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Fifteen thousand scientists have issued a dire warning to humanity about impending collapse but virtually no-one takes notice. Ultimately, our global systems, which are designed for perpetual growth, need to be fundamentally restructured to avoid the worst-case outcome.

For a moment, the most important news in the entire world flashed across the media like a shooting star in the night sky. Then it was gone. Last month, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued a dire warning to humanity. Because of our overconsumption of the world’s resources, they declared, we are facing “widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss.” They warned that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

This is not the first such notice. Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, 1,700 scientists (including the majority of living Nobel laureates) sent a similarly worded warning to governmental leaders around the world. In ringing tones, they called for a recognition of the earth’s fragility and a new ethic arising from the realization that “we all have but one lifeboat.”

This second warning contains a series of charts showing how utterly the world’s leaders ignored what they were told twenty-five years earlier. Whether it’s CO₂ emissions, temperature change, ocean dead zones, freshwater resources, vertebrate species, or total forest cover, the grim charts virtually all point in the same dismal direction, indicating continued momentum toward doomsday. The chart for marine catch shows something even scarier: in 1996, the catch peaked at 130 million tonnes and in spite of massively increased industrial fishing, it’s been declining ever since—a harbinger of the kind of overshoot that unsustainable exploitation threatens across the board.

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

Dying Ecosystems

December 11, 2017

Dying Ecosystems

Photo by Richard Allaway | Public Domain

Earth’s ecosystems support all life, though collapsed ecosystems would be like stepping outside of the international space station not wearing a space suit. Pop! Bam! Gone!

A recent academic study about signals of ecosystem collapse throughout history fits the space suit analogy. Terrifying truth is exposed: The all-important biosphere is sending out warning signals of impending crises… worldwide. It does not seem possible that ecosystems collapse and life dies off. That’s too hard to believe… but, what if it does collapse?

“The Earth’s biodiversity is under attack. We would need to travel back over 65 million years to find rates of species loss as high as we are witnessing today.” (James Dyke, The Ecosystem Canaries, Which Act as Warning Signs of Collapse, The Guardian, Aug. 19, 2016).
“Biodiversity increases resilience: more species means each individual species is better able to withstand impacts. Think of decreasing biodiversity as popping out rivets from an aircraft. A few missing rivets here or there will not cause too much harm. But continuing to remove them threatens a collapse in ecosystem functioning. Forests give way to desert. Coral reefs bleach and then die,” Ibid.
It’s already happening! Imagine flying in an aircraft while watching the rivets pop, one by one. At some point in time screaming overrides thinking. But, thank heavens; we’re not quite there yet.
Scientists from University College London and the University of Maryland studied 2,378 archeological sites and discovered that every society for thousands of years gave early clues to its own demise. Of course, demise happened precisely because those early warnings were ignored, while thinking: “it’s impossible, can’t happen.”

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

Major study shows species loss destroys essential ecosystems

December 7, 2017

Major study shows species loss destroys essential ecosystems

Long term research by German ecologists proves that loss of biodiversity has “direct, unpleasant consequences for mankind.”

Two days ago, C&C published a reply to a biology professor who shrugged off species extinction as unimportant because evolution will replace the lost organisms. This report, adapted from a Technical University of Munich news release, thoroughly confirms our view that he was dead wrong.

Due to its breadth, the Jena experiment proves for the first time that a loss of biodiversity has negative consequences for many individual components and processes in ecosystems.

How serious is the loss of species globally? Are material cycles in an ecosystem with few species changed? In order to find this out, the “Jena Experiment” was established in 2002, one of the largest biodiversity experiments worldwide. Professor Wolfgang Weisser from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) reports on two unexpected findings of the long-term study: Biodiversity influences almost half the processes in the ecosystem, and intensive grassland management does not result in higher yields than high biodiversity.

An ecosystem provides humans with natural “services”, such as the fertility of the soil, the quality of the groundwater, the production of food, and pollination by insects, which is essential for many fruits. Hence, intact ecosystems are crucial for the survival of all living things. What functional significance therefore does the extinction of species have? Can the global loss of species ultimately lead to the poorer “functioning” of ecosystems? Professor Weisser from the Chair for Terrestrial Ecology at the TUM has summarized the findings of the long-term “Jena Experiment” in a 70-page article in the journal Basic and Applied Ecology.

“One unique aspect of the Jena Experiment is the fact that we performed our experiments and analyses over 15 years”, explains Prof. Weisser. “Because the influence of biodiversity is only visible after a delay, we were only able to observe certain effects from 2006 or 2007 onwards — i.e. four or five years after the beginning of the project.”

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

What, Me Worry? Humans Are Blind to Imminent Environmental Collapse

November 20, 2017

What, Me Worry? Humans Are Blind to Imminent Environmental Collapse

Accelerating biodiversity loss may turn out to be the sleeper issue of the century.

Nature can’t compete with human activity overtaking the Earth. Photo by Ben Chapman, Creative Commons licensed.

A curious thing about H. sapiens is that we are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament.

This was underscored once again in October when scientists reported that flying insect populations in Germany have declined by an alarming 75 per cent in the past three decades accompanied, in the past dozen years, by a 15 per cent drop in bird populations. Trends are similar in other parts of Europe where data are available. Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?

Too bad. Biodiversity loss may turn out to be the sleeper issue of the century. It is caused by many individual but interacting factors — habitat loss, climate change, intensive pesticide use and various forms of industrial pollution, for example, suppress both insect and bird populations. But the overall driver is what an ecologist might call the “competitive displacement” of non-human life by the inexorable growth of the human enterprise.

On a finite planet where millions of species share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species necessarily drives the contraction and extinction of others.

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

PERENNIAL POLYCULTURES AND THE RICHNESS OF DIVERSITY

November 13, 2017

PERENNIAL POLYCULTURES AND THE RICHNESS OF DIVERSITY

THE WAY NATURE PROVIDES

Imagine walking down a country road. On one side of the road, you see acres and acres of corn grown in neat rows. On the other side of the road stands an old-growth forest filled with towering trees and a thick underbrush. If you were to ask anyone which side of the road produced the most food, almost everyone would say that the cornfield is a symbol of abundance; and while the forest might be pretty, it is simply not productive.

We have been taught that food can only be grown in orderly rows and that the wildness of nature might be pretty but simply can´t provide for our well-being and sustenance. Imagine, now, that you turn off that country road and begin to walk through the old growth forest. Underneath a pine tree, you might find thousands of pine nuts scattered on the ground. Oyster and shitake mushrooms sprout from decaying logs while a flush of morel mushrooms blooms in a patch of fallen leaves.

A wild blueberry bush provides fresh fruit in a clearing while currants grow well in the shade of the larger trees. You might even come across a gnarly, old apple tree providing an abundant crop. The thick forest provides a great habitat for deer, turkey, and other tasty wildlife as well. Hundreds of other less known edible greens may make up part of the ground cover of the forest floor.

Nature always tends towards abundance, though it may not be the neat and orderly abundance that we see in the cornfield. The production of edible foodstuffs in an old growth forest may very well outcompete the cornfield on a calorie by calorie basis.

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

Perennial Polycultures-The Biomass Belt: Fertility Without Manure

May 29, 2016

Balkep-Feature

PERENNIAL POLYCULTURES – THE BIOMASS BELT: FERTILITY WITHOUT MANURE

We’re extending the Polyculture Project to include experimental perennial polycultures on various plots of our newly acquired land. Our aim is to develop models that are low cost to establish and maintain, can produce healthy affordable nutritious food and will enhance biodiversity.

We’ve been looking into fencing our plots, and how to meet fertility demands of the establishing perennial crops such as fruits, nuts, herbs and perennial vegetables without relying on animal manures and imported compost, and have come up with a polyculture that may meet both of these needs that we call the biomass belt.

WHAT IS THE BIOMASS BELT?

The biomass belt is a perennial polyculture dedicated to growing mulch and fertilizer fodder that can apply to annual and perennial crops. It’s a very simple closed system that can quickly provide a supply of nutrient dense liquid fertiliser or nutrient dense mulch material as well as valuable habitat.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The polyculture is composed of mineral accumulating comfrey in raised beds, Nitrogen fixing ground cover sown into the pathways and a Nitrogen fixing hedgerow. Local native herbaceous annuals and perennials are also encouraged to grow within the hedgerow.

Illustration by Georgi Pavlov - www.georgipavlov.net — Illustration by Georgi Pavlov – www.georgipavlov.net

The comfrey is grown in raised beds for biomass and can be cut from 4 – 7 times each year with the material being used to make liquid fertiliser or used directly as mulch. The deeply rooted comfrey mines nutrients deep in the subsoil that would otherwise wash away with the underground soil water or remain inaccessible to other plants. Some of these nutrients are relocated within the comfrey leaf biomass. As the biomass is cut and applied as the mulch or converted into liquid fertiliser, the nutrients are delivered back to the top soil and again accessible to crops and other plants.

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

Ten years that changed everything; and prevented all change

November 2, 2015

Ten years that changed everything; and prevented all change

We are one month away from the COP-21, in Paris, that should change everything – and will probably change nothing relevant. But change does occur, even though in ways that often surprise us, and in ways we may not like to see. The past decade has been a period of enormous changes and, also, a decade of gigantic efforts aimed at avoiding change at all costs. It is one of the many contradictions of our world. So, let me try to tell the story of these difficult years.

– The acceleration of climate change. In 2005, climate change seemed to be still a relatively tame beast. The scenarios presented by the IPCC (at that time updated to 2001) showed gradual temperature increases and the problems seemed to be decades away – if not centuries. But 2005 was also the year when it became clear that limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees C was much more difficult than previously thought. At the same time, the concept that climate change is a non linear process started to penetrate the debate and the danger of the “runaway climate change” was more and more understood. The events of the decade showed the rapid progression of climate change. Hurricanes (Katrina in 2005, Sandy in 2012, and many others), the melting of the ice caps, the melting of the permafrost, releasing its deadly charge of stored methane, giant forest fires, entire states going dry, the loss of biodiversity, the acidification of the oceans, and much more. It was found that high temperatures affect humans more than it was believed and, as a last straw, that the negative effects on the human behavior of increasing CO2 concentrations are much more important than previously believed. We are discovering with horror that we are transforming our planet into a gas chamber and we don’t know how to stop.

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

The Global Oil Supply: Implications for Biodiversity?

November 1, 2015

The Global Oil Supply: Implications for Biodiversity?

The following is an overview of my recent lecture to the Linnean Society of London, which is named in honour of Carl Linneus, who among many other accolades has been described as “The father of modern taxonomy”, and is also considered as one of the founders of modern ecology. It is the world’s oldest active society for the biological and environmental sciences, and the roll call of its Fellows includes such great names as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

The lecture itself can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/143163653

The link between the global oil supply and biodiversity is not directly causal; rather, the two are elements of a broader and more integrated picture. Of the energy used by humans on Earth, crude oil represents the lion’s share (33%), followed closely by coal (30%), with gas in third place at 24%. Traversing the gamut of energy sources, we find nuclear energy (4%) and hydro-power (7%), with renewable energy (wind and solar) entering the final furlong at just above 2% of total energy use, meaning that around 88% of our energy is furnished by the fossil fuels. 100 years ago, oil could be produced at an EROEI of 100, while this is now nearer to 17 as a global average, and falling, as unconventional oil sources increasingly make up for the decline in conventional production. So it’s becoming increasingly harder to maintain the oil flow into global civilization.

The Global Oil Supply.

We produce around 30 billion barrels of oil every year, which is absolutely staggering, and depending on exactly what you count as oil, this works out to 84 million barrels a day, or about 1,000 barrels every second. The major producers are Saudi Arabia and Russia, who between them produce around one quarter of the world’s oil supply….click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Leaked Map Reveals Big Gas Is Setting Its Sights on the Most Biodiverse Place on Earth

October 25, 2015

Leaked Map Reveals Big Gas Is Setting Its Sights on the Most Biodiverse Place on Earth

Part of a map from Pluspetrol, an exploration and production company, showing its interest in areas of Manú National Park in Peru’s Amazon. (Pluspetrol)

A leaked map shows that a private energy corporation based in Argentina is eyeing Manú National Park in Peru’s Amazon, one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

In a detailed article in The Guardian, environment writer David Hill, who researches forest governance in Peru from his location in the Amazon, traces the back-and-forth of Pluspetrol’s apparent quest for the hydrocarbons beneath the protected land:

The map vaguely and ignorantly – or hopefully? Disdainfully? – calls Manu a “reserve”, where gas operations are permitted. Not so in national parks. Peru’s 1997 Law of Protected Natural Areas states “the extraction of natural resources is not permitted” in parks, while the 2001 regulations for “protected natural areas” states the “settlement of new human groups and the exploitation of natural resources is prohibited.” In addition, the 1993 Constitution “obliges” the government “to promote the conservation of biological diversity and protected natural areas.”

Manu isn’t just any national park. It is home to members of several indigenous peoples – the Matsigenka, “Matsigenka-Nanti”, “Mashco-Piro”, Nahua, Quechua and Yine – while UNESCO, which has designated it a biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site, says that the biodiversity “exceeds that of any other place on earth.” In early 2014 scientists described Manu as “top of the [world’s] list of natural protected areas in terms of amphibian and reptile diversity”, and back in 2006 other scientists found that the number of bird and mammal species is the “largest for any similarly sized area in the world.”

“For 10 years [Manu] has held the title as the world’s richest protected area for birds and mammals,” Bruce Patterson, from The Field Museum in the US, told the Guardian.

Hill writes that the map was featured in April 2013 in a report by the Peruvian nongovernmental organization Ecodess. So why draw attention to it now?

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

Leaving Our Children Nothing

October 2, 2015

Leaving Our Children Nothing

Our generation has a unique opportunity. If we set our minds to it, we could be the first in human history to leave our children nothing: no greenhouse-gas emissions, no poverty, and no biodiversity loss.

That is the course that world leaders set when they met at the United Nations in New York on September 25 to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 17 goals range from ending poverty and improving health to protecting the planet’s biosphere and providing energy for all. They emerged from the largest summit in the UN’s history, the “Rio+20” conference in 2012, followed by the largest consultation the UN has ever undertaken.

Unlike their predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals, which focused almost exclusively on developing countries, the new global goals are universal and apply to all countries equally. Their adoption indicates widespread acceptance of the fact that all countries share responsibility for the long-term stability of Earth’s natural cycles, on which the planet’s ability to support us depends.

Indeed, the SDGs are the first development framework that recognizes a fundamental shift in our relationship with the planet. For the first time in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, the main factors determining the stability of its systems are no longer the planet’s distance from the sun or the strength or frequency of its volcanic eruptions; they are economics, politics, and technology.

For most of the past 12,000 years, Earth’s climate was relatively stable and the biosphere was resilient and healthy. Geologists call this period the Holocene. More recently, we have moved into what many are calling the Anthropocene, a far less predictable era of human-induced environmental change.

This fundamental shift necessitates a new economic model. No longer can we assume – as prevailing economic thinking has – that resources are endless. We may have once been a small society on a big planet. Today, we are a big society on a small planet.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sustainable-development-future-generations-by-johan-rockstr-m-2015-09#jxJCG5Y1RGemoPRF.99

“Doomsday” Arctic Seed Vault Tapped For First Time In History As Syrian Civil War Threatens Biodiversity

September 25, 2015

“Doomsday” Arctic Seed Vault Tapped For First Time In History As Syrian Civil War Threatens Biodiversity

With Russian boots officially on the ground at Latakia and with rumors circulating that the PLA may arrive within weeks, Syria has officially replaced eastern Ukraine as the most likely theatre for the start of World War 3.

While we certainly hope that cooler heads will prevail, the determination on the part of Washington, Riyadh, and Doha to oust the Assad regime simply isn’t compatible with Tehran and Moscow’s efforts to preserve the existing global balance of power which means that something will ultimately have to give and if it becomes clear that Iran is set to benefit in any way from whatever the outcome ends up being, expect Benjamin Netanyahu to make another trip to The Kremlin, only next time, he won’t be so cordial.

For those who – much like a certain CIA “strategic asset” – are looking for signs that Syria’s four-year old, bloody civil war might mark the beginning of the apocalypse, look no further than the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which was tapped for first time in history in response to the uncertain future of Aleppo. Here’s Reuters:

Syria’s civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of seeds from a “doomsday” vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday.

The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

“Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km (800 miles) from the North Pole.

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

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

May 31, 2015

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

Among the manifold quotes that are attributed to Albert Einstein, are variants along the lines of:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

and

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

Whether it was in fact the author and originator of “Relativity” (both special and general) and the “Photoelectric Effect”, the latter of which, from his Annus mirablis, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, is disputed, “http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/, nonetheless, Einstein was a man of great awareness, as might be summarised by his more provenly attributable quote, to the effect that: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins121993.html The latter axiom is indeed true.

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

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

May 22, 2015

Albert Einstein, Soil, Honey Bees and Biodiversity.

Among the manifold quotes that are attributed to Albert Einstein, are variants along the lines of:

“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”

and

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

There is a tendency for humans to perceive ill occurrences as unconnected events, rather as the Biblical plagues of Egypt: water into blood, frogs, lice, wild animals or flies, deceased livestock, boils, storms of fire, locusts, darkness and death of the firstborn. Scientists now believe that these events really happened, but they were in fact all results of a single cause: not the wrath of a punitive God, but climate changehttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7530678/Biblical-plagues-really-happened-say-scientists.html. Modern humans are aware of contemporary global menaces: a changing climate, peak oil, a dodgy economy that could collapse at any moment, and the extinction of honey bees, but relatively few of us know that the world’s productive soils are also under threat.

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

With Too Much of a Good Thing, Europe Tackles Excess Nitrogen

April 20, 2015

With Too Much of a Good Thing, Europe Tackles Excess Nitrogen

In Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries, European governments are beginning to push farmers, industry, and municipalities to cut back on fertilizers and other sources of nitrogen that are causing serious environmental harm.

by christian schwagerl

Only seconds after Claudia Wiedner drops the metallic rod into the gray waters of Lake Scharmützel, 30 miles southeast of Berlin, the probe starts sending signals back to her computer. On a cold, foggy day in March, Wiedner, a limnologist at the Brandenburg University of Cottbus-Senftenburg, and a research technician are out on the water in their small vessel to investigate nitrogen pollution.

The water samples they pull up tell an encouraging tale — at least in this lake. “We have been measuring reactive nitrogen and phosphorus in this lake since 1993 and what we see is a change for the better — levels have dropped considerably,” Wiedner says. Her colleague, Ingo Henschke, an avid diver and former fisherman, can attest to this, saying that better sewage treatment and a decrease in nearby farming have significantly improved water quality.

“I was able to document a return of large swaths of stoneworts algae and the rich water life they sustain,” Henschke says.

But Scharmützel Lake is an exception in Germany — it serves as a kind of gold standard for positive changes. For like the rest of Europe and much of the world, Germany’s waterways are suffering from a surplus of nitrogen that is spread across fields as fertilizer, pours off of farms where livestock and chickens are raised, or flows out of factories, sewage systems, and wastewater treatment plants. The result is harmful algal blooms in lakes, dead zones in oceans, and an impoverishment of terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity — problems that the European Union is now trying to address.

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

SUBURBAN SPRAWL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ECOLOGICALLY DEVASTATING

January 11, 2015

SUBURBAN SPRAWL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ECOLOGICALLY DEVASTATING

As development gobbles up open space, conservationists take a fresh look at subdivisions with biodiversity in mind.

Fort Collins, Colo., is a growing, vibrant college town with a typical American problem: Beyond its idyllic historic city center, cookie-cutter subdivisions are eating away at farm fields, ranches and forests. According to the National Wildlife Federation, “the conversion of natural areas for homes, offices and shopping centers has become one of the most serious threats to America’s native plant and animal species.” It’s also a leading cause of biodiversity decline worldwide.

Yet one development, called the Hill at Cobb Lake, stands out from the turfgrass- and pavement-covered sprawl. Here, homes clustered along a single access road leave bird-filled meadows and ancient cottonwoods untouched.

The Hill is different because it was designed with the notion that rural and suburban housing don’t need to be a death sentence for biodiversity. Homes here are strategically clustered to preserve the most ecologically valuable parts of the land.

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

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