THURSDAY, JAN 12, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Module 1-10
A short 8-week course in ecological design, module 1, lesson 10
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: SUSTAINABILITY, FROM THE WIRES, LANGUAGE GAMES
Abstract: As I have sustainability concerns and concerns for posterity's and the biosphere's future, I will start a course in Ecological Design tomorrow, which is one of four 'dimensions' of the offering. Subnotes to file will likely follow.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The 10th lesson. [My comments are in brackets.]
A Systemic Biosphere Crisis
Now that we have reviewed a number of related and mutually supportive whole-systems approaches to ecological design, let’s take a brief look at the systemic context that is driving us towards having to redesign the human presence on Earth. Three related issues are at the forefront of this need for a re-design:
- i) we are facing dangerous run-away climate change if we do not change our ways; [the danger is in that it becomes a distraction from our condition of one-off, plague-phase overshoot as meta-problem (of which climate change is one of many).]
- ii) the age of fossil fuel has to come to an end and we need to find ways to meet our energy, transport and other material needs without burning fossil fuels; [fossil fuel use is climaxing this century followed by decline due to reducing return on energy invisted as all fossil fuels, other fuels (e,g. biomas) and other sources (e.g. wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, hydro, and arable land is maximally used until depleation and dissolution of modern techno-industrial society whose continuence permaculture, agribusiness, industrial design and ecological design seek to perpetuate, prolong, instead of destroy/replace.]
- iii) human activities over millennia have badly degraded the biosphere, in particular since the discovery of fossil fuel energy and the Industrial Revolution. [we are the expansionist form of human that spread within and out of Africa 50k to 60k years ago as an invasive species to 'displace' all other hominin and hundreds of megafauna before building empire afteer empire after empire... until enabled by a planetary larder of fossil fuels for the taking we built the first global monetary culture/empire/form of civilization and the last after the planetary larder is pillaged. We have met the enemy and, looking confused, say, 'what enemy? Nature? We will, we will, double down on what has worked for 50k years and dominate Gaia by remorseless redesign until Gaia listens to us.]
The end of the age of fossil fuels, therefore, is an opportunity for us to meet our needs through regenerative practices that restore degraded land and combat biodiversity loss. [The end of the age of fossil fuels (or lichens on St. Matthew Island) will have a determinate outcome: rapid population reduction and economic contraction whether by design or chaotic die-off. Failure to understand our predicament, our problematique, prevents us from understanding to solutionatique: birth-off to mitigate die-off.]
The calls for a rapid, radical and sustained response to climate change are getting louder and louder. The scientific community has been in consensus for many years. Reports on biodiversity loss and desertification have called for a whole-systems approach support. Ecologists, hydrologists and soil microbiologists are calling for ecosystem restoration. The Indigenous Peoples of the world are leading the way in defending the Earth and promoting restoration. People on the streets are calling for drastic action, Pope Francis has compared humanity’s inaction with being on the verge of suicide, and even political and business leaders are beginning to call for wise and long-term decisions to protect the planetary climate regulation system upon which all our future depends. [The scientific community has been in consensus since the 1970s as summarized by Catton in Overshoot: The ecological basis for revolutionary chance 1980, and when it became clear that the public and their leaders had stopped listening, world scientists of the Union of Concerned Scientists organized top world scientists, e.g. most Nobel Winners, to sign a Wold Scientists' Warning to Humanity in 1992 as a 2x4 upside our collective head. The result was far too few listened to matter, prefering feel-good solutions not involving real solutions. Making changes at the margins of the expansionist hegemon is a distraction. Why Do Society and Academia Ignore the ‘Scientists Warning to Humanity’ On Population?]
6.1. Biodiversity Loss, Desertification and Climate Change
Three UN Framework Conventions emerged from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The Framework Convention on Biological Diversity (UNFCDB), the Framework Convention on Desertification (UNFCCD) and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While two of the Conventions have been overshadowed by the Convention on Climate Change, together the three represent the essential aspects of the systemic biosphere crisis and they should be tackled through a whole-systems approach.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity aims to study the increasingly alarming loss of species’ populations and communities that threaten ecosystem functioning and even collapse. 196 Parties (nation states, plus the EU) have signed the Convention, including the Strategic Plan and the Aichi Targets for the UN Decade of Biodiversity (2011-2020). The objectives were to provide education and funding to ensure a resilient biodiversity of species by 2020. ["the existence of independent sovereign states IS war." —H.G. Wells 1933. The existence of 196 Parties IS the loss.]
Nonetheless, the Inter-governmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) produced an 8,000-page Global Assessment Report in May 2019 showing conclusively that 1 million species are threatened with extinction and that ecosystem collapse due to biodiversity loss will impact severely on human survival too. The main drivers of terrestrial biodiversity loss were (specialised industrial) agriculture, urbanisation and other land-system change. We can tackle these aspects of the problem through regenerative ecological design. [All non-adults in the room leave. The main proximal driver of mass extinction is agriculture of all forms and the distal driver is the belief that all humans must be fed. When we can no longer turn fossil fuel into food, a 90% depopulation of humans, livestock, and pets will be rapid followed by a slowing in the rate of descent that could (80% chance based on prior descent pathways) end in game over.]
Climate change came in fourth place, though undoubtedly, the impact of global warming will be felt more keenly as the temperature continues to rise. Degradation of ocean ecosystems is more directly attributable to global warming and ocean acidification as the oceans absorb CO2, but over-exploitation of species through industrial-scale fisheries, pollution and dead zones from agricultural fertilisers are major culprits too.
The link below is for reference only and you are not required to read the report:
https://www.ipbes.net/global-assessment-report-biodiversity-ecosystem-services
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification was included in 1994. Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas. It is caused primarily by human activities and climatic variations. Desertification does not refer to the expansion of existing deserts. It occurs because dryland ecosystems, which cover over one third of the world ‘s land area, are extremely vulnerable to overexploitation and inappropriate land use. Poverty, political instability and armed aggression, deforestation, overgrazing and inappropriate irrigation practices can all undermine the productivity of the land. The livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in some 100 countries are threatened by desertification and they are the poorest and most marginalized people. One in three people inhabit drylands.
We can also combat desertification through regenerative ecological design. Restoring land combats desertification and this requires methods of reforestation, ecosystem restoration and changes to agriculture that are appropriate for the local biome. Maximising the soil organic carbon facilitates rainwater retention and restores the natural carbon, hydrological and nutrient cycles (see module 3). Restoring land through community action is the most effective and can also add to achieving a number of Sustainable Development Goals.
In the video below, we see an example of Farmer Led Natural Management (FLNM) in a region badly desertified by deforestation and inappropriate agriculture. When reforestation projects failed for a number of years with 80% of planted saplings dying, they adopted a different, whole-systems approach, adapted to their local biome, rehydrating the land and improving the lives of small-scale farmers, many of whom are women. It embraces several of the Sustainable Development Goals and is a fine example of a whole-systems approach to combating desertification and climate change while restoring ecosystems.
Source: UN Convention on Combatting Desertification
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the best-known of the three and most of us have seen media reports about the urgency of tackling fossil fuel emissions and the consequences for further delay.
Since the advent of agriculture, humanity has interfered with the natural cycle of carbon. This has become more pronounced since the Industrial Revolution, after which the normal dynamic equilibrium, which involves carbon cycling between the atmosphere, the oceans and the land (forests, soil and vegetation) and some carbon being sequestered into the Earth’s crust by geo-physical processes, has been seriously disrupted.
This cycle has been disrupted by emissions of greenhouse gases – mainly carbon dioxide – from the burning of fossil fuels, but also large amounts of CO2 emissions from degraded land and agriculture. In many ways, what we are burning as fossil fuel is ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth after a geo-chemical transformation of ancient plant and animal matter that had absorbed this ancient sunlight. And by degrading land we are disrupting the carbon and hydrological cycles.
By digging up this ancient carbon that had been safely stored away in the Earth’s crust and burning it at ever faster rates since the start of the industrial revolution we have altered the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere resulting from the burning of fossil fuels creates a planetary greenhouse effect.
The parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change meet annually at the COPs (Conference of Parties) to discuss reports drawn up by the IPCC (Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change). At the COP21 in Paris in 2015, the parties succeeded in signing up to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2 degrees C and 1.5 C if possible. The decision was based on the science presented in the IPCC report in 2014. [added graphic:]
Watch the video below (15min) summarising the 2014 synthesis report on climate change. The report mentions solutions for mitigation, some of them heavily critiqued in subsequent years, such as BECCS (Bio-energy with Carbon Capture and Storage) and other ‘Negative Emissions Technologies’. We will look at these in module 4 on energy and technology.
According to the Paris Agreement, each country submits a National Determined Contribution, proposals delineating the mitigation measures they will take in accordance with the pathways laid out by the IPCC on limiting temperature rise. ‘Climate neutrality’ (net zero emissions) should be achieved by 2050 and meanwhile adaptation measures should reduce risks of loss and damage, particularly to sustainable development goals, and in support of developing countries, by conserving sinks such as forests and wetlands, but also financial and technological assistance. The poorest parts of the planet, and those people who have contributed the least to global warming, will be the first to feel the consequences.
On NASA’s climate website you can find a Climate Time Machine that illustrates the changes in temperature, emissions, glaciers and sea-level rise over time. If you want to you can click on the link below to see the changes over time. The website also contains more details and updates on extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding.
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/25/interactive-climate-time-machine/
In 2018 and 2019, the Panel published two reports, one on the differences between 1.5 and 2 degrees C and the other on climate change and land. In the former, it is clear that differences are substantial. For example, at 2 degrees C the coral reefs disappear completely, at 1.5 degrees C only 70% will disappear. However, according to the UN Environment Programme’s “Emissions Gap Report”, released in November 2018, current unconditional NDCs will see global average temperature rise by 2.9 to 3.4°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. BAU (Business As Usual) scenarios with no emissions reductions see us on a path to between 5.9 and 8.4 degrees of warming by 2100.
According to the Climate Transparency Report 2020, G20 countries are not on track to meet emissions-reduction pledges, the majority are not on a path that will lead them to meeting their targets for 2030. Moreover, to restrict warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to triple its current emission reduction pledges. To restrict global warming to 1.5°C, global ambition needs to increase fivefold and the IPCC has determined that to have a 66% chance of halting warming at 1.5 degrees, we will need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030. The Climate Transparency Report(which we recommend you to download and read) highly recommends investing in adaptation.
The links below are for reference only and you are not required to read the reports.
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
The report Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems published in 2019 is a very welcome addition to previous reports. It follows the UN’s FAO’(Food and Agriculture Organisation) conference on climate change in Paris in 2017 which drew together scientists from agriculture-related disciplines. The report explores the role natural systems play in the carbon cycle and the vast potential to draw down CO2 through reforestation and agricultural methods that store carbon in the soil. Whole systems approaches to agriculture, such as holistic planned management for grazing, permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology, can draw down atmospheric CO2 and at the same time combat desertification and biodiversity loss. As we saw in the video above about Farmer Led Natural Management, this pathway can also help achieve many of the Sustainable Development Goals. The UNs Food and Agriculture Organisation has called for more support for small holders practicing agroecology and in 2014 this was the pathway proposed by Prof. Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, in his report. He also advocates for a move away from the global trade in foodstuffs to food sovereignty. We will be looking at relocalisation of food provision and a wide range of agro-ecological practices for carbon sequestration in soil in module 3.
“Sustainable Development Goal 2 presents a vision for integrated approaches to eradicate hunger and malnutrition under climate change through sustainable agriculture. Hunger, poverty and climate change can be tackled together through approaches that recognize the critical linkages between rural poverty, sustainable agriculture and strategies that promote resource-use efficiency, conserve and restore biodiversity and natural resources, and combat the impacts of climate change.”
FAO’s Work on Climate Change, 2017
We have the solutions and now we need to start implementing them through a whole-systems approach and through a change in attitude to our place in the biosphere, in the fabric of life. This is urgent because we must avoid the point of no return, the tipping points that could tumble us into a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario.
6.2. Tipping Points and Earth Stewardship
In 2018, a number of Earth Systems’ scientists published a warning that feedback loops in the climate system would, at some point, most likely send us into ‘runaway climate change’. They call for a major change in attitude to stewardship of the biosphere. The diagram below shows the potential trajectories set in motion by feedback loops as well as our potential arrival at a stable Earth system within the Anthropocene.
As we can see from the diagram, we have moved out of the Glacial-interglacial limit cycle and beyond the relative climatic stability of the Holocene that allowed civilisation to flourish, firstly as settled agrarian societies and towns until the fossil fuel age allowed for rapid development of cities in industrial societies. We are at the dawn of the Anthropocene, where human emissions and biosphere degradation are carrying us towards the planetary threshold after which intrinsic and positive biogeophysical feedback loops kick in and the internal Earth Systems Dynamics are unstoppable no matter what we do. These biogeophysical feedback are a normal part of the Earth Systems Dynamics, they maintain the system in a stable state (negative feedback). However, feedback that amplify a perturbation (positive feedback) can change the state of the System. It is a fork in the road. The diagram below shows the potential tipping cascades.
[Full stop. Climate change is a symptom of our meta-problem, overshoot, 50k years in the expansion, climaxing this century. It is a distraction. If the climax could be restored to 1950 norms forever with the push of one button with no side effects, it would mean the difference between the Anthropocene mass extinction event being on par with that of the late Cretaceous or rivaling that of the Permian. In either case human extinction is likely, and for posterity's sake, we Anthropocene enthusiasts need to know ourselves, our form of civilization, as cause. Putting on a different hat or fixating on climate change is to fail to face our situation, our perpetrator culture.]
6.3. Human Feedbacks in the Earth System
“In the dominant climate change narrative, humans are an external force driving climate change to the Earth System in a largely linear, deterministic way; the higher the forcing in terms of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, the higher the global average temperature. However, our analysis argues that human societies and our activities need to be recast as an integral, interacting component of a complex, adaptive Earth System. This framing puts the focus not only on human system dynamics that reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also on those that create or enhance negative feedbacks that reduce the risk that the Earth System will cross a planetary threshold and lock into a Hothouse Earth pathway”
Will Steffen, Timothy M. Lenton et al, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, PNAS, 2018. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
We are not separate from the biosphere, like all life on Earth we are part of the Earth Systems Dynamics. Through a whole-systems approach, through regenerative ecological design, we can return the planetary cycles we have disrupted to full functioning again. The stewardship the authors call for is within our grasp. [A metastatic cancer is not separate from the host body. We are the dynamic, the dissipative structure that is degrading a planetary life-support system. We can rapidly reduce our population by birth-off to below carrying capacity, likely in the 7 to 35 million range, needed to end the Anthropocene mass extinction event, an outcome that will come anyway. Human extinction is not an absolute given.]
6.4. Peak Oil Revisited
As we have already seen, the Transition Town movement emerged from permaculture in 2005 as the result of an energy-descent plan drawn up by students on a course given by permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins. During its expansion to many countries through new transition initiatives and the ‘transition training’, the twin-issue of climate change and peak oil have been presented as the major drivers of the need for ‘transition’. [And since Earth Day 1970, over fifty years of political activism and fine words have failed to slow the pace of planetary destruction.]
Peak oil is the point in time when conventional oil production reaches the maximum rate of extraction and thereafter production gradually begins to decline. It is not the point where we are running out of oil or fossil fuels, but rather the point where the energy and money that have to be invested into extracting these good quality fuels rises sharply as more expensive drilling or extraction techniques (e.g. fracking, and tar-sand extraction) have to make up for the decline in conventional (sweet crude) oil sources. The quality of the oil declines too in terms of EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested). So, whereas the high-quality, conventional oil might give a return of 100 barrels for 1 barrel of oil used in extraction [19th century], decline in quality might reduce the EROEI to 10 to 1 or even less. [Decline will be to zero. I've been to three Biophysical economics conferences, gone fishing with, had diner with... Charlie Hall, originator of the EROI metric based on Odum's EYR (emergy yield ratio) metric. Added graphic:]
The rising global demand for fossil fuels, not only for transportation and the generation of electrical energy, but also as a key resource for our entire material culture, including industrial agriculture, further drives us towards a peak in many fossil fuels. Conventional sources peaked in 2005. [Conventional oil peaked 2018, gas and coal to follow.] Over the last decade, a large amount of new fossil fuel reserves has been discovered (albeit reserves that would be very costly to exploit). The point is no longer ‘peak oil’ or ‘peak fossil fuel’, much rather we have to ask the question: Can we afford – both financially and with regard to climate change – to burn and exploit the remaining fossil fuel reserves? The short answer is no we cannot (more in chapter on peak oil and unburnable carbon below). [We mined all the quano deposites in the 19th century, and today nitrogenous fertilizers derived from natural gas via Haber process allow annual planting without a fallow period (5 to 50 years) without which about 4 billion humans will die of starvation and shortage induced conflict. Denial is willful ignorance.]
Einstein famously said: “The stone age did not come to an end because we ran out of stones.” [Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi petroleum minister, claimed the stone age did not come to an end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil (Wheeler & Thomson, 2003, The New Bottom Line: Energy and Corporate Ingenuity, p. 248). ] Nor will the fossil fuel age end because we are running out of fossil fuels. We simply cannot afford to burn the reserves we have left, if we hope to stabilise global climate patterns and avoid overstepping the climate tipping points that would lead to even more catastrophic climate change. [Phase out the use of all fossil fuels in five years, but modern techno-industrial culture cannot even think about doing so because the UN's SDGs can only be met if we grow the economy, red, blue, green, whatever, to eliminate poverty.... The dynamic of the system cannot select for other than short-term self interest. Pretend solutions serve the world socioeconomic-political system.]
However, the pathways presented by the IPCC and adopted by the Paris Agreement call for ‘Net Zero Emissions’ by 2050 and this does not mean burning fossil fuels will stop. ‘Net Zero Emissions’ calls for a balance between emissions produced and emissions drawn down and sequestered either in natural carbon sinks such as forests and soil, or stored underground in reservoirs through Carbon Capture and Storage. These ‘Negative Emissions Technologies’ and their feasibility will be discussed in module 4.
The Post Carbon Institute has produced a large number of studies and books on peak oil and energy-descent to help prepare people and their communities for a post-carbon future.
Module 1, lesson 11
