By: Jeremy Barnes
Jeremy’s Corner
On March 2nd, 2023, Michael Benfield, spoke on the fiftieth anniversary of Green Party of England and Wales, of which he was one of the founders. He said he believed the battle for the world’s environmental survival was “at this moment, lost… I think we have succeeded in helping to educate but we have failed in dealing with the battle for environmental survival.” The scale of the solutions is simply too unpalatable for any political party to propose, he argued. The focus now has to be on mitigation. “It doesn’t mean to say that we can’t perhaps do other things to put things right, but it’s a very dire situation that we have.”
What follows is an imaginary scenario as to what might unfold if we continue to fail to support the talk with action. I want to acknowledge at the outset my indebtedness to Dave Goulson’s chapter, A View From the Future, in Silent Earth, David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, which covers a huge amount of ground for such a short book, and Brian Watson, Headed Into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We’ll Face.
Too Little Too Late
I’ve lost. Last night they came for the last little bits and I was unable to stop them. What surprises me, looking back, is how fast this has come to be. I thought it was something my grandchildren would have to deal with; now I believe there is nothing left to which they can respond.
I recall the abundance of my youth. Supermarkets were filled daily with food, including exotic fruits flown in from all over the world and available throughout the year. And it was so cheap that we bought more than we needed, throwing away at least one third, much of it only half-eaten. Indeed the privileged societies of the world consumed so much that there was an epidemic of obesity and a wave of self-inflicted diabetes at the same time as, every day, hundreds of children were dying worldwide from hunger. And this excess came wrapped in plastic that went into the landfills together with the dirty diapers and unused medicines, the household chemicals and industrial waste, eventually leaching into the water systems and thus the oceans, to the point that microplastics were omnipresent, including at the bottom of the Marian Trench, more than five miles below the sea surface.
Gasoline was plentiful and cheap. Many families had two or more cars, each of which was six or eight cylinders when four was more than enough, heavy on fuel consumption, and there was little hesitation in driving or flying anywhere at short notice, despite the warnings of excess emissions. And we lived in large houses with beautiful gardens, watered by sprinklers that turned themselves on and off without any thought from us.
60 years ago in the midst of the excesses of the developed world, Rachel Carson wrote, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
In 1992, 1,700 scientists from every corner of the globe issued a Warning to Humanity explaining that the lifestyle of developed nations was changing the global climate, polluting our soils, rivers and air, felling rainforests, overfishing the seas, creating acid rains and driving species extinct, in effect destroying the biodiversity which our planet had developed over literally millions, if not billions, of years, and which is both basic and essential to all life, whether it be animal, bird or insect.
Governments paid little heed, even when a second warning was issued in 2017, this time signed by 20,000 scientists. Indeed, in 2000, one of the leading voices on climate change, Al Gore, was narrowly defeated in a Presidential election by George Bush, a climate denier. With the benefit of hindsight, that was a critical opportunity missed. Most politicians, despite their rhetoric, cannot see beyond the next election, and the general public has become so accustomed to short term gratification that it cannot think long term, never mind take actions that might be uncomfortable despite their being for the greater good. Add to this a capitalist system that allows multi-national conglomerates to focus on profits rather than the human or environmental good, an unfounded belief in the benefit, if not the inevitability, of endless economic growth, and a belief that science, robotics, mechanization and Artificial Intelligence, despite being part of the problem, would come up with the necessary solutions. Indeed a UNO report in March 2023, eight years in the making, focused on technological innovation, thereby once again absolving John and Jane Doe from facing any personal change in behaviors.
I have long been a beekeeper, always having (or after last night, perhaps I need to use the past tense) several hives of honey bees. Thus a personal trigger point was some research out of Germany, published in 2022, which showed that the global biomass of insects has declined by 76% in less than 25 years. Insects evoke strong emotional responses – usually fear and loathing – but they are the foundation upon which the natural world rests. Many plants are eaten by them and, in turn, are eaten by other insects as well as by birds, reptiles and a variety of small mammals. But, as this report made clear, insects, as a class, were dying, and we were the cause.
Insects are also the foundation of our food pyramid, from earth worms who aerate the soil lessening our reliance on fertilizers, to those who act as biological control agents that can help reduce our reliance on pesticides, to the myriad of pollinators – bees, moths, butterflies, bats, wasps, ants, flies and birds among many others. 87% of all plant species require pollination in order to produce fruits or seeds and this includes 75% of all agricultural food crops.
Yet most people remained blithely oblivious to these dramatic changes, explainable by several factors. First, shifting baselines, where we mistakenly thought that the current state of the world at any one time was ‘normal.’ Secondly, the vast majority of people in more developed nations were so detached from the natural world that they saw pollinators only as bugs that needed to be squashed, unaware that the agri-businesses that mass-produced their food was also putting toxins in the water, soil and air to the point that even the nectar collected by honey bees was impoverished. Thirdly, our culture and education system for the most part did not encourage deep connections with the natural world, nor the ability to think and act selflessly in the long term.
Consequently, and like the reports before it, the appeal of 2017 had no visible impact on policy or behavior even as the percentages of wild vertebrates declined and carbon emissions increased, together with those of methane-emitting livestock, global climate temperatures and the human population. It was named The Sixth Extinction and gave rise to numerous appeals on behalf of the polar bears, elephants and white rhinos while the real obsolescence was happening in our own backyards.
By 2030, food crops such as coffee, chocolate, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches and apples become more scare, replaced by the limited (and frankly unappealing) products of the grass family: wheat, rice, and barley – which are wind-pollinated. It’s a self-repeating positive feedback loop because everything in nature is interlinked with synergies that no one could predict. At local levels, with the gradual loss of, and huge increase in the price of milk, cheese and beef, the public learns how cattle are fed primarily alfalfa, that alfalfa is insect-pollinated, and that insect pests had become resistant to the barrage of pesticides to which they had been subjected for decades, thus overwhelming the beneficial insects like ladybirds, overflies, lacewings and carabid beetles, severely weakened as they were by the same chemicals. At a global level, reduced ice cover at the Poles decreases reflection of the sun’s energy, leading to more warming and thus more melting (glacier melting in both the Arctic and Antarctica increased more than four times in the space of six years in the early 2020’s); the thawing of the Arctic permafrost released huge quantities of methane that were once trapped underground (methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide;) changing weather patterns reduced rainfall in the Amazon and forests of equatorial Africa, so the rainforests disappeared after acting as ‘the lungs’ of our planet for some 55 million years.
At the same time, extreme weather conditions increase, especially hurricanes and wild fires. Heavy rains, storm surges and increases in the ocean level floods cities from New York to London to Mumbai, Shanghai, Osaka and Miami; the weakened economies can not afford to build the necessary protections, insurance companies are bankrupted and eventually large swaths of countryside disappear underwater, starting with the Maldives and Bangladesh and including much of Florida and the Fens of England.
By 2035, it’s obvious that the world no longer has the capacity to feed a global population that has stabilized at some ten billion people. Summer droughts in the American wheat belt and the advance of the Sahara southwards in Africa means many farmers had to leave their land with nowhere to go. A century of intensive farming has critically reduced the narrow layer of top soil on which plants depend; what remains is critically polluted by chemicals (the world’s only sources of natural fertilizer, especially potassium found primarily in Morocco, are exhausted;) underground water used for irrigation has dried up, and all major rivers have stopped flowing in the Summer, causing storage dams to go dry.
Increasingly, ‘climate refugees’ are forced into crowded temporary accommodations which are ideal for outbreaks of deadly diseases, not least cholera. The consequent fear, combined with rising unemployment, food prices and shortages, leads to protests, riots, and the election of increasingly extremist politicians who in turn inflame this pubic anxiety for personal ends.
By 2040, countries have become isolationist, putting their own interests before those of humankind or the environment. The mistrust, if not derision, of scientists reaches new peaks in an environment in which ‘truth’ is defined by those who shouted the loudest or had the money to buy time on the media. The title of Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, seems increasingly prescient.
As agricultural production declines globally, money can no longer buy food from abroad, supermarket shelves begin to empty and families begin to stockpile provisions, resenting any suggestion that they should help feed the migrants camped on their borders.
There is no doubt that those in developing countries suffer the worst. The theme of the 2030’s was of the three f’s (floods, fires and famines) leaving a billion people destitute and desperate. Millions died in famines; those who survived created mass migrations north and south, trying to escape the civil wars that broke out along ethnic and religious lines as people looked for a scapegoat to blame for their suffering.
Initially, the rich were still able to live in a state of luxury out of all proportion to their numbers, even to their value. But as the environment collapses, as measured by the increasing levels of the oceans and of aridity, share prices fall, hedge funds fold and banks collapse. Hyperinflation makes money virtually worthless and everyone is poor. It’s a painful reminder that the foundation of the economy, even of civilization, is a healthy environment – if one cannot grow food the economy is obliterated.
As early as 2022, life expectancy begins to fall, living standards decline and the health services are overwhelmed. An aging population, the epidemic of obesity, related chronic illnesses such as diabetes, the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, and plagues in the unsanitary migratory camps only make the situation worse.
By 2040, schools, hospitals and a nation’s infrastructure are in disrepair, paychecks (when they come) cannot cover the basic necessities of family life, law and order crumble, people steal and loot what they can, and many abandon the cities. Eventually, the electric supply falters and then fails – those who had stockpiled food lost much of it when their freezers failed. And without power, water stops running, shops close, gasoline is rationed (my ration was two gallons per month) but without electricity there was no way to pump nor to get power for electric vehicles.
How have I survived, at least until now? Fortunately, I live in a rural area, have a well that can be accessed by hand, solar panels to provide electricity, a few chickens, some deer in the woods which I try to trap and, my pride and joy, a two acre vegetable garden, hidden from view and large enough to feed the three generations that live in the farmhouse. Or so I thought.
Last night some desperate, starving people, scavenging what they could to stay alive, invaded the farm. First, they killed the few chickens, desperate for meat and ignoring the fact that otherwise there was a steady supply of eggs. They tore apart the two bee hives, partly for honey, which they could have taken without killing the bees, and then for the larvae which are a rich source of protein, even as their removal will lead to the death of the colonies. Then, they found the garden and tore it up, irrespective of whether the root and leaf vegetables were ready to eat or not. Everything is gone, including the seed which I collected so carefully in the Fall to create seedlings in the Spring. Yes, I have a gun, but it’s an empty threat, literally – there has not been any ammunition available for at least five years.
So, for me and my extended family, as for most others, it is over. Like those affected by the dreadful plagues in the Middle Ages, we have no alternative but to accept our fate.
The irony is that in this last decade, with humanity in retreat, there are signs of environmental recovery. The water in the streams is more clear; there are indigenous shrubs and wildflowers growing in the fields that were once intensively cultivated, without smog and microplastics the trees are more leafy, and it might have been my imagination, or even wishful thinking, but last week I thought I caught a glimpse of a butterfly, which would have been the first in three years.
It is all too little too late. We had our chances to change our behaviors, and ignored them, hoping instead for miracles, or at the very least a colony on Mars. Anything but the acceptance of personal responsibility and accountability
So what of the future? Human beings are newcomers to this world. If we start with the first homosapiens, which is 150,000 years before the first use of language, as best as we can calculate, we have been present for .0004% of the planet’s history. That is equivalent to eight seconds in a 24 hour day. There has never been any guarantee that humans are not destined to disappear one day; we just never thought it would be this soon. Not only is the end of our reign imminent, but we should welcome it. By desperately hanging on, repeatedly doing the same things, we are only postponing the inevitable. Without us, the earth will recover and perhaps, sometime in the next one or two million years, another intelligent species might emerge unencumbered with myths of divine creation and the right to domination, and a deeper understanding of the concept of love. All evidence of our existence will have disappeared, and hopefully these new beings, in whatever form they take, will do a better job than we have, not that any of us will be around to see it.
