Oh, Boy! What a Saturday morning this is turning out to be. I recently received a letter informing me that I’ve been selected to receive a nice recognition, to be announced in a couple of months. I thought of the letter after I’d been up for a while this morning, and it made me feel good. But a bit later I found that my printer was malfunctioning; it seems unable to print in simple black, though the cartridge is relatively new and properly HP-certified. OK, it's a short-term problem, I’m sure I can fix it. Little ups and downs such as these are not important in themselves, but they can get in the way of addressing larger concerns.
So, on to the hard stuff.
As I began looking through the day’s feeds, many having to do with climate change in one way or another, one of the first papers I ran across is a link to a paper by Daniel Rothman of MIT in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rothman is Co-Director of the Lorenz Center in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. We all know that the oceans are undergoing changes in temperate and acidity at unprecedented rates. If today’s human-induced emissions cross certain thresholds, as Rothman predicts they soon will, many marine ecosystems are likely to go extinct. The consequences may be just as severe as the Earth experienced during previous mass extinctions. We tend to lose track of the fact that 71 percent of the planet’s surface is covered with water. We should care about what goes on in those deeps.
On the general subject of the oceanic environment, how about the runaway increases in Sargassum seaweed blooms along the coasts in Florida, the Caribbean and Mexico? The stuff stinks to high heaven and accumulates almost faster than it can be carted off. Check out the photo of a formerly pristine white sand beach in Cancun. A likely driver of this massive new intrusion is an increase in nutrients flowing from the Amazon into the South Atlantic because more and more land in the Amazon is being converted to agriculture, with an attendant overuse of fertilizers. So we lose the carbon-sequestering power of the rainforest and gain a wholly new source of pollution. As they say, what goes around comes around…
My next read was a paper entitled "Sleepwalking Into Certan Catastrophe, or Awakening via Agroecology", by Steve McFadden. He referred to a UN report on the devastating consequences climate change could have for a large fraction of the world’s population. The looming threat of massive food shortages brought on by changing patterns of rainfall and temperatures all over the planet has food scientists thinking about agroecology, a stabilizing set of principles and practices for clean, just, and sustainable farms and food. Transformation of agriculture through agroecological techniques and principles could have profoundly beneficial impacts on land, workers, and food. But how do we get to actually making changes, to progressing beyond talking about what might be possible, to actually making the necessary moves? In the short term, large corporations such as BASF, Bayer, 3M, DowDupont, Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, Exxon, Chevron and many more stand to lose a great deal in making many of the needed changes. Corporations hold great political power in the global economy. It will be difficult to constrain them from using it to maintain their short-term business models. If they had wise, informed models that look ahead, the way forward might come to light. An article not long ago in Bloomberg Business News about Tom Hayes, the new CEO of Tyson Foods gives hope that enlightened leadership can be found in the corporate world, but is there enough of it?
The obstacles to change extend beyond just giant corporations. How many owners of large tracts of farmland who farm using monocropping methods, with high tillage and heavy reliance on fertilizers and pesticides are prepared to change from the practices that have made them rich? The feeds I read from the world of agriculture have a lot to do with the politics of maintaining government bailouts in the wake of massive flooding, wholesale losses of animals from hurricanes and tropical storms. Extreme weather events of the past few years don’t seem to have brought about an acknowledgment that the current models of industrialized farming must change. The solution could lie in employing regenerative agriculture. True, the ag feeds are sprinkled here and there with mentions of cover crops, low-till and no-till, permaculture and so on. Farmers such as Gabe Brown, who has successfully used regenerative agricultural practices for many years have garnered a lot of deserved attention. But climate change is coming fast, and moves to confront the changes afoot have been pitifully small in relation to the continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
Those who live citified lives can easily be unaware of the pollution of rivers and underground water resources resulting from CFAO operations; of a steady erosion of soil quality that comes with frequent tilling, eventually leaving land devoid of native soil organic matter, no longer capable of supporting sustainable food production; of deforestation operations that permanently strip out whole regions of plants that were soaking up CO2 and thus serving to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. They may not think of the huge quantities of CO2 that result from manufacturing fertilizers. Nor are they likely to dwell upon the folly of planting, harvesting and processing vast quantities of corn to produce ethanol as a gasoline additive. Ethanol is blended with petroleum gasoline in America in order to meet a federal government mandate known as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and its updated version, RFS2. The original rationale was the desire to support U.S. agriculture. The RFS currently requires that about 10 percent of all gas-engine fuel sold in the United States be ethanol. There is virtually nothing left of the original rationale other than making some rich farm landowners even richer.
These examples call attention to the fact that agriculture is a leading source of greenhouse gas emissions and the cause of much ecological damage. And because of the slow pace at which this realization is penetrating into the public consciousness, it seems unlikely that reforms will come on a sufficiently broad and timely scale. I’ve frequently called attention to the great book Drawdown, which spells out a list of 80 or more feasible steps that could be enacted on a sufficiently large scale to go far toward mitigating climate change. Agriculture is at the heart of many of the most important ones. We need to find ways to make change happen. The alternative is described in David Wallace-Wells’s book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Check out this arresting interview with him.
The rapid-fire announcements of plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 are exemplary of an unfortunate expectation that new technologies will be enough to save us from global warming. Any realistic analysis leads to the conclusion that it will take a lot more than achieving net-zero emissions. It will require revolutionary new approaches to using the planet’s landmass to produce food and serve as a sink for CO2 by revitalizing currently depleted and desertified land. We will have to massively reduce global consumption of animals as a food source, learn to budget the ever more limited freshwater resources—and so much more. Small steps are being taken in the developed nations, but it’s a constant battle to educate the public and prevail politically against those who refuse to surrender their short-term interests. On this particular morning, it’s not easy to be optimistic.
