Preaching for the Planet or Just Spinning Our Wheels
At a Glance
Section titled “At a Glance”| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2016-06-15 |
| Journal | Conservation Biology |
| Authors | John M. Halley |
| Institutions | University of Ioannina |
Abstract
Section titled “Abstract”Hope on Earth: A Conversation. Ehrlich, P. R., and M. C. Tobias. 2014. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, U.S.A. 188 pp. $22.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-226-11368-5. Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth. Barnosky, A. D. 2014. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A. 240 pp. $22.19 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-520-27437-2. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future. Sabin, P. 2013. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, U.S.A. 304 pp. $28.50 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-300-17648-3. If we are to persuade people that our environmental problems constitute an existential threat, we will have to have dialog with our opponents over substantive issues. Reading these 3 books reminded me that it is not just about getting the science right. We are going to have to account for the culture wars in which the environment increasingly gets bundled with liberal and left-wing politics. Then, there is what I call carbon fatigue, the tendency of people, even sympathetic ones, to tune out when encountering science, especially climate-change science, not just because it is bad news but because all those numerical details are hard work. That said, there are times we have paid a high price for not having our science complete and our forecasts right. Hope on Earth: A Conversation is a ramble between various topics at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) featuring Paul Ehrlich and Michael Charles Tobias with a short visit by John Harte. There are excursions into animal sentience, the extinction crisis, Ehrlich’s butterfly work, and Harte’s 30-year climate-change experiments at RMBL. As someone who has himself written on the relationship between environmentalism and animal advocacy (Halley 2015), I was interested in the dialog about animal sentience. Although I felt that the choice to eat free-range chicken as a step toward better animal welfare was unfairly given short shrift, there were good stories. For example, the cannibalistic chimpanzees that seemed to repent, walking 2 miles and dropping the body of their victim at the doorstep of Jane Goodall. Calling on a higher power for redemption or the beginnings of hooliganism? There are lots of interesting anecdotes like this. After more (and more) about climate change, we get plenty of opinions on other wedge issues: race, gender, abortion, atheism, and gun control. Some of these are subject to considerable repetition. It occurred to me that this is not a book you could give to conservative Republicans to try to win them over on climate change or biodiversity loss. The tone becomes strident and abrasive at times on all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with the environment. Gun owners and social conservatives are frequent targets. Anthony Barnosky’s Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth could certainly not be accused of setting out to cause offence. Six years ago, I put two of Anthony Barnosky’s papers (Barnosky et al. 2004; Barnosky 2008), both about extinctions in the Pleistocene, on my students’ reading list prior to the class excursion for our applied ecology course, during which we visited the natural history museum near the lignite mines of the power stations at Ptolemaida, in Northern Greece. The museum is there because numerous megafauna remains have been found above the lignite. This field trip, with such a commentary by Barnosky, was a chance to visit the Pleistocene story as well as the theme of atmospheric CO2 and even to combine them. We don’t take the field trip anymore due to the Greek economic crisis, but Barnosky remains on the reading list. I still drive across the plain of Ptolemaida, but I hardly notice the big smokestacks (and their deadly emissions) because I am thinking about mammoths, Homotherium, and Elephus antiquus, and what it was like 160,000 years ago. I blame Barnosky. One is supposed to extract dull facts from scientific articles, not the stuff of dreams. (Good thing that the road is straight.) Dodging Extinction is about the 6th mass extinction, the one being caused by us and how we might dodge the huge bullet heading in our direction. There have been many books written on this subject. Do we need another? Barnosky’s unique approach to the topic is via “global change issues … primarily from a paleobiological perspective.” The book combines his own research insights with material he gathered from many other sources. The first 3 chapters are mainly extinction stories in an evolutionary context. From some street-level stories of Galapagos tortoises to the big five mass extinctions, readers learn that current anthropogenic extinction rates are comparable with those of the big five mass extinctions. Evidence also shows that they were all preceded by a major buildup of greenhouse gases. The global CO2 changes we are inducing now rival even those preceding the Permian cataclysm. In a chapter entitled “Power,” Barnosky introduces that utterly fascinating (and chilling) account (originally published in his 2004 Science paper) that gets quoted by many people I talk to: About 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, total megafaunal biomass crashed with many species suddenly disappearing. However, after this crash, human biomass continued to rise. The global ecosystem gradually reached a new state in which megafaunal biomass was now concentrated around one species, humans. Precrash biomass levels were reached just before the Industrial Revolution began; then, they skyrocketed above the precrash baseline as humans augmented the energy available to the global ecosystem by mining fossil fuels. From the middle of chapter 4, Barnosky turns more to an analysis of our current situation, first addressing the harnessing of energy in a sustainable way. He considers how we could adapt our food requirements and our money system, destructive in their current configuration, so as to avoid the 6th extinction. Chapter 7 is a speed history and a polite rebuttal of the DNA dreamers’ notion of de-extinction. Although it may be possible to recreate the genome, what would happen next? Even relatively recent cases are problematic. For example, if the Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) were brought back from extinction how would we recreate its chestnut (Castanea dentata) forest habitat and how would we get rid of all the Starlings (Sturnidae) that replaced them? Bringing back any Pleistocene megafauna would certainly be a mammoth endeavor. When writing about the 6th extinction, the theme is so vast and so terrible that one could find a justification for almost any style: seriousness, cheerfulness, fury, comedy, or anguish. Barnosky situates himself squarely between the first two. He works hard to cultivate an approachable style to the point that it gets chatty in places (“it’s here that things get tricky”). I rather like that gravitas present in his more academic writings. Barnosky writes with great power whenever it involves paleobiology and especially when there is global quantitative analysis involved. When he turns to modern issues, the result is mixed. Some of his sustainability and conservation analyses are a bit heavy going. Despite useful and interesting anecdotes, I felt carbon fatigue gaining on me. Sometimes, when reading we-can-save-the-planet-together books, one gets the sinking feeling than unless one’s opponents stop blocking environmental legislation, we are just spinning our wheels. The book The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future is for those who are afraid we might be just spinning our wheels. It reminds us there are some in this world who do not even believe in an extinction crisis, or any other environmental crisis. One such was the late Julian Simon. For many, September 1990 was a dark moment of environmental history. That was when Simon, notorious cornucopian economist, won his bet. Simon had challenged environmentalists to a bet “If you will pay me the current market price of $1000 or $100 each, of any standard mineral or other extractive product you name, and specify any date more than a year away, I will contract to pay you the then-current market price of the material. How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists?” (Simon 1981). Ehrlich and his colleagues John Holdren and John Harte accepted Simon’s offer, choosing 5 metals over a 10-year span: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten (Ehrlich 1982). Between Ehrlich’s chosen dates, the prices of all these commodities fell. Simon received a check from Ehrlich for $576.07, but the bragging rights were priceless. Paul Sabin, associate professor of history at Yale, has gathered the larger story of this drama in his book, which should be on the reading list of anyone who cares about our environment and how to mobilize humans to help. The book is entertaining, illuminating, and chastening. In 6 chapters, Sabin skillfully weaves the story of the two huge egos and their clash and the wound that clash left behind. Sabin treats both his subjects with respect, and by the end of the book, we can sympathize with either or both. Also, he avoids casting the last stone. Although this is a scholarly book—one-quarter of the 300 or so pages are devoted to footnotes and references—the style is accessible. For me, the end came too soon. Paul Ehrlich became something of a high priest for the rapidly growing environmental movement in the 1970s following his book The Population Bomb. His confrontational, entertaining, and humorous style made him a media sensation. Ehrlich’s message was simple—humans were approaching the limits foreseen by Malthus, we needed to urgently address the problems of overpopulation and overconsumption and to stop abusing the environment. This was a message whose time had come, and it rapidly gained traction. By contrast, Julian Simon was languishing in obscurity even as Ehrlich was drawing audiences of thousands. Simon, then a professor of economics and marketing at the University of Illinois-Urbana, also had been working for population control to combat poverty but was unable to find good evidence linking population to poverty. Simon started to think that the evidence was actually the reverse. In 1970, Simon had a kind of epiphany in which he switched to thinking about people as a great resource. Simon had been suffering from serious depression. But his epiphany now powered him out of depression and propelled him into a prophetic crusade against Ehrlich and the “doomsayers”. His emotional chemistry with Ehrlich was bad from the start. As time went on, it became worse, reaching a crescendo in the pages of Social Sciences Quarterly, where the famous bet was offered. The Ehrlich-Simon debate also reflected the clash between the iconic presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. The environment was once a bipartisan thing in U.S. politics. In the 1960s and 1970s even Richard Nixon, a pragmatic president who saw political potential in this popular movement, pushed through various pieces of new environmental legislation, and earmarked 10 billion dollars for cleaning up water bodies. These plans did not satisfy Ehrlich, who described them as “hilarious.” The administration started to take heat from business interests, so in 1970, Nixon started to back off because, as he said, “I have an uneasy feeling that perhaps we are doing too much.” Carter, however, was a true believer. As well as passing a raft of new environmental legislation, Carter believed that government should lead from the front. Under newly installed solar panels, White House staffers were expected to live frugally. One of the many amusing stories Sabin tells is how national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would move a lamp closer to the thermostat in his office in order to get the air conditioning to turn on sooner. The backlash foreseen by Nixon came under Ronald Reagan. The solar panels were removed as Reagan started to roll back all of Carter’s legislation. As public opinion resisted, Reagan began to moderate and drift back toward the center. But the damage had been done. The polarization of U.S. politics had started. Simon won his bet in 1990, and we in the environmental movement got egg on our faces. Sabin suggests that metals were a poor choice because of their high volatility—a deepening shortage crisis would be hard to spot. Many say that on chance alone Ehrlich should have won, that Simon was lucky. But who was really right? Julian Simon, to his credit, said that what he was expecting people to believe seemed to argue against all logic and common sense. But Simon’s provocative stance is built on the work of other economists such as Ester Boserup and Simon Kuznets. Boserup, in particular, raised serious challenges to the arguments of Malthus (Boserup 1965). Boserup used agricultural data to show that there is little correlation between human poverty and population and theorized a staircase of technological innovations that allowed population to grow beyond the Malthusian limit. Simon pushed this argument to the limit: only the size of the universe was a real obstacle to the expansion of human numbers. Even Sabin does not buy this. But human population through the 20th century has continued its hyperexponential trajectory, arguably with increasing levels of wealth. Classical ecological population theory exemplified by the logistic equation is based on common sense and predicts that as population increases, there should be a gradual slowing due to limiting factors. Now if logic and common sense say one thing and the facts say something else, what are scientists supposed to do? We are supposed to find a logical solution that encompasses the awkward facts through new theories and models. Jared Diamond (who does not appear in this book) has noted that many extinct civilizations did not go into decline but collapsed right at their peak (Diamond 2011), something not foreseen in the logistic equation. Hern (1999) argues that the correct analogy regarding the appropriation of resources by human civilization (in its current configuration) is cancer, something that often exhibits hyperexponential growth followed by collapse. Thus, the staircase of technological fixes itself may peak and enter a cascade of hyperexponential decay. Both Simon and Ehrlich might be right, but they come down on different sides of a hyperexponential peak. A coherent theoretical perspective is needed, and we do not have one. It is a wonderfully interesting subject. One almost forgets the vast suffering that would follow if our civilization and its technological fixes went into collapse. A great fissure has opened up in environmental politics in the United States and elsewhere. Nobody has fully explained this culture war. Why have the Republicans (the party of Theodore Roosevelt) become so antienvironment? Sabin does not fully explain, but he highlights the destructive power of the Ehrlich-Simon clash and thinks that both bear some blame for fueling this war. He quotes historian Naomi Oreskes, who points out that the hell-bent pursuit of a scientific trump card by both sides, but mainly the Simon camp, has excluded other human systems such as esthetic and moral choices. I would have liked to have seen more about this in the book. Social conservatives, cornucopians, and oil-business people are among those liable not to give serious consideration to the environment, for very different reasons. So, could I give any of these books to such opponents? The book by Ehrlich and Tobias is mainly for the converted. You could not give it to a cornucopian or social conservative. I could give Barnosky’s to someone already wavering or on board and wanting to solve environmental problems or who has a taste for epic themes. A close colleague has already sent The Bet to oil-business friends in Calgary (who think the Alberta tar-sands project is a wonderful thing). I would give The Bet to anyone because it is a conversation starter for the environment.
Tech Support
Section titled “Tech Support”Original Source
Section titled “Original Source”References
Section titled “References”- 1965 - The conditions of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure
- 2011 - Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive
- 1982 - That’s right—you should check it for yourself
- 2015 - Animals and the environment: advocacy, activism, and the quest for common ground
- 1981 - Environmental disruption or environmental repair?