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The world’s driest areas are tipped to get even drier, with potentially worrying implications for soil productivity. Author provided

Deep beneath our feet, out of sight and out of mind, millions of tiny communities of microbes are working together to perform key functions for the ecosystem.

They provide services that are essential for human development and wellbeing, such as food and fibre production, nutrient cycling and climate regulation.

The scale of these communities is staggering. The microflora in soils are the most abundant group of organisms on Earth. A teaspoon of soil contains up to a billion bacteria, several metres of fungal filaments, and thousands of protozoa and nematodes.

Yet, like many plant and animal communities, microflora are facing new threats due to climate change.

Dry spell

One of the biggest concerns is the drying trend forecast for many regions across the world. Little is known about whether this increasing soil aridity will cause a loss of microbial diversity, or what the effects might be. Unlike plant and animal communities, the consequences of this loss of microbial diversity remain debatable.

Dryland ecosystems are crucially important, both to the environment and humans. They cover 41% of the Earth’s surface and are home to around 38% of the world’s people. They also harbour a rich and unique diversity of species, and play a critical role in the global carbon cycle.

Drylands are expanding, too. The most recent climate forecasts indicate that the global extent of drylands may increase by up to 23% by the end of this century. Despite this, there has so far been no global, systematic assessment of the bacteria, fungi and other microbes that live in these soils.

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

Seeing the Forest

November 3, 2015

Seeing the Forest

Seeing the Forest tells the story of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon — how it made a successful transition from timber extraction to ecosystem restoration.

Once the epicenter of conflict, the Siuslaw today is an exemplar of cooperation and collaboration.

They harvest wood sustainably by thinning overly dense monoculture stands that are a legacy of the earlier days of unrestrained clearcutting. This not only improves the health of the forest by providing better habitat, but also creates local jobs and provides revenue to fund other restoration activities.

These activities include stream and watershed restoration, installing large culverts for aquatic organism passage, road maintenance, and road closures. All of these activities create more local jobs, in a virtuous circle that benefits the people, the forest, and salmon.

This is the story of how one national forest evolved from seeing trees as its primary resource, to seeing the forest as a whole.

Seeing the Forest from Alan Honick on Vimeo.

Text by David Bollier

In the 1990s, many communities in central Oregon were torn asunder by the “War of the Woods.” Environmentalists had brought lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service for violating its own governing statutes. For decades, timber companies had been allowed to clear-cut public forests, re-seed with tree monocultures, and build ecologically harmful roads on mountain landscapes.

Environmentalists won their lawsuit in 1991 when a federal judge issued an injunction that in effect shut down timber operations in the Pacific Northwest of the US. While the endangered northern spotted owl was the focus of much of the debate, the health of the entire ecosystem was at risk, including the Pacific salmon, which swim upstream to spawn.

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

Permaculture: Regenerative – not merely Sustainable.

October 21, 2015

Permaculture: Regenerative – not merely Sustainable.

Introduction.

September 2015 saw the International Permaculture Conference, held in London followed by the Convergence, which occupied 6 days at Gilwell park, on the Essex-London border, where practitioners of the discipline gave presentations and workshops on various aspects of this growing art, which is a sustainable design system intended to emulate the principles of living ecosystems. While it has been emphasised that such terms as sustainable development, and sustainable agriculture, are really oxymorons, since neither untrammeled growth nor our present form of industrial food production can be maintained in perpetuity, permaculture has a value-added factor that extends beyond what might be merely maintained or sustained, which is the quality of regeneration.All sustainable solutions are unsustainable over the longer term, if they are not also intrinsically regenerative.

Nature offers the ultimate example of a design that is both sustainable and regenerative, and it is logical to appeal to natural principles for solutions to many of our current problems. This is sometimes taken to mean that we need adopt more “simple” lifestyles, abandoning our technology in the process, but the reality is more complex. Within a broader perspective of Regenerative Design, permaculture identifies the elements of sustainable living which are harmonious with nature. Discordant practices which lead, e.g. to soil erosion fret the environment, and are neither sustainable nor regenerative, but degenerative.

Regenerative versus sustainable.

That which is sustainable maintains what already exists, but does not restore (eco)systems that have been lost. The word “sustainable” strictly means “self-sustaining” but is often understood, particularly in the media and by the general public, to merely mean “able to last” or “the capacity to endure.” This has been represented, humorously, by the example of two men talking together. One asks the other, “How’s your marriage going?” To which the other man replies, rather dejectedly, “Well, it’s sustainable.”

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

Modelling Tools for Dealing with Environmental Complexity

September 9, 2015

Modelling Tools for Dealing with Environmental Complexity

Photo: Kyle Horner. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (cropped).

In many regions of the world, managing water demand without damaging the local ecosystem is a challenge. For instance, in regions suffering from water scarcity, extensive agricultural fields are often established along the coast. Water for irrigation is partly taken from groundwater and partly from surface water originating in nearby mountainous regions. The local water supply is, however, not only used for agricultural purposes, but also serves as a source of drinking water for the local population.

Around the globe, populations are increasing due to better health care and improved living conditions. However, more people need more water, more food and more energy. The high and diverse demand for water, combined with an insufficient supply, often causes considerable water use conflicts.

Local authorities of such regions might seek to mitigate conflict by pumping larger amounts of water from the aquifer for irrigation. But this may set off a chain of unforeseen consequences as it can affect the water balance by, for example, reducing the amount of available water in surrounding areas. In coastal regions, this causes saltwater to intrude into the aquifer. The saltwater intrusion leads to salinisation of the agricultural soils and renders the groundwater no longer potable.

Thus the initial conflict extends from a water quantity to a water quality management problem. The soil becomes unsuitable for traditional crops, in turn leading to socio-economic consequences such as farmers losing income due to unproductive land or people needing to migrate to regions with better soil fertility.

irrigation dryland

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

Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World

July 14, 2015

Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World

As climate change puts ecosystems and species at risk, conservationists are turning to a new approach: preserving those landscapes that are most likely to endure as the world warms.

The San Francisco Bay was once one of the richest estuaries in North America. Almost completely enclosed and protected from the open ocean, and with more than 200 freshwater creeks feeding into it, it was a fertile refuge for young salmon, halibut, sturgeon, anchovy, and smelt. It was lined with some 200,000 acres of tidal marsh, and the connected Sacramento Delta doubled that, creating a region so rich and productive it was known as the Everglades of the West.

San Francisco Estuary lnstitute

This tidal marsh in San Francisco Bay is one of the key areas on which local environmentalists are focusing.

By the middle of the 20th century, infill for development and diking had shrunk the bay’s tidal marshes to just 40,000 acres. In 1999, the San Francisco Estuary Institute set a goal of bringing the acreage of tidal lands in the bay back to 100,000. Several thousand acres have been rebuilt since then, and the replacement of nearly 30,000 more is in the planning stage.

Then came the specter of climate change.

Environmentalists realized that hard won gains could be undone as the sea level rises and claims the marshes — new and old — which are home to the clapper rail, a shorebird, and the salt marsh harvest mouse, endangered species both. “So the question isn’t just how do you restore tidal marshes,” says Robin Grossinger, senior scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute. “But how do you increase resilience as you restore them at the same time?”

Conservation is a moving target and growing more that way, in ways both predictable and not.

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

How Canada Is Endangering Its Natural Wealth

June 4, 2015

How Canada Is Endangering Its Natural Wealth

Impaired ecosystems leave Canada at an economic disadvantage. A Tyee Solutions excerpt.

It’s an old economic truism that scarcity creates value. In an era when natural capital is disappearing around the globe, it’s also increasingly highly valued. Beyond degrading biological, intrinsic and cultural values, Canada’s ineffective stewardshipof our ecosystems puts at risk billions, potentially trillions of dollars worth of wealth.

As long ago as 1996, Simon Fraser University economist Nancy Olewiler estimated that British Columbia received $2.75 billiona year (adjusted for inflation to 2014) in non-lumber value from its pre-pine-beetled forests, mainly from outdoor recreation, but also from wildlife viewing and recreational fishing and hunting.

More recently, economists have estimated that the ecological services provided by the Mackenzie River watershed in northern Canada are worth some $571 billion a year —thirteen and a half times the region’s official GDP of $42 billion. In 2014 an unknown portion of that wealth went up in smoke when fires consumed vast swaths of boreal forest in the Northwest Territories.

Canadians feared for their natural security, as long ago as 1989 when eight in ten of us agreed at least somewhat in surveys that pollution “threatens the survival of the human race.” The extent of that threat is now much clearer. So is how much we stand to lose.

Wherever economists look, they find that nature’s contribution to Canada’s wealth exceeds what appears in conventional accounts. The value of climate-threatening carbon stored in Manitoba’s 50 million hectares of boreal forest, for example, was assessed last year at $117 billion — 10 times the province’s full budget — not counting recreation, hunting, and other economic contributions.

Toronto’s trees were revealed in a different study to be worth more than $80 million annually, in services that run from energy-saving shade to scrubbing pollutants from the air; that amount was more than the city spent in 2014 on economic development and recreation. The asset value of the urban forest was assessed at $7 billion.

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

Nicaragua Canal: A Giant Project With Huge Environmental Costs

May 16, 2015

Nicaragua Canal: A Giant Project With Huge Environmental Costs

Work has already begun on a $50 billion inter-ocean canal in Nicaragua that would cut through nature reserves and bring massive dredging and major ship traffic to Central America’s largest lake. Scientists and conservationists are warning that the project is an environmental disaster in the making.

In a scenic lagoon on Nicaragua’s Brito River, less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean, schoolteacher Jorge Lopez and a friend were fishing on a recent morning. He gestured toward a bend in the narrow river, canopied with arching trees draped in moss, and said, “There are howler monkeys, crocodiles, and parrots all along this waterway. It would be a shame to lose all this.”

What threatens this tranquil spot and many others in Nicaragua is a controversial and wildly ambitious project to build a 173-mile canal — more than three times the length of the Panama Canal — that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans via the Caribbean Sea. The $50 billion canal project is the brainchild of Chinese businessman Wang Jing and has the full support of the Nicaraguan government, which claims that the canal will give a huge boost to the country’s economy, the second poorest in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti.

Many Nicaraguans back the canal project, and preliminary work has already begun — even before the completion of an environmental impact assessment. But other Nicaraguans, as well as local and international scientists, say the canal would be an environmental catastrophe, threatening a host of ecosystems across the country. They say it would also displace tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, including indigenous people whose territories the canal would cross.

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

Planetary Boundaries and Human Prosperity

May 5, 2015

Planetary Boundaries and Human Prosperity

The future of humanity will depend on mastering a balancing act. The challenge will be to provide for the needs of more than ten billion people while safeguarding our planetary life-support systems. Recent scientific insights have made us better equipped than ever to strike that balance. Doing so will be our generation’s great task.

Ending poverty has become a realistic goal for the first time in human history. We have the ability to ensure that every person on the planet has the food, water, shelter, education, health care, and energy needed to lead a life of dignity and opportunity. But we will be able to do so only if we simultaneously protect the earth’s critical systems: its climate, ozone layer, soils, biodiversity, fresh water, oceans, forests, and air. And those systems are under unprecedented pressure.

For the last 10,000 years, the earth’s climate has been remarkably stable. Global temperatures rose and fell by no more than one degree Celsius (compared with swings of more than eight degrees Celsius during the last ice age), and resilient ecosystems met humanity’s needs. This period – known as the Holocene – provided the stability that enabled human civilization to rise and thrive. It is the only state of the planet of which we know that can sustain prosperous lives for ten billion people.

But humans have now become the single largest driver of ecosystem change on earth, marking the start of a new geological age that some call the Anthropocene. Scientists argue over the exact starting point of this epoch, but it can be dated to somewhere around 1945, when modern industry and agriculture began to expand briskly. In the future, geologists will see telltale markers like radioactive carbon – debris from nuclear blasts – and plastic waste scattered across the planet’s surface and embedded in rock.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/environment-boundaries-human-prosperity-by-johan-rockstr-m-and-kate-raworth-2015-04#tOJwRqXxsP1puGFf.99

Adjusting the Fifth to a Finite Planet, Part II

March 19, 2015

Adjusting the Fifth to a Finite Planet, Part II

Editor’s Note: This is the second piece of a two-part post. You can read Part 1 here.

Among the avenues by which Takings case law could be adapted to the reality of a finite planet are these three:

One: Change the default by changing the definition of what constitutes a reasonable investment expectation. It is no longer reasonable for an individual to expect to profit from using property in ways that would destroy or diminish the property’s ability to provide ecosystem services to the public at large. Instead of the general public having to pay property owners the going market rate for land burdened by regulation–a rate that reflects the most intensive economic use of the land that can be imagined by infinite-growth-believing, financial-risk-taking optimists–land owners would have to compensate the general public when their acts diminish the flow of ecosystems services.

Two: Change the default by promulgating the notion of an ecological servitude. All property that abuts navigable waters in the U.S. is held under a navigational servitude: the public’s interest in maintaining navigable waters trumps the interests of waterfront property owners. As Justice Jackson put it in United States v. Willow River Power Co., “Rights, property or otherwise, which are absolute against all the world are certainly rare, and water rights are not among them.” Given the legitimate authority of government to pursue the public interest in establishing and maintaining navigable waters, he said, “private interest [in the disposition of waterfront property] must give way to a superior right, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, as against [the public interest represented through] the Government, such private interest is not a right at all.”

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

7 Things You Should Know About Permaculture – Verge Permaculture

December 13, 2014

7 Things You Should Know About Permaculture – Verge Permaculture.

What is permaculture? For those of you who’ve only heard of the term in passing, and ever for you seasoned “permies” who struggle to explain this exciting (and sometimes life-changing) idea to others, here’s the gist in 7 points:

1. Permaculture is a Design System That Uses Ecosystem Principles to Meet Human Needs

Permaculture is an ecological systems theory. As author Toby Hemenway notes, while conventional thinking asks how we can meet our own needs, permaculture asks the broader question of how we can meet our needs while also taking ecosystem health into account.

Permaculture looks closely at how ecosystems work and condenses those functions into twelve general principles. These in turn inform our design decisions about shelter, food, water, energy, and waste management. They also rest on two fundamental assumptions:

Humans are a part of the planet and cannot be separated from it.
Humans can be a positive force that leaves things better than we find them.

If we are willing to learn from and work with nature, we can make smarter decisions to inform how we live. These choices can prevent the wasteful use of fossil fuels or the unnecessary need for environmentally and economically costly foods. They can help us avoid living in areas prone to fires, droughts, and floods. They can help us tread more lightly on the environment while saving us money and keeping us healthier and happier in the long-term.

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

The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell

December 11, 2014

The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell.

One of the interesting features of blogging about the twilight of science and technology these days is that there’s rarely any need to wait long for a cogent example. One that came my way not long ago via a reader of this blog—tip of the archdruidical hat to Eric S.—shows that not even a science icon can get away with asking questions about the rising tide of financial corruption and dogmatic ideology that’s drowning the scientific enterprise in our time.

Many of my readers will recall Bill Nye the Science Guy, the star of a television program on science in the 1990s and still a vocal and entertaining proponent of science education. In a recent interview, Nye was asked why he doesn’t support the happy-go-lucky attitude toward dumping genetically modified organisms into the environment that’s standard in the United States and a few other countries these days. His answer is that their impact on ecosystems is a significant issue that hasn’t been adequately addressed. Those who know their way around today’s pseudoskeptic scene won’t be surprised by the reaction from one of Discover Magazine’s bloggers: a tar and feathers party, more or less, full of the standard GMO industry talking points and little else.

Nye’s point, as it happens, is as sensible as it is scientific: ecosystems are complex wholes that can be thrown out of balance by relatively subtle shifts, and since human beings depend for their survival and prosperity on the products of natural ecosystems, avoiding unnecessary disruption to those systems is arguably a good idea. This eminently rational sort of thinking, though, is not welcomed in corporate boardrooms just now. In the case under discussion, it’s particularly unwelcome in the boardrooms of corporations heavily invested in genetic modification, which have a straightforward if shortsighted financial interest in flooding the biosphere with as many GMOs as they can sell.

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

The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity

December 7, 2014

The Environment: Increasing Waste – Crash Course Chapter 24 | Peak Prosperity.

Chapter 24 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below.

Following up on the previous chapter focusing on human-caused resource depletion, the other disheartening part of the story of the environment concerns the things we humans put back into it, and the impact they have on the ecosystems that support all of life — ours included.

Like the economy, ecosystems are complex systems. That means that they owe their complexity and order to energy flows and, most importantly, they are inherently unpredictable. How they will respond to the change by a thousand rapid insults is unknown and literally unknowable.

Like any complex system, an ecosystem will tend to remain in a stable form until the pressures become too great and then they will suddenly shift to a different baseline and exist there for a while. That is, instead of having some magical preferred equilibrium, they have many — and some of those will be decidedly less or more awesome for humans to exist within.

If the world tips from a stable climate to a less stable one, as it has done many times in the past, then growing enough food for everyone will become difficult if not impossible.

An ocean acidified will remain that way for possibly hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Overly-depleted cod fisheries will take many decades to recover, if and only if they are not fished in between. A species wiped out remains that way forever.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and view the video…

Protecting Seeds and Their Stories: The Sacred in Everyday Life – PermacultureNews.org

November 12, 2014

Protecting Seeds and Their Stories: The Sacred in Everyday Life – PermacultureNews.org.

The recent UN Climate Change Summit, the marches in New York and around the world, once again brought into our collective consciousness the need for real change. As did the shocking news of the global loss of species. The vital need to protect our ecosystems is part of a cry that embraces the whole earth, from the smallest creature to the vast oceans. And in the midst of this call to cease our globally self-destructive behavior is a story that touches each of us, every day.

It is in every bite of an apple, every bowl of rice, every piece of bread we butter. It is the essential and elemental story of seeds, how we are losing our heritage, and how this effects our soul as well as our body.

As I take my walk these early fall mornings, I pass by an old apple tree with gnarled and empty branches. Only a few weeks ago these same branches pushed over the hedgerow, laden with red and golden fruit. Nature’s generosity is one of life’s wonders; and yet, seeing these empty branches, I am also reminded of the hidden sadness of loss, knowing how once in this country we had around 5,000 apple varieties but now mostly grow only 15 varieties. Accordian, Camack Sweet, Haywood June, Sally Crocket, are just a few names of what has been lost. Like apples, all seeds, our most essential source of sustenance, are losing their biodiversity. They are suffering the same fate as much of the natural world, with many varieties being made extinct—75% lost from the world’s fields1: yet another example of what our mechanized world is destroying, the ecocide we are witnessing.

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

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