Ecosystem Catastrophe
Although most of the reporting, most of the conversation, is wrapped around the terms climate change or, for the hardheaded, global warming / heating, what we are living in is the broadest imaginable ecosystem catastrophe, happening not at some future date or time but right now.
Rather than list individual failings, it is better to realize that there is no part, no subsystem, no component of the global ecosystem which is not currently undergoing rapid, accelerating, measurable degradation. Insects are vanishing, including but not limited to bees. The oceans are dying, acidified, heated, overfished, overtraveled, filled with plastic at every scale from microplastics to drift nets. Over half of all the land wildlife has vanished, either into extinction or into tiny remnant fading populations, in just my adult lifetime.
The air is filled with poison gases, plastics, excess methane and an imbalance of CO2. The songbirds who used to fill the air with song and their bellies and babies with ticks and other insects are mostly gone.
Local biomes are degraded, filled with weedy invasive species which have moved into the poor soils and toxic waters that remain from those which once supported rich local ecosystems.
Industrial agriculture sterilizes, poisons, kills, and washes away topsoil, taking with it clean surface waters and living creeks, to be replaced with channelized and paved ditches and city-destroying flash floods.
What does not flood, burns.
We need the topsoil.
We need the bugs. We need the birds.
While we’re at all that, the entire globe, air, water, land, rock, inanimate objects and cold blooded life forms, are, on average, about a degree hotter than they were the day I was born back in 1947. What we measure as temperature, the physical Earth recognizes as energy. Energy makes things move. The more energy the faster things move, the larger their scale of motion becomes. Winds blow harder, rain falls harder, ground dries faster, and paper wasps get grouchier. Material objects grow larger. E, it turns out, really does equal MC^2. Add E, Constant remains constant, M increases.
The amount of free energy represented by this global degree of heat is so great as to be incomprehensible, inconceivable. We can’t wrap our minds around it. All the nuclear bombs and all the nuclear tests ever detonated by all the lunatic nations of the industrial world did not add any measurable temperature to the global system. The ecosystem absorbed that energy and you couldn’t see the difference. Solar energy captured by carbon-based molecules, that you can see.
The Public Discussion
Within this context, this known, visible, measured, recorded, indisputable context, Americans and the peoples of the developed world, national governments and multi-national corporations, stake out one of two positions: About a third deny that anything is happening. I have nothing to say to them. Go outside. But - they think “outside” is 18 mph across the land on a gasoline 4-wheeler, and it looks fine from there.
The faster you go the more you miss.
The other position, the majority position, is that the problem is The Climate and the solution is to Halt Fossil Fuels by Transitioning to Green Energy. The most radical of them demand a Green New Deal. All are agreed that solving Climate Change will create millions of high paying, high tech jobs.
This is pure science fiction. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing can ever be built, that it is technically possible. There is considerable evidence that to build it - if we chose to act as though it were possible and try to build it - would require far more of several elements than are known to exist on Earth.
The energy required, from mining to disposal, is so great as to be almost unimaginable. And that comes first, all of it, first, before any of the alleged benefits. First we burn the coal, gas, and oil.
Over half of the required technology has never been invented. Self-described optimists say that we can solve it just like we put a man on the moon, just like we invented the Internet.
We put a man on the moon with fossil fuels. We invented the Internet with fossil fuels.
Every technical problem modern humanity has ever solved has been solved by developing a means to apply fossil energy to it. This time fossil energy, highly concentrated energy, is the problem. There is no possible place where we can solve this problem by applying more fossil energy.
But that’s the direction we’re moving. More fossil energy every year than the year before.
Except the year Covid hit.
We cannot fix the mess we’re in by mining, manufacturing, transporting, bulldozing, pouring concrete, and stringing cable. Even if the global non-fossil energy system would work as claimed, the ecosystem couldn’t possibly survive us building it. The way we extract materials from, exploit the surface of, and spread poison on, Earth for our toys is at least as big a problem as the fuel we use to do it. That’s what’s killing the biosphere. It’s not the CO2, not the heat, not yet.
If we woke up tomorrow and all our machinery was emissions free, it wouldn’t help much. The concrete we’re pouring isn’t a machine, it’s what the machines do. Concrete all by itself, at present global use, would be enough to keep the temperature rising forever. And as it turns out, the machines we use to make, prepare for, and pour, all that concrete, are not themselves emissions free. They do, as it turns out, run on diesel fuel and emit CO2.
The Way Out
To the extent we have a chance, it lies in the natural systems which we have so degraded. Our best hope is to regenerate functioning ecosystems over all the planet that we occupy. It will take years, decades, centuries, but it will not require any fossil fuels.
Obviously we have thrown away vast swaths of our birthright, tens, hundreds of thousands of species evolved each for their own niche in their local biome, and never bothered to learn what was there and how it worked. It’s time to study. We can’t get them back, but we have created openings for the next Cambrian Explosion.
There are some who advocate for planting trees, and in fact I do plant trees on my farm, but saying “plant trees” is like saying “climate change.” Both concerns are valid, but neither takes in the big picture. Ecosystems. Ecosystems consist of all the parts of a given space, the living, the formerly living, the mineral substrate. All of Earth, land and water, is one encompassing ecosystem and interacts within itself in ways we barely can know exist.
The more different life forms we can encourage in any given space, the more carbon we tie up. Topsoil, real live topsoil, is mostly a huge population of small and microscopic living creatures, each made of its component carbon and other elements. living among the mineral portions that define the spaces. Atop that soil and within it, every living creature, every green photosynthesizing creature making food out of sunlight, air, and water, the ones loose and fixed who eat them, then eat them, layer after layer, and a whole different structure of layers eating the corpses of the fallen, plant and animal. All made, ultimately, of atmospheric carbon, a few other gases, minerals, and always water, the precious stuff of life. Untold tons per living acre. Half of it atmospheric carbon.
A living ecosystem builds itself with atmospheric carbon and hydrogen, carbon from air, hydogen from water, excretes oxygen, transpires water, creating in the process foods, fibers, sweets and pretties and building materials.
There is no guarantee that we can get out of the mess we’re in, but there could be a chance if we would put our efforts into rebuilding the systems that removed atmospheric carbon last time.
There is no chance we can build machines to do it. That’s all science fiction.
My Part In It
I can see, from here, a road we could take to enable us, the human race, worldwide, to slow, halt, and reverse our degradation of the ecosystem. We don’t have to give up our human-ness, but we have to reevaluate our position in the global ecosystem. We will have to reassess what we value, what is valuable to us as people. It is my intention to lay out the hows and the whys, over time, as essays, here on Substack. It is my hope to make the journey understandable, comfortable, reasonable.
The journey begins with acknowledging that we are moving too fast. Step one of rebuilding a livable, restorative, comfortable ecosystem to support and provide for us humans, and for all our fellow species here on Earth, is to slow down and pay attention.
Slow down.
I smiled sadly at your mention of grouchier paper wasps. Before the 2020 wildfire that came for my acres by a river near a forest in Oregon, I’d cultivated ever more wildness around my place over the 16 years I’d tended it.
My porch paper wasps were downright friendly back at home... even the bald-faced hornets were gentle! They had plenty of resources, clean air, a diversity of chemical-free flowers and other insects on which to prey.
We had no evacuation notice, the wildfire started so close, I had maybe 20 minutes to flee. I fled to family in California, the Bay Area... Silicon Valley. Where bees drop dying from the sky some days... and most days, I see none at all, even with flowers blooming. Even the honey bees here are aggressive... they’re poisoned, I see it, I wish I could help them.
If only we’d slow down, like you say. I loved my slow life in Oregon... gardening, growing food, watching so many bees buzz through their lives happily... so many plants and other critters. This place of concrete and endless objects, some ironically made to look natural... just ever more resources extracted. It all feels outlandish to me, and yet most people seem to love it here.
I appreciate your thoughts and essays. I’ve learned much from your threads, particularly about the mining required for these so-called renewables. It’s good to know there are others who see all that we’re doing, turning the natural world to waste, ever more and ever faster.
Slowing down... it’s a good philosophy, folks’d even be happier over time. So would so many other lifeforms, including the bees and wasps.