Peak Everything and the Breakdown of the Biosphere
Photo credit: World Bank.
This is the first of five blogs-slash-essays on how the breakdown of ecosystems around the planet will likely impact global civilization’s ability to feed all the many billions of people in the coming decades. The second essay examines why we will likely not change our behaviors in time to avert disaster. In the last three essays, I review three natural catastrophes in-the-making. Each provides a different lens into the larger biospheric catastrophe.
The essays are entitled
1. Peak Everything and the Collapse of the Biosphere
2. Shifting Baseline Syndrome
3. The End of the Amazon
4. Dead Zones: Farming destroys fishing
5. The Insect Armageddon (or The Final War against Nature)
Peak Everything and the Breakdown of the Biosphere
Although Civilization’s growing population and consumption exacts increasingly more from the Earth, we have ever less of its bounty to work with. We have already passed “peak everything,” as Richard Heinberg put it, where “everything” denotes all those material conditions necessary to sustain our population-dense industrial civilization, including oil, gas, and coal, arable land and soil fertility, surface water and groundwater reserves, forests, wetlands, climate stability, wild fish stocks, uranium, copper, phosphorus, as well as most every other important resource, renewable and otherwise.[1] And the resources degrading and diminishing most precipitously (such as soil, water, phosphorus, and the atmosphere) are those upon which food, our most fundamental need, is based. We have been destroying the planet’s natural resources as if there were no consequence or inherent responsibility in their use.[2] Even without the specter of global warming to exacerbate our problems, even were the future to provide the most accommodating of climates (and it won’t, of course), humanity’s fortunes are now tied to somehow holding on to the last remnants of what were once seemingly infinite natural resources.
Feeding ourselves—the numbers we must feed and the ways that we do it—has killed off most of the planet’s creatures, whether they were intentional targets (whales, wolves, and insects) or just collateral damage (sea turtles, frogs, and bumblebees).[i] In the oceans, serial overfishing has turned vast regions once teaming with animals into marine deserts.[ii] Invariably, the animals have been hunted for whatever they provided at rates that were neither biologically nor economically sustainable. The Atlantic cod is already gone. The tuna, grouper, and wild salmon are now being hunted out. With accelerating speed, humans are killing down the food webs, dining on ever-smaller, less appetizing creatures as the larger ones either disappear or become economically unviable.[3] Even the Antarctic krill, a most important, small crustacean near the near bottom of the food chain, is now being routinely fished in the Southern Ocean as food for our pets and fish farms.[iii]
On land, too, the way we feed ourselves has killed off much of the natural world. Ominous and frightening as global warming is to our long-term prospects, it still runs a distant second to agriculture in terms of the damage we have thus far inflicted on the planet.[iv] The ways in which we farm produces a third of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, much of global warming, climate change, and the acidification of oceans.[4] Four-fifths of deforestation is a direct result of clearing land for crops and pastures.[v] Since around 1850, we have burned, cut, and filled in a billion hectares of natural habitats—wetlands, grasslands and forests—and converted them into farmland.[vi] That’s more than the entire area of Canada, the world’s second largest country. It is principally this loss and fragmentation of habitat that drives the sweeping extinctions across the planet.[vii] Agriculture is directly responsible for more than nine-tenths of the water use that is driving water scarcity, most of the world’s land degradation, desertification and soil erosion, the doubling of reactive nitrogen on Earth, and four-fifths of the eutrophication that causes coastal dead zones.[viii]
This, by definition, is not sustainable. We cannot continue devouring and destroying the life-supporting resources of this finite planet any more than a cancer can grow forever at the expense of its host. At some point, systems break down. This is no longer hypothetical. Critical planetary systems—the biosphere, atmosphere, cryosphere, and hydrosphere—are showing unequivocal signs of strain, as if Earth were signaling to us with increasing urgency that we have transgressed the thresholds for salubrious co-existence. The cryosphere is melting away before our eyes, as the oceans and atmosphere heat up and turn volatile, and the biosphere informs us with the die-offs, extinctions, and the emptying skies and seas that it is unraveling, its complexity of creatures great and small being replaced by the simpler ecosystems of a more primordial Earth.
In its most recent report, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) announced that the destruction to Nature is as much an existential threat to humanity as is climate change.[ix] The IPBES performs a similar data gathering and policy making role for biodiversity and ecosystems as the IPCC does for climate change, although it is less well known. The IPBES, the Union of Concerned Scientists, as well as thousands of science articles through the past few decades have been voicing grave concerns about the biosphere’s deteriorating condition.[x] Many fear that even before the ecosystems, communities, and animal and plant populations disappear, the unweaving of their interconnections and the simplifying of them at every scale will deteriorate the overall integrity of the biosphere, and therefore—ultimately, from our self-centered perspective—its ability to sustain large human numbers.[xi]
The existential question for humanity is, how much longer do we have? Are we approaching the critical thresholds where complex systems change abruptly from one state to another, from, say, rainforest to desert, or from a biodiverse estuary to toxic slough? The simple answer is that natural systems are far too complex to say definitively. The term complexity denotes the kinds of systems, events, and phenomena whose future states are beyond our mathematical abilities to model precisely. As the mathematical ecologists Carl Boettiger and Alan Hastings note, “Catastrophes and tipping points manifest in ways specific to the particular complex system. Given the diverse nature of complex systems, there are no general predictions that can yet be made about them.”[xii] And what happens when thousands of those systems across the planet—interacting and feeding back on each other—are breaking down at the same time?[5] Changes to natural ecosystems are proceeding so fast that many of them will likely either disappear or impact other planetary systems before our models can warn us of the implications.[xiii]
Footnotes
[1] Heinberg (2007). For each resource in question, peak holds a slightly different meaning. For most nonrenewable resources, such as coal and uranium, the absolute amount of the available resource has peaked and will continue to diminish in amount and quality. Peak oil has a specific definition—after having already extracted a trillion or two barrels of oil—the amount we can extract each year has reached its highest point. And as the easy oil has already been used, it will require increasingly more energy to extract the remaining oil. For many resources (water, soil, phosphorus, fossil fuels), peak is also a function of the environmental destruction that further use would involve (Watari et al., 2021). As for renewables such as forests, soils, and other ecosystems, peak suggests that these resources will continue to diminish both in quantity and quality long into the future. However, they can—with appropriate human stewardship—renew themselves in time frames of centuries and millennia, as long as pivotal species have not already gone extinct.
[2] Considering them as ‘natural capital’ is hardly more sophisticated conceptually, as this values living creatures, climate, and water with the same metric as equipment, inventory, and cash flow. Deep ecologists maintain that the two sets are of completely different realms, as different in category as a thing and love, as a piece of lint and God. The defense for conceptualizing resources as natural capital is that in a capitalist paradigm their value would selfishly motivate us to at least use natural resources more efficiently.
[3] Furthermore, the phytoplankton—the very base of the food web—may be declining as a response to warming oceans (Siegel and Franz, 2010).
[4] (FAO, 2000), Lal (2004), Foley et al. (2005), Campbell et al. (2017), Poore and Nemecek (2018), Díaz et al. (2019). The trees, shrub and other plant life that have been cleared away for the billion hectares of farmland since 1850 (Groombridge and Jenkins, 2004) are burned or they decompose on location. Both processes break down the various carbon bonds in the plants, releasing 85% of the forest carbon as carbon dioxide (Soares-Filho et al., 2006). Denuded, the soil becomes exposed to the heating of the sun and to leaching by water. Within a few years most of the organic material is decomposed and removed, much of it out-gassed into the atmosphere (Botkin and Keller, 2007). Agriculture is also responsible for 65% of the methane emissions (UNDP, 2000:64). Molecule for molecule, methane is twenty-four times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (Wuebbles, 2002). It is released from the one hundred-sixty-plus million hectares of rice paddies flooded like swampland and from the intestinal fermentation in the billions of livestock and their manure (Hillel, 1991:216; Trawavas, 2001; Wuebbles, 2002; Koohafkan et al., 2005; UND, 2008:64). Plus, some 10-15% of the fossil fuels used worldwide go into growing, processing, packaging, and transporting of our food (Hawken et al., 1999).
[5] A very abridged version of even the short list of systems experiencing either historically unprecedented destruction or utter breakdown includes the Amazon, Congo, and Southeast Asian rainforests; the melting away of continental glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica, of the Arctic summer sea ice, and of valley glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and in the world’s mountain ranges; the weakening of the Indian Summer and African monsoons; the slowing of the Atlantic Ocean currents; the Boreal Forest Dieback; the loss of permafrost and the tundra; the coral bleaching events of the Great Barrier Reef; the vanishing of the California and Tasmania kelp forests; the takeover of alien invasive species; the bark beetle outbreaks in the world’s temperate conifer forests; and the drying of the world’s largest rivers and lakes (including Lake Chad, Poyang, and the Aral ‘Sea’).
Endnotes (References for these can be found in References for Blogs)
[i] Tollefson (2019).
[ii] Díaz et al. (2019).
[iii] Schiermeier (2010).
[iv] Tilman et al. (2001), Campbell et al. (2017), Gilbert (2018), Springmann et al. (2018, Díaz et al. (2019), Tollefson (2019), Cardoso et al. (2020).
[v] Kindall and Pimentel (1994), Haberl et al. (2007), Foley et al. (2011), Campbell et al. (2017).
[vi] Smil (2000b:67), Groombridge and Jenkins (2004).
[vii] Vitousek et al. (1997), Wilcove et al. (1998), Sala et al. (2000), World Resources Institute (2001), Balmford et al. (2005), Foley et al. (2005), Green et al. (2005), Benton (2007), Butler et al. (2007), Campbell et al. (2017), Gilbert, (2018), Tollefson (2019), Popkin (2022).
[viii] Water—Foley et al. (2005), Campbell et al. (2017), Richey et al. (2017), Poore and Nemecek (2018). Desertification—Geist and Lambin (2002). Nitrogen—Campbell et al. (2017). Dead zones – Poore and Nemecek (2018).
[ix] IPBES (2018).
[x] Union of Concerned Scientists (1992), Rockstrom et al. (2009), Ripple et al. (2017), IPBES (2018), Watts (2018, March 23).
[xi] Laurance (2001), Tilman et al. (2001), Folke et al. (2004), Foley et al. (2007), Kitzes et al. (2008), Rockstrom et al. (2009), Barnosky et al. (2012), Ripple et al. (2017), Steffen et al. (2018).
[xii] Boettiger and Hastings (2013).
[xiii] Barnosky et al. (2012)..
