“The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself”
(Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)
There was a marked contrast between the extensive media coverage of last November’s COP27 climate summit in Egypt and the sparse coverage of last December’s COP15 Biodiversity summit in Canada. Climate breakdown has entered public consciousness in a way that ecological breakdown has not. This is perhaps understandable, as nowadays most humans have had direct experience of being damaged in some way by a changing climate. Habitat destruction contributes to climate change, but it is wildlife rather than us who are harmed most directly by it. Ultimately, the causes and consequences of climate disruption and habitat destruction are linked, and solutions will have to be found that address that interlinkage. Perhaps we need to shift our focus, from thinking about us humans as the centre of an ‘environment’ - something that is out there, surrounding us - to experiencing ourselves as part of nature, not apart from it.
Decarbonisation
In the limited progress that has been made in tackling climate change, some measures have benefitted wildlife as well as the climate - small scale restoration of forests and wetlands, for example. But the main emphasis has been on developing lower carbon sources of power, with little attention given to what is being powered, how it is powered, and how this affects the living planet. This is progress, but progress towards what Paul Kingsnorth has termed “business as usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon.” (Confessions of a recovering environmentalist, Orion, Jan/Feb 2012). Demand reduction (desirable with all physical consumption, but essential where current technology depends on fossil fuels, such as with air travel and construction projects based on concrete) is hardly pursued at all.
“Our justified panic to address global warming has made us susceptible to seductive technological promises.”
(Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies. 2021)
The publication of Bright Green Lies in 2021 was an eye-opener. The authors, activists in Deep Green Resistance, itemised the consequences for the living planet of the ecological damage associated with these “seductive technological promises.” This ecological damage includes:
the trees felled to provide the pellets burnt as ‘biofuel’ in power stations like Drax in Yorkshire (bizarrely, this is defined as renewable energy, because the trees would have died at some point anyway and because in decades to come replacement trees may sequester the carbon that has been burned)
the metals, silicon and rare earths that have to be mined in order to produce solar panels, most of which cannot be recycled when the panels come to the end of their life.
the vast quantities of concrete and steel that have to be produced in order to install wind turbines, and the wildlife that is displaced or killed during their operation
the hugely destructive processes that are needed to extract lithium and cobalt for the batteries that power electric vehicles and store the electricity that is needed to balance the intermittency of wind and solar
the damming of water courses and harm to aquatic life that is involved in creating the reservoirs that are used in pumped hydro storage (also needed to balance the intermittency of wind and solar).
Of course, the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and the construction of facilities that process them, cause ecological damage in addition to their major role in global heating. It is certainly the case that the overall damage caused by ‘bright green’ technologies is less than that caused by the fossil fuel technologies they hopefully replace. But replacing very damaging technology with slightly less damaging technology, while fuelling growing demand, falls far short of what would be needed to restore balance between humans and the rest of nature. And when account is taken of how tempting it will be for the near zero marginal costs of renewable energy to boost demand, it is not clear whether the overall ecological damage in the long term would decrease or increase.
The proposals by influential think tank RethinkX for how renewable energy should be produced and consumed in the UK are particularly troubling. Their argument, presented to the 2022 House of Lords Energy and Investment Inquiry, is that the amounts of expensive hydrogen and battery storage that are needed to balance the intermittency of wind and solar power can be greatly minimised by providing enough renewable capacity to meet peak winter demand, freeing capacity the rest of the time to meet new demands. The ecological damage caused by the increased consumption, and by the increased mining that would be needed to construct the fourfold expansion in generating capacity that would be required, is totally ignored.
Population - the elephant in the room?
I’ve suggested, here and here, that historically significant growth in human population resulted from males seizing control of fertility. Numbers increased particularly dramatically, with industrialisation, over the past couple of centuries, from 1 billion at the start of the nineteenth century to the current figure of around 8 billion. Many environmentalists are understandably cautious about identifying population as an issue, given the classist and racist underpinnings of Malthusianism, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics, but that doesn’t mean it is an issue that can be dismissed.
When primatologist Jane Goodall suggested that rainforest destruction had been exacerbated by the population growth that has occurred over the last 500 years, her words were distorted to make out that she advocated reducing population to the levels of 500 years ago as the solution. Her remarks were made at the 2020 World Economic Forum conference, prompting wild conspiracy theories on social media, including that her misquoted words proved that world elites had planned the Covid 19 epidemic. All Goodall had acknowledged was that population pressures had contributed to deforestation. She did not suggest that it would be either desirable or possible to reverse that. In practice, even the 2 billion global population growth that the UN anticipates over the next 30 years would be hard to avoid, as it is mainly a consequence of girl children who are alive now reaching child-bearing age.
It’s not just the overall numbers of humans that puts pressure on the living planet. There’s a complex interaction between climate change and the distribution of the world’s population, too. So far, most climate-related migration has taken place within national boundaries. But as impacts like desertification and sea level rise intensify, some regions will become uninhabitable, so that for increasing numbers of people, survival will depend on being able to move across borders.
It is often pointed out that, with current levels of inequality, the climate impacts of consumption by the world’s rich far outweigh the impacts of much greater numbers of the world’s poor. This is true, but social justice would require increased consumption by the poor, just to meet basic needs, as well as much greater reductions in consumption by the rich. And if wider ecological impacts, not just climate impacts, are considered, concerns about continued population growth cannot be ignored - more people need more food, which means more farming, taking even more land from other species and/or depending on chemical inputs and genetic modification to increase yields from existing farmland.
Making education and full reproductive freedom available to all women, in all parts of the globe, would enable world population to peak at below 10 billion, easing ecological pressures as well as improving women’s rights. Questioning the need for continued growth and avoiding panic pro-natalist responses to birth rate decline, such as those being considered in Italy, Japan, and South Korea, would also help. But to expect the global peak to occur before the middle of this century would be extremely optimistic. And managing population decline thereafter, in a humane way, with a dwindling labour force to meet the needs of retirees, would be far from straightforward.
Farming - the most destructive part of the system
If rapid population decline is both unrealistic and problematic, then the main way we can reduce the impacts of ecological as well as climate breakdown is by changing what we eat and how it is produced. Meat and dairy consumption, which cause the most ecological damage, have increased as incomes have risen, and the world’s livestock population is currently growing more than twice as fast as its human population. Reversing this trend would have the biggest beneficial impact, on both climate and biodiversity. But diet is very culture bound and resistant to change, as I know from personal experience.
I experienced the horrors of intensive farming at first hand working as an 18-year-old on a kibbutz in Israel. I never forgot the day when I had to wade through a huge shed overcrowded with chickens, picking up terrified birds for them be inoculated with antibiotics by a fellow worker. The experience left me feeling physically sick, and not just because I came out of the shed covered in chicken shit. I was not deterred, though, from eating eggs in the canteen at breakfast the next morning. I hadn’t connected the eggs I was eating with the hens who had shown me their terror.
Eight years elapsed before I acknowledged my initial gut feeling and began to adopt a plant-based diet. And it was decades later before I learnt how the routine use of antibiotics as a growth promoter in industrial poultry farming was also promoting antibiotic resistance. How long might it take for someone who has no direct experience of the horrors of factory farming to adopt a plant-based diet? The living planet needs more immediate action.
Changes in how food is produced, along the lines suggested in George Monbiot’s recent book Regenesis, might, if supported by government policy, be more immediately effective. He suggests that a return to crop rotation, development of no-till cultivation of perennial grains, and innovation of new, protein-rich meat substitutes produced by precision fermentation of microbes, could reverse soil erosion, eliminate the need for chemical inputs, and make it possible to rewild or reforest much of the land currently given over to farming.
“We can now contemplate the end of most farming, the most destructive force ever to have been unleashed by humans. We can envisage the beginning of a new era, in which we no longer need to sacrifice the living world on the altar of our appetites.”
(George Monbiot, Regenesis, 2022)
Alternatively, or additionally, it might be possible to make agriculture more sustainable by distributing precision fermentation products to organic smallholders as animal feed that could substitute for soya protein.
Is precision fermentation just another seductive technological promise? It could be. But the first signs that it might help to address both the climate and the ecological crises look promising. Other tech innovations that have been suggested, such as the use of CRISPR to edit the genes of microbes in soil and water to enhance their carbon capture capability, would almost certainly be far more ecologically damaging.
Mea culpa
Was I, too, taken in by bright green technological promises? Not totally. But I certainly downplayed my concerns - like so many, I felt that the urgency of the climate crisis required that these concerns take a back seat, at least for the time being. And I suspect that this reflected my disconnect from nature, and an unconscious belief that human wellbeing took precedence over the wellbeing of the rest of the living planet.
In the 1990s, when I was working as a Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Policy, the main focus of my research was to identify political and economic barriers to technological changes that could bring about decarbonisation, for example here (apologies for the Foucauldian jargon). I saw new technologies like solar energy and electric vehicles as complementing changes that would be needed in how we live our lives, and I underestimated the extent to which technical fixes would be used as a substitute, rather than a support, for those changes. Crucially, I paid no attention to the impacts on the living planet of extracting the raw materials that those technical fixes would require.
I took early retirement at the turn of the century to become a full time carer, and my academic research into Environmental Policy came to an end. But more than a decade later I was drawn back into the issues after witnessing blatant climate denial by opponents of Navitus Bay, an offshore wind farm project in the English Channel, near where I lived. Much of my spare time in 2014 was spent writing submissions for, and attending sessions of, a Planning Inquiry into this project. Opposition to the project was strong and well organised (a key participant had been Head of Public Relations at Gazprom UK). Their campaign focussed on supposed interference with sea views and how this might damage the tourist industry (using arguments that are being repeated, almost word for word and image for image, in current campaigns against offshore wind farms along the East Coast of the USA).
My submissions to the Navitus Bay Inquiry concentrated on highlighting the benefits of locating wind generation close to where it would be consumed, and exposing the fallacies in the opposition campaign’s arguments about sea views and tourism. I could see that there was no way, within the framework of the Inquiry, to make the case for new wind farm development to be accompanied by measures to reduce overall energy demand. I was concerned about some of the impacts of the project on wildlife (particularly birds migrating across the English Channel), but I didn’t make too much of this, as I didn’t want to add another plank to the opposition case.
So there were valid reasons, both practical and tactical, for giving full support to the Navitus Bay project. I am struck, though, that when I subsequently wrote an article for The Ecologist criticising the Government’s acceptance of the Inquiry recommendation to scrap the project, I did not take the opportunity to share my wider concerns about encouraging growth.
Coming next - the Pritzker family, not just meddling with our biology, meddling with the stratosphere as well.
Respecting nature's limits
What makes you so sure that "green" technologies are less damaging? I'm really curious.