Civilization as Asteroid

SUBHEAD: We and our livestock are more than an order of magnitude greater than all animals on land.

By Darrin Qualman on 13 June 2018 in Resilience -
(https://www.darrinqualman.com/humans-livestock-extinctions/)


Image above: These 600-700 pound steers are being fed in a feedlot in Jetmore, Kansas, for “backgrounding” to gain weight to around 1,000 pounds. They’ll be sent to another feedlot for “finishing” before slaughter. From (https://aspenranchrealestate.com/Colorado_Cattle_Ranching).

Humans and our livestock now make up 97% of all animals on land.  Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3%.  This is based on mass.  Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.

To clarify, if we add up the weights of all the people, cows, sheep, pigs, horses, dogs, chickens, turkeys, etc., that total is 32 times greater than the weight of all the wild terrestrial mammals and birds: all the elephants, mice, kangaroos, lions, raccoons, bats, bears, deer, wolves, moose, chickadees, herons, eagles, etc.

A specific example is illuminating: the biomass of chickens is more than double the total mass of all other birds combined.


Image above: At this KFC "broiler shed" there is only artificial light, no fresh air, and huge fans circulate the stale ammonia filled air. Chicken meat is perfect for our fast food culture. A producer can ‘grow’ a chicken within a few weeks with super large breasts, and minimize overhead through economies of scale. From (https://pos394.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/do-you-know-how-your-chicken-was-raised/).

Before the advent of agriculture and human civilizations, however, the opposite was the case: wild animals and birds dominated, and their numbers and mass were several times greater than their numbers and mass today.

Before the advent of agriculture, about 11,000 years ago, humans made up just a tiny fraction of animal biomass, and domesticated livestock did not exist.  The current situation—the domination of the Earth by humans and our food animals—is a relatively recent development.

The preceding observations are based on a May 2018 report by Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Bar-On and his coauthors use a variety of sources to construct a “census of the biomass of Earth”; they estimate the mass of all the plants, animals, insects, bacteria, and other living things on our planet.

The graph below is based on data from that report (supplemented with estimates based on work by Vaclav Smil).  The graph shows the mass of humans, our domesticated livestock, and “wild animals”: terrestrial mammals and birds.  The units are millions of tonnes of carbon.[1]  Three time periods are listed.


Image above: Graph of history of land based mammals and bird biomass over last 11,000 years. From www.darrinqualman.com.

The first, 50,000 years ago, is the time before the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction.  The Megafauna Extinction was a period when Homo sapiens radiated outward into Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas and contributed to the extinction of about half the planet’s large animal species (over 44 kgs).  (Climate change also played a role in that extinction.)

In the middle of the graph we see the period around 11,000 years ago—before humans began practicing agriculture.  At the right-hand side we see the situation today.  Note how the first two periods are dominated by wild animals.  The mass of humans in those periods is so small that the blue bar representing human biomass is not even visible in the graph.[2]

This graph highlights three points:

1. Wild animal numbers and biomass have been catastrophically reduced, especially over the past 11,000 years
2. Human numbers and livestock numbers have skyrocketed, to unnatural, abnormal levels
3. The downward trendline for wild animals visible in this graph is gravely concerning; this graph suggests accelerating extinctions.

Indeed, we are today well into the fastest extinction event in the past 65 million years.  According to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “the rate of known extinctions of species in the past century is roughly 50–500 times greater than the extinction rate calculated from the fossil record….”

The extinction rate that humans are now causing has not been seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago—the asteroid-impact-triggered extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Unless we reduce the scale and impacts of human societies and economies, and unless we more equitably share the Earth with wild species, we will enter fully a major global extinction event—only the sixth in 500 million years.  To the other species of the Earth, and to the fossil record, human impacts increasingly resemble an asteroid impact.

In addition to the rapid decline in the mass and number of wild animals it is also worth contemplating the converse: the huge increase in human and livestock biomass.  Above, I called this increase “unnatural,” and I did so advisedly.


The mass of humans and our food animals is now 7 times larger than the mass of animals on Earth 11,000 or 50,000 years ago—7 times larger than what is normal or natural.

For millions of years the Earth sustained a certain range of animal biomass; in recent millennia humans have multiplied that mass roughly sevenfold.

How?  Fossil fuels.  Via fertilizers, petro-chemical pesticides, and other inputs we are pushing hundreds of millions of tonnes of fossil fuels into our food system, and thereby pushing out billions of tonnes of additional food and livestock feed.

We are turning fossil fuel Calories from the ground into food Calories on our plates and in livestock feed-troughs.   For example, huge amounts of fossil-fuel energy go into growing the corn and soybeans that are the feedstocks for the tens-of-billions of livestock animals that populate the planet.

Dr. Anthony Barnosky has studied human-induced extinctions and the growing dominance of humans and their livestock.  In a 2008 journal article he writes that “as soon as we began to augment the global energy budget, megafauna biomass skyrocketed, such that we are orders of magnitude above the normal baseline today.”

According to Barnosky “the normal biomass baseline was exceeded only after the Industrial Revolution” and this indicates that “the current abnormally high level of megafauna biomass is sustained solely by fossil fuels.”

Only a limited number of animals can be fed from leaves and grass energized by current sunshine.  But by tapping a vast reservoir of fossil sunshine we’ve multiplied the number of animals that can be fed.  We and our livestock are petroleum products.

There is no simple list of solutions to mega-problems like accelerating extinctions, fossil-fuel over-dependence, and human and livestock overpopulation.  But certain common sense solutions seem to present themselves.

I’ll suggest just one: we need to eat less meat and fewer dairy products and we need to reduce the mass and number of livestock on Earth.  Who can look at the graph above and come to any other conclusion?

We need not eliminate meat or dairy products (grazing animals are integral parts of many ecosystems) but we certainly need to cut the number of livestock animals by half or more.

Most importantly, we must not try to proliferate the Big Mac model of meat consumption to 8 or 9 or 10 billion people.  The graph above suggests a stark choice: cut the number of livestock animals, or preside over the demise of most of the Earth’s wild species.

1. Using carbon content allows us to compare the mass of plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, etc.  Very roughly, humans and other animals are about half to two-thirds water.  The remaining “dry mass” is about 50% carbon.  Thus, to convert from tonnes of carbon to dry mass, a good approximation is to multiply by two.
    
2. There is significant uncertainty regarding animal biomass in the present, and much more so in the past.  Thus, the biomass values for wild animals in the graph must be considered as representing a range of possible values.  That said, the overall picture revealed in the graph is not subject to any uncertainty.  The overall conclusions are robust: the mass of humans and our livestock today is several times larger than wild animal biomass today or in the past; and wild animal biomass today is a fraction of its pre-agricultural value.

Graph sources:
– Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 17, 2018.
– Anthony Barnosky, “Megafauna Biomass Tradeoff as a Driver of Quaternary and Future Extinctions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (August 2008).
– Vaclav Smil, Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).


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Primitive Technologies

SUBHEAD: Videos on how to build the foundation of a civilization by hand with Stone Age technology.

By Juan Wilson on 2 May 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/05/primitive-technologies.html)


Image above: A mud house with tiled roof and a hot air duct heating system. From ().

I have to thank Katie Young, from Olehena, Kauai for making me aware of the Primitive Technology YouTube channel.

Wikipedia says:

Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by and starring John Plant. Based in Far North Queensland, Australia, the series demonstrates the process of making tools and buildings using only materials found in the wild. Created in May 2015, the channel has gained over 7.6 million subscribers and garnered over 500 million views as of April 2018.

The site consists, today, over 75 videos demonstrating the creation of several categories of Stone Age technology using only what can found on/in the ground and from the plants of a semitropical forest.

The categories include (opens in new window):
"Pyrotechnology"
"Shelter"
"Food & Agriculture"
"Tools & Machines"
"Weaving & Fiber"
"Weapons"

The videos are remarkable in many ways. They have no narrative, comments, subtitles, graphics or musical soundtrack. They consist only of one young ingenious man taking what what he can gather  by hand from the ground and the plants that grow out of the ground. This consists of stone, clay, algae, branches, fiber, leaves, seeds, etc.

From what he gathers he makes all alone the tools to construct much of not only what would is needed to survive in the wilderness, but what would be needed to begin and maintain a civilization; including shelter and food.  Beyond that he demonstrates building a termite clay kiln capable of firing river clay into roof tiles and even a water powered hammer that can autonomously pulverize things without assistance.

These films are well edited to show the necessary steps to achieve surprisingly sophisticated results with only visual cues and the sounds of the tools working and the ambient sounds of the forest itself. Remarkable!



Video above: building a kiln out of mud for firing tiles and bowls. From (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZGFTmK6Yk4).

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Growthism as the solution - Part 4

SUBHEAD: Growth has been the solution to America's problems at a cost to nature and its inhabitants.

By Erik Lindberg on 7 February 2017 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-02-07/growth-as-a-solution-growthism-part-4/)


Image above: Painting of Oklahoma Landrush in 1889 when settlers furiously dashed across the Oklahoma plains to stake their claims to nearly two million acres put up for grabs by the U.S. government. From (http://www.history.com/news/the-oklahoma-land-rush-125-years-ago).

Note: You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series on Resilience.org at their respective links.

"I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know to how to stay quietly in his room."  – Pascal

In April 1889, fifty-thousand people stood shoulder to shoulder, impatiently shuffling, waiting on the border of Oklahoma territory.  Many were on horseback; others were poised to charge on foot, laden with tents, pans, and tools.

Wagons too stood at the ready, while trains full of passengers let off steam, waiting to start the journey to the sites that would, within hours, be the brand new towns of Guthrie and Oklahoma City.

There to view it was William Willard Howard, who described what he saw in a May 18, 1889 article in Harper’s Weekly,

As the expectant home-seekers waited with restless patience, the clear, sweet notes of a cavalry bugle rose and hung a moment upon the startled air. It was noon. The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. 

Moved by the same impulse, each driver lashed his horses furiously; each rider dug his spurs into his willing steed, and each man on foot caught his breath hard and darted forward. A cloud of dust rose where the home-seekers had stood in line, and when it had drifted away before the gentle breeze, the horses and wagons and men were tearing across the open country like fiends.

The horsemen had the best of it from the start. It was a fine race for a few minutes, but soon the riders began to spread out like a fan, and by the time they had reached the horizon they were scattered about as far as eye could see. [i]

By the end of the day Oklahoma lay staked and claimed.  The new city of Guthrie had been laid out and was by sundown the home to an estimated seven or eight thousand prospectors and speculators.  By week’s end, crude restaurants, shops, and homes had been thrown together, and furious digging had produced the wells necessary to  quench the thirst of the new inhabitants.

As Howard reflects in his Harper’s article, “The landless and home-hungry people on the train might be pardoned their mental exhilaration, when the effect of this wonderfully beautiful country upon the most prosaic mind is considered.”

While the Oklahoma land rush is certainly among our most dramatic, rushes have been an vital part of America’s history, whether the pursuit of happiness fixed its sights on land, gold, or oil; such exuberance, hope, and instant triumph, and with it the dashed dreams, have shaped our landscapes, both inner and outer, leaving in their wake ribbons of highway crisscrossing the land and the scars of an unsettled life lived always on the move.

The Homestead Act of 1862 was fundamental to the development of these American landscapes.

Between 1862 and 1976, when it was finally repealed, 1.6 million homesteaders lay claim to 270 million acres of land.   For its part, the California Gold Rush brought around 300,000 seekers from around the globe to California.  Between 1848 and 1850 San Francisco grew from a settlement of 1000 to a city of 25,000.

But it all began earlier than that.  Between 1607 and 1623, Charles Mann reports, seven thousand settlers landed in Jamestown Virginia.

Even though four out of five died, they kept coming, wave after wave, and not just there, but throughout the Americas, lured by gold, silver, sugar, and tobacco, then guano, cotton, and rubber, each in its own glimmering way a medallion of unsustainability.

These rushes are most often presented as episodes in our national myths of free people seeking a better life, packing their whole life, and their future, on their backs and heading towards a beckoning frontier.

That’s the story we tell ourselves.  And even critical intellectuals, soberly aware of our nation’s many originary sins, can’t resist the draw of the limitless when it emerges once again, as in the Silicon Valley rush of recent decades.

We might consider these national stories footnotes to one of our great documents of Growthism, The Frontier Thesis of American History, announced by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893.

“Up to our own day,” he explained, “American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.  The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

Turner’s project is to explain “the peculiarity of American institutions,” or to be more direct about his motives, our particular national excellence.

The way our institutions “have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people” who at “every stage must carve progress out of primitive frontier circumstances” is, in Turner’s mind, central to the existential condition of America, and to the unique American Character:

“this perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.”[ii] 

This ideal is still with us.  It has turned to new frontiers like space or the inner self.  Now, ours are the frontiers of technology and data, and today’s conquistadors the “innovator” or “entrepreneur” battling against the ageless forces of marginal inconvenience.

By today’s standards, nevertheless, Jackson was not doing serious history, but was engaged in national myth-making, though many of today’s historians may one day be similarly judged.  He directly downplays the role of slavery in America and the land is only “free” by ignoring its native inhabitants, who were characteristically ushered onto reservations to make way for the white settlers who would, in matter of decades, turn Oklahoma (for its part) into a dusty desert.

Is the American character, should one actually exist, fluid, or perhaps just soluble; simple, or base; reborn, or perennially distracted and always on to something new and bigger?

Does it reach for a sublime and Earthly infinite, or does it have as its highest point of navigation a point lying half way between East and West Egg?

However we answer these questions, it is difficult to maintain that these rushes and this constant westward expansion were simply the proving ground for a stalwart American character, a place where hero would become victor.

An examination of the political record and the way the Federal government strategically engaged in expansion as a response to political pressures should dispel any idealism.

America, like Australia, was initially prized as a place not only from which riches might be drawn, but somewhere upon which Europe’s excess population and unwanteds might be released.  This same pattern was soon adopted by the sovereign American states.

The mere existence of a space to the West, as I have argued in the past, enlivened Jefferson’s imagination which was, in the face of its vastness, given to repeated and habitual references to infinite and limitless possibility.

But in a far more pragmatic way, Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty was to spring forth from the “nest” of the “new confederacy,” as Americans would, according to his plan laid out in a 1786 letter, simply outbreed European rivals and expand across the continent.

After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad knitted the north and south back together.

And when the West had been fully seized as prophesized by Fredrick Jackson Turner, it is no coincidence, the United States soon surpassed its territorial boundaries with the great expansions of the late 1890s and the taking of Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.

Land was used to compensate unpaid soldiers from the Revolutionary war, was offered to civil war veterans, and eventually affordable homesteads in America’s suddenly expanding suburbs were made available to soldiers returning home from WWII.

With room to roam, countless political challenges disappear.  Our politics talk of little else than the promise of space, opportunity, and a distant goal to keep us moving forward.

In his irreplaceable study, The Great Depression, historian Robert McElvaine argues that during the depression, especially in its early years, Americans entertained an anti-Growthist approach: “under those conditions, many Americans temporarily rejected the new ideology and returned to more traditional values of based on community.”

But this was to be short lived, as the solutions the New Deal “finally settled for accepted the very modern forces that the Depression experience had led so many people to spurn.”

A return to Growth, in other words, ended the Depression, and the Democratic party has never looked back in its attempt to maintain Rooseveltian social progress and egalitarian economic values by way of a constantly expanding economic pie.

As McElvaine points out, “President Kennedy even revived an old term for this cherished American belief when he spoke of a New Frontier.  A majority in the sixties was willing to help others because they thought this could be done without harming themselves.”[iii]

This is all to say that growth is a solution.  But a solution to what?  The normal view is that growth is the solution to stagnation, but this begs all useful and interesting questions—and especially the ones pressing for answers as we confront the limits to growth.

For much of human history, and in societies that were able to sustain themselves over the long run, what we mistakenly call “stagnation” is better described as the cycle of life, with a steady and repeating exchange of inputs and outputs operating within a stable local ecology.

Stagnation, understood ecologically, is a problem only when the wheel of life has stopped turning, when staying put amounts to wallowing in your own waste, when movement and expansion is required in order to find undenuded and unsullied place.

This obligatory restlessness is as old as the European project in the Americas.  As George Washington put it, describing the wasteful and destructive farming practices of the American South, “’a piece of land is cut down,’ meaning stripped of its timber, and then ‘kept under constant cultivation, first in tobacco and then in Indian corn (two very exhausting plants), until it will yield scarcely anything’ at all.”[iv]

Jefferson similarly described the economics of agricultural destruction in Notes on Virginia: “the indifferent state of that [careful agricultural practices] among us does not proceed from want of knowledge merely; it is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please.”[v]

It is far less expensive, he elsewhere remarks, to cut a new acre than manure an old one.[vi]

The idea of the pursuit of happiness has been literalized across the landscape of the Americas and has been implanted in our hearts.  It is no wonder that we dream of a supply of infinite energy and view the economy as perpetual motion machine.

Growth, we might then conclude, is a solution to growth, or at least to the conditions that growth creates.  Growth becomes necessary when, in Wendell Berry’s words, we depend on energy economies of mere production and consumption, rather than ones appropriate to our biological nature.

These, Berry explains, require “the addition of a third term: production, consumption, and return.  It is the principle of return,” Berry continues, “that complicates matters, for it requires responsibility, care, of a different higher order.”[vii]

 An economy of production and consumption alone is extractive and always on the move, looking for new and growing throughputs, inured to the care of stocks.

Care is not fostered by a nation built upon land-rushes, nor upon a plantation system and slave labor; and return has connotations of the closed and binding moral and psychological orders that make the carefree, utility-maximizing, profit-seeking Individual shudder.

At this point it may be helpful to refer back to my previous installment about the Growthist Self, and drill a little deeper into the devil’s bargain that the Growthist Self is forced to make.

Contrary to the modern image of the past as merely a dark age of misery and drudgery, to which a modern one of unburdened possibility is contrasted and from which we lucky moderns bravely escaped, premodern societies offered people an order of goods that have disappeared from modern society.

 These premodern social orders, when operating properly, included principles of responsibility and care absent from a competitive society, the job of which is to provide only an open backdrop for individual achievement.  While we celebrate the belief that “there are no limits,” limits, as any parent knows, help provide stability and order, and also a sense of security.

While we rejoice in our mobility, it comes with costs which our ledger books may not record.  Traditional social roles are often despised in modern society because of the limits they impose; but we forget that the difficult passage from adolescence into adulthood was once far less perilous than it is today.

We eschew inherited community—it is not freely chosen and has ties that painfully bind–but wonder at our loneliness and alienation.  We often treat choice as a synonym for good, but then must ignore the resulting anxiety and regret as the inevitable price of progress.

What we like to think of as advanced industrial nations do, of course, offer freedoms and opportunities previously undreamt of–and if I am taken to be suggesting that this gift should be thoughtlessly abandoned, then my ambivalence has been buried too deeply amidst my consideration of the generally unthinkable.  I would not be writing this were I not myself desiring the exhilaration of change.

But advanced societies suffer from a kind of sickness of the self not seen in traditional societies.  America exhibits this sickness more than any other—the mass incarceration and destitution amidst plenty; the gutted working class trudging the aisles of Walmart looking for glimmering cellophane hope; the throngs of uneducated, the American idle filling purposeless days with unhealthy food and cheap distractions; the rage, frustration and violence among neighbors, here, the multi-billion dollar defense and marketing budgets, there; the addiction and lost children in a nation that not only consumes a quarter of the world’s natural resources, but a quarter of its recreational drugs, as well.

We, more than any others, know not how to sit quietly in our rooms.

Are the pay-offs worth it?  Or is life lived in denial of limits a failed experiment, its victims piling up like careening cars on a foggy highway?

For amidst the excited impatience and exuberance of our Oklahoma land seekers, and the myths of American rejuvenation and exceptionalism, we miss something equally basic and profound: that these land seekers must race just to find a home.

The thrill of contest hides the indignity of it, not to mention the terrible possibility of homelessness.  If the pursuit of happiness is a race, losers there must be—and are.

There is a standard Liberal, and at least tacitly Growthist, response to my suggestion that life without limits is not a good unto itself.  If cars are piling up in the fog, “lift the fog,” they will say.  There is nothing wrong with the absolute freedom of self-creation and the elimination of limits, both inner and outer, nothing wrong with structuring life like a race.

Rather, the only problem is that there are hidden obstacles, half of which social progress has already removed, the other half of which the so-called arc of history has in its sights.

With the correct (liberal/progressive) politics, the argument continues, we can finally eliminate all such barriers and usher in an age of purposeful equality, fraternity, and healthy contentment, all equals in the pursuit of happiness.  We can lift the fog—and then race on, never having to return.

But what if we can’t lift the fog?

What if we lift it only to reveal ecological limits bearing down on us?

I’m tempted, here, to play out this metaphor of the fog, but on consideration realize it would lead us down a byway where we will only find another inconclusive dialectic of the Enlightenment.  Suffice it to say, then, at least for people (like me) who cut their teeth as liberals it is indeed difficult to access a perspective which looks positively on limits and boundaries or traditions and roles.

Resurrected limits usually march under the banner of last year’s hierarchies (under the banner also known of as “conservative politics”), and as such limits are employed in the pursuit of power rather than as an alternative form of the good life.

But in failing to appreciate a deeper, I don’t know the right word—perhaps conservativism, perhaps something else—we fail to see the way the conditions of Growthism are deeply unsettling, and that the boundless and unguided opportunity that sits at the heart of Liberalism and America and its culture of eternal change forms not a kind of sociality, but an anti-sociality.

For a society such as ours, then, an entirely new sort of social glue had to materialize so that we might coexist and interact–though glue is the wrong sort of metaphor to describe the primary means of political coexistence in Liberal democracies.

For it is Growth and expansion that underlie our political system.  Growth is not what keeps us together; it is what allows us to separate–and freedom and individuality require separation.[viii]

Lack of growth, in contrast, holds people together in ways we do not know how to manage.

Politicians and economists are not mistaken about the perils of a no-Growth society, for without growth we become angry and resentful, turn on each other in bitter, tribal rivalries.

Where they are mistaken, however, is their misapprehension of Growth as normal, not to mention sustainable.  Lack of Growth is not the crime against humanity, per se, as today’s Growthists imagine.

Rather, there is at present a historical mismatch between the Individual and the sort of static and steady state that sustainability requires.

The Individual is at home only on the range.

As I have been arguing here and in my previous installment, then, the shipwrecked modern Individual has ceded a number of comforts and safeties of community and place, and must be given something else in return, something to lure them into a perilous beyond.

Early liberals, the framers of our constitution, for instance, were not fully aware of the Growthist nature of the systems they were constructing and hoped that the promise of freedom and a degree of possibility and opportunity might be all that was required (they also depended on considerable hold-over conventions and traditions that have subsequently melted into air).

But it turned out that the Individual always needed more, a principle now enshrined in the American Dream with little question—that each generation should be “better off” than previous ones.  There is no set amount that constitutes enough or ever could.

Rather and in a purely relational sense, there must be the promise of continued and permanent expansion.  This is the devil’s bargain that the Individual makes, though to call it a bargain is misleading: the uprooted Individual never had a choice but to be thrust into a world of choice.

But the trade-off, if we are to conduct a trans-cultural comparison, is this: for relinquishing a certain kind of order, stability, and sense of place we are in turn given the promise not just of “a lot,” but the promise of more.  And it is the promise of more, and enough delivery of it, that has held Liberal society together.  I, for one, have no faith that it can survive any degree of contraction.

Those few among us who actually understand how our monetary system works may at this point suggest that the Individual’s requirement for Growth has mainly to do with a financial system which must grow simply to stand still and maintain itself.

I will turn to these issues in my next installment, but for now let me suggest that the historically determined present need to Grow exists more broadly than is explained by the way our  money is loaned into existence, as important as that is to our current reality.   There is a structural element that cuts deeper, one that is remarkably simple.

Since the Individual is responsible for plotting his own course and attaining her own fortune by way of competition, the more chances of winning there are, the more orderly and cooperative a society will be.

If a static or shrinking economy is a zero-sum (or negative-sum) game, the system will be swamped with losers.  That is why our society is enamored with the notion of the win-win situation, and with metaphors like the rising tide that lifts all boats or the economy that trickles down.

It explains why Americans were quick to grasp and embrace Reagan’s rather complex and counterintuitive supply-side economics.

Growthism stretched or incredulity to the point where we can accept nearly any sort of win-win scenario, no matter how magical the thinking behind it.

We might similarly note that the outlook for the competitive individual has as much to do with the consequences of losing as its relative chance.  If “losing” merely means not gaining as much, as opposed to relinquishing current possessions and identities, it is easier to honorably stomach defeat.

This, and not our alleged adherence to gleaming democratic principles, explains the peaceful transfer of power in the United States and other stable democracies:  when the Republicans have won, or vice versa, the day-to-day lives of Democrats undergo very little change.

There is no transition of property or social hierarchy, here, thus making defeat acceptable enough.  Put the same people with the same beliefs and expectations into a zero-sum situation, and the results will be entirely different, as they perhaps are slowly becoming today.  The moment an electoral defeat, like an economic one, has substantial impact on enough people–the moment it takes from them what they already have–the result will be revolts and the breakdown of democratic institutions.

Even the vague and unconscious threat of the end of growth brings the masses into the streets.  This explains why civil rights flourish in times of economic expansion, while fault lines reemerge in times of retrenchment.  Under conditions of Growth, winners abound and generosity flows like wine.

These dynamics  also explain why a severe economic recession is rightly, in our present context, called a depression.

For against the backdrop expectations of an expansive hope, economic depressions act on the body politic not unlike depression on the individual.   For a depression involves the piling up of losses that begin to appear more than episodic, but part of self-reinforcing descent whose bottom is hidden from view.  Hope is overshadowed by doubt and despair crushes faith.  There appears to be no escape, only walls closing in and doors slamming shut, leaving the Individual alone, full of shame and defeat.

Communities, in contrast to individuals, are far better adapted to contraction and might manage it without depression, though any simple suggestion that we replace the Individual with Community does no justice to the high stakes and difficult fences of such as transition.

Finally, this explains my own preoccupation with the rise of the Individual, the geography of freedom, and our table of beliefs and expectations.  Over the past several centuries, all matters of relieving social disorder, of increasing freedom, and curing depression other than Growth and expansion have lost their legitimacy.

Now, regardless of how well they worked in the past and no matter how central they are to everything we hold dear, they are no longer viable options.  Growth, now, is not a solution to our problems; Growth is our problem.

[i] http://urbanplanning.library.cornell.edu/DOCS/landrush.htm
[ii] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/
[iii] McElvaine, Robert.  The Great Depression (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), pp xlii, 348.
[iv] Quoted in Kennedy, Robert G.  Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slaver, and the Louisiana Purchase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 17
[v] http://web.archive.org/web/20080914030942/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html
[vi] I discuss this at greater length in: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-01-06/the-mis-taking-of-america/
[vii] Berry, Wendell.  The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), p. 85.
[viii] http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-11/a-geo-physis-of-freedom/

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Wildlife loss of 58% since 1970

SUBHEAD: Absent radical system change, world faces two-thirds wildlife loss by 2020.

By Nadia Prupius on 27 October 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/27/absent-radical-system-change-world-faces-two-thirds-wildlife-loss-2020)


Image above: Mountain gorillas are threatened with extinction as they have been reduced to two isolated populations in Central Africa. From (http://www.nature.com/news/mountain-gorillas-stuck-in-genetic-bottleneck-1.17277).

We are at a decisive moment in time when we can seize the solutions to steer our food, energy, and finance systems in a more sustainable direction'

Global populations of wild animals could be down by two-thirds by 2020 without reform to food and energy systems, according to a devastating new report out Thursday.

The analysis by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London finds that animal populations dropped 58 percent between 1970 and 2012. Without radical action, the world could witness a decline of 67 percent by 2020.

The annual Living Planet Index is the most comprehensive study to date, the organizations said. Since the mid-twentieth century, use of natural resources has gone up dramatically, harming biodiversity and other critical ecosystems.

And now, as scientists suggest we've entered into a new geological epoch created by human activity—the Anthropocene—the report states that we are endangering the natural systems we rely upon, and are faced with a "dual challenge" to keep the earth habitable for animals and people.

"Wildlife is disappearing within our lifetimes at an unprecedented rate," said Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International. "This is not just about the wonderful species we all love; biodiversity forms the foundation of healthy forests, rivers, and oceans. Take away species, and these ecosystems will collapse along with the clean air, water, food, and climate services that they provide us."

"We have the tools to fix this problem and we need to start using them now if we are serious about preserving a living planet for our own survival and prosperity," Lambertini said.

The top threats to species identified in the report—fish, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, from gorillas to salamanders—are directly linked to human activity. That includes habitat loss and over-exploitation of wildlife, both of which are in part a result of global food production for a booming population. The report notes that agriculture takes up about one-third of the Earth's territory and accounts for 70 percent of water use.

The Guardian also summarizes other findings:

Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants. Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug. Amphibians have suffered one of the greatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts.

But the report also offers some auspicious statistics, such as the measures small-scale farmers in developing countries are taking to protect their regional lakes and other biodiversity hotspots. And it notes that some species, such as the tiger and the giant panda, are starting to recover, suggesting that drastic action would make a significant impact.

The researchers hope the report will serve as a global wake-up call on conservation.

"Human behavior continues to drive the decline of wildlife populations globally, with particular impact in freshwater habitats. Importantly however, these are declines, they are not yet extinctions—and this should be a wake-up call to marshal efforts to promote the recovery of these populations," said Professor Ken Norris, director of science at the zoological society.

The report outlines some of the most necessary systemic changes that need to occur to prevent the massive species damage: expanding the global network of protected places; creating legal and policy frameworks that support equitable access to food, water, and energy; divesting from fossil fuels and redirecting financial flows to conservation and ecosystem management; producing and consuming more sustainable goods; and, in particular, transitioning into a resilient food system that does not rely on factory farms and agriculture.

Lambertini said, "No matter how you add it up, the math does not look good. The more we continue to exceed Earth's limits, the more damage we do to our own future. We are at a decisive moment in time when we can seize the solutions to steer our food, energy, and finance systems in a more sustainable direction."

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The End of Night

SUBHEAD: There’s a growing medical consensus that all this artificial light is bad for our health.

By Emmett Fitzgerald on 25 February 2016 in Yes Magazine -
(http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-end-of-night-why-we-need-darkness-in-the-age-of-artificial-light-20160226)


Image above: The Milky Way from a tent above the city. From original article.

Since the invention of electric light, the night has been getting progressively brighter. But a growing body of research shows experiencing total darkness is critical to our well-being.

Throughout history, humans have gathered in the dark to marvel at the starry blanket overhead. Nowadays, artificial light pollution obscures the night sky in much of the industrial world—which could lead to unforeseen consequences for the environment and for human health.

Too much light at night can actually make cities more dangerous.

Since the invention of electric light in the 19th century, the night has been getting progressively brighter, but things really took off in the 1990s. “It’s about ten times as bright as it was just 20 years ago,” says Paul Bogard, author of the book The End of Night.

The acceleration has to do with population growth, an increase in nighttime labor, and the widespread belief that more light makes cities safer. Paul Bogard says that light does increase safety, but only up to a point. Too much light at night can actually make cities more dangerous.

“There’s so much light in our nights and its glaring lights that make it hard for us to see,” he says. “Too much light tends to create the illusion of safety; we think we can be reckless purely because it’s light out, and that’s obviously not the case.”

With overlit gas stations and bright LED streetlights shining skyward, a clear night sky is harder and harder to find. And our eyes, which developed the ability to see in low-light settings, rarely have the occasion to use that skill anymore.

“Forty percent of Americans and Western Europeans never or rarely experience night vision,” says Bogard. “We’re in the light so much that our eyes never switch.” Even inside it’s hard to avoid the glow of streetlights, and we often glance at brightly lit cellphone screens right up until we fall asleep.
There’s a growing medical consensus that all this artificial light is bad for our health. It interrupts our sleep patterns, confuses our circadian rhythms, and inhibits our ability to produce melatonin.
“Melatonin is only produced in the dark,” says Bogard, “and what scientists are finding is that a lack of melatonin in our bloodstream is linked to an increased risk for breast and prostate cancer.”
Doctors are not saying that the light in your cellphone will give you cancer, but increasingly they recognize the importance of darkness to our overall wellbeing. “We’ve evolved in bright days and dark nights, just like all life on Earth,” Bogard says, “and we need both for optimal health.”

Wildlife also depends on darkness. Sea turtles, for example, need a dark sky to navigate. When hatchlings climb out of their nest on the beach, they need to crawl their way to the sea. “They’ve evolved to swim or scurry to the brightest light on the horizon,” says Bogard, “which for all those hundreds of millions of years has been the stars and the moon reflected on the water, but now it’s the hotels and parking lots in the wrong direction.”

Concerned about the impacts of light pollution, a growing movement is working to reduce excess lighting in our cities and protect dark skies. This is playing out in the National Park Service, which has created the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division. “They measure how dark the skies are in parks,” says Nate Ament, who works for the National Parks in Moab, Utah. “I think they’ve taken measurements in over 400 locations. So we have this really rich dataset of darkness all over the entire country.”

One metric for darkness is the Bortle Scale, which rates the sky from 1 to 9. Las Vegas or Times Square would clock in at a 9. Humans have lit up so much of the world that it’s almost impossible to find a Bortle Class 1 anymore, but some of the darkest skies in the country are in the four corners region, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet on the Colorado plateau.

Canyonlands National Park, just down the road from Moab, has been measured at a Bortle Class 2 and was recently named an International Dark Skies Park—the seventh on the Colorado Plateau. “That’s by far the highest concentration of these parks in the entire world,” says Ament, “there’s only 28 worldwide.”

With so much federally protected land on the plateau, Nate wants to preserve a really large swath of darkness right in the heart of the West. He works with towns like Moab to cut unnecessary lighting and introduce technologies like light shields that reduce sky glow.

Smart lighting is an easy sell when you explain how much money it can save. One town that’s been particularly forward thinking is Flagstaff, Arizona. “There’s one study that estimates if the entire state of Arizona were to take up Flagstaff’s lighting practices, it could save the state $30 million a year,” says Ament. “That gets people's attention.”
For years, the National Park Service has worked to protect some the most beautiful views in the country—Sentinel Dome at Yosemite, Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon. Ament’s job is to protect the increasingly rare view of a clear night sky. He says that if we want our children to see the stars, we’re going to have to turn some lights off.

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Argentina's plan to restore wetlands

SUBHEAD: The country is implementing an ambitious program to restore wildlife in its wetlands.

By Marina Aizen on 11 November 2015 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/argentina-wetlands-wildlife_564219dde4b0307f2caf041c)


Image above: The Natural Ibera Reserve, home of a significant variety of fauna, is a natural paradise unique in its type. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: We published this to call attention to what could happen in Hawaii. The two greatest wetlands in Hawaii, Ewa on Oahu and Mana on Kauai, were both obliterated by American interests in the last century in a half. The Ewa plain was dug out for Pearl Harbor and the remaining Ewa plain has been burdened by military and industrial interests (now it is being scarred by the HART rail system construction). On Kauai the marshes of Mana were filled in for sugar cane and now are dominated by the military-industrial complex of the Pacific Missile Range Facility and the Chemical/Pesticide corporation's experimental GMO fields. For the long term health of the Hawaiian Islands we should restore the flora and fauna of these to sources of Pacific bird, insect, fish wildlife.]

The Ibera wetlands are witnessing South America’s largest experiment to reintroduce lost species, which will change the estuary’s appearance and dynamize its economy.

Tucked away in the shelter provided by the meadow, Jurumina is fast asleep, coiled like a fireman’s hose. Even her long anteater snout seems made for putting out fires. But nothing seems to disturb her in the Ibera, a landscape shaped by estuaries that this creature blends so well into.

Her natural connection to these bird-thronged surroundings is a picture postcard that, until recently, belonged to the realm of memory. For Jurumina’s species had been wiped out in this flood-prone land where camalotes bloom with purple flowers.

If Jurumina can now curl up to sleep and then get up to feed off termites scurrying nearby, it is because she is part of an ambitious experiment, the first of its kind in the Americas, organized by a team of Argentine and international scientists. They plan to bring together all the pieces of the jigsaw that the life of this vast wetland represents: it has been left damaged, fragmented and, in many cases, deliberately destroyed.

Only South Africa has carried out large scale reintroductions of animals. What is happening in the Ibera wetlands is setting a precedent in Argentina and many other countries. The technical term is ‘rewilding’.

Practically speaking, it means giving the environment back its original functions. In his San Alonso ranch, the biologist Ignacio Jiménez explains that you cannot divorce the landscape from its living inhabitants. And he claims that under the same bio-physical conditions – that is, the availability of water and the climate – an environment transforms according to the inhabitants that it supports.

In simple terms, the geography of a place will change according to whether or not it contains giraffes. And the landscape of the Ibera has been visibly impoverished by the absence of its charismatic critters.

Their return will generate more woodland and better meadows. Both have a key role because they sequester carbon from the atmosphere (the principal cause of climate change): one absorbs it, while the other fixes it in the soil and converts it into peat.

“Achieving a fully functional ecosystem means re-introducing large carnivores and herbivores. Rewilding says ‘let’s bring them back’,” Jiménez tells us. He works for the NGO Conservation Land Trust, established by US philanthropist Douglas Tompkins.

The project has a motto, “Corrientes vuelve a ser Corrientes” or, loosely translated, “Corrientes province is going back to how it was.” The province has been covered with posters featuring this slogan, because it is definitely society as a whole that will benefit from the restoration of its wildlife. The Ibera wetlands are today a mecca for eco-tourism because of its fabulous birds, capybaras, alligators and Cayará monkeys, among other animals.

“If we succeed here, in 30 years’ time this whole area will be full of life,” Jiménez says excitedly. “The Ibera will be home to woodland creatures that can serve as a tourist attraction. It is an historic opportunity to lessen a very real crisis. We have a trickle of species losses that we cannot make up for. Rewilding will generate better numbers.”

The sun has barely emerged from the horizon when a group of peasants comes into view, driving a JCB with an air of triumph. Their work is to continue the construction of gigantic pens that will shelter a new generation of jaguars until they can be released.

The pens of San Alonso, the most isolated point of the Ibera wetlands, have the look of a chemical molecule when seen from the air, with their four interconnected cages, each 120 square meters large. Inside live two females (the first to arrive is called Tobuna; she is magnificent) and two males.

Once the females are pregnant, they will be moved to bigger pens – around 1.5 hectares – where their young will be out of sight of humans. They will be left live prey so that they learn how to hunt.

Once they have reached maturity, they will be separated from their mothers and will go on to an even bigger pen, 30 hectares large. Everything works well in theory. “We still have to see if the reality corresponds to our ideas,” Jiménez admits.

One of the first species to return to the Ibera wetlands were the anteaters. They come from different areas, where many local people bring them up alongside their dogs. Girls find the baby anteaters affectionate and loving, but the critters stand no chance of surviving in a household environment.

“For this reason it is very important to work together with local communities,” says the biologist Alicia Delgado, head of the Rescue Centre in the Riachuelo area, where they undergo an obligatory quarantine before their relocation.

“The anteater is neither herbivore nor carnivore. It is an insectivore. It fulfills a specific role in the food chain, as insect eater and as prey to larger animals,” the scientist says.

The animal became extinct in the Ibera in the 1980s. Competition with dogs, hunting and habitat loss were the factors the sealed its fate.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The Golden Plain  8/27/2013
Ea O Ka Aina: The Mana Mirage 4/17/1847
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Don’t come back in until dinner

SUBHEAD: Maybe our inner mom needs to say, “Get out of the house! Don’t come back in until dinner.”

By Brian Miller on 1 Mrch 2015 for Winged Elm Farm -
(http://www.wingedelmfarm.com/blog/2015/03/01/dont-come-back-in-until-dinner/)


Image above: Warm and safe couch potato children working their tablets. From (http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/03/experts-parents-control-kids-tablet-usage/).

I grew up in a household with strict rules. Foremost among them: Get out of the house. When not in school we were expected to be outside. We spent our days doing chores and fishing, looking for pirate treasure along Contraband Bayou or building forts, swimming in ponds or going to the library.

Whether on bikes or on the bayou, that landscape was full of kids. On days spent inside because of rain we would play board games or read, watching TV was off limits.

Today, where our farm is located, in East Tennessee, the countryside is mostly empty. You see the occasional activity outdoors, usually men on tractors. But only once in sixteen years have I seen a kid cross the seventy acres of our farm. Never have I had to yell at a kid for building a fort on our land. No kid has ever darkened the door to ask permission to hunt rabbit or squirrel, or fish in our ponds.

There are homes nearby where I have never observed a person outside. Cars appear and disappear in the driveways. But the owners are not once glimpsed. I’ve cut a hay field; long hours, three days in a row and never spotted a person outside a neighbor’s house. A house, I add, that often had four cars in the drive.

While baling that hay on the final day, I saw one of the cars start up and move down the driveway. It drove the 150 feet to the mailbox. A youthful arm extended out of the driver’s window and collected the mail. The car reversed back up to the house.

It would be tempting to ridicule the generation of kids who spend their lives in darkened rooms, zombied in screen-time with their gadgets. But their parents, who by example, are equally to blame. With all of the challenges we face to our civilization and planet, it seems somehow dishonorable to while away one’s life in such an unproductive manner.

That the rural landscape is empty in the very place where hands and eyes are needed is troubling. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson refer to the benefit of “eyes to acres”. They mean that the understanding and the correction of problems in our landscape begin by an intimate daily familiarity.

In a way, it seems like a modern day Highland clearance; where blame rests partly with forces that have devalued the local in favor of the global, removing those eyes-to-acres. But it is a blame shared by us for our willing collusion in that withdrawal, as passive consumers of this life.

Understanding our land begins with engagement, even if it is just a kid rambling along on an idle afternoon across a pasture and a wooded hill.

Maybe our inner mom needs to say, “Get out of the house! Don’t come back in until dinner.”

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Lives Not Our Own

SUBHEAD: Do we have the wisdom, humility and restraint, to choose earth membership over lordship?

By Tom Butler on 12 January 2015 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-01-12/lives-not-our-own)


Image above: He stands centered and supportive as she moves from rock to rock. A candid shot of a young local staying in Kalalau Valley, on Kaui From a photograph by Arius Hopman (http://www.hopmanart.com/artwork_detail.php?products_id=512&d0b60ae1b1df7ccc6df7be0a).

Nature is gone. . . . You are living on a used planet. If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.¹
—ERLE ELLIS

“Wild” is process, as it happens outside of human agency. As far as science can reach, it will never get to the bottom of it, because mind, imagination, digestion, breathing, dreaming, loving, and both birth and death are all part of the wild. There will never be an Anthropocene.²
—GARY SNYDER

IN HIS “FAT MASTERPIECE,” The Fool’s Progress, Edward Abbey wrote of the protagonist’s father: “Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously. ‘Ideas can hurt people,’ he would say. ‘Ideas are dangerous. I’d rather have a man come at me with an ax than a Big Idea.’”³

This is a book about ideas—ideas dangerous and ideas infused with restorative, healing properties. It’s also about language and the way it shapes individual and collective views of the world, forging the deep “root metaphors,”⁴ to borrow education reformer Chet Bower’s term, which so fundamentally shape a culture’s development that they become invisible to the people within that culture.

Such is the idea of human hegemony, the way that our species, but one of millions on Earth and subject to the same forces and beneficiary of the same biological lineage, has (especially in its modern technological incarnation) come to believe that the community of life is merely a storehouse of “natural resources” subject to appropriation.

Keeping the Wild was conceived to confront the notion of human hegemony and also to join the growing conversation within the conservation movement about the so-called Anthropocene.

That word describing the age of human dominion of Earth has been embraced by some academics, journalists, and environmentalists and is increasingly used to conceptualize, and often to justify, further domestication of the planet.

Cheerleaders for the Anthropocene have variously been called “neo-greens,” “pragmatic environmentalists,” “new conservationists,” “Anthropocene boosters,” and “postmodern greens.”

As there is not one dominant moniker for their camp, the editors have not enforced consistency among this volume’s contributing authors.

The essays to come explore in detail the arguments made by the neo-greens, whose writings include the following claims:=

• The Anthropocene has arrived and humans are now de facto planetary managers;
• If “pristine wilderness” ever existed, it is all gone now; moreover, focusing on wilderness preservation has poorly served the conservation movement;
• Nature is highly resilient, not fragile;
• To succeed, conservation must serve human aspirations, primarily regarding economic growth and development;
• Maintaining “ecosystem services,” not preventing human-caused extinction, should be conservation’s primary goal;
• Conservation should emphasize better management of the domesticated, “working landscape” rather than efforts to establish new, strictly protected natural areas.
• Conservationists should not critique capitalism but rather should partner with corporations to achieve better results.

These ideas, individually and collectively, are worthy of close inspection; respectful debate; and, in the view of the editors, vigorous rebuttal.

While some contributors to this volume offer spirited rejoinders to the neo-greens, their criticism is nowhere intended to denigrate specific persons or organizations. Indeed, the editors have assumed that all of the players in these debates are acting in good faith, with genuine desire to see conservation succeed.

Clearly, however, we have stark differences in worldview and thus disagree about strategies to protect the Earth.

Even a cursory look at the burgeoning Anthopocene literature will reveal celebratory, techno-triumphalist voices that seem not discomfited by but almost to revel in the belief that humans have become overseers of the planetary plantation.

Other voices are more muted in tone, regretfully embracing a kind of environmental realpolitik— that, for better or worse, humanity is now in the global driver’s seat and thus should manage Earth well. Whether celebratory or reluctant, the neo-greens’ language creates a linguistic platform that reinforces and shapes anew humanity’s resourcist agenda.

The growing chorus of Anthropocene boosterism strikes us as an updated form of noblesse oblige inflated to a planetary scale—a call to humanity to rise to its globe-managing responsibilities—but actually embodying the type of hubris that David Ehrenfeld dissected so well in The Arrogance of Humanism. ⁵

This is all the more ironic because it is anthropocentrism—the worldview at the heart of this arrogance—that is leading Earth, and humanity, to ruin.

Before citing Stewart Brand’s famous quote that opened the Whole Earth Catalog—“We are as gods and might as well get good at it”—contemporary Anthopocene proponent Erle Ellis gushes about the “amazing opportunity” that “humanity has now made the leap to an entirely new level of planetary importance.”⁶

But whereas one could read Brand’s full passage as a whimsical entreaty to personal empowerment at the apex of 1960s countercultural zeitgeist, it is hard to interpret Ellis as anything but a straight-ahead celebrant for a cyborg generation alienated from the natural world, steeped in simulacra, and inclined to believe that any environmental problem can be solved through a techno-fix.

Are we truly “as gods”? Certainly humans now have the ability to destroy life on a scale formerly reserved for geological and astrophysical phenomena. But our godlike powers of destruction, rooted not in malevolence but in our sheer bulk and thoughtless ways of living, are not balanced by equivalently divine creative powers.

Notwithstanding the efforts of synthetic biology engineers (whose goals are utilitarian—building new life-forms to serve humans), we do not have the ability to create diverse and beautiful life as nature has done on this globe for some 3.5 billion years.

We are born of that epic evolutionary flourishing, and yet now are busy disrupting the primal force that gave us life. We are second-tier deities, conceited demigods, at best.

If the only choice before us were either to become good at being godlike or to remain inept and toxic to the diversity of life, then surely it would be right to choose the former—to make ourselves better “stewards” (a word that originally meant the ward of the sty, the keeper of domestic animals).

This seems to be what the Anthropocene boosters in conservation are hoping for when they propose, “nature could be a garden.” That is, a world thoughtfully manipulated, perhaps even “sustainably,” for human ends.

But these prospects for the future of humanity are a false dichotomy. Surely there are other possibilities, including our potential choice to become plain members and citizens in the community of life and relinquish the delusion that we are “Lord Man.”

Writing some twenty-six centuries ago, likely from a simple cabin in the woods, a Chinese sage considered what results when hubris prompts people’s desire to possess the world:

As for those who would take the whole world
To tinker as they see fit,
I observe that they never succeed:
For the world is a sacred vessel
Not made to be altered by man.
The tinker will spoil it;
Usurpers will lose it.⁷
(Lao-Tzu, 6th century B.C.)

The proposed “Anthropocene” term for a new geological epoch and the Anthropocene-framed agenda for conservation based on domesticating Earth represent an unmistakable and, we contend, illegitimate claim on power. These developments not only make humans usurpers but advance this way of life as right. The present global extinction crisis tallies the ways we are indeed losing the sacred vessel of the world.

While perhaps little considered by those who are economically and politically power-hungry, a usurper always retains the option of renouncing and stepping away from a claim on power.

In modern, techno-industrial society where the civil religion of progress means ever-more commodification of nature to serve economic growth, promoting a reasoned discussion about retrenchment puts one on the margins of polite society.

In the world of ever more, the idea of less—of reducing human numbers and economic pressure on the biosphere—is almost unthinkable. But it is not impossible, and the act of forgoing technology-enhanced power has occasional cultural precedents.

Such precedents include the nonuse of firearms, a technology already long known in Japan, during that nation’s self-imposed, roughly two-centuries-long isolation from global trading networks prior to 1854, and the present-day Amish culture’s decision to avoid technologies that undermine family and community life.

Individuals, too, have the opportunity to step back from assumed godhood by embracing a personal philosophy based on deep ecology principles, which affirm the intrinsic value of all lifeforms and the desirability of living on a planet of flourishing biological diversity.

We can consciously choose to live in ways that minimize impact on the Earth by managing ourselves—lowering our numbers, scaling down our global economy, and making thoughtful decisions about the technologies we use.

Are such questions about worldview, power, and technology relevant to a book devoted to debating the future of conservation? Yes, for they help illuminate the foundations of the schism to be examined. Within every social change movement there are tensions between reformers and those who seek structural change.

Our point is that if the conservation movement simply assumes that the current trajectory of population growth, economic development, and technological innovation should persist—or is just too entrenched to question—then it may be reasonable, as the neo-greens attempt, to craft human-centered conservation strategies that aim to reform that status quo by “greening” it.

Within the context of the status quo it is sure to be deemed politically realistic and will bolster opportunities for conservation groups to partner with corporate interests.

But seeking to tinker with the whole world is, as LaoTzu warned, destined to spoil it. We believe that merely greening up a flawed system cannot stem the global ecosocial crisis—the great unraveling of wild nature and indigenous human communities—and a different range of strategies will be needed.

Those strategies will be oriented toward sustaining wildness and restoring degraded ecosystems. They will steer us toward domesticating less and doing so more skillfully, with our managed landscapes emulating to the extent possible the inherent vibrancy of natural ecosystems.

Nature will be our measure, and the ultimate yardstick for cultural health will be the degree to which our species does not cause the extinction of others, allowing the rest of life to flourish. These aims cannot be accomplished without fundamentally changing our presence on the planet.

In short, the debate over the future of conservation hinges on our vision for the future of Earth: Do we continue down the path toward a gardened, managed planet with less beauty and wildness? Or take a wilder path toward beauty and ecological health, with a smaller human footprint, and cultures imbedded in a matrix of wildness, where we are “part of a seamless membrane of life”?⁸

CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS VOLUME are a luminary collection of writers, thinkers, academics, and conservation activists from North and South America, Europe, and Australia. We have grouped their writings into three sections: “Clashing Worldviews,” “Against Domestication,” and “The Value of the Wild,” with a personal essay by Kathleen Dean Moore as Epilogue. Unlike many anthologies, the contributions herein reflect considerable variety in tone, from academic to popular.

Perusing some of the writings in section one will help orient the reader to the debate at hand, but each essay stands alone and can be understood by persons without extensive familiarity in the scholarly literature about wilderness, including earlier critiques of the wilderness idea by so-called wilderness deconstructionists.

Indeed, wilderness deconstruction—the literal kind, not the abstruse theorizing of academics influenced by postmodern literary criticism—concerns us most. Of primary importance is how “Anthropocene” thinking is influencing the communications and strategies of on-theground conservation practitioners, from the largest international NGOs to state agencies and local land trusts.

If conservation is to be framed primarily within the context—and acceptance of—human domination of the planet, there will continue to be profound consequences for life: for the diversity of species and subspecies, populations of wild plants and animals, variety of ecosystems, ecological and behavioral processes, and evolutionary unfolding. The contributors to this volume submit that such a conceptual framing will almost surely lead to ultimate failure to protect the natural world.

As never before, the Earth now needs a radical questioning of human domination coupled with creative, successful conservation strategies to restore and preserve the diversity of life.

It is this grim reality that wild and beautiful places continue to be destroyed by human action, that our numbers and behavior have precipitated a sixth great extinction event in Earth history, which challenges us to examine deeply our societal trajectory.

Moreover, we cannot take on faith, nor encourage such faith in the mass of humanity, that the current dominant economic and political structures will persist indefinitely. The prospect of rapid and potentially catastrophic climate change is poised to accelerate the extinction crisis and, in worst-case scenarios, could make the planet unfriendly to much of life, including ourselves.

Thorough, systemic criticism is crucial if conserva-tionists are to become more effective. We hope that this and a subsequent, companion volume focused on protected areas—and the need to expand them and connect them—can help build the intellectual infrastructure of the global conservation movement and keep us from going down strategic dead ends.

This is no mere academic exercise for all of us who are working to conserve wild places and creatures around the globe.

Conservation and environmentalism are big tents, and the history of these separate but related movements is rich with tension between people who saw their objective primarily as about preserving wild nature and those who sought “sustainable” use of “natural resources” for people.

Many scholarly works cover that ground, which will not be repeated here, but it does seem to us that the current debate about the future of conservation is, as Curt Meine explains in his essay, not particularly new. Apparently each generation will have its “great new wilderness debate.”

Why is it that domestication-versus-wildness is such a fascinating subject? Not just, perhaps, because of the dynamic historical and ongoing tensions within the conservation movement, nor because a new term, Anthropocene, has entered the popular lexicon.

Perhaps it is because these competing inclinations and tendencies exist also within the human heart and psyche; we come from wildness, and those of us in the wild tribe embrace the power of wildness in every way that we can, even while immersed in a technocratic milieu. In order to live, most human societies, at least since the Neolithic Revolution, have domesticated their surroundings.

And so we inhabit a world deeply affected by the activities of our own kind, and sometimes we have domesticated with skill and beauty. The accelerating domestication of the world, however, can make us lose sight of the love of wildness within us. As Barbara Kingsolver put it so well:

People need wild places. . . . To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours. . . . It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet Earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.⁹

Just as the competing urges of the wild and the domestic live within us, they are likely to persist within the conservation movement until humanity embraces a land ethic that both places the well-being of the entire biotic community first and renounces the idea that Earth is a resource colony for humanity.

Do we have the wisdom to exercise humility and restraint, to choose membership over Lordship? The lives that are not our own hang in the balance.

Notes
1. E. Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet,” Wired, May 2009. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/05/ftf-ellis-1/.
2. G. Snyder, pers. comm., 2013.
3. E. Abbey, The Fool’s Progress (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988), p. 150.
4. C. A. Bowers, “Toward an Eco-Justice Pedagogy,” 2003. http://www.bath.ac.uk/cree/resources/ecerbowers.pdf.
5. D. Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979).
6. E. Ellis, “Neither Good nor Bad,” New York Times, 23 May 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/05/19/ the-age-of-anthropocene-should-we-worry/neither-good-norbad.
7. Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, R. B. Blakney translation (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1955), Signet Classic edition 2001, p. 29.
8. K. Sale, After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domestication (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 120.
9. B. Kingsolver, Small Wonder (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2002), p. 40.
This essay is the introduction to Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth, ed. G. Wuerthner, E. Crist, and T. Butler. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2014), ix–xv. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

You can find "Keeping the Wild" here:
(http://islandpress.org/keeping-wild)
ISBN: 9781610915588 Published May 2014

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A new geography of hope

SUBHEAD: In a warming world we’ll discover that wilderness continues to sustain us.

By Kathleen Dean Moore on 3 October 2014 for Earth Island Journal -
(http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/a_new_geography_of_hope/)


Image above: Photo of wilderness by Nate Zeman. From original article.

After some serious wandering through a thicket of fire-blackened spars, we were able to find the burnt butt of the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness boundary sign and a vague indentation where the trail had been. Some of the great Douglas firs still stood, but their limbs had burned to stubs and their bark hung in scabby patches on the trunks.

The wildfire had burned entirely through the smaller trees and toppled them in tangled heaps. I know that forests burn – that’s the way of forests – but this fire hadn’t just burned the trees to the ground. It burned the ground itself and even the roots in the ground, hollowing out a warren of tunnels and caves.

My husband and I stepped along the shadow of the trail, careful as cats, but even so we broke through often, sinking to a shin or knee in an emptiness where roots had been. Our boots were dusted white as bones. And even worse: Expecting the usual silence of the wilderness, we were not prepared for the racket of a billion beetles, gnawing dead trees.

We were as gloomy as the day, depressed by the irony of walking through the charred stubble of a so-called “geography of hope.” That’s how Wallace Stegner described wilderness 50 years ago.

Designated wilderness areas, he wrote, are a “means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” Exactly so. I, too, believed that the industrialized growth economy was certifiably insane – obsessed with pointless, greedy getting and unable to conform its behavior to standards of right and wrong.

And I knew the hope in wildness. I had stood above the tree-line on Mt. Jefferson in Oregon, where snow-capped volcanoes parade the length of the Cascade Range, and I have felt the limitless possibilities and endless expanses that seemed unconstrained even by gravity – the weightlessness of open space. In that wilderness, even avalanche lilies unfurling at the very edge of snowfields testified to deep evolutionary wisdom and time without end. What could be a better marker of sanity than to value and protect places like this?

But dear God, wild places are really taking it in the chin now as global warming strengthens its grip on the land. Because wilderness designation has protected the most vulnerable places, it’s no surprise that these are being hit hard and first – the high airy mountaintops, the steep forests, the coastal marshes and Arctic edges, the last refuges of specialized species, places of high drama and deeply felt significance.

From the wilderness mountaintop, the “end of nature” can now be clearly seen. Where is the hope in wilderness now, in the polar bear and rotten ice that have become the face of climate catastrophe? Where is the hope in the orange-needled, beetle-killed forests, facing into a hot wind? Where is the hope in a shrunken, dusty glacier at the base of a raw couloir?

In a time of drought and storm, I am struggling to know what to make of the geography of hope.

At the top of the next hill, we stopped to dig out our water bottles. The incessant assault of beetles’ buzz was driving me mad, and so was the grey and ashen land that seemed to stutter like a silent film as we walked past the framing spars. 

But here was a flash of movement between the trees. We heard sharp raps, repeated, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Another flick of wings, and a black-backed woodpecker attached itself to the spar I was leaning against. The bird began again to drum. In the hollow of my chest, I could feel the percussion. Bark flakes fell on the brim of my baseball cap. My husband laughed, which sent the woodpecker side-stepping to the other side of the trunk. 

There is nothing to do but re-imagine the geography of hope, thinking in new ways about the reasons why wilderness is profoundly sane on a planet reeling under a pathology of greed and shortsightedness. I want to say that the wounded wilderness landscape offers a new kind of hope. It’s a defiant hope, a ferocious hope, sometimes a desperate hope.

Also maybe a redemptive hope, a hope that as plants and animals change their very life-ways in a brutal race against climate change, humans also can change their life-ways, reinventing what it means to be human in a finite, deeply interdependent, and generously beautiful world.

A defiant hope
Like a fence, the boundaries of a wilderness area contain a landscape. But, more importantly, they exclude another type of landscape, the rubble of the bulldozer and the drill. A wilderness is testimony to the human will to say, No: the industrial growth economy will not cross this line.

Reckless disdain for the natural world has no place here. In this place on Earth, the landscape is valued in itself, for its own sake, not for the profit that might be wrung from it. Fracking pads must stop short of this red-rock canyon.

Oil wells must stop short of this Arctic mountain range. Water-sucking mines must stop short of this desert spring. A wilderness echoes with moral outrage: There are business plans that are hideous and cruel; they will not enter here.

A ferocious hope
But even if wilderness legislation can bar the entry of extractive industry, nothing can protect any area from the effects of global warming. No wilderness permit system can exclude the storms.

No federal agency can call thunderstorms into a fearsomely parched land. No boundary check-in station can control the tides. The only way to protect the wilderness from global warming is to take ferocious action against the causes of global warming itself. That means that anyone who loves wilderness is called to action against the fossil fuel industries, which have shown themselves perfectly willing to let destruction of wild places be one of the costs of doing business.

Those of us who love wilderness cannot be distracted or appeased by the prospect of climate change adaptation. If a family’s house is on fire, they don’t appoint a committee to study how they might adapt to living in the burnt-out shell of what was once their beautiful house. They put out the damn fire.

Those who love wilderness cannot be deceived that ecosystem restoration can keep pace with destruction, unless the destruction is stopped or dramatically slowed. Those who love wilderness cannot pin their hopes on the resilience of the exquisitely balanced ecosystems of the wildernesses.

Resilience means to jump back into a former state after a disturbance, like a rubber band – resilience, from re (back) and silere (to jump). At some point, a rubber band breaks, a process better called pre-silience – landscapes leaping into something new and unknown. If conservationists would defend the wilderness, they must join the struggle to stop fossil fuels, and they must be fierce in the fight.

A desperate hope 
There is no doubt about the geophysical worth of wilderness in a time of climate change. The desperate hope is that healthy forests and soils can sequester carbon dioxide as fast as humankind can pour it into the air. Obviously, the more healthy ecosystems, the better.

So the more intact wilderness, tangled banks, heavily breathing forests, greening jungles, tundra, and dense black soil are present on the planet, the more carbon dioxide they will suck from the air. To the extent that designated wilderness saves intact ecosystems, and so saves carbon sinks, it is the great hope of the reeling world. A sane policy would rapidly expand protected land, not asking, Is it pristine? Is it untrammeled? But asking only, Does it breathe?

A redemptive hope
There is one place you can go on God’s good Earth where you have little choice but to be your best self. That place is the wilderness. It is simply against the law to be a greedy, reckless pig in the wilderness. It is simply against the law to steal or vandalize whatever you want.

A wilderness sojourner is called to a kind of self-restraint that is rare in life – a generosity of spirit that takes only what is given and returns it in gratitude and care. This is a fact of great importance: A week in the wilderness is proof that a human being is capable of being a good and decent citizen of Earth.

The surprise is that when travelers cross that wilderness boundary, they have the ability to slip from one level of being to another, from people surrounded and obsessed and dependent on multitudinous stuff torn from the Earth, to people whose greatest pleasures are simplicity and a close connection to something greater than they are, something wiser and more powerful. If there is not hope in this proof of the transmutability of human character, I don’t know where it can be found.

I’ve started to think that I am drawn to the wilderness because I want to free myself to become a person I believe in. I’m tired of doing what I think is wrong. It grieves me. I know full well that my car is emitting carbon dioxide that will create real hardship for my grandchildren.

Even as I board the planes, I know that the costs of my cross-country flights will be paid by bewildered children. I do it anyway. A week in the wilderness near my home is a chance to re-create myself, to re-shape my life to express my deepest values, to practice being the person I want to be.

The freedom of the wilderness is not that I can do anything I want; it’s the opposite. Here I am free to restrain myself by my own sense of right and wrong, to go AWOL from the industrial growth economy’s war against the world.

In the wilderness I am free to go AWOL from the industrial growth economy’s war against the world.

On the back of a fallen spar, we teetered across a draw, then climbed a small bald. Bare and bristled hills rolled over to grey clouds that obscured the high peaks. 

In that grey land, I was glad for the red fabric of my husband’s parka. I followed him around a palisade of blackened spars propped against a cliff. In gusts of ash, he traipsed over the rise and stopped dead. I was not prepared for what I saw when I stood beside him: In a low space, water had gathered into a small oval pond that was vivid green, and all the greener for its bed of ash. We hurried toward it – who wouldn’t hurry toward what is green and growing? 

Green algae bubbled in a broad band around the edge of the pond and spread in green cirrus clouds from its center. Black insects peppered the green billows. So unexpected, so lavishly fecund, the pond could have bubbled up from the welling springs of Life itself. We sat beside it. After a time, we pulled out cheese sandwiches and ate them, picnicking by a pea-green proto-lake in the cinders.

In times that seem grim and rootless, when even the ground gives way under my feet, I will enter a new geography of hope. I have loved this wilderness once, and I love it still. The dark, ferny-kneed forest and shy owls, the soft trails, the smell of pine and bracken are gone – maybe gone forever into a sizzling hot future.

I don’t know how to bear the dead weight of this sorrow and of this shame. I do know that what remains is a wilderness of sinewy, raw-boned possibility. Just that – possibility – the creative urgency of life unfurling in the dark folds of the land, the fertility of the human imagination and the expansive embrace of the human heart. The wilderness of possibility is the home of hope.

• Kathleen Dean Moore is a philosopher and the author or co-editor of many books, including Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril and Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature.

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