries, takes place in regions that rely on irrigation, particularly in the southwestern U.S. and the Great Plains. The water for irrigation comes from both surface water and aquifer sources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Woodchip Handbook: A Complete Guide for Farmers, Gardeners and Landscapers: Excerpt

October 30, 2021

The Woodchip Handbook: A Complete Guide for Farmers, Gardeners and Landscapers: Excerpt

The following excerpt is from Ben Raskin’s new book The Woodchip Handbook: A Complete Guide for Farmers, Gardeners and Landscapers (Chelsea Green Publishing, October 2021) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

The Woodchip Handbook

By Ben Raskin

Restoring Damaged Soil

With the potential for woodchip to boost soil health, hold onto water and promote plant growth, it is a small step to look at how to effectively harness that potential for rescuing degraded and damaged soils. There are numerous examples of how this has been done, and we’ll look at a few of them here. In some of the studies woodchip and biochar are used either comparatively or in combination, and there is certainly potential for combining the shorter-term benefits of woodchip with the longer-lasting properties of biochar. Both the physical and biological properties of woodchip are used in soil remediation.

Bioremediation

We have already seen the potential for woodchip and the fungi that decompose them to absorb potentially polluting nitrates, but there is some evidence that it could be used more widely to help deal with other manmade pollutants, ‘such as chlorinated and non-chlorinated hydrocarbons, wood preserving chemicals, solvents, heavy metals, pesticides, petroleum products, and explosives. There is an even stronger body of evidence on the potential of biochar for this purpose, but creating biochar is more costly and in most cases some of the energy is lost during the production process. Woodchip is cheaper and easier to produce, so it is worth looking at those situations that could use it.

For contaminants that would eventually break down anyway, such as oil and diesel spills, woodchip appears to have the potential to significantly increase the speed at which the contaminants disintegrate…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Evolution and Climate Change Through the Lens of Power

October 19, 2021

Evolution and Climate Change Through the Lens of Power

During the last century, evolutionary biologists developed the idea that power (defined as the rate of energy transfer) is key to the survival and success of species. This notion was formalized as the maximum power principle, which biologist John DeLong has explained as follows:

“biological systems organize to increase power whenever the system constraints allow. . . . With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to reproduction and survival, and therefore an organism that captures and utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a fitness advantage.”[1]

The 20^th century seemed a propitious time for such an idea to arise, as one species—ours—was in the process of gaining unprecedented power by harnessing the energy of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas constitute tens of millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight—energy that’s vastly greater in quantity than any energy sources humans had harnessed previously.

Constraints on all sorts of human activities were suddenly lifted. Soon we were out-competing all other organisms and, in effect, taking over the world. During the last two centuries, human per capita energy usage grew eight-fold—while the number of “capitas” also doubled three times over. All this newly available energy found uses in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, and warfare. Today, just through mining, we displace far more of the planet’s crust each year than do all of nature’s processes (wind, rain, and earthquakes) combined. Human-made stuff now outweighs all of Earth’s biomass. It’s been the biggest power grab on this little planet of ours in tens or hundreds of millions of years…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise

October 18, 2021

Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise

In his book Small Farm Future Chris Smaje worries about some problems that might arise in a society in which these kinds of farms meet most food demand. This area is also targeted by Alex Heffron and Kai Heron in their critique of the book, which their Marxist position leads them to see as only advocating a “petite-bourgeoise” vision and thus no satisfactory solution to the problems capitalism is causing. It seems to me that both are overlooking the fact that in the future conditions will be radically different to what they are now and will determine that the problems under discussion will be minimal if they arise at all.

The concerns are firstly to do with whether or not small farms mostly run by families will generate the kinds of conflicts that have been common in peasant societies in the past, especially to do with patriarchal domination and marginalisation of women and children, and secondly to do with whether it is satisfactory to leave the farming sector in the hands of private enterprise. Heffron and Heron do not make clear what they would want but it would seem that the core Marxist principle of eliminating private ownership of the means of production would lead them to advocate state ownership of the farming sector.

Both parties are analysing these issues in terms of how things worked in peasant societies and how things are organised and thought about in present society. My argument is that this is not the right approach, because things will be very different in the near future. So I must first take some space to explain my reasons for thinking this.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Key Is Interrelated Communities

September 23, 2021

The Key Is Interrelated Communities

Part of the GTI forum on Can Human Solidarity Globalize?

Richard Falk’s engaging essay invites us to identify various “foreclosures of the imagination” that are blocking the emergence of pathways to greater global solidarity in the future. Any realistic thoughts about the future, though, must surely be set within the context of the physical conditions humankind will face in the Era of Disasters, which we have already entered. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is now easier for people to imagine a regional or planetary situation where forces of nature take over and humans are not in control. Still, the human tendency to ignore an almost unthinkable threat in the hope that it will go away or strike someone else is a very problematic foreclosure of imagination in our situation. Regardless, in the coming decades, every department and agency in every government in nearly every country is going to be focused on, in addition to its usual duties, the ramifications of frequent, massively destructive catastrophes causing cumulative, often irreparable damage to the economy, social structure, institutions, communities, and mental health.

We survive or die where we live, so a place-based, community focus is ascendant as the planetary crises worsen. Perhaps it is time to dust off the decades-old, but marginalized, “alternative” vision of the global family of humankind as being a nested community of communities of communities. In this model, the United Nations would be restructured, which could be reflected in a redesign of the seating in the General Assembly chamber. Instead of alphabetical seating, why not have major groupings according to the continents? Within those groups, countries would be seated together according to regions…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The gritty reality of solar power

September 13, 2021

The gritty reality of solar power

Time is fast running out. The world’s affluent nations, with their abundant greenhouse emissions, have to finally drag themselves across the starting line and begin phasing out fossil fuels at the accelerated pace that the climate emergency demands. And if they can manage to do that, they clearly will need to quickly build up wind and solar electric capacity to partially compensate for the shrinkage of oil, gas, and coal supplies while addressing the prospect of energy shortages by securing production of essential goods and services for everyone.

Unfortunately, mainstream climate visions have strayed far from confronting the existential necessity to banish fossil fuels. They simply assume that the buildup of renewable energy will automatically chase fossil fuels out of our lives and fully replace them, watt for watt and Btu for Btu. These visions hold out the promise of a world in which a pristine, Sun-powered economy fulfills any and all of our material desires far into the future—a delicious, guilt-free cornucopia. But the green-growth promise is a mirage, and the realities of a high-production, wind- and solar-powered world will be much less tasty.

Any industrial installation, including solar and wind farms, profoundly disrupts the landscape on which it sits. If it were possible to fully satisfy the bloated energy appetites of affluent nation by covering hundreds of millions or billions of acres of the Earth’s surface with power-harvesting hardware, the result would be irreparable ecological damage.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing booms to supply such a sprawling proliferation of solar arrays, wind power plants, battery-backed electric grids, electric-vehicle fleets, and other hardware would require outrageously large inputs of metals such as lithium, cobalt, silver, copper, aluminum, nickel, iron, and a host of exotic rare earth elements..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Standing Rock is Everywhere: The Indigenous Heart of the Climate Change Fight

September 10, 2021

Standing Rock is Everywhere: The Indigenous Heart of the Climate Change Fight

This is a story of victory for the earth and of the end of the Keystone XL pipeline. It also involves the Dakota Access pipeline and the Standing Rock Lakota reservation, indeed the entire world, all of which is threatened by our desperate last burst of fossil fuel exploitation. It is a story of what the dogged persistence and creativity of indigenous people and their allies can do against the kind of power we’ve been told is impossible to resist. But it’s a story without a guaranteed ending. The ending depends on us.

In 2004, small indigenous nations living near the Alberta Tar Sands project, the largest unconventional oil extraction effort in the world, began reaching out for help. Not only was the project interfering with their water, fishing, and hunting infrastructure, but rare and unusual cancers were appearing. They contacted policy experts at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington, D.C., who met with them in 2005 and saw photographic documentation of the devastation. These experts began to gather data and to raise awareness in the United States, on whose special refineries the project relied. Experts focused on the unique risks posed by tar sands at every stage of production, including extraction, transportation, and refinement. It wasn’t enough, but without the testimony and photographs supplied by indigenous people, experts would not have noticed for some time.

In 2008, approximately two dozen people from indigenous nations and environmental activist groups met to develop an overall strategy. The groups decided that the most promising activist target was the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, proposed by the giant TransCanada (now TC Energy) corporation to move the tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Stopping the pipeline would rob the Tar Sands project of financial justification…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This ship is sinking

August 2, 2021

This ship is sinking

Is there time to rearrange the deck chairs as in the Paris Agreement, or should we just start passing out lifejackets? Many people still hope we’ll make a manageable transition to a low-impact economy. I’ve pretty much lost hope for that outcome, primarily because two factors now must be included in a realistic forecast—currently discernible collective human will, and already-appearing climate impacts.

Currently discernible collective human will

Oil companies have known of the link between their products and climate change since 1965. The news media was told about it when James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988. By 2000 environmentalists were beginning to educate the public and elected officials, testing terminology to find words that would capture attention and motivate action. “Should we say ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change?‘ ‘Greenhouse gases’ or ‘climate pollution?’” For at least two decades there has been steady and often brilliant effort by scientists, climate activists, and energy experts to show both the perils we face and the possible solutions.

We know the results. Major emitters have clung to fossil fuels and used their clout to obfuscate the issue rather than change direction. Emissions are rebounding post-pandemic, and 2023 is predicted to see the highest levels of CO₂ emissions in human history. At this point it is probably a fact that the desire not to exceed 1.5^oC is just a wish and not a fully inhabited intention for most of those who have the power to make it happen.

I’ve been surprised by the inertia, but I shouldn’t have been. The climate crisis may be seen as the logical result of cumulative actions that go back thousands of years. The agricultural revolution seems to have encouraged top-down social and economic systems, and perhaps the subjugation of nature and of humans lower in the hierarchy encouraged the development in the human population of what I will call insensitivity…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Climate Crisis: Interview with Social Psychologist Kelly Fielding

July 16, 2021

The Climate Crisis: Interview with Social Psychologist Kelly Fielding

Kelly Fielding is a social and environmental psychologist and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research has included a focus on trying to understand climate change beliefs and identifying ways to address climate change skepticism and inaction. The interview took place 7 July, 2021.

AA: What are your thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis?

KF: I feel a lot of despair. Part of me thinks I’m not supposed to feel that, because I have PhD students working in this area, for example I’ve got a PhD student working on eco-anxiety. Probably like most people who work in this space and really care about this issue, I experience a range of feelings. Those range from, yes we will make it happen to wanting to throw up my hands in the air. A lot of the research on emotions and climate change has focused on the role of hope and the role of fear, and anger and despair and frustration. I feel all of these things in relation to climate change. You know, one of my PhD students did a meta-analysis of all the recent media articles on eco-anxiety. It was interesting that the media articles mainly focus on children and young people. I think that’s because, as an adult, you’re probably better at compartmentalizing. You say to yourself, there is a scary thing over here, climate change, but meanwhile I need to get on with these other things.

AA: You have done much to characterize the underlying attitudes, vested interests and ideologies that relate to skepticism about human-caused climate change. Is that work complete, or is there more to understand?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Future Is Not a Spectator Sport

July 13, 2021

The Future Is Not a Spectator Sport

Like all self-organized, adaptive systems, society moves in nonlinear ways. Even as our civilization unravels, a new ecological worldview is spreading globally. Will it become powerful enough to avert a cataclysm? None of us knows. Perhaps the Great Transition to an ecological civilization is already under way, but we can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. We are all co-creating the future as part of the interconnected web of collective choices each of us makes: what to ignore, what to notice, and what to do about it

Excerpted from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe (published in June in the UK, and available July 13 in the US)

The nonlinearity of history

There are many good reasons to watch the unfolding catastrophe of our civilization’s accelerating drive to the precipice and believe it’s already too late. The unremitting increase in carbon emissions, the ceaseless devastation of the living Earth, the hypocrisy and corruption of our political leaders, and our corporate-owned media’s strategy of ignoring the topics that matter most to humanity’s future—all these factors come together like a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut driving our society toward breaking point. As a result, an increasing number of people are beginning to reconcile themselves to a terminal diagnosis for civilization. In the assessment of sustainability leader Jem Bendell, founder of the growing Deep Adaptation movement, we should wake up to the reality that “we face inevitable near-term societal collapse.”

Our civilization certainly appears to be undergoing profound transition. But it remains uncertain what that transition will look like, and even more obscure what new societal paradigm will re-emerge once the smoke clears. A cataclysmic collapse leaving the few survivors in a grim dark age?…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Jem Bendell on Deep Adaptation to climate chaos

July 10, 2021

Jem Bendell on Deep Adaptation to climate chaos

Interview with Professor Jem Bendell on Deep Adaptation to climate chaos, by Facing Future TV.

In 2018, a climate paper by Jem Bendell went viral, being downloaded over a million times. It helped to launch a worldwide movement of people seeking to reduce harm in the face of societal disruption and collapse. In this interview for Facing Future TV, Jem explains the concept of Deep Adaptation, how he developed the idea, what it means in practice, what he says to critics, and what his new book on the topic is about.

FF: Who are you and how would you describe yourself?

I am a middle-aged British man who has been an environment and development scholar, activist and consultant for over a quarter of a century. I’ve lived much of my life outside the UK, worked around the world, with a lot of the time in the Global South. In that time I’ve been driven by the idea that getting smarter about the problems we face will help to reduce them. And I still suffer from that story. Hence all the writing and teaching, and the new book.

FF: What is Deep Adaptation?

Deep Adaptation has become an umbrella term for an ethos, a framework, a community and a movement.

The ethos is essentially a commitment to working together to do what’s helpful during the disruption and collapse of societies because of the direct and indirect impacts of environmental breakdown including climate change. It’s an ethos of being engaged, open-hearted and open-minded about how to be and how to respond.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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