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Deforestation and burning biomass for power in the Netherlands

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sign: https://stopbiomassacentrales.petities.nl/

Content:
00:42 Schoorl, clear-cut in the dunes of the Netherlands
01:55 biomass profit construction 
04:45 the hoax of carbon dioxide neutrality
05:50 the lie of Wiebes (min. of Economics and Climate)
07:14 day and night time harvesting in Estonia
07:40 Enviva, worlds biggest biomass producer

Prior Dutch version that went viral: https://vimeo.com/356584707

Biomassive Clear-Cut is a no-budget film by the Tropism Art & Science Foundation on the deforestation by the Dutch State Forest Administration.
“Realised with simple means, but we are urged to tell the deceptiveness of biomass.”
• director: Robin Noorda
• participants: Margot van de Stolpe, Alfred Marseille en Paul Godschalk
• voice over: Anchorette Koolman
• Federation Against Biomass
• Estonian Forest Aid
• Dogwood Alliance
• many thanks to all the participants
• sound design: ‘Echoes of Time’ Kevin MacLeod 

We have done our utmost to identify all rights holders correctly,
but if a correction or addition is required, you are requested to contact
Tropism Art & Science Collective foundation (www.tropism.eu) - © 2020

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In the time of this great, strange plague, Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world.

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In the time of this great, strange plague, Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world.

God doesn't need to come down upon a mountain, for the mountain itself is the revelation. We only have to look at it and we will know how we should live.

I would like to tell you a few things about this virus and the lessons it should teach us, all the things we should be learning. I would like to add my voice to the crowd and be heard above it.

I would like to say: fish have returned to the Venetian canals now that humans have stopped polluting them.

I would like to say: the clouds of air pollution over Italy and China have dissipated since people were prevented from causing them with their cars, planes, factories.

I would like to say: up to 80,000 premature deaths which would have been caused this way have probably been prevented in China by the shutdown of the economy.

I would like to say: carbon monoxide levels in the air above New York have collapsed by 50 percent in a single week.

I would like to say: Nature recovers swiftly when we stop our plundering of Her bounty.

I would like to say: lift your gaze, humans.

I would like to say: we can learn from this, we can change.

I am squatting in the sun on this day of the spring equinox, it is a cold sun, I am down by the pond with my children, we are watching the tadpoles squirm free of their jelly under the leafing poplars. The world is turning.

Today is the day when shafts of dawn sunlight illuminate the passages of the old Neolithic tombs at Carrowkeel, at Loughcrew, at Newgrange. Today at Stonehenge, at Wayland's Smithy, at West Kennet, all across these Atlantic islands-today is the day the light of Sky pierces the darkness of Earth. Today is the day that aérios meets chthón.

Neolithic : we think we know what this word means, but it is just another one of our categories. When we say Neolithic, we mean: forgotten people, unknown people, the first farmers. When we say Neolithic, we mean: who were they and what was their world and how was it so different from ours under this same sky?

Their world, the world of those people long supplanted, was a world of tombs; a world of great barrows raised on high downs, barrows that became the pregnant belly of Earth, barrows into which, each equinox, a shaft of sunlight would pierce, enter the womb of the Mother, seed new life each spring.

I am writing this on the day of the equinox in the time of the great, strange plague.

I would like to say, as if I could tell you: This was what they knew. That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth, without both chthón and aérios. That if you live without one or the other, you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will be only half-made, and one day it will fall over and you will fall with it.

I would like to say: well, we had it coming.

The Irish writer John Moriarty wrote a lot about chthón. His life's search was for ways to re-embed us in what we have lost, to take us around and down again, to correct the Western Error. In his autobiography, Nostos, he writes:

Chthón is the old Greek word for the Earth in its secret, dark, depths, and if there was any one word that could be said to distinguish ancient Greeks from modern Europeans, that word chthón, that would be it. Greeks had the word, we haven't. Greeks had the pieties and beliefs that go with the word, we haven't. Greeks had the wisdom that goes with the word, we haven't. Greeks had the sense of spiritual indwelling that goes with the word, we haven't. In the hope that they might continue in the goodwill of its dark but potentially beneficent powers, Greeks poured libations of wine, of honey, or barley-water sweetened with mint down into this realm, we don't.

I would like to say that we forgot all about chthón, we with our space stations and our stellar minds, our progress and our clean boots, our hand sanitizers and our aircon units, our concrete vaults and our embalming fluid; that for a short period we escaped into aérios, or thought we had, and now we are going to have to go underground again, and you can be sure we will be dragged there by the Hag against our will, and we will fight and fight as the sun comes down the shaft and we see again what is carved on the stones down there.

You can forget about chthón, but chthón won't forget about you.

I would like to say that I know what to do about all this, or what to learn. I would like to teach it to you so that you may learn too. I would like to be a prophet in a time when prophets are so sorely needed.

Unfortunately, I am not qualified for this role. I don't know anything at all, and I am learning, painfully, that this was my lesson all along.

I don't know anything at all.

My society does not know anything at all.

All the things I was brought up to label as learning  : my A-levels, my Oxford University degrees, all the books I have read and written, all the arguments I learned how to formulate, all the ideas I learned how to frame, the concepts I learned how to enunciate. All this head-work, all these modern European ways of seeing, understanding, controlling, managing, directing the world:

Nope.

None of that was it.

One of the best-known myth cycles of Celtic Ireland is the life story of the great warrior Finn McCool. Finn, in his boyhood, was apprenticed to an old woodland hermit by the name of Finnegas. Finnegas had spent his life fishing for an elusive salmon which dwelt in a pool under a group of hazel trees. The hazel trees contained a great old magic, and when their nuts dropped into the pool and were eaten by the salmon, they imparted to it all the knowledge and wisdom of the world.

Up from the earth the wisdom came, through the trees, down into the water, and Finnegas knew that if he could catch and eat the salmon then all that wisdom would be his.

One day, to his great joy, Finnegas finally caught the salmon. He laid it upon the ground and instructed Finn, his apprentice, to cook it for him while he took a walk in the woods to collect himself, to prepare for his great moment.

Cook the salmon, he instructed Finn, but eat none of it.

Yes, master, said Finn.

When Finnegas returned and looked into Finn's eyes, he saw immediately that everything had changed. He saw that the catastrophe had occurred.

Did you eat the salmon? he demanded. No, master, replied Finn. But ...

Cooking the salmon, Finn had seen a blister appear in its flesh. Perhaps wanting the meal to be perfect for Finnegas after his years of labor, he had pressed the blister down with his thumb and in the process had scalded his hand with hot oil from the cooking fish. Instinctively, he had raised his thumb to his mouth to suck away the pain.

In Finn's eyes now, Finnegas saw all the wisdom of the world, and he saw too that it was Finn, and not he, who was destined for greatness. Finnegas saw that his life's dream, his life's work, was not what he had thought it was. Everything he had learned, the moment he thought he had prepared for:

Nope.

Eat, master, said Finn, offering the fish to Finnegas, for this was your work. But Finnegas refused. No, he said. No, the fish is yours, Finn, and some part of me always knew it would be so. Yours is the work, Finn. My work was to prepare for it. Eat the fish, and use well what you learn.

Enlarge

Maybe we thought we would one day eat that salmon, you and I. Maybe we thought that if we worked hard enough, learned enough, we could catch it and learn from it, we could save the world, change the world, teach the world some lessons.

I thought that once. I probably learned it at university. Now I think that I, we, our generations, those of us brought up within the machine, brought up to breathe with it, rely on it, those of us tamed and made by it, those of us who crushed the world without thinking-the wisdom to come is not ours.

We will never escape what we have made and what made us. We are not equipped.

We are not the people who will eat the salmon. We are not Finn.

But perhaps, if we're lucky, we could be Finnegas.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, we could lay some ground for what is to come.
Yours is the work. My work was to prepare for it.
You cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. You cannot use your arguments and your concepts to access the chthón. You cannot use your Oxford University degree to build a world which regards Oxford University degrees with the bafflement they deserve to be greeted with.

It is good to learn how little I know, and how little we matter.

Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or-whisper it-we do not want to.

But Earth does, and it will.

It turns out that we were never in control at all.

Control is what civilizations do. Perhaps it is what they are. Perhaps it is their central story. If we can control the world, we can protect ourselves from the darkness it contains. We can protect ourselves from what lies under the ground, in the tombs. Who doesn't want to be protected? But who, in the end, can ever be?

Later in his autobiography, Moriarty writes that he is attempting to walk into culture. Into a culture so sure of itself that it wouldn't ever need to become a civilization.

Cultures like that have existed before. They will again. But not yet. And when they come, people like us will not make them. We can't. It is not our work.

Who knows what happens next? Maybe the virus will come and carry me away, me with my weak chest, me with my winter coughs, deepened every year by the damp Atlantic land I am grounded in, and there will be nothing to be done about this. Then my atoms and light will go back where they came from, or forward to somewhere else, and this is the way of things, and when exactly did we forget that? When exactly did we decide that our tiny little temporary mass of atoms, named and suited and given a role, pumped up with words and stories, should have any right at all to persist in its small form when all else is change and motion?

Nothing matters at all, and this is why everything does.

Look: the sun pierces the tunnel; the belly of the Mother is seeded again as another year begins. Something will be born when the summer comes. You do not need to catalogue it, understand it. You do not need to learn anything at all from it.

You can just watch it come.

Cultures that last are cultures that do not build. Cultures that last are cultures that do not seek to know what cannot be known. Cultures that last are cultures that crawl into their chthón without asking questions. Cultures that know how to be, that look at the sun on the mountain, and say, yes, this is the revelation.

People last when they do not eat apples that were not meant for them, when they do not steal fire they do not understand. People last when they sit in the sun and do nothing at all.

Let us learn from this! we say. Let us take this crisis and use it to make us better! Better people, more organized people, wiser people. Sleeker people, more efficient people. Let us become sustainable! Let us learn to tell new stories, for the old ones are broken now!

We should be saying: stories were the problem. We should be saying: no more stories, not from us.

We should be saying: break the stories, break them all. Nothing of this should be sustained.

We should be saying: no more normal. Not now, not ever.

We should be saying: we could die any moment, and this has always been true. Look at the beauty!

We should be saying: see the sunlight crawl down the passage of the tomb.

We should be saying: something is about to be illuminated.

We should be saying: watch.

Writer

Paul Kingsnorth

Artist

Jia Sung

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In the time of this great, strange plague, Paul Kingsnorth returns to the Celtic tale of Finnegas, the woodland hermit who devoted his life to catching and eating the salmon that contained the wisdom of the world. God doesn't need to come down upon a mountain, for the mountain itself is the revelation.

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Exposing the power of corporate lobbying in the EU.

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Campaign against the “New Deal For Nature” (NDFN)

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Campaign against the “New Deal For Nature” (NDFN)

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This is the corporate coup of the commons. It represents the monetisation of all nature on a global scale.

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Our natural world is facing the most serious threats she has ever known.

At the forefront is the accelerating loss of biodiversity, upon which all life depends.

Worse still, this very real threat is being marketed and exploited in order to re-boot the global economy.

The so-called "New Deal For Nature" (NDFN) is being drawn up by the world's most powerful corporations, financial institutions, and NGOs complicit in human rights abuses.

Also at the helm of the NDFN is the
World Economic Forum which entered into partnership with the United Nations on June 13, 2019.

The NDFN is due to be finalized at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference in Beijing in October 2020.

This is the corporate coup of the commons. It represents the monetization of all nature on a global scale.

Under the guise of environmental protection, the NDFN amounts to the privatization, commodification and objectification of nature, marketed with emotive imagery and holistic framing.

It also threatens further Indigenous displacement and genocide.

The NDFN would involve the total transformation of the global economic system for the creation of new markets, to salvage the failing global economic capitalist system that is destroying our shared futures and all life on Earth.

Mark Tercek, former CEO of The Nature Conservancy describes the intent best: "This reminds me of my Wall Street days. I mean, all the new markets, the high yield markets, this is how they all start."

The NDFN must be stopped. We call on all those who care about nature to speak out now.

We urge them to hold public meetings, disseminate information, form local campaign groups, hold protests, and to take whatever action is necessary to halt this monstrous and unprecedented assault on our living world by the capitalist system.

Scroll down to find out more, or visit our new website at http://nodealfornature.org/.

Five reasons to say "no" to
the New Deal For Nature

1. Conceived of by vested interests. The New Deal For Nature (NDFN) is being drawn up by the world's most powerful corporations, financial institutions, and conservation NGOs, including WWF. WWF has been complicit in human rights abuses for decades. At the helm of the NDFN is the World Economic Forum which entered into partnership with the United Nations on June 13, 2019.

2. Undemocratic.The NDFN is being negotiated without any participation from the wider public. The deal will be concluded at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference in Beijing in October 2020 without any vote by our local, regional or national parliaments, bypassing full democratic scrutiny.

3. Represents the corporate coup of the commons. During negotiations on free trade agreements such as TTIP and CETA, we saw how our governments work hand-in-hand with multinational corporations to hand over even greater power to big business, privatising more public services. Now nature is up for grabs.

Under the guise of taking action on the climate and ecological crises, what the NDFN entails, in practice, is the financialisation and privatisation of nature (defined as "ecosystem services", "natural capital", "natural climate solutions" or "nature-based solutions")-global in scale. Assigning monetary value to nature enables industries such as the fossil fuel industry to continue polluting as long as they commit to engaging in net zero activities such as offsetting carbon emissions by planting trees, or by "restoring" nature.

4. Rescues the very system destroying nature.The NDFN would involve the total transformation of the global economic system to create new markets, thereby salvaging the failing global economic capitalist system that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe.

5. Harms those best placed to protect biodiversity. The NDFN would threaten the further displacement and genocide of Indigenous and tribal peoples as global corporations and conservation NGOs seek control of their lands to maintain hegemony under the guise of tackling climate change and restoring nature. This represents a new wave of colonisation, for peoples in the Global South in particular. For further information, click

here.

​

~ The Anarchist Revelation

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Accueil | 'Non' au New Deal pour la Nature

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Our natural world is facing the most serious threats she has ever known. At the forefront is the accelerating loss of biodiversity, upon which all life depends. Worse still, this very real threat is being marketed and exploited in order to re-boot the global economy.

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History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin

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History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin

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Deep sea mining will destroy ecosystems not even discovered yet

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It's underwater-and the consequences are unimaginable.

Elicia Edijanto

Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven't spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean. Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it's a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore. Mountains surge from underwater plains, canyons slice miles deep, hot springs billow through fissures in rock, and streams of heavy brine ooze down hillsides, pooling into undersea lakes.
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These peaks and valleys are laced with most of the same minerals found on land. Scientists have documented their deposits since at least 1868, when a dredging ship pulled a chunk of iron ore from the seabed north of Russia. Five years later, another ship found similar nuggets at the bottom of the Atlantic, and two years after that, it discovered a field of the same objects in the Pacific. For more than a century, oceanographers continued to identify new minerals on the seafloor-copper, nickel, silver, platinum, gold, and even gemstones-while mining companies searched for a practical way to dig them up.

Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia; in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.

From Our January/February 2020 Issue

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Regulations for ocean mining have never been formally established. The United Nations has given that task to an obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority, which is housed in a pair of drab gray office buildings at the edge of Kingston Harbour, in Jamaica. Unlike most UN bodies, the ISA receives little oversight. It is classified as "autonomous" and falls under the direction of its own secretary general, who convenes his own general assembly once a year, at the ISA headquarters. For about a week, delegates from 168 member states pour into Kingston from around the world, gathering at a broad semicircle of desks in the auditorium of the Jamaica Conference Centre. Their assignment is not to prevent mining on the seafloor but to mitigate its damage-selecting locations where extraction will be permitted, issuing licenses to mining companies, and drafting the technical and environmental standards of an underwater Mining Code.

Writing the code has been difficult. ISA members have struggled to agree on a regulatory framework. While they debate the minutiae of waste disposal and ecological preservation, the ISA has granted "exploratory" permits around the world. Some 30 mineral contractors already hold licenses to work in sweeping regions of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. One site, about 2,300 miles east of Florida, contains the largest system of underwater hot springs ever discovered, a ghostly landscape of towering white spires that scientists call the "Lost City." Another extends across 4,500 miles of the Pacific, or roughly a fifth of the circumference of the planet. The companies with permits to explore these regions have raised breathtaking sums of venture capital. They have designed and built experimental vehicles, lowered them to the bottom, and begun testing methods of dredging and extraction while they wait for the ISA to complete the Mining Code and open the floodgates to commercial extraction.

At full capacity, these companies expect to dredge thousands of square miles a year. Their collection vehicles will creep across the bottom in systematic rows, scraping through the top five inches of the ocean floor. Ships above will draw thousands of pounds of sediment through a hose to the surface, remove the metallic objects, known as polymetallic nodules, and then flush the rest back into the water. Some of that slurry will contain toxins such as mercury and lead, which could poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles. The rest will drift in the current until it settles in nearby ecosystems. An early study by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences predicted that each mining ship will release about 2 million cubic feet of discharge every day, enough to fill a freight train that is 16 miles long. The authors called this "a conservative estimate," since other projections had been three times as high. By any measure, they concluded, "a very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species."

At the ISA meeting in 2019, delegates gathered to review a draft of the code. Officials hoped the document would be ratified for implementation in 2020. I flew down to observe the proceedings on a balmy morning and found the conference center teeming with delegates. A staff member ushered me through a maze of corridors to meet the secretary general, Michael Lodge, a lean British man in his 50s with cropped hair and a genial smile. He waved me toward a pair of armchairs beside a bank of windows overlooking the harbor, and we sat down to discuss the Mining Code, what it will permit and prohibit, and why the United Nations is preparing to mobilize the largest mining operation in the history of the world.

Until recently, marine biologists paid little attention to the deep sea. They believed its craggy knolls and bluffs were essentially barren. The traditional model of life on Earth relies on photosynthesis: plants on land and in shallow water harness sunlight to grow biomass, which is devoured by creatures small and large, up the food chain to Sunday dinner. By this account, every animal on the planet would depend on plants to capture solar energy. Since plants disappear a few hundred feet below sea level, and everything goes dark a little farther down, there was no reason to expect a thriving ecosystem in the deep. Maybe a light snow of organic debris would trickle from the surface, but it would be enough to sustain only a few wayward aquatic drifters.

That theory capsized in 1977, when a pair of oceanographers began poking around the Pacific in a submersible vehicle. While exploring a range of underwater mountains near the Galápagos Islands, they spotted a hydrothermal vent about 8,000 feet deep. No one had ever seen an underwater hot spring before, though geologists suspected they might exist. As the oceanographers drew close to the vent, they made an even more startling discovery: A large congregation of animals was camped around the vent opening. These were not the feeble scavengers that one expected so far down. They were giant clams, purple octopuses, white crabs, and 10-foot tube worms, whose food chain began not with plants but with organic chemicals floating in the warm vent water.

For biologists, this was more than curious. It shook the foundation of their field. If a complex ecosystem could emerge in a landscape devoid of plants, evolution must be more than a heliological affair. Life could appear in perfect darkness, in blistering heat and a broth of noxious compounds-an environment that would extinguish every known creature on Earth. "That was the discovery event," an evolutionary biologist named Timothy Shank told me. "It changed our view about the boundaries of life. Now we know that the methane lakes on one of Jupiter's moons are probably laden with species, and there is no doubt life on other planetary bodies."

Shank was 12 years old that winter, a bookish kid in North Carolina. The early romance of the space age was already beginning to fade, but the discovery of life near hydrothermal vents would inspire a blossoming of oceanography that captured his imagination. As he completed a degree in marine biology, then a doctorate in ecology and evolution, he consumed reports from scientists around the world who found new vents brimming with unknown species. They appeared far below the surface-the deepest known vent is about three miles down-while another geologic feature, known as a "cold seep," gives rise to life in chemical pools even deeper on the seafloor. No one knew how far down the vents and seeps might be found, but Shank decided to focus his research on the deepest waters of the Earth.

Scientists divide the ocean into five layers of depth. Closest to the surface is the "sunlight zone," where plants thrive; then comes the "twilight zone," where darkness falls; next is the "midnight zone," where some creatures generate their own light; and then there's a frozen flatland known simply as "the abyss." Oceanographers have visited these layers in submersible vehicles for half a century, but the final layer is difficult to reach. It is known as the "hadal zone," in reference to Hades, the ancient Greek god of the underworld, and it includes any water that is at least 6,000 meters below the surface-or, in a more Vernian formulation, that is 20,000 feet under the sea. Because the hadal zone is so deep, it is usually associated with ocean trenches, but several deepwater plains have sections that cross into hadal depth.

Deepwater plains are also home to the polymetallic nodules that explorers first discovered a century and a half ago. Mineral companies believe that nodules will be easier to mine than other seabed deposits. To remove the metal from a hydrothermal vent or an underwater mountain, they will have to shatter rock in a manner similar to land-based extraction. Nodules are isolated chunks of rocks on the seabed that typically range from the size of a golf ball to that of a grapefruit, so they can be lifted from the sediment with relative ease. Nodules also contain a distinct combination of minerals. While vents and ridges are flecked with precious metal, such as silver and gold, the primary metals in nodules are copper, manganese, nickel, and cobalt-crucial materials in modern batteries. As iPhones and laptops and electric vehicles spike demand for those metals, many people believe that nodules are the best way to migrate from fossil fuels to battery power.

The ISA has issued more mining licenses for nodules than for any other seabed deposit. Most of these licenses authorize contractors to exploit a single deepwater plain. Known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, or CCZ, it extends across 1.7 million square miles between Hawaii and Mexico-wider than the continental United States. When the Mining Code is approved, more than a dozen companies will accelerate their explorations in the CCZ to industrial-scale extraction. Their ships and robots will use vacuum hoses to suck nodules and sediment from the seafloor, extracting the metal and dumping the rest into the water. How many ecosystems will be covered by that sediment is impossible to predict. Ocean currents fluctuate regularly in speed and direction, so identical plumes of slurry will travel different distances, in different directions, on different days. The impact of a sediment plume also depends on how it is released. Slurry that is dumped near the surface will drift farther than slurry pumped back to the bottom. The circulating draft of the Mining Code does not specify a depth of discharge. The ISA has adopted an estimate that sediment dumped near the surface will travel no more than 62 miles from the point of release, but many experts believe the slurry could travel farther. A recent survey of academic research compiled by Greenpeace concluded that mining waste "could travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers."

Like many deepwater plains, the CCZ has sections that lie at hadal depth. Its eastern boundary is marked by a hadal trench. No one knows whether mining sediment will drift into the hadal zone. As the director of a hadal-research program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, Timothy Shank has been studying the deep sea for almost 30 years. In 2014, he led an international mission to complete the first systematic study of the hadal ecosystem-but even Shank has no idea how mining could affect the hadal zone, because he still has no idea what it contains. If you want a sense of how little we know about the deep ocean, how difficult it is to study, and what's at stake when industry leaps before science, Shank's research is a good place to start.

I first met Shank about seven years ago, when he was organizing the international mission to survey the hadal zone. He had put together a three-year plan to visit every ocean trench: sending a robotic vehicle to explore their features, record every contour of topography, and collect specimens from each. The idea was either dazzling or delusional; I wasn't sure which. Scientists have enough trouble measuring the seabed in shallower waters. They have used ropes and chains and acoustic instruments to record depth for more than a century, yet 85 percent of the global seabed remains unmapped-and the hadal is far more difficult to map than other regions, since it's nearly impossible to see.

If it strikes you as peculiar that modern vehicles cannot penetrate the deepest ocean, take a moment to imagine what it means to navigate six or seven miles below the surface. Every 33 feet of depth exerts as much pressure as the atmosphere of the Earth, so when you are just 66 feet down, you are under three times as much pressure as a person on land, and when you are 300 feet down, you're subjected to 10 atmospheres of pressure. Tube worms living beside hydrothermal vents near the Galápagos are compressed by about 250 atmospheres, and mining vehicles in the CCZ have to endure twice as much-but they are still just half as far down as the deepest trenches.

Building a vehicle to function at 36,000 feet, under 2 million pounds of pressure per square foot, is a task of interstellar-type engineering. It's a good deal more rigorous than, say, bolting together a rover to skitter across Mars. Picture the schematic of an iPhone case that can be smashed with a sledgehammer more or less constantly, from every angle at once, without a trace of damage, and you're in the ballpark-or just consider the fact that more people have walked on the moon than have reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest place on Earth.
Read: Deep dive on the life and times of ocean rovers
The first two people descended in 1960, using a contraption owned by the U.S. Navy. It seized and shuddered on the descent. Its window cracked as the pressure mounted, and it landed with so much force that it kicked up a cloud of silt that obscured the view for the entire 20 minutes the pair remained on the bottom. Half a century passed before the film director James Cameron repeated their journey, in 2012. Unlike the swaggering billionaire Richard Branson, who was planning to dive the Mariana in a cartoonish vehicle shaped like a fighter jet, Cameron is well versed in ocean science and engineering. He was closely involved in the design of his submarine, and sacrificed stylistic flourishes for genuine innovations, including a new type of foam that maintains buoyancy at full ocean depth. Even so, his vessel lurched and bucked on the way down. He finally managed to land, and spent a couple of hours collecting sediment samples before he noticed that hydraulic fluid was leaking onto the window. The vehicle's mechanical arm began to fail, and all of the thrusters on its right side went out-so he returned to the surface early, canceled his plan for additional dives, and donated the broken sub to Woods Hole.

The most recent descent of the Mariana Trench was completed last spring by a private-equity investor named Victor Vescovo, who spent $48 million on a submarine that was even more sophisticated than Cameron's. Vescovo was on a personal quest to reach the bottom of the five deepest trenches in the world, a project he called "Five Deeps." He was able to complete the project, making multiple dives of the Mariana-but if his achievement represents a leap forward in hadal exploration, it also serves as a reminder of how impenetrable the trenches remain: a region that can be visited only by the most committed multimillionaire, Hollywood celebrity, or special military program, and only in isolated dives to specific locations that reveal little about the rest of the hadal environment. That environment is composed of 33 trenches and 13 shallower formations called troughs. Its total geographic area is about two-thirds the size of Australia. It is the least examined ecosystem of its size on Earth.

Without a vehicle to explore the hadal zone, scientists have been forced to use primitive methods. The most common technique has scarcely changed in more than a century: Expedition ships chug across hundreds of miles to reach a precise location, then lower a trap, wait a few hours, and reel it up to see what's inside. The limitations of this approach are self-evident, if not comic. It's like dangling a birdcage out the door of an airplane crossing Africa at 36,000 feet, and then trying to divine, from the mangled bodies of insects, what sort of animals roam the savanna.

All of which is to say that Shank's plan to explore every trench in the world was somewhere between audacious and absurd, but he had assembled a team of the world's leading experts, secured ship time for extensive missions, and spent 10 years supervising the design of the most advanced robotic vehicle ever developed for deepwater navigation. Called Nereus, after a mythological sea god, it could dive alone-charting a course amid rocky cliffs, measuring their contours with a doppler scanner, recording video with high-definition cameras, and collecting samples-or it could be linked to the deck of a ship with fiber-optic cable, allowing Shank to monitor its movement on a computer in the ship's control room, boosting the thrusters to steer this way and that, piercing the darkness with its headlamps, and maneuvering a mechanical claw to gather samples in the deep.

I reached out to Shank in 2013, a few months before the expedition began. I wanted to write about the project, and he agreed to let me join him on a later leg. When his ship departed, in the spring of 2014, I followed online as it pursued a course to the Kermadec Trench, in the Pacific, and Shank began sending Nereus on a series of dives. On the first, it descended to 6,000 meters, a modest target on the boundary of the hadal zone. On the second, Shank pushed it to 7,000 meters; on the third to 8,000; and on the fourth to 9,000. He knew that diving to 10,000 meters would be a crucial threshold. It is the last full kilometer of depth on Earth: No trench is believed to be deeper than 11,000 meters. To commemorate this final increment and the successful beginning of his project, he attached a pair of silver bracelets to the frame of Nereus, planning to give them to his daughters when he returned home. Then he dropped the robot in the water and retreated to the control room to monitor its movements.

On-screen, blue water gave way to darkness as Nereus descended, its headlamps illuminating specks of debris suspended in the water. It was 10 meters shy of the 10,000-meter mark when suddenly the screen went dark. There was an audible gasp in the control room, but no one panicked. Losing the video feed on a dive was relatively common. Maybe the fiber-optic tether had snapped, or the software had hit a glitch. Whatever it was, Nereus had been programmed to respond with emergency measures. It could back out of a jam, shed expendable weight, guide itself to the surface, and send a homing beacon to help Shank's team retrieve it.

As the minutes ticked by, Shank waited for those measures to activate, but none did. "There's no sound, no implosion, no chime," he told me afterward. "Just ... black." He paced the deck through the night, staring across the Stygian void for signs of Nereus. The following day he finally saw debris surface, and as he watched it rise, he felt his project sinking. Ten years of planning, a $14 million robot, and an international team of experts-it had all collapsed under the crushing pressure of hadal depths.

"I'm not over it yet," he told me two years later. We were standing on the deck of another ship, 100 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, where Shank was preparing to launch a new robot. The vehicle was no replacement for Nereus. It was a rectilinear hunk of metal and plastic, about five feet high, three feet wide, and nine feet long. Red on top, with a silvery bottom and three fans mounted at the rear, it could have been mistaken for a child's backyard spaceship. Shank had no illusion that it was capable of hadal exploration. Since the loss of Nereus, there was no vehicle on Earth that could navigate the deepest trenches-Cameron's was no longer in service, Branson's didn't work, and Vescovo's hadn't yet been built.
Read: Goodbye forever, beloved deep-sea robot

Shank's new robot did have a few impressive features. Its navigational system was even more advanced than the one in Nereus, and he hoped it would be able to maneuver in a trenchlike environment with even greater precision-but its body was not designed to withstand hadal pressure. In fact, it had never descended more than a few dozen feet below the surface, and Shank knew that it would take years to build something that could survive at the bottom of a trench. What had seemed, just two years earlier, like the beginning of a new era in hadal science was developing a quixotic aspect, and, at 50, Shank could not help wondering if it was madness to spend another decade of his life on a dream that seemed to be drifting further from his reach. But he was driven by a lifelong intuition that he still couldn't shake. Shank believes that access to the trenches will reveal one of the greatest discoveries in history: a secret ecosystem bursting with creatures that have been cloistered for eternity in the deep.

"I would be shocked if there aren't vents and seeps in the trenches," he told me as we bobbed on the water that day in 2016. "They'll be there, and they will be teeming with life. I think we'll be looking at hundreds or thousands of species we haven't seen before, and some of them are going to be huge." He pictured the hadal as an alien world that followed its own evolutionary course, the unimaginable pressure creating a menagerie of inconceivable beasts. "My time is running out to find them," he said. "Maybe my legacy will be to push things forward so that somebody else can. We have a third of our ocean that we still can't explore. It's embarrassing. It's pathetic."

While scientists struggle to reach the deep ocean, human impact has already gotten there. Most of us are familiar with the menu of damages to coastal water: overfishing, oil spills, and pollution, to name a few. What can be lost in the discussion of these issues is how they reverberate far beneath.

Take fishing. The relentless pursuit of cod in the early 20th century decimated its population from Newfoundland to New England, sending hungry shoppers in search of other options. As shallow-water fish such as haddock, grouper, and sturgeon joined the cod's decline, commercial fleets around the world pushed into deeper water. Until the 1970s, the slimehead fish lived in relative obscurity, patrolling the slopes of underwater mountains in water up to 6,000 feet deep. Then a consortium of fishermen pushed the Food and Drug Administration to change its name, and the craze for "orange roughy" began-only to fade again in the early 2000s, when the fish was on a path toward extinction itself.

Environmental damage from oil production is also migrating into deeper water. Disturbing photographs of oil-drenched beaches have captured public attention since at least 1989, when the Exxon Valdez tanker crashed into a reef and leaked 11 million gallons into an Alaskan sound. It would remain the largest spill in U.S. water until 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon explosion spewed 210 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. But a recent study revealed that the release of chemicals to disperse the spill was twice as toxic as the oil to animals living 3,000 feet below the surface.

Maybe the greatest alarm in recent years has followed the discovery of plastic floating in the ocean. Scientists estimate that 17 billion pounds of polymer are flushed into the ocean each year, and substantially more of it collects on the bottom than on the surface. Just as a bottle that falls from a picnic table will roll downhill to a gulch, trash on the seafloor gradually makes its way toward deepwater plains and hadal trenches. After his expedition to the trenches, Victor Vescovo returned with the news that garbage had beaten him there. He found a plastic bag at the bottom of one trench, a beverage can in another, and when he reached the deepest point in the Mariana, he watched an object with a large S on the side float past his window. Trash of all sorts is collecting in the hadal-Spam tins, Budweiser cans, rubber gloves, even a mannequin head.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the impact of trash on aquatic life. Fish and seabirds that mistake grocery bags for prey will glut their stomachs with debris that their digestive system can't expel. When a young whale drifted ashore and died in the Philippines in 2019, an autopsy revealed that its belly was packed with 88 pounds of plastic bags, nylon rope, and netting. Two weeks later, another whale beached in Sardinia, its stomach crammed with 48 pounds of plastic dishes and tubing. Certain types of coral like to eat plastic more than food. They will gorge themselves like a kid on Twinkies instead of eating what they need to survive. Microbes that flourish on plastic have ballooned in number, replacing other species as their population explodes in a polymer ocean.

Read: A troubling discovery in the deepest ocean trenches
If it seems trivial to worry about the population statistics of bacteria in the ocean, you may be interested to know that ocean microbes are essential to human and planetary health. About a third of the carbon dioxide generated on land is absorbed by underwater organisms, including one species that was just discovered in the CCZ in 2018. The researchers who found that bacterium have no idea how it removes carbon from the environment, but their findings show that it may account for up to 10 percent of the volume that is sequestered by oceans every year.

Many of the things we do know about ocean microbes, we know thanks to Craig Venter, the genetic scientist most famous for starting a small company in the 1990s to compete with the Human Genome Project. The two-year race between his company and the international collaboration generated endless headlines and culminated in a joint announcement at the White House to declare a tie. But Venter's interest wasn't limited to human DNA. He wanted to learn the language of genetics in order to create synthetic microbes with practical features. After his work on the human genome, he spent two years sailing around the world, lowering bottles into the ocean to collect bacteria and viruses from the water. By the time he returned, he had discovered hundreds of thousands of new species, and his lab in Maryland proceeded to sequence their DNA-identifying more than 60 million unique genes, which is about 2,500 times the number in humans. Then he and his team began to scour those genes for properties they could use to make custom bugs.

Venter now lives in a hypermodern house on a bluff in Southern California. Chatting one evening on the sofa beside the door to his walk-in humidor and wine cellar, he described how saltwater microbes could help solve the most urgent problems of modern life. One of the bacteria he pulled from the ocean consumes carbon and excretes methane. Venter would like to integrate its genes into organisms designed to live in smokestacks and recycle emissions. "They could scrub the plant's CO2 and convert it to methane that can be burned as fuel in the same plant," he said.

Venter was also studying bacteria that could be useful in medicine. Microbes produce a variety of antibiotic compounds, which they deploy as weapons against their rivals. Many of those compounds can also be used to kill the pathogens that infect humans. Nearly all of the antibiotic drugs on the market were initially derived from microorganisms, but they are losing efficacy as pathogens evolve to resist them. "We have new drugs in development," Matt McCarthy, an infectious-disease specialist at Weill Cornell Medical College, told me, "but most of them are slight variations on the ones we already had. The problem with that is, they're easy for bacteria to resist, because they're similar to something bacteria have developed resistance to in the past. What we need is an arsenal of new compounds."

Venter pointed out that ocean microbes produce radically different compounds from those on land. "There are more than a million microbes per milliliter of seawater," he said, "so the chance of finding new antibiotics in the marine environment is high." McCarthy agreed. "The next great drug may be hidden somewhere deep in the water," he said. "We need to get to the deep-sea organisms, because they're making compounds that we've never seen before. We may find drugs that could be used to treat gout, or rheumatoid arthritis, or all kinds of other conditions."

Marine biologists have never conducted a comprehensive survey of microbes in the hadal trenches. The conventional tools of water sampling cannot function at extreme depth, and engineers are just beginning to develop tools that can. Microbial studies of the deepwater plains are slightly further along-and scientists have recently discovered that the CCZ is unusually flush with life. "It's one of the most biodiverse areas that we've ever sampled on the abyssal plains," a University of Hawaii oceanographer named Jeff Drazen told me. Most of those microbes, he said, live on the very same nodules that miners are planning to extract. "When you lift them off the seafloor, you're removing a habitat that took 10 million years to grow." Whether or not those microbes can be found in other parts of the ocean is unknown. "A lot of the less mobile organisms," Drazen said, "may not be anywhere else."

Drazen is an academic ecologist; Venter is not. Venter has been accused of trying to privatize the human genome, and many of his critics believe his effort to create new organisms is akin to playing God. He clearly doesn't have an aversion to profit-driven science, and he's not afraid to mess with nature-yet when I asked him about the prospect of mining in deep water, he flared with alarm. "We should be very careful about mining in the ocean," he said. "These companies should be doing rigorous microbial surveys before they do anything else. We only know a fraction of the microbes down there, and it's a terrible idea to screw with them before we know what they are and what they do."

Mining executives insist that their work in the ocean is misunderstood. Some adopt a swaggering bravado and portray the industry as a romantic frontier adventure. As the manager of exploration at Nautilus Minerals, John Parianos, told me recently, "This is about every man and his dog filled with the excitement of the moon landing. It's like Scott going to the South Pole, or the British expeditions who got entombed by ice."

Nautilus occupies a curious place in the mining industry. It is one of the oldest companies at work on the seafloor, but also the most precarious. Although it has a permit from the government of Papua New Guinea to extract metal from offshore vents, many people on the nearby island of New Ireland oppose the project, which will destroy part of their marine habitat. Local and international activists have whipped up negative publicity, driving investors away and sending the company into financial ruin. Nautilus stock once traded for $4.45. It is now less than a penny per share.

Parianos acknowledged that Nautilus was in crisis, but he dismissed the criticism as naive. Seabed minerals are no different from any other natural resource, he said, and the use of natural resources is fundamental to human progress. "Look around you: Everything that's not grown is mined," he told me. "That's why they called it the Stone Age-because it's when they started mining! And mining is what made our lives better than what they had before the Stone Age." Parianos emphasized that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which created the International Seabed Authority, promised "to ensure effective protection for the marine environment" from the effects of mining. "It's not like the Law of the Sea says: Go out and ravage the marine environment," he said. "But it also doesn't say that you can only explore the ocean for science, and not to make money."

The CEO of a company called DeepGreen spoke in loftier terms. DeepGreen is both a product of Nautilus Minerals and a reaction to it. The company was founded in 2011 by David Heydon, who had founded Nautilus a decade earlier, and its leadership is full of former Nautilus executives and investors. As a group, they have sought to position DeepGreen as a company whose primary interest in mining the ocean is saving the planet. They have produced a series of lavish brochures to explain the need for a new source of battery metals, and Gerard Barron, the CEO, speaks with animated fervor about the virtues of nodule extraction.

His case for seabed mining is straightforward. Barron believes that the world will not survive if we continue burning fossil fuels, and the transition to other forms of power will require a massive increase in battery production. He points to electric cars: the batteries for a single vehicle require 187 pounds of copper, 123 pounds of nickel, and 15 pounds each of manganese and cobalt. On a planet with 1 billion cars, the conversion to electric vehicles would require several times more metal than all existing land-based supplies-and harvesting that metal from existing sources already takes a human toll. Most of the world's cobalt, for example, is mined in the southeastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where tens of thousands of young children work in labor camps, inhaling clouds of toxic dust during shifts up to 24 hours long. Terrestrial mines for nickel and copper have their own litany of environmental harms. Because the ISA is required to allocate some of the profits from seabed mining to developing countries, the industry will provide nations that rely on conventional mining with revenue that doesn't inflict damage on their landscapes and people.

Whether DeepGreen represents a shift in the values of mining companies or merely a shift in marketing rhetoric is a valid question-but the company has done things that are difficult to dismiss. It has developed technology that returns sediment discharge to the seafloor with minimal disruption, and Barron is a regular presence at ISA meetings, where he advocates for regulations to mandate low-impact discharge. DeepGreen has also limited its operations to nodule mining, and Barron openly criticizes the effort by his friends at Nautilus to demolish a vent that is still partially active. "The guys at Nautilus, they're doing their thing, but I don't think it's the right thing for the planet," he told me. "We need to be doing things that have a low impact environmentally."

By the time I sat down with Michael Lodge, the secretary general of the ISA, I had spent a lot of time thinking about the argument that executives like Barron are making. It seemed to me that seabed mining presents an epistemological problem. The harms of burning fossil fuels and the impact of land-based mining are beyond dispute, but the cost of plundering the ocean is impossible to know. What creatures are yet to be found on the seafloor? How many indispensable cures? Is there any way to calculate the value of a landscape we know virtually nothing about? The world is full of uncertain choices, of course, but the contrast between options is rarely so stark: the crisis of climate change and immiserated labor on the one hand, immeasurable risk and potential on the other.

I thought of the hadal zone. It may never be harmed by mining. Sediment from dredging on the abyssal plains could settle long before it reaches the edge of a trench-but the total obscurity of the hadal should remind us of how little we know. It extends from 20,000 feet below sea level to roughly 36,000 feet, leaving nearly half of the ocean's depths beyond our reach. When I visited Timothy Shank at Woods Hole a few months ago, he showed me a prototype of his latest robot. He and his lead engineer, Casey Machado, had built it with foam donated by James Cameron and with support from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose engineers are hoping to send a vehicle to explore the aqueous moon of Jupiter. It was a tiny machine, known as Orpheus, that could steer through trenches, recording topography and taking samples, but little else. He would have no way to direct its movements or monitor its progress via a video feed. It occurred to me that if Shank had given up the dream of true exploration in the trenches, decades could pass before we know what the hadal zone contains.

Mining companies may promise to extract seabed metal with minimal damage to the surrounding environment, but to believe this requires faith. It collides with the force of human history, the law of unintended consequences, and the inevitability of mistakes. I wanted to understand from Michael Lodge how a UN agency had made the choice to accept that risk.

"Why is it necessary to mine the ocean?" I asked him.

He paused for a moment, furrowing his brow. "I don't know why you use the word necessary," he said. "Why is it 'necessary' to mine anywhere? You mine where you find metal."

I reminded him that centuries of mining on land have exacted a devastating price: tropical islands denuded, mountaintops sheared off, groundwater contaminated, and species eradicated. Given the devastation of land-based mining, I asked, shouldn't we hesitate to mine the sea?

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"I don't believe people should worry that much," he said with a shrug. "There's certainly an impact in the area that's mined, because you are creating an environmental disturbance, but we can find ways to manage that." I pointed out that the impact from sediment could travel far beyond the mining zone, and he responded, "Sure, that's the other major environmental concern. There is a sediment plume, and we need to manage it. We need to understand how the plume operates, and there are experiments being done right now that will help us." As he spoke, I realized that for Lodge, none of these questions warranted reflection-or anyway, he didn't see reflection as part of his job. He was there to facilitate mining, not to question the wisdom of doing so.

We chatted for another 20 minutes, then I thanked him for his time and wandered back to the assembly room, where delegates were delivering canned speeches about marine conservation and the promise of battery technology. There was still some debate about certain details of the Mining Code-technical requirements, oversight procedures, the profit-sharing model-so the vote to ratify it would have to wait another year. I noticed a group of scientists watching from the back. They were members of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, which formed in 2013 to confront threats to the deepwater environment. One was Jeff Drazen. He'd flown in from Hawaii and looked tired. I sent him a text, and we stepped outside.

A few tables and chairs were scattered in the courtyard, and we sat down to talk. I asked how he felt about the delay of the Mining Code-delegates are planning to review it again this summer, and large-scale mining could begin after that.
This article appears in the January/February 2020 print edition with the headline "20,000 Feet Under the Sea." Financial support for this article has been provided by the 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation.
Drazen rolled his eyes and sighed. "There's a Belgian team in the CCZ doing a component test right now," he said. "They're going to drive a vehicle around on the seafloor and spew a bunch of mud up. So these things are already happening. We're about to make one of the biggest transformations that humans have ever made to the surface of the planet. We're going to strip-mine a massive habitat, and once it's gone, it isn't coming back."

Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. His most recent book is Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II.

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History's Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin

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It's underwater-and the consequences are unimaginable. Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven't spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean. Many people imagine the seabed to be a vast expanse of sand, but it's a jagged and dynamic landscape with as much variation as any place onshore.

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To save honey bees we need to design them new hives

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To save honey bees we need to design them new hives

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Man-made hives allow too much heat and humidity loss

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Honey bees are under extreme pressure. Beekeepers in the US have been losing and then replacing an average of 40% of their honey bee colonies every year since 2010, a rate that is probably unsustainable and would be unacceptable in other kinds of husbandry. The biggest contributor to this decline is viruses spread by a parasite, Varroa Destructor. But this isn't a natural situation. The parasite is spread by beekeeping practices, including keeping the bees in conditions that are very different from their natural abode of tree hollows.

A few years ago, I demonstrated that the heat losses in man-made honey bee hives are many times greater than those in natural nests. Now, using engineering techniques more commonly found probing industrial problems, I've shown that the current design of man-made hives also creates lower humidity levels that favour the Varroa parasite.

Natural nests inside tree cavities create high humidity levels in which honey bees thrive and which prevent Varroa from breeding. So if we can redesign beekeeper hives to recreate these conditions, we could help stop the parasite and give honey bees a chance to recover.

The life of the honey bee colony is intimately entwined with its home. We can see this from the sophisticated way honey bees choose nests of the correct sizes and properties, and how hard they work to modify them. In fact, the nest can be seen as part of the honey bee itself, a concept that in biology is known as an " extended phenotype ", which refers to all the ways a creature's genes affect the world.

Perhaps the most common example of an extended phenotype is that of the beaver, which shapes its environment by controlling the flow of water with dams. Nests enable honey bees to similarly adjust their environment by controlling the flow of two fluids - air and water vapour - plus something that acts like a fluid - heat.

The honey bees select a tree hollow with an entrance at the bottom that makes rising hot air inside the nest less likely to escape. They then modify it by applying an antibacterial vapour-retarding sealant of tree resin over the inside walls and any small holes or cracks. This further prevents any warm air leaks and helps maintain the right level of water vapour. Inside the nest, the bees build a honeycomb containing thousands of cells, each of which provides an insulated microclimate for growing larvae (baby bees) or making honey.

Unnatural designs

Despite the importance of nests to honey bees, the hives we build them bear little resemblance and have few of the properties of the natural tree nests European honey bees evolved with. In the 21st century, we're still using hives designed in the 1930s and 1940s, based on ideas from the 1850s. Natural nests were only scientifically surveyed as recently as 1974 and research into their physical properties only began in 2012.

Man-made hives are squat and squarish (for example 45cm high), constructed from thin wood (under 2cm thick) with large entrances (around 60cm²) and often large openings of wire mesh underneath. They were designed to be cheap and for beekeepers to easily access the bees and remove the honey. In contrast, European honey bees evolved with natural tree nests that are on average tall (around 150cm), narrow (20cm) with thick walls (15cm) and small entrances (7cm²).

In order to assess how well man-made hives recreate the conditions of natural nests, I needed to measure the flow of fluids (air, water vapour and heat) around them. To do that, I turned to an aspect of physical science and engineering called thermofluids, the study of liquids, gases and solids of combustion, and changes of state, mass and energy movement.

In the honey bee nest, this means the "combustion" of sugars in honey and nectar, the evaporation and condensation of water, and air flow through the nest. It also includes everything being transported by the honey bees through the entrance or leaking through the walls.

The various barriers that honey bee nests create can be used as convenient boundaries in mathematical models of the energy needed and humidity produced inside the nest. My new study combines these models with data from experimental research on the thermal properties of honey bee nests and hives and behavioural studies on how honey bees ventilate their nest.

This enabled me to compare the average humidity in man-made hives and tree nests with that needed by honey bees and their parasites. I found that most man-made hives have seven times higher heat loss and eight times bigger entrance size than tree nests. This creates the lower humidity levels that favour the parasite.

My research shows the role of the honey bee nest is clearly far more sophisticated than just simple shelter. Simple changes to hive design in order to lower heat loss and increase humidity, for example using smaller entrances and thicker walls, could reduce the stress on the honey bee colonies caused by Varroa Destructor. We already know that simply building hives from polystyrene instead of wood can significantly increase the survival rate and honey yield of the bees. More research into the thermofluidic complexity of nests would allow us to design the optimal hives that balance the needs of honey bees with their human keepers.
This article has been amended to make clear that the average 40% of US honey bee colonies lost each year are replaced.

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To save honey bees we need to design them new hives

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Honey bees are under extreme pressure. Beekeepers in the US have been losing and then replacing an average of 40% of their honey bee colonies every year since 2010, a rate that is probably unsustainable and would be unacceptable in other kinds of husbandry.

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Light pollution key factor in insect declines

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Light pollution key factor in insect declines

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Artificial light at night is badly affecting insects

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Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.

Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects' lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.

"We strongly believe artificial light at night - in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change - is driving insect declines," the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. "We posit here that artificial light at night is another important - but often overlooked - bringer of the insect apocalypse."

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. "Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately," they said.

Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: "Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting - ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives."

Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, and the first global scientific review, published in February, said widespread declines threatened to cause a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems".

The latest review says: "Insects around the world are rapidly declining. Their absence would have devastating consequences for life on this planet."

There are thought to be millions of insect species, most still unknown to science, and about half are nocturnal. Those active in the day may also be disturbed by light at night when they are at rest.

Reproduction

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, notes that light has long been used deliberately by farmers to suppress insects. But as human infrastructure has expanded, and the cost of lighting has fallen, light pollution has come to affect a quarter of the world's land surface.

The most familiar impact of light pollution is moths flapping around a bulb, mistaking it for the moon. One-third of insects trapped in the orbit of such lights die before morning, according to work cited in the review, either through exhaustion or being eaten.

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A privet hawk moth in flight at night in Hungary Photograph: Blickwinkel/Alamy

Recent research in the UK found greater losses of moths at light-polluted sites than dark ones. Vehicle headlights pose a deadly moving hazard, and this fatal attraction has been estimated to result in 100 billion insect deaths per summer in Germany.

Artificial light also hinders insects finding a mate in some species, the review found, most obviously in firefly beetles, which exchange bioluminescent signals during courtship.

Development

Some insects use the polarisation of light to find the water they need to breed, as light waves line up after reflecting from a smooth surface. But artificial light can scupper this. "Mayflies live for only one day, so they come out and look for polarised light. They find it - but from asphalt - lay their eggs there, and they all die. That's a good way to knock out an entire population in 24 hours."

The development of juvenile insects, such as field crickets, also has been shown to be affected by light pollution, which changes the perceived length of the day and night.

The review found the search for food is affected by light pollution. Insects that avoid light, for example weta, the giant flightless crickets found in New Zealand, spend less time foraging in light-polluted areas.

Insects are important prey for many species, but light pollution can tip the balance in favour of the predator if it traps insects around lights. Spiders, bats, rats, shorebirds, geckos and cane toads have all been found feeding around artificial lights. Such increases in predation risk was likely to cause the rapid extinction of affected species, the researchers said.

The researchers said light pollution is particularly hard for insects to deal with. Most human-caused threats to insects have natural analogues, such as climate change and invasive species, meaning some adaptation may take place. But the daily cycle of light and dark had remained constant for all of evolutionary time, they said.

However, light pollution was the easiest of all the threats to insects to deal with, Seymoure said. "Once you turn off a light, it is gone. You don't have to go and clean up, like you do with most pollutants. I am not saying we need to get rid of light at night, I think we just need to use it wisely."

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Thousands of dancing fireflies in Japan. Photograph: Kei Nomiyama/Barcroft Images

Simply turning off lights that are not needed is the most obvious action, he said, while making lights motion-activated also cuts light pollution. Shading lights so only the area needed is illuminated is important, as is avoiding blue-white lights, which interfere with daily rhythms. LED lights also offer hope as they can be easily tuned to avoid harmful colours and flicker rates.

"The evidence that light pollution has profound and serious impacts on ecosystems is overwhelmingly strong," said Matt Shardlow, the chief executive of the conservation charity Buglife. "It is imperative that society now takes substantial steps to make the environment safer for insects.

"A national light-reduction target, enforceable in law, would be the most appropriate next step." He said new UK government light-pollution guidance failed to take into account the insect decline crisis.

Prof Nigel Raine, a pollination expert at Guelph University in Canada who is not involved in the review, said: "Light pollution could have significant ramifications at the insect population, species or community level."

He said more attention should be paid to the issue by scientists: "But it might be too soon to say the impacts are as significant as other stressors."

Seymoure's team said there had not been more research on light pollution and insects because of diurnal bias - a preference among ecologists for studying daytime phenomena.
Topics

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Light pollution is key 'bringer of insect apocalypse'

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Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date. Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects' lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.

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Global agricultural crisis and holistic management

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Global agricultural crisis and holistic management

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Allan Savory, speaks to a crowd of 200 at an event sponsored by Harvard Food and Law Society

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Allan Savory Presenting at Harvard Law School

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Why scientists who know nature are becoming an endangered species

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"The U.S. is running short of people who can tell the forest from the trees." So says a recent article that is at least partly indicative of the fate of Wall Street Journal science education in the U.S. in recent years. It tells of the growing problem of "plant blindness," the term used among botanists to indicate the inability of many people, even those in the scientific community, to identify plants.

Organizations such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management can't find enough scientists to deal with invasive plants, wildfire reforestation, and basic land-management issues.

... The issue has prompted botanical gardens around the nation to raise the alarm. Colleges are beefing up plant identification coursework for a generation of botanists more focused on their microscopes than studying leaf patterns. Bills introduced in the U.S. Senate in July and the U.S. House last year are aimed at promoting botany education.

I confirmed this fact with a young friend of our family who is studying botany in college. She related a conversation she had with one of her professors who had the same worry: too few students are focusing on the actual study of plants, and instead studying the commercialized applications of the discipline. Nobody, said her professor, seems interested in the plants anymore.

As Belkin relates:

Not only are there fewer university botany programs, but those who graduate from them may not be well versed in plant identification. The cutting edge of plant science, which has commercial applications, is molecular. Students and universities are following the significant money.

As William Friedman, a Harvard biology professor, explained to Belkin, there is molecular biology on one hand, and global ecology on the other. "The area in the middle is all about how a plant grows; that is disappearing from most university curricula and we need this information because things are changing really fast."

There is now, says Belkin, only one botanist on the federal payroll for every 20 million acres of land, many having retired in recent years. And herbaria - plant collections - are disappearing from the colleges in which they used to be housed.

The money one can make in molecular biology is clearly one reason for the shift away from a focus on plant identification. And the focus on global ecology is another. However, a third reason may be the way we teach science in our elementary and secondary schools.

In fact, science education in many American classrooms has turned almost completely away from teaching a knowledge of what nature consists of, instead focusing on what I would call "instrumental" science - science as it can be used for certain practical or commercial purposes. We're all about figuring out how to clone animals or measure the level of global warming or genetically develop insect-resistant strains of corn, but we can't say what kind of insect it is that our child just brought in from the backyard.

If you look at the Next Generation Science Standards, which have been adopted by many states over the last several years, you can see pretty clearly the almost complete lack of emphasis on the actual study of nature. No more bug collections. No more classification of plants. None of the things that really get people interested in science in the first place.

Can students have an adequate understanding of nature without knowing what makes it up?

There is not a single instance in the standards of any student being required to identify, name, define, classify, observe, or describe any individual natural object. In fact, a student could easily meet the new science standards without ever meeting an animal, a plant, or a mineral.

There is no mention of the taxonomy of animals, no morphology of plants, and no attempt to teach the physical properties of rocks and minerals.

While for many of us it was a rite of educational passage to learn the name and order of the planets in our solar system, there seems to be no concern that the next generation of students know anything at all about the individual astronomical bodies with which we share a sun-much less those that occupy the further reaches of space.

The Next Generation Science Standards have at least one thing in common with the space they don't teach very much about: They are both made up largely of a content vacuum.

Our students need to know about the amazing things that make up our world, and the only way to do that is to teach them what it contains. If we excite them about science in this way, we will not only produce enough students with the skills to identify plants, but more than enough to meet the needs of the more commercial areas of science.

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Plant Blindness: Why Scientists Who Know Nature Are Becoming an Endangered Species

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"The U.S. is running short of people who can tell the forest from the trees." So says a recent Wall Street Journal article that is at least partly indicative of the fate of science education in the U.S. in recent years.

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‘Climate change’ is missing the point. We have an Ecosystem Emergency.

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‘Climate change’ is missing the point. We have an Ecosystem Emergency.

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Ecosystem loss has taken place at catastrophic scales warranting emergency response. It is not a future issue: it’s happened and is happening.

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- Why I support the principles and approach of Extinction Rebellion -
Mea culpa, humans. Whilst I care deeply about sustainability, I have a confession to make: I have not been clear in my language about saving our planet - interchanging without consideration the words 'sustainability', 'climate change', 'environment', 'nature', 'biodiversity', 'ecosystem', and others. Most commonly I used climate as a catch all. Nor have I read closely the data on where we're at.

In the run up to the UN Climate Summit in New York a few weeks ago, I read some of the data and reports and came to two damning realisations that I feel compared to share.

Ecosystem loss has taken place at catastrophic scales warranting emergency response. It is not a future issue: it's happened and is happening.

A wide-spread misconception, partially masked by focussing on climate of which the effects generally are in future decades to come, is that ecosystem loss is a future issue. We hear things like 'by 2050, extreme weather events will mean that once-in-a-century floods will happen yearly' or 'in 2100, sea levels will rise to a point that we lose XX% of islands'. Whilst true, this hides that when it comes to ecosystem loss, much has already happened and it is happening daily. Homo sapiens have long rampaged other species on Earth, wiping out many of the megafauna as we settled new continents. But the post industrial destruction rates are truly at a different scale and what's also different is that today we know the destructive impact that we're having. This is why the message of extinction and emergency of Extinction Rebellion ring true to me.

Let's get some facts on the table. I have read many of the reports that came out in 2019: the UN IPCC report detailing accelerating glacial melting; the WMO 2019 report detailing accelerating sea level ("on sea-level rise...since 1993 is 3.2mm per year...however, 2014 to 2019 the rise increased to 5mm per year") and temperature rise ("global temperatures rose 1.1C since 1850...but up 0.2C between 2011 & 2015"); the UNEP report assessing progress on the environmental targets of the Global Goals finding we're unable to even track a whopping 68% of them; the birds report showing that we've lost 3 billion birds (30%) since 1970 in N. America; and many others. All worthwhile reading.

However, none was more damning than the UN Biodiversity (IPBES) report released in May. What made the headlines was that ~1 million species - ~25% of all species - are at extinction risk. But whilst that news was future looking, what alarmed me far more was the past data therein. It made clear that since 1980 (roughly, during my lifetime) we have seen:

The global biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%.

Natural ecosystems declined by 47% on average, relative to their earliest estimated states

Live coral cover on reefs has nearly halved (this one over the past 150 years).

A related report by World Wildlife Fund from 2014 estimated that the number of animals living on the land has declined 40%, and the same for animals in marine ecosystems. Animals in freshwater ecosystems have declined by 75%. Looking more closely at a set of species, it found similarly to the UN report that the major drivers were not climate but habitat loss and exploitation.

Wait, what? Let us digest this again.82% of the wild animals by mass already gone? 50% of live corals already gone? 75% of freshwater ecosystems gone? Not in some hypothetical future, but already gone? Holy shit.

Furthermore, today, we exterminate another 150-200 species per day. This is 'tens to hundreds' times the background extinction event, so 90-99% of these are directly due to human activity. That is 13-18% of all species lost each decade at the present rate. It doesn't take a genius to realize that we don't have too much time to loose most species at the present clip.
This is a colossal planetary emergency as it stands. 2. We need to switch our prime focus from climate change to ecosystem emergency.
A second problem is our very focus on climate change. Most of the public discourse about sustainability focuses on it as the main issue. This is sloppy thinking for three reasons. Firstly, it is not the climate per se we care about, but the effects that it has on life (us humans and other species) that matters. The Earth has gone through myriad shifts in climate and we don't care about the mix of gasses and temperatures per se. We care about climate only insofar as it negatively impacts life. Though this reasoning is perfectly obvious, frequently, climate is confusingly substituted as the end issue which can skew discussions and distort the focus of action. The ethical catastrophe of our day, if one's to be singled out, is biodiversity loss and ecosystem destruction. Put in plain words: decimation, or extinction, of numbers of animals and numbers of species. Humans are destroying the plants, animals, and ecosystems it needs to support life on earth.

Secondly, and more importantly, climate is simply not the dominant factor contributing to said ecosystem loss. It could become dominant in time, and thus for sure deserves our serious attention. It is not a hoax invented by the Chinese to trick the West into curbing it's growth; it is very serious. As California Governor Gavin Newsom said last week, if you don't believe in Climate Change, just come and spend a week in California - such is the cadence of extreme wildfires afflicting the state. But it is not the dominant factor driving wildlife decimation. Today it's the third most important driver. The top 5 drivers of climate change according to the IPBES report are, in order: (1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution, and (5) invasive alien species. Climate will likely be an increasing driver of biodiversity loss - so it's critical we work to reverse it - but even greater attention is deserved on the first two.

Thirdly, per above, ecosystem loss is already happening - not a future matter. By focussing on climate everyone tends to think environmental concerns can put off to the future. If one focuses on ecosystem loss, the need for immediate action is far more evident and compelling.

Thus, flipping from a climate change to ecosystem emergency centred discourse is critical.
Let's talk about ethics.
There are three big moral errors of our age that are largely unseen and unspoken:

national discrimination - that we consider it ok to discriminate between people based on where people are born;

future generations - typically zero value is attributed to future generations in our present ethical calculus; and

other species - similarly, typically, zero valued is attributed to other species in our present ethical calculus.

Arguably, the greatest is the last. Although it is routine for non-human life to have a weight of zero in practical considerations today, it is hard if one stops and thinks about it to not consider this an ethical challenge of the greatest proportions - in line with any other ethical challenge humanity has ever faced.
Why Extinction Rebellion (XR) is right
For these reasons, I wholeheartedly endorse the principles and approach we have seen to date by efforts of XR; the simple, calm, truth to power language we've heard from Greta Thunberg.

They are right to re-brand this about extinction - that's what matters most (though I'd add ecosystem decimation as the broader category);

They are right to say this is an emergency - we've destroyed about half the animals on earth and are wiping out completely 150-200 species/day more; and

They are right to rebel by taking to the streets and do Gandhi-esque, peaceful non-cooperation with companies and the state until we see change, because that is the moral thing to do.

Let's get behind them.

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Climate is missing the point. We have an ecosystem emergency.

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Why I support the principles and approach of Extinction Rebellion - Mea culpa, humans. Whilst I care deeply about sustainability, I have a confession to make: I have not been clear in my language about saving our planet - interchanging without consideration the words 'sustainability', 'climate change', 'environment', 'nature', 'biodiversity', 'ecosystem', and others.

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The Role of Glyphosate in the Rise of Human Chronic Health Problems

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The Role of Glyphosate in the Rise of Human Chronic Health Problems

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Dr Zach Bush interview

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Dr. Zach Bush will tell you he is "very much" trained as a traditional, patient-facing MD, yet you wouldn't necessarily expect that given his present-day work. After studying internal medicine, which included a training on hormone medicine, Bush became interested in cancer research and started developing chemotherapy treatments. Yet he soon felt frustrated that his work was doing nothing to prevent the things that caused cancer in the first place.

"I went from that world of chemotherapy and drug concepts and drug development to the sudden realization that there had never been a cancer caused by a lack of chemotherapy," Bush told me. "And so, no matter how good I got at making chemotherapy, I was always going to be missing the point, missing the root cause of the situation."

This realization redirected his focus to nutrition. Eventually he opened a nutrition center in rural Virginia. "And out of that experience, we realized that the nutrition of today on the grocery store shelves was not really working as it had in the 1960s," he said. "And that took us down into this new era of chemical farming and the discoveries of the chemicals that were in the soils."

That took Bush on a path towards studying glyphosate, the herbicide introduced by Monsanto in 1974 for agricultural weed control, and which is the primary ingredient in common consumer pesticides like RoundUp. In the late 1990s, Monsanto began creating genetically modified crops that were resistant to glyphosate, called "RoundUp Ready" seeds - meaning farmers could spray glyphosate heavily on their crops and expect that only the weeds, and not their crops, would be affected. The US Department of Agriculture notes that 90 percent of domestic corn crops are genetically modified seeds that are resistant to glyphosate or other herbicides.

The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) s a result of its ubiquity in crops like corn and soy, glyphosate has infiltrated much of our food system, and declared glyphosate as a "probable carcinogen" in 2015. That would be fine and good if it was something that we rarely came into contact with, but, a creeps into our diets unbidden. As Salon's Matt Rozsa reported earlier this year, an Environmental Working Group study tested 21 oat-based cereal and snack products for glyphosate. 17 of then contained glyphosate at levels considered unsafe for children, including multiple brands of Cheerios.

I spoke to Dr. Bush at the Original Thinkers festival in Telluride, Colorado; this interview has been condensed and edited for print.
Nicole Karlis: Can you share more about how you came to believe that glyphosate could be at the root of so many different health issues?
Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah, it was totally by accident on my side. So, I was studying soil, found some carbon molecules made by bacteria and fungi in soil, and therefore, in our gut, as well, that had medicinal qualities similar to the chemotherapy [drugs] I used to make. And that was the sudden "Aha!" moment that closed the question of, "How come, when we're missing some bacteria, we get cancer?"

And so, we had found these correlations, but we hadn't figured out causation. And when we found these molecules, I felt like I was starting to put the dots together between changes in the microbiome and cancer - we were suddenly missing this family of molecules that were capable of giving this "medicine" from the soil.

We started studying these carbon molecules in human cell cultures and [doing] experiments in cancer cells. And one of my chief scientists [had] the realization that this was causing cell repair to happen at a very rapid rate in gut cells, and the repair that it was doing was actually repairing the same injury that was caused by glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup.

And so, in a roundabout way, we found the solution to it before I found the problem. I didn't know about the glyphosate issue, really. As I started researching glyphosate and Roundup in the context of the human health collapse, suddenly I found all of these correlations in the medical literature and soil literature, public health statistics, to show that this Roundup chemical was added to our food chain in 1996. And every year, more [is put] into the global environment ... [it] has really undermined, not just human biology, but biology in our water systems, soil systems, oceans, and now [is] destroying the ecosystem at large.
Some people might say "Well, I haven't used Roundup, so maybe I'm untouched by it." Is that true?
Unfortunately, it's a water-soluble molecule. As it evaporates, we start breathing it in our air, which has a high-water content, and then it ends up in our clouds, and it rains down. [W]e're at about almost four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate used in soils worldwide every year.
What do you know that this chemical does to the human body?
The first thing it does is act as an antibiotic in the soil and in our gut, and so this molecule is taken up into our food. So, it's not something you can wash off. It's actually in the flesh of the tomato, corn, soybean, whatever it hits. And so, it's integrated in that water structure, and as it hits your gut microbiome [it] acts as an antibiotic to kill the microbial diversity in your intestines. We now know [this] is the beginning of chronic disease, many chronic diseases are now being mapped back to injuries in the microbiome. And so, as we wipe out the bacteria and fungi with this broad spectrum antibiotic in our food, we are killing the health of our animals, the livestock we consume, beef, poultry, pork, and everything else. So, we're making those animals sick.

As humans, we're seeing the same pattern. This epidemic of chronic disease has emerged from this collapse of the microbiome. The glyphosate antibiotic holds our whole gut and vascular lining together. Those are called tight junctions, and the tight junction Velcros are responsible for creating intelligent barriers. Your gut membrane is the largest barrier to the outside world: it covers two tennis courts in surface area and is the thickness of half of the width of a human hair. So, it's this tiny microscopic cellophane-like covering that separates the outside world from your human biology. What glyphosate and Roundup does is perforate that membrane by destroying those tight junctions and creating something - that's now been called "leaky gut" in the public - in the medical literature it's called gut permeability - it increases gut permeability.

And so, that injury starts to activate the immune system, and we become reactive to our foods. So, we develop allergies of all sorts, pollen allergies and environmental allergies, but also all the food allergies that have become so prevalent in our children today. And so, we lose the barrier system, and so at that point, not only have you become chronically inflamed, you're also literally losing self-identity.
How do we get rid of this chemical in our food system?
Step one: stop spraying it, so it dissipates in the environment over time. The way it does dissipate is through microbial digestion, so fortunately, there are microbes on the earth that can digest any toxin we can think of - because ultimately, the toxins we develop are just rearrangements of molecules that are already existed on Earth. If we stopped spraying today, over the next 50 years, we could see the toxicity levels drop to levels that we could probably tolerate better. We started a nonprofit called Farmer's Footprint that's working and training chemical farmers to learn how to farm without these chemicals. Our nonprofit is working to regenerate 5 million acres under this model over the next six years.
So, what gives you hope with all of this?
The rate of repair is hopeful, so my hope is really steeped in the speed at which biology responds to just a little break. So, if we can just stop the injury for a moment, Mother Earth and biology itself has such a resilient nature. Life itself is resilient, and will repair.

It is possible that we're beyond the recovery of the human species where we've got maybe 60 or 70 years left as a species at our current trajectory of collapse.
Because of chemicals like glyphosate?
More than that, because of everything we're doing. I'd say Roundup is our public enemy number one probably, but that's one of 260 chemicals that are now prevalent in our food system. So, we have completely chemicalized the human experience and the planet itself, and so the level of toxicity has superseded the planet's capacity for life. We've lost [biodiversity] on the planet in the last 40 or 50 years, and so we're almost halfway done with this great extinction. And we're not paying attention to it very well.
If farmers stop using Roundup, how will that impact food costs?
[Not using Roundup can] save tons of money. It turns out, when we go into regenerative agriculture, the farmers make five times to 10 times their bottom line income in three to five years. And so, they can get themselves out of the bankruptcy that they're all facing right now by just stopping all the inputs - the amount of money that the banks are forcing them to borrow against our chemical fertilizers, chemical herbicides, chemical pesticides, and that bankrupts 6,000, 8,000 farms a year. And so, if we just stop those inputs and we go back to nature's natural cycles, we get healthy soil within three to five years, and the productivity of that farm explodes because not only is the crop yield starting to improve, [they're] also getting diversification of their income streams. And we've completely eliminated 90% of their costs. The income potential for these farmers is radical, and so because of that - because of those economic markers - I have real hope.

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Why Dr. Zach Bush believes herbicides could end life on Earth

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Dr. Zach Bush will tell you he is "very much" trained as a traditional, patient-facing MD, yet you wouldn't necessarily expect that given his present-day work. After studying internal medicine, which included a training on hormone medicine, Bush became interested in cancer research and started developing chemotherapy treatments.

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The problem with this so-called green energy source is that instead of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, it increases the amount of CO2 coming out of the smokestack compared to fossil fuels

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The urgency of the climate crisis is inspiring some extreme and unproven ideas for how to hide carbon and cool the planet, such as ocean fertilization, turning CO ₂ into rocks, and seeding the atmosphere to dim the sun. Arguably one of the most reckless ideas, though, is already well underway: burning "forest biomass"-that is, trees-in power plants as a replacement for coal. The problem with this so-called green energy source is that instead of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, it increases the amount of CO 2 coming out of the smokestack compared to fossil fuels, and the climate "benefit" is claimed by simply not counting the emissions.

While policymakers in developed countries (the European Union, the United States, Canada, Japan, and Korea, among others) seem perfectly happy with this solution, scientists and activists are reacting with bewilderment and fury as entire forests are vaporized into the atmosphere in the name of renewable energy. Meanwhile, the burgeoning biomass and wood-pellet industries are dancing away with billions in renewable energy subsidies. To counter this atrocious trend, I founded an organization in 2010, the Partnership for Policy Integrity, to provide reliable science and policymaking clarity on the forest and climate impacts of burning forests for fuel. Since then, many environmental groups have joined the fight, but we still haven't ended this parade of stupidity, because the forces are powerful and the pool of money is deep.

Like many damaging forms of economic activity, the biomass industry started out small and at first flew under the radar. For decades, sawmills and pulp and paper manufacturers have burned sawdust, wood scraps, and black liquor (the condensed chemical slurry left over from wood pulping) to produce heat and power. Environmental groups were content to call this green energy considering that the alternative had been incineration or dumping black liquor into streams. And since these other outcomes would generate CO ₂ anyway, burning such materials was considered to provide carbon-neutral energy. Few people questioned why even the filthiest, most polluting biomass boilers at paper mills-some producing sulfur dioxide emissions to rival those of coal plants-were getting renewable energy subsidies, and over time these subsidies (along with federal renewable energy tax credits) became an important source of revenue for wood-consuming industries.

As more US states enacted renewable energy mandates, however, developers and speculators cashed in on subsidies by building more standalone wood-burning power plants designed solely to put power on the grid. The trend appears to have peaked in the US in 2010 with the post-financial crash stimulus program, which issued cash grants for renewable energy production, including biomass power. Burning wood to produce electricity is expensive, and many plants are not competitive even with supplemental green energy payments. As a result, in the United States the biomass industry has slowed in recent years, although the continued treatment of bioenergy as renewable means it might receive another boost though programs like a Green New Deal.

In the EU, however, where subsidies and incentives have been more consistent and lucrative, wood consumption for energy has careened upward, more than doubling between 2000 and 2017. Eurostat data on renewable energy and forestry reveal that wood comprises about 35 percent of total renewable energy inputs in the EU, though actual delivered heat and electricity are lower because the technologies for converting inherent energy to useful energy are extremely inefficient. Fuelwood now comprises about a quarter of all forest harvesting in the EU, and total consumption of wood for energy has risen to over 400 million tons a year. A small but increasing portion of this tonnage is in the form of wood pellets, which burn hotter than green wood chips and are easier to ship and handle, making them an effective substitute for coal and residential heating fuels.

Much of the EU's forest industry operates under strictures, with the result that, as demand for "energy wood" increased, so has harvesting in less regulated forests, especially in the southern US and Canada. There, the wood-pellet industry has grown exponentially, but it has also expanded in the less scrutinized corners of Europe, such as the boreal bog forests of Estonia and the ancient forests of the Carpathian Mountains in Slovakia, Ukraine, and Romania, home to the lynx, bears, and wolves of old European folktales.

Wood pellets are still just a fraction of the total wood burned for energy in the EU, yet, even so, the industry's impacts have been horrendous. The wood-pellet industry has become particularly controversial in the American South, where a company named Enviva, the largest wood-pellet producer in the world, set up shop and quickly got to work liquidating forests. The South is known as the US's "wood basket," thanks to its endless rows of plantation pine, but the wood-pellet industry has also targeted natural forests, including some of the most carbon-rich, biodiverse wetland forest ecosystems of the eastern United States.

Hardwoods are a preferred pellet feedstock because the processing, grinding, cooking, extruding, and cooling of wood pellets made from pine emit large quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a class of federally regulated pollutants. Enviva did not want to pay for the installation of VOC pollution-control technology at some of its plants, so officials in the state of Virginia who issue air permits instead required the company to use a minimum amount of hardwood feedstock in order to reduce VOC emissions. Soot emissions have also emerged as a chronic problem at wood-pellet production plants in the US South.

Clearcutting is never pretty, but there is something especially sickening about seeing a forest annihilated for supposedly green energy. The wood-pellet industry's excesses-including its misleading claims that it uses only "forestry residues," commonly understood to be the tops and limbs of trees that have otherwise been harvested for lumber-are exposed in a half-hour documentary, Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?, made by Lisa Merton and Alan Dater of Marlboro Productions, and now streaming for free at Link TV (full disclosure: I gave technical advice to the filmmakers and appear in the film). The film features the intrepid staff of a North Carolina environmental group, Dogwood Alliance, as they wade chest-deep though snake-infested wetlands to reach forest clearcuts and then follow trucks loaded with logs back to the pellet plant.

The film then follows the pellets as they are shipped overseas and burned for electricity, including at Drax, a 4,000 MW power plant in the UK that has converted four of its six boilers to burn wood pellets instead of coal, and currently provides around 7 percent of the UK's electricity. The scale of this operation is astounding, with a year's worth of pellets consumed by Drax representing wood mass approximately equivalent to clearcutting a forested square extending to eighteen miles on each side.

Not content with the existing supply of pellets from Enviva and other companies, Drax has built its own pellet plants in the US. The paradox of Drax's investment in such "vertical integration" is that it will likely make the company more vulnerable when the bioenergy scam inevitably fails. In the meantime, though, Drax receives renewable energy subsidies funded by the British public to the tune of about a billion dollars a year, or $2.78 million per day, as of 2017.

While wood pellets from North American forests feed Europe's large biopower plants, much of the biomass harvested within the EU ends up as green wood chips that fuel thousands of smaller heat and power plants, and as pellets that are sold for residential and commercial heating. Traditional firewood harvesting also still constitutes a large share of this domestic use. Wood fuels are shipped all over the EU, and the fragmented nature of the industry, with tens of thousands of suppliers, means that there is little transparency in the supply chain and an increasing risk of wood coming from forests that are supposed to be protected.

Illegal logging happens for all kinds of reasons, but the demand for energy wood is an increasing driver, as previously "low-value" wood can be monetized. Working with the Environmental Investigation Agency, the Romanian nonprofit Agent Green has exposed, sometimes at great personal risk, how wood logged out of the primeval forests of the Carpathians ends up as firewood or bagged wood pellets sold at Austrian hardware stores as a source of "green" heat. Analysis of satellite imagery reveals tree cover decimated throughout the Carpathians-and indeed, the same liquidation of forests is happening in Estonia, Latvia, the southern US, and British Columbia in Canada. These are all places where the wood-pellet and biomass industries have taken hold and are adding to existing pressures on forests.

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How, then, did trees from southeastern US wetlands and ancient European forests come to be classified as a zero-carbon renewable energy source-not just in the EU, but also in Japan and Korea? For these countries, too, are increasingly importing wood pellets from more forested nations as they phase out coal. The rationalizations involved in this scheme induce moral and intellectual whiplash, because they seem to shift constantly, and ultimately, to make no sense.

Countries all over the world report their greenhouse gas emissions annually to the United Nations. International carbon-accounting rules require carbon loss from forest harvesting to be reported in the "land sector." The first problem is that harvested forest wood is not reported as an emission, even if it is burned for energy, but simply shows up as a reduction in that country's reported forest carbon uptake year to year. However, since the lost forest carbon has ostensibly already been noted in the land sector, energy sector emissions of CO ₂ from burning the resulting biomass are counted as zero, to avoid counting the carbon loss twice.

Although it inevitably undercounts forest-harvesting impacts, this system by and large works as a way of characterizing gross fluxes of forest carbon at the national level.The problem is that in justifying subsidies for renewable energy, policymakers and forest industry representatives (who may sometimes be the same people) have reified the concept of bioenergy as counting as zero when burned, to bioenergy actually having emissions of zero globally. This means that when it comes to financial support, bioenergy is usually treated as equivalent to zero-emissions technologies such as wind and solar as a way of mitigating climate-warming.

Wood-burning power plants in fact emit more CO ₂ per megawatt-hour than even coal plants. In order to reconcile this physical reality with the billions provided in subsidies intended to reduce emissions, the biomass industry has come up with more and more outlandish explanations for why burning trees should be considered automatically carbon-free.

When annual crops are used to make liquid biofuels like corn ethanol, the biomass portion of the fuel's net emissions is considered carbon-neutral because yearly crop regrowth and carbon uptake are assumed to offset the CO ₂ emitted by fuel combustion the year before. Clearly, this argument does not work for forest biomass, because trees take decades to regrow. Deprived of the regrowth argument, the biomass industry claimed for years to utilize only mill waste and forest residues from sawtimber harvesting (wood that, it was claimed, "would decompose anyway"), even when the industry was deliberately cutting forests for fuel. For far too long, policymakers accepted similar claims from the wood-pellet industry, even as environmental groups on the ground documented widespread clearcutting and the use of large-diameter timber as pellet feedstock.

Lost in this argument, though, was the important fact that even if the biomass and pellet industry were only using forestry residues, burning those residues emits CO ₂ instantly, while the same wood left to decompose emits it over years, if not decades. Thus, far from being zero-carbon, the cumulative net emissions from burning forestry residues for fuel still speeds the transfer of forest carbon into the atmosphere, and the accumulated net impact of such emissions likewise speeds warming.

When the pellet industry ran out of road for its false claims about residues, it came up with a new rationale to justify biomass as instantly carbon-neutral: as long as forests are growing more wood than is being cut, and are thus harvested "sustainably," burning any of that wood has zero net emissions. This sophistry gained a surprising amount of traction with policymakers considering it essentially postulated that the carbon just disappears, thus violating a basic physical principle of the conservation of mass.

By this logic, even as the biomass industry levels more forest, it must claim offsetting carbon uptake in an ever-increasing area of forests elsewhere to neutralize those emissions. But this notion quickly bumps up against the reality that the amount of carbon locked up in forests is decreasing globally; there is no epic and immediate regrowth on this planet that is compensating for all the supposedly sustainable harvesting. (The correct accounting approach, in fact, recognizes that forest carbon uptake is already counted as offsetting a portion of existing fossil-fuel emissions; the biomass industry's claim seeks to double-count that benefit.)

The concept of carbon neutrality is so central to the biomass industry that if it were overturned, the entire rationale for the industry would virtually disappear. Companies know this, which is why they continually make misleading statements such as Enviva's claim that burning its pellets "reduces" greenhouse gas emissions compared to burning fossil fuels. The company does not reveal that this claim relies on reporting only fossil-fuel CO2 emissions from manufacturing and transporting pellets, and on simply not counting the CO2 coming out of the smokestack when the pellets are burned.

Since publicly traded companies like Enviva have a duty to disclose information that is material to shareholders' interests-and a corresponding duty not to make false statements-my group filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against the company in 2016 over its misleading claims about emissions. On the recommendation of the SEC's secretary, we also petitioned the SEC for a rule-making that would require all publicly traded bioenergy companies to disclose their real emission impacts. We still await action from the SEC, even as billions more dollars flow into "green" bioenergy investments.

It's not just the companies that want to ignore emissions. Pro-bioenergy legislators in both the US and the EU also regularly mislead the public on the impacts of the industry. In the US, Maine Senators Susan Collins and Angus King, both strong biomass boosters, shoehorned a rider into a congressional appropriations bill, enacted in 2018, that forces the EPA to treat forest biomass as carbon-neutral-despite the recent findings of a multiyear EPA task force, which concluded that burning wood can have significant net emissions. (One of the more darkly humorous moments in Burned is watching Senator Collins spout, almost verbatim, talking-points scripted by biomass industry lobbyists in a floor speech on bioenergy.)

The US senators and their industry allies hoped to build markets for biomass by replacing coal. Unfortunately for them, not even the Trump EPA was up to the deception required to claim that burning biomass reduces emissions. Despite the legislative order to treat biomass as carbon-neutral, the EPA's final "Affordable Clean Energy" rule concluded that burning biomass emits more CO ₂ than fossil fuels, and that co-firing biomass with coal degrades a power plant's efficiency. So much for the "trees are growing somewhere" theory.

In the EU, though, pro-bioenergy legislators have been more adept. The EU sets the rules for renewable energy implementation and subsidies in member states, revising its Renewable Energy Directive every ten years. Horrified by the accelerating forest carnage under the current directive, the nonprofit and scientific communities lobbied hard at the EU for constraints on the use of forest wood as a renewable fuel in the 2018 RED that sets policy for 2021-2030. The EU's own team of advisers, the European Academies Science Advisory Council, warned the EU's president, Jean-Claude Juncker, in January 2018 that:

The legal mandate to record forest biomass-fired energy as contributing to the EU's renewable energy targets has had the perverse effect of creating a demand for trees to be felled in Europe or elsewhere in order to burn them for energy, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere which would otherwise stay locked up in the forest, and simultaneously drastically reducing the carbon sink strength of the forest ecosystems... [T]he current use of imported pelleted forest biomass was leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions with no guarantee of when (or even if) the additional carbon released to the atmosphere would be offset by forest regrowth.

Rather than conclude that the biomass subsidy program is based on a fraud, the EU policymakers' response was to devise a Potemkin set of "sustainability" criteria for biomass that will do almost nothing to protect forests and the climate. The revised directive claims that the new constraints will "continue to ensure high greenhouse gas emissions savings compared to fossil fuel alternatives" and "avoid unintended sustainability impacts"-as misleading a statement as I have ever seen in public policy.

Since all the usual tactics of the nonprofit community had failed, including documentary photos, briefings, and scientific evidence, we felt we had no choice but to sue the EU (with the European Parliament and Council as defendants) over the new rules. My organization thus coordinated a March 2019 lawsuit that challenges inclusion of forest biomass in the new renewable energy directive. We worked with plaintiffs from the EU and the US who demonstrated in their testimony how the biomass industry is causing direct harm to their health and livelihoods, and we are now waiting to hear whether the EU court will accept the case.

Climate science shows that to avoid the most catastrophic warming impacts, the world must cut its carbon emissions in half in the next few years, and be carbon-neutral, balancing emissions with carbon uptake, by 2050. There is no way to achieve this without a vast restoration and expansion of the world's forests. Provided these forests are natural and not monoculture plantations, this initiative could also help to address another great environmental crisis we face, the extirpation of so many of the world's species. Many member states have signed on to the EU goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, but a great deal must change: right now, EU member states allocate billions in renewable energy subsidies to promote wood-burning, but little to forest restoration.

A new law enacted in Slovakia is a brave start, given the typical bullying from the forest industry.After forest activists at WOLF Forest Protection Movement (the lead plaintiff in the biomass lawsuit) demonstrated damage to forests from biomass harvesting, the government last year restricted bioenergy subsidies to mill residues and energy crops, eliminating subsidies for forest wood. On this side of the Atlantic, similar rules in Massachusetts took low-efficiency wood-burning power plants off the renewable energy menu in 2012-although the state's current Republican governor seems intent on overturning those forest protections. It really is this simple: to mitigate climate change, we need to grow more trees, not burn them for energy. Policymakers need to wake up, because we're running out of time.

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The urgency of the climate crisis is inspiring some extreme and unproven ideas. Arguably one of the most reckless ideas is already well underway: burning "forest biomass"-that is, trees-in power plants as a replacement for coal.

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If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels

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The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans-at last-for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

This is a welcome shift, and we need more of it. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that warrants our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that it will pave the way to a utopia of "green growth." Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there's no reason we can't keep expanding the economy forever.

This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.

The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans-at last-for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

This is a welcome shift, and we need more of it. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that warrants our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that it will pave the way to a utopia of "green growth." Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there's no reason we can't keep expanding the economy forever.

This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.

The phrase "clean energy" normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes-but scientists warn that we can't keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That's enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions-and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium-an essential element in wind turbines-extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we're going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium-an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That's just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world's projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four-all for the entire period from now to 2050.

The problem here is not that we're going to run out of key minerals-although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent.

Take silver, for instance. Mexico is home to the Peñasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that's 7 miles around and as high as a 50-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone.

To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Peñasquito. Just for silver.

Lithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing problems. In the Andes, where most of the world's lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada to Tibet, killing off whole freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely even started, and it's already a crisis.

And all of this is just to power the existing global economy. Things become even more extreme when we start accounting for growth. As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive-and the higher the growth rate, the worse it will get.

It's important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global south. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It's not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.

If we don't take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies-buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way.

Some hope that nuclear power will help us get around these problems-and surely it needs to be part of the mix. But nuclear comes with its own constraints. For one, it takes so long to get new power plants up and running that they can play only a small role in getting us to zero emissions by midcentury. And even in the longer term, nuclear can't be scaled beyond about 1 terawatt. Absent a miraculous technological breakthrough, the vast majority of our energy will have to come from solar and wind.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we're after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates.

Of course, we know that poorer countries still need to increase their energy use in order to meet basic needs. But richer countries, fortunately, do not. In high-income nations, the transition to green energy needs to be accompanied by a planned reduction of aggregate energy use.

How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput-legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions.

Reducing energy demand not only enables a faster transition to renewables, but also ensures that the transition doesn't trigger new waves of destruction. Any Green New Deal that hopes to be socially just and ecologically coherent needs to have these principles at its heart.

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The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans-at last-for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

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Multiple Effects of Antibiotic Use in Livestock

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Multiple Effects of Antibiotic Use in Livestock

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Antibiotics in cow manure impact plant function

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For the study, researchers analyzed ecosystems exposed to manure from cattle given no antibiotics and manure from cattle given a common antibiotic, as well as a control sample not exposed to manure. Credit: Carl Wepking/CSU

Use of antibiotics is under heightened scrutiny due to the increased prevalence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. While the primary focus is on more stringent use of antibiotics in medical settings, the use of antibiotics in the livestock sector is gaining increased attention.

A new study led by Colorado State University and the University of Idaho found multiple effects on soils from exposure to manure from cows administered antibiotics, including alteration of the soil microbiome and ecosystem functions, soil respiration and elemental cycling.

The team also saw changes in how plants allocated carbon below ground and take up nitrogen from the soil. In addition, they observed a decrease in ecosystem carbon use efficiency. This means that when antibiotics are used, less carbon is stored in the soil and more is lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

The study, "Prolonged exposure to manure from livestock-administered antibiotics decreases ecosystem carbon-use efficiency and alters nitrogen cycling," is published Oct. 9 in Ecology Letters.

Carl Wepking, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at CSU, said the findings give him "pause" due to the widespread use of antibiotics.

"There's no environment on earth that is free from the effects of antibiotics," he said.

The research team used a pulse-chase experiment, a technique to focus on the manure's effect on whole ecosystems. Credit: Carl Wepking/CSU

In the U.S., 80 percent of antibiotics are used in livestock production. Globally, livestock antibiotic use is projected to increase by 67 percent by the year 2030.

For the study, researchers analyzed ecosystems exposed to manure from cattle given no antibiotics and manure from cattle given a common antibiotic, as well as a control sample not exposed to manure. All of the manure samples were collected from standard dairy operations maintained by researchers from the Virginia Tech Department of Dairy Science.

Previous research on this topic found researchers injecting antibiotics into manure, then adding it to the soil, or adding raw antibiotics to the soil, said Wepking. The design of this study offered a much more realistic and applicable design.

The research team also used a pulse-chase experiment, a technique to examine elemental cycling, focusing on the manure's effect on whole ecosystems. Scientists took samples over the course of seven days, and found that in the presence of antibiotics, carbon traveled into the above ground plant material, to the roots of the plants, into the soil and respired back out as carbon dioxide much faster than any of the others.

"There was much less of that new carbon retained in the system compared with other soils we sampled," explained Wepking, who also serves as executive director of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative, which is housed in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at CSU.

Carl Wepking, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at CSU, said the findings give him 'pause' due to the widespread use of antibiotics. Credit: Michael Strickland, University of Idaho

It's often thought that manure is a helpful fertilizer, and that it adds nutrients and carbon to soil but this benefit might be offset if antibiotics are administered to livestock.

While more research is needed, Wepking said given the study's findings, people may want to consider the effects of antibiotics in the soil when using manure as fertilizer.

"Research is expanding more and more, to look at antibiotic exposure and resistance in agricultural landscapes," said Wepking. "It's already well-documented that overuse of antibiotics is a problem for humans, and that we are running out of effective antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. Based on this research, we have learned that antibiotic use also has environmental effects."

More information: Carl Wepking et al, Prolonged exposure to manure from livestock‐administered antibiotics decreases ecosystem carbon‐use efficiency and alters nitrogen cycling, Ecology Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1111/ele.13390

Journal information: Ecology Letters

Provided by Colorado State University

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Researchers find multiple effects on soil from manure from cows administered antibiotics

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Use of antibiotics is under heightened scrutiny due to the increased prevalence of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. While the primary focus is on more stringent use of antibiotics in medical settings, the use of antibiotics in the livestock sector is gaining increased attention.

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Extinction of insects and fungi relying on dead and decaying wood for survival

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Uma equipa internacional publicou na revista Science um apelo a uma "mudança a radical" na estratégia europeia de gestão das florestas, sublinhando que a limpeza em grande escala provoca efeitos negativos consideráveis na diversidade dos insetos e fungos que dependem de madeira morta.

Durante séculos, a silvicultura seguiu a estratégia de retirada de madeira e reflorestação, que teve como consequência uma diminuição constante da diversidade biológica e a extinção de muitos fungos e insetos.

Por exemplo, na Alemanha, está prevista para os próximos anos a retirada de uma grande quantidade de árvores mortas por causa da seca de 2018 e um programa de reflorestação, com fundos de cerca de 800 milhões de euros que deveriam ser "usados para preservar a madeira morta".

"É provável que a estratégia do Governo federal alemão e de outros governos da Europa central crie bosques de flora homogénea que continuarão a ser particularmente vulneráveis aos impactos das alterações climáticas no futuro", afirmou à agência Efe o investigador Alexandro Leverkus, da Universidade de Granada.

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Especialistas em floresta pedem a governos para não tirarem madeira morta

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Uma equipa internacional publicou na revista Science um apelo a uma "mudança a radical" na estratégia europeia de gestão das florestas, sublinhando que a limpeza em grande escala provoca efeitos negativos consideráveis na diversidade dos insetos e fungos que dependem de madeira morta.

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The role of farming subsidies in ecosystem degradation

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The role of farming subsidies in ecosystem degradation

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The cost of the damage currently caused by agriculture is greater than the value of the food produced.

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The public is providing more than $1m per minute in global farm subsidies, much of which is driving the climate crisis and destruction of wildlife, according to a new report.

Just 1% of the $700bn (£560bn) a year given to farmers is used to benefit the environment, the analysis found. Much of the total instead promotes high-emission cattle production, forest destruction and pollution from the overuse of fertiliser.

The security of humanity is at risk without reform to these subsidies, a big reduction in meat eating in rich nations and other damaging uses of land, the report says. But redirecting the subsidies to storing carbon in soil, producing healthier food, cutting waste and growing trees is a huge opportunity, it says.

The report rejects the idea that subsidies are needed to supply cheap food. It found that the cost of the damage currently caused by agriculture is greater than the value of the food produced. New assessments in the report found producing healthy, sustainable food would actually cut food prices, as the condition of the land improves.

"There is incredibly small direct targeting of [subsidies at] positive environment outcomes, which is insane," said Jeremy Oppenheim, principal at the Food and Land Use Coalition (Folu), the collaboration of food, farming and green research groups that produced the new report. "We have got to switch these subsidies into explicitly positive measures."

He said the true global total was likely to be $1tn a year, as some subsidies are difficult to quantify precisely: "That trillion dollars of public funding is available and is a massive, massive lever to incentivise the farming community across the world to act differently."

A series of major recent reports have concluded the world's food system is broken. It is driving the planet towards climate catastrophe while leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight, 130 national academies of science and medicine concluded in November. Another report found that avoiding meat and dairy was the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, with livestock using 83% of farmland to produce just 18% of calories.

The " planetary health diet " published by scientists in January requires an 80% cut in the red meat eaten by Europeans and North Americans. Adopting this diet in coming decades would mean 60% of today's pasture could be used for wildlife or other purposes, an area similar to the size of Brazil.

But Oppenheim said: "We couldn't find any examples of governments using their fiscal instruments to directly support the expansion of supply of healthier and more nutritious food."

Overall, the Folu report said the damaging way the world currently produces food and uses land causes $12tn a year in hidden costs to the environment, human health and development.

"Continuing on current trends means sleepwalking into a scenario wherein climate change increasingly threatens human life, biodiversity and natural resources are depleted, people increasingly suffer life-threatening, diet-induced diseases, food security would be compromised, and [poverty reduction] is seriously impaired," it said. "Such a pathway would within a few decades threaten our collective security."

But it said transforming the food and land use systems in the next decade is a remarkable opportunity, which could reap a societal return more than 15 times the investment costs required, which are estimated at less than 0.5% of global GDP.

Transforming food and land use would also make the food supply more secure, said Oppenheim: "Stick with the model we have got and you can be reasonably confident that in the next 20 years we are going to have a number of climate-related food price spikes, because we have a highly concentrated system, with a small number of [regions] that are absolutely critical to the supply of grains."

"We need a big system reset and I think it is the role of government is to lead on these issues," said Caterina Ruggeri Laderchi, research director at Folu and formerly at the World Bank. "It is extremely important for the planet, but it can be good for business too." The report says a shift to sustainable production of healthy food could unlock $4.5tn in new commercial opportunities each year by 2030.

The subsidy analysis in the report was done by the International Food Policy Research Institute, using OECD data. It found three-quarters of the $700bn annual subsidy is paid directly to farmers and that 15% supports measures such as research on higher yielding crops and road building in rural areas. It analysed subsidies in 51 nations and includes most, but not all, of global subsidies.

Benefits from reforming subsidies has been seen in some places. Farmers in the European Union have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from fertiliser by 17% while yields rose, and China is phasing out support for fertilisers.

The "remarkable" return of forests in Costa Rica, the report says, followed the eliminating of cattle subsidies and payments for improving nature. "But there is a long way to go," the report concludes. "Perverse subsidies need to be rapidly redirected or phased out."

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$1m a minute: the farming subsidies destroying the world - report

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The public is providing more than $1m per minute in global farm subsidies, much of which is driving the climate crisis and destruction of wildlife, according to a new report. Just 1% of the $700bn (£560bn) a year given to farmers is used to benefit the environment, the analysis found.

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45% of area pledged for reforestation are to be commercial plantations

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45% of area pledged for reforestation are to be commercial plantations

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The study shows that land put aside for natural forests holds 40 times more carbon than plantations and six times more than agriculture that mixes trees and crops, known as agroforestry.

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Restoration opportunity map across 43 tropical and sub-tropical countries. Data source: Minnemeyer, S., et al. Bonn Challenge: A World of Opportunity (World Resource Institute, 2011). Credit: Data source: Minnemeyer, S., et al. Bonn Challenge: A World of Opportunity (World Resource Institute, 2011).

International plans to restore forests to combat global warming are flawed and will fall far short of meeting 1.5C climate targets, according to new research by UCL and University of Edinburgh scientists.

The study, published as a comment piece in this week's Nature, reveals that almost half (45%) of the vast areas that countries have pledged are set to become plantations of commercial trees, a move which will seriously reduce expected carbon uptake and prevent agreements to curb climate change being met.

Lead author, Professor of Global Change Science, Simon Lewis (UCL Geography) said, "There is a scandal here. To most people forest restoration means bringing back natural forests, but policy makers are calling vast monocultures 'forest restoration'. And worse, the advertised climate benefits are absent."

"Plantations are much poorer at storing carbon than natural forests. To combat climate change, natural forest restoration is clearly the most effective approach. Well-managed forests can also help to alleviate poverty in low-income regions, as well as conserve biodiversity and support the UN's Sustainable Development Goals."

To meet 1.5C requires rapid emissions cuts and removing carbon from the atmosphere. The international community is striving to restore 350 million hectares of forest, an area slightly larger than the size of India, by 2030, to do just this.

New calculations based on 43 countries' restoration pledges show that only by allowing natural forests to return would sufficient carbon be captured for new forests to play their part in meeting global climate goals.

The 43 tropical and sub- tropical countries -where trees grow fast-have signed up to restoration commitments, many as part of the Bonn Challenge that aims to restore 350 million hectares of forest. Together, those countries, which include Brazil, India and China, have already committed to restore 292 million hectares of forest.

18-year-old naturally regenerating forest (exclusion of fire, some planting of native species) in Kibale National Park, Uganda. The forest supports elephants and many species of monkey after just 18 years. Credit: Credit, S. Lewis.

The study, which is the first in the world to compile and analyse country-level commitments for forest restoration, shows that land put aside for natural forests holds 40 times more carbon than plantations and six times more than agriculture that mixes trees and crops, known as agroforestry.

Using long-term carbon sequestration rates for natural forest, plantations and agroforestry, the researchers show that restoring natural forests over 350 million hectares of land removes 42 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, whereas using current pledges for plantations (45%), natural forests (34%) and agroforestry (21%) applied to the whole area reduce this to 16 billion tonnes of carbon by 2100, assuming that all new natural forests are protected. And if commercial monocultures were planted across 100% of the area just 1 billion tonnes of carbon is sequestered.

Countries differ vastly in their commitments. Vietnam represents the world's largest commitment of new natural forests, at 14.6 million hectares; Brazil has pledged 19 million hectares of new plantations; Nigeria has the most agroforestry, 15.7 million hectares.

Co-author Dr. Charlotte Wheeler (University of Edinburgh and formerly of UCL) said, "The reason plantations are so poor at storing carbon is that they are harvested every decade or so, meaning all the carbon stored in the trees goes back into the atmosphere, as the plantation waste and the wood products-mostly paper and chipboards-decompose.

"Instead, restoring all 350 million hectares back to natural forests can meet the role forests need to play under Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change emissions pathways that keep global warming to 1.5C.

"Of course, new natural forests alone are not sufficient to meet our climate goals. Emissions from fossil fuels and deforestation must also stop. Other ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere are also needed. But, no scenario has been produced that keeps climate change below dangerous levels without the large-scale restoration of natural forests."

The scientists recommend that the definition of 'forest restoration' excludes monoculture plantations, and propose four ways to increase carbon capture from today's forest restoration schemes. Firstly, increase the proportion of land being regenerated to natural forest; second, prioritise restoration in Amazonia, Borneo and the Congo Basin, which support very high biomass forest compared to drier regions; third, build on existing carbon stocks by targeting degraded forests for natural regeneration; and fourth, once natural forest is restored, protect it.

Simon Lewis, Charlotte Wheeler and colleagues. 'Regenerate natural forests to store carbon,' will be published in Nature online on Tuesday 2 April 2019 and in print on Thursday 4 April 2019.

Journal information: Nature

Provided by University College London

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Restore natural forests to meet global climate goals

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International plans to restore forests to combat global warming are flawed and will fall far short of meeting 1.5C climate targets, according to new research by UCL and University of Edinburgh scientists.

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The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is the intergovernmental body which assesses the state of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services it provides to society, in response to requests from decision makers.

FIND OUT MORE

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IPBES | Science and policy for people and nature

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Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history - and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from IPBES, the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April - 4 May) in Paris.

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The Design Flaw at the Core of Humanity's Malaise

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The Design Flaw at the Core of Humanity's Malaise

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Recognising the design flaws in our default programming is the first step to envisioning the world we know is possible.

by Judith Schwartz

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Many of us-read: anyone paying attention-are worried about problems like climate disruption, biodiversity loss, toxins in our foods, income inequality and the hollowing out of towns. Such troubles seem impossible to solve, hopeless to untangle. But maybe our woes are not so complicated. Perhaps these interrelated challenges stem from a basic design flaw. And we can fix it.

I contend this messy moment reflects the fact that our "operating system" is outdated and not suited to our current circumstances. I'm talking about the economy: the system that runs our society's conceptual software. For the way that we produce, trade, value and distribute goods and wealth interferes with our ability to address the major trials of our time. We have come to accept the present framework as inevitable, but that's far from the case. The rules our economy plays by are not natural law, like gravity or the properties of the Periodic Table. Rather, they are the result of human decisions, the consequences of which were not apparent at the time.

There is stark irony in the fact that the stock market has soared while large chunks of the country have been covered by water from hurricanes or ash from wildfire. This suggests the gaping disconnect between finance and reality. There's something screwy with the books when economic indicators rise in tandem with environmental calamity and loss of life and property. It's reminiscent of the "big short", when financiers bet and made money on failure in the housing market. If Wall Street's got its numbers right, Earth futures are not looking so good right now.

One defect in our economic model is its dependence on growth. We know that resource and ecological limits dictate that we can't grow indefinitely. And yet, because money is created by debt that must eventually be paid, the growth imperative is baked into the system. Economists have evaded the social and environmental costs associated with relentless growth by choosing not to count them. In a deft accounting trick, the negatives linked with profitable enterprise (like water and air pollution, landscape degradation, blighted downtowns) are deemed "externalities". Again, this is a design flaw, which can be mended by internalizing such costs so that they are borne by the entity that creates the problem instead of by the public.

Understanding faulty design at the root of our economy can help clarify certain kinds of conflicts that frequently arise. Let's take a scenario where an energy company wants to drill in a pristine area and that this will harm vulnerable species, increase greenhouse gases and disrupt local communities. The company claims the environmental damage is a small trade-off for boosting the economy and creating jobs. A functioning system wouldn't require people to give up their assets and autonomy in order to be economically viable; indeed, those assets and agency are their basis of wealth. It has become standard to see such scenarios through a political lens-a matter about which "liberals" and "conservatives" hold different views. Instead, we can regard the fact that companies profit amidst human and environmental exploitation as a glitch in the system that could bring the whole thing down, like a kind of malware.

If we're going to grow, let it be natural wealth. Conventional economics is fueled by scarcity; too much productivity drives down prices and therefore competition. We've been mining our natural capital for so long-and with bigger and more destructive technologies-that we have forgotten how productive healthy ecosystems can be. We can think of the scarcity premise as part of an obsolete operating system. An upgrade dedicated to building our resources will bolster security and create the conditions for abundance. In agriculture, for example, there's evidence that farm subsidies support outmoded practices and discourage innovation. Not what one wants in an operating system. Our upgrade corrects that little hiccup so that farmers are rewarded for enhancing soil health, which in turn enhances water retention, biodiversity, and all-around resilience.

Once you're attuned to the fundamental design errors, you'll find evidence all over. For instance, we now have youth un- and under-employment (and resulting despair) and, at the same time, the emptying out of vast areas of the country. This is a major bug in the software. Fix it, and there could be incentives to learn and apply regenerative agriculture to degraded landscapes and languishing rural communities. You'll notice also that underlying flaws trigger errors in related systems, such as politics, education and law. The legal system, for example, provides recourse for infringements on private property-but not necessarily for resources that we all share, like air, water, forests and soil. Talk about hacking the vulnerabilities in the system. It may seem risky to modify programming at this scale. But recall the Y2K bug everyone was worried about, and how the rollover went smoothly.

In an interview, author Raj Patel, who most recently co-wrote "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet," said that many people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We need to appreciate the difference between human-devised systems-which, by definition, are negotiable-and the exigencies of nature, which are not. We need to understand that society's working "software" was developed during a unique time of geographical expansion and rapid technological change, and that its algorithms neglected human, cultural and environmental costs.

We can choose to tweak or outright transform this model. Among several options: bring externalities into pricing and incorporate the value of ecosystems, as in The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity initiative, which seeks to "make nature's values visible; an emphasis on the Global Commons, as articulated by Johann Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre; and recognition of the Rights of Nature, as has been instituted in Ecuador and Bolivia and applied to rivers in India and New Zealand.

Here's a bold statement: If we place value on ecosystem function, we could turn around our environmental, social and economic problems and inequities right now. Businesses and policymakers would be motivated to preserve and enhance environmental conditions, rather than be heedless. Indigenous people would be respected for their ecological knowledge and practices. Entrepreneurial energy would shift away from the making and marketing of products no one really needs and toward creative ways of regenerating ecosystems: which, in turn, restore nature's climate-regulating processes. An industrial agricultural model that wreaks havoc on landscapes and communities would give way to agroecological approaches like Permaculture, Holistic Management and agroforestry that rebuild natural and social wealth. What we need is the intention-and a design framework that supports human and ecological wellbeing.

Recognizing the design flaws in our default programming is the first step to envisioning what is possible. Let's not forego the chance due to a failure of imagination. Or of courage.

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The Design Flaw at the Core of Humanity's Malaise

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Recognizing the design flaws in our default programming is the first step to envisioning the world we know is possible... Many of us-read: anyone paying attention-are worried about problems like climate disruption, biodiversity loss, toxins in our foods, income inequality and the hollowing out of towns.

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Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

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Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

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Professor Jem Bendell BA (Hons) PhD

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The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change

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The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change

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A three-year UN-backed study from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform On Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has grim implications for the future of humanity

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Nature is in freefall and the planet's support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That's the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it's stark.

The last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat climate change poses to life. Far less talked about but just as dangerous, if not more so, is the rapid decline of the natural world. The felling of forests, the over-exploitation of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and water are together driving the living world to the brink, according to a huge three-year, U.N.-backed landmark study to be published in May.

The final report will be handed to world leaders not just to help politicians, businesses and the public become more aware of the trends shaping life on Earth, but also to show them how to better protect nature.

"High-level political attention on the environment has been focused largely on climate change because energy policy is central to economic growth. But biodiversity is just as important for the future of earth as climate change," said Sir Robert Watson, overall chair of the study, in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

"We are at a crossroads. The historic and current degradation and destruction of nature undermine human well-being for current and countless future generations," added the British-born atmospheric scientist who has led programs at NASA and was a science adviser in the Clinton administration. "Land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change are three different faces of the same central challenge: the increasingly dangerous impact of our choices on the health of our natural environment."

Industrial farming is to blame for much of the loss of nature, said Mark Rounsevell, professor of land use change at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who co-chaired the European section of the IPBES study. "The food system is the root of the problem. The cost of ecological degradation is not considered in the price we pay for food, yet we are still subsidizing fisheries and agriculture."

This destruction wrought by farming threatens the foundations of our food system. A February report from the U.N. warned that the loss of soil, plants, trees and pollinators such as birds, bats and bees undermines the world's ability to produce food.

An obsession with economic growth as well as spiraling human populations is also driving this destruction, particularly in the Americas where GDP is expected to nearly double by 2050 and the population is expected to increase 20 percent to 1.2 billion over the same period.

Nature is likely to be hit particularly hard over the next 30 years, said Jake Rice, chief scientist emeritus at the Canadian government's department of oceans and fisheries, who co-chaired the Americas study. High consumption and destructive farming will further degrade land and marine ecosystems, he added, although the pace of destruction is diminishing because so much has already gone.

"The great transformation has already taken place in North America but the remote parts of South and Central America remain under threat. A new wave of destruction is transforming the Amazon and Pampas regions [of Latin America]," said Rice.

All of this comes at a huge cost and has implications for the systems that prop up life on this planet, throwing into doubt the ability of humans to survive.

"The loss of trees, grasslands and wetlands is costing the equivalent of about 10 percent of the world's annual gross product, driving species extinctions, intensifying climate change and pushing the planet toward a sixth mass species extinction," says the report.

Future generations will likely experience far less wildlife, said Luthando Dziba, head of conservation services at South African National Parks, who co-chaired the section of the IPBES report that focuses on Africa.

"Africa is the world's last home for a wide range of large mammals but the scientific consensus is that under current scenarios to 2100 more than half of African bird and mammal species could be lost," said Dziba.

Around 20 percent of Africa's land surface has already been degraded by soil erosion, loss of vegetation, pollution and salinization, he said, adding that the expected doubling of the continent's population to 2.5 billion people by 2050 will put yet further pressure on its biodiversity.

While people are familiar with the threats to whales, elephants and other beloved animals, the problem goes far deeper than that. Animal populations have declined by 60 percent since 1970, driven by human actions, according to a recent World Wildlife Fund study.

"Species which are not charismatic have been politically overlooked," said Rounsevell. "Over 70 percent of freshwater species and 61 percent of amphibians have declined [in Europe], along with 26 percent of marine fish populations and 42 percent of land-based animals ... It is a dramatic change and a direct result of the intensification of farming," he said.

This destruction is also driving mass human migration and increased conflict. Decreasing land productivity makes societies more vulnerable to social instability, says the report, which estimates that in around 30 years' time land degradation, together with the closely related problems of climate change, will have forced 50 to 700 million people to migrate.

"It will just be no longer viable to live on those lands," said Watson.

The study will also recognize that much of the remaining wealth of nature depends on indigenous people, who mostly live in the world's remote areas and are on the frontline of the damage caused by destructive logging and industrial farming. According to IPBES, indigenous communities often know best how to conserve nature and are better placed than scientists to provide detailed information on environmental change.

Brazil - which nationwide hosts about 42,000 plant species, 9,000 species of vertebrates and almost 130,000 invertebrates - has an indigenous population of almost 900,000 people, says the report.

"What surprised me the most about this study was that it became clear that the older cultures, like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, have different values which protect nature better [than Western societies]," said Watson. "No one should romanticize indigenous peoples, and we cannot turn the clock back, but we can learn a lot from them on how to protect the planet."

Although their conclusions are stark, the IPBES authors are not entirely gloomy about Earth's prospects. In offering practical options for future action, they want to show that it is not too late to slow down or even reverse degradation.

The authors are expected to say in their conclusions that to avoid disaster, existing laws will have to be enforced, and further regulations put on, for example, deforestation and overfishing. Reports already published have also called for better protection of pollinators, tighter control of invasive species and greater public awareness of the decline in nature.

They will also recognize that individual and community actions to plant trees, regenerate abandoned lands and protect nature can have a major positive impact.

Many other solutions to save nature have been put forward by individuals and countries.

Several countries are taking bold initiatives to restore land, both to help meet climate targets and to protect and enhance biodiversity. Pakistan intends to plant 10 billion trees (although its previous billion tree campaign was not without controversy), Ethiopia has mobilized communities to regenerate 15 million hectares of degraded lands and the Green Wall project is pushing for a 4,970-mile long belt of vegetation across Africa. Meanwhile, the U.N. Environment program has reported a surge in the number and size of marine protected areas.

But despite these moves to reverse the ongoing destruction of the natural world, the big picture remains worrying. Ambitious global agreements like the Aichi targets set in Japan in 2010 and the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals around protecting nature, may not be met at current rates of progress, say the report authors.

Ultimately, Watson concludes that saving nature will require a major rethink of how we live and how we think about nature, but that it is possible to turn this dire situation around if governments want it to happen.

"There are no magic bullets or one-size-fits-all answers. The best options are found in better governance, putting biodiversity concerns into the heart of farming and energy policies, the application of scientific knowledge and technology, and increased awareness and behavioral changes," Watson said. "The evidence shows that we do know how to protect and at least partially restore our vital natural assets. We know what we have to do."
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HuffPost's 'This New World' series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com

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We Face A Crisis Bigger Than Climate Change, But We're Not Talking About It

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Nature is in freefall and the planet's support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That's the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it's stark. The last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat climate change poses to life.

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Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers

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Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers

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Highlights

• Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.

• Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected.

• Four aquatic taxa are imperilled and have already lost a large proportion of species.

• Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.

• Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes

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Highlights

*

Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.

*

Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected.

*

Four aquatic taxa are imperiled and have already lost a large proportion of species.

*

Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.

*

Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes.

Abstract

Biodiversity of insects is threatened worldwide. Here, we present a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe, and systematically assess the underlying drivers. Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades. In terrestrial ecosystems, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) appear to be the taxa most affected, whereas four major aquatic taxa (Odonata, Plecoptera, Trichoptera and Ephemeroptera) have already lost a considerable proportion of species. Affected insect groups not only include specialists that occupy particular ecological niches, but also many common and generalist species. Concurrently, the abundance of a small number of species is increasing; these are all adaptable, generalist species that are occupying the vacant niches left by the ones declining. Among aquatic insects, habitat and dietary generalists, and pollutant-tolerant species are replacing the large biodiversity losses experienced in waters within agricultural and urban settings. The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change. The latter factor is particularly important in tropical regions, but only affects a minority of species in colder climes and mountain settings of temperate zones. A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends, allow the recovery of declining insect populations and safeguard the vital ecosystem services they provide. In addition, effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments.

View full text

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Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers

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Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. * Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected. * Four aquatic taxa are imperiled and have already lost a large proportion of species. * Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.

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Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

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Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

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Insects could vanish within a century at current rate of decline, says global review

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The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems", according to the first global scientific review.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are "essential" for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet.

"Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades," they write. "The repercussions this will have for the planet's ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least."

Butterflies and moths
There has been a "severe reduction" in butterflies and moths in the Kullaberg nature reserve in Sweden compared with 50 years ago. Scientists found more than a quarter of the 600 species once found had been lost. Butterflies were hardest hit, losing almost a half of species, including the large tortoiseshell and scarce copper. In England, two-thirds of 340 moth species declined from 1968-2003.

Bumblebees
Museum records enabled scientists to assess the fate of 16 species of bumblebees in the US midwest from 1900 to 2007. They found four had completely died out, while eight were declining in number, and blamed intensive agriculture and pesticides.

Dragonflies
Red dragonfly populations have fallen sharply in Japan since the mid-1990s, which scientists link to insecticides in rice paddies that stop the water-living nymphs emerging into adults. In the US, recent surveys across California and Nevada found 65% of dragonflies and damselflies had declined in the 100 years since 1914.

Leafhoppers
Leafhoppers and planthoppers often make up a large proportion of the flying insects in European grasslands. But scientists found their abundance in Germany plunged by 66% in the 50 years to 2010. Soil acidification, partly due to heavy fertiliser use, was the main cause.

Ground beetles
In the UK, dramatic declines in ground beetles have been seen in almost three-quarters of the 68 carabid species studied from 1994-2008. A few species increased, but overall one in six of all the beetles was lost in that time.

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The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

"If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet's ecosystems and for the survival of mankind," said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.

The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is "shocking", Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: "It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none."

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. "If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death," he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years.

The new analysis selected the 73 best studies done to date to assess the insect decline. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit. For example, the number of widespread butterfly species fell by 58% on farmed land in England between 2000 and 2009. The UK has suffered the biggest recorded insect falls overall, though that is probably a result of being more intensely studied than most places.

Bees have also been seriously affected, with only half of the bumblebee species found in Oklahoma in the US in 1949 being present in 2013. The number of honeybee colonies in the US was 6 million in 1947, but 3.5 million have been lost since.

There are more than 350,000 species of beetle and many are thought to have declined, especially dung beetles. But there are also big gaps in knowledge, with very little known about many flies, ants, aphids, shield bugs and crickets. Experts say there is no reason to think they are faring any better than the studied species.

A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses. "There are always some species that take advantage of vacuum left by the extinction of other species," said Sanchez-Bayo. In the US, the common eastern bumblebee is increasing due to its tolerance of pesticides.

Most of the studies analysed were done in western Europe and the US, with a few ranging from Australia to China and Brazil to South Africa, but very few exist elsewhere.

"The main cause of the decline is agricultural intensification," Sánchez-Bayo said. "That means the elimination of all trees and shrubs that normally surround the fields, so there are plain, bare fields that are treated with synthetic fertilisers and pesticides." He said the demise of insects appears to have started at the dawn of the 20th century, accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s and reached "alarming proportions" over the last two decades.

He thinks new classes of insecticides introduced in the last 20 years, including neonicotinoids and fipronil, have been particularly damaging as they are used routinely and persist in the environment: "They sterilise the soil, killing all the grubs." This has effects even in nature reserves nearby; the 75% insect losses recorded in Germany were in protected areas.

The world must change the way it produces food, Sánchez-Bayo said, noting that organic farms had more insects and that occasional pesticide use in the past did not cause the level of decline seen in recent decades. "Industrial-scale, intensive agriculture is the one that is killing the ecosystems," he said.

In the tropics, where industrial agriculture is often not yet present, the rising temperatures due to climate change are thought to be a significant factor in the decline. The species there have adapted to very stable conditions and have little ability to change, as seen in Puerto Rico.

Sánchez-Bayo said the unusually strong language used in the review was not alarmist. "We wanted to really wake people up" and the reviewers and editor agreed, he said. "When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern."

Other scientists agree that it is becoming clear that insect losses are now a serious global problem. "The evidence all points in the same direction," said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK. "It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects."

Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said: "It is gravely sobering to see this collation of evidence that demonstrates the pitiful state of the world's insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet's ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to halt and reverse these dreadful trends." In his opinion, the review slightly overemphasises the role of pesticides and underplays global warming, though other unstudied factors such as light pollution might prove to be significant.

Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford Universityin the US, has seen insects vanish first-hand, through his work on checkerspot butterflies on Stanford's Jasper Ridge reserve. He first studied them in 1960 but they had all gone by 2000, largely due to climate change.

Ehrlich praised the review, saying: "It is extraordinary to have gone through all those studies and analysed them as well as they have." He said the particularly large declines in aquatic insects were striking. "But they don't mention that it is human overpopulation and overconsumption that is driving all the things [eradicating insects], including climate change," he said.

Sánchez-Bayo said he had recently witnessed an insect crash himself. A recent family holiday involved a 400-mile (700km) drive across rural Australia, but he had not once had to clean the windscreen, he said. "Years ago you had to do this constantly."

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Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

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The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems", according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

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Claude Bourguignon on the link between soils, deforestation and climate change

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Claude Bourguignon on the link between soils, deforestation and climate change

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Brilliant summation with lots of useful statistics

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We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Late

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We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Late

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Jeremy Lent on the need to transform civilisation

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In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of "green growth" are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an "ecological civilization": one that prioritizes the health of living systems over short-term wealth production. Reprinted in: EcoWatch | Common Dreams | Resilience | Open Democracy
We've now been warned by the world's leading climate scientists that we have just twelve years to limit climate catastrophe. The UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put the world on notice that going from a 1.5° to 2.0° C rise in temperature above preindustrial levels would have disastrous consequences across the board, with unprecedented flooding, drought, ocean devastation, and famine.

Meanwhile, the world's current policies have us on track for more than 3° increase by the end of this century, and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections, and thus place at risk the very continuation of our civilization. We need, according to the IPCC, "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society." But what exactly does that mean?

Last month, at the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS) in San Francisco, luminaries such as Governor Jerry Brown, Michael Bloomberg, and Al Gore gave their version of what's needed with an ambitious report entitled "Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century by the New Climate Economy." It trumpets a New Growth Agenda: through enlightened strategic initiatives, they claim, it's possible to transition to a low-carbon economy that could generate millions more jobs, raise trillions of dollars for green investment, and lead to higher global GDP growth.

But these buoyant projections by mainstream leaders, while overwhelmingly preferable to the Republican Party's malfeasance, are utterly insufficient to respond to the crisis facing our civilization. In promising that the current system can fix itself with a few adjustments, they are turning a blind eye to the fundamental drivers propelling civilization toward collapse. By offering false hope, they deflect attention from the profound structural changes that our global economic system must make if we hope to bequeath a flourishing society to future generations.

Ecological overshoot

That's because even the climate emergency is merely a harbinger of other existential threats looming over humanity as a result of ecological overshoot-the fact that we're depleting the earth's natural resources at a faster rate than they can be replenished. As long as government policies emphasize growing GDP as a national priority, and as long as transnational corporations relentlessly pursue greater shareholder returns by ransacking the earth, we will continue accelerating toward global catastrophe.

Currently, our civilization is running at 40% above its sustainable capacity. We're rapidly depleting the earth's forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. We've already transgressed three of the nine planetary boundaries that define humanity's safe operating space, and yet global GDP is expected to more than double by mid-century, with potentially irreversible and devastating consequences. By 2050, it's estimated, there will be more plastic in the world's oceans than fish. Last year, over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: "Soon it will be too late," they wrote, "to shift course away from our failing trajectory."

Techno-optimists, including many of the GCAS dignitaries, like to dismiss these warnings with talk of "green growth"-essentially decoupling GDP growth from increased use of resources. While that would be a laudable goal, a number of studies have shown that it's simply not feasible. Even the most wildly aggressive assumptions for greater efficiency would still result in consuming global resources at double the sustainable capacity by mid-century.

A desperate situation indeed, but one that need not lead to despair. In fact, there is a scenario where we can turn around this rush to the precipice and redirect humanity to a thriving future on a regenerated earth. It would, however, require us to rethink some of the sacrosanct beliefs of our modern world, beginning with the unquestioning reliance on perpetual economic growth within a global capitalist system directed by transnational corporations driven exclusively by the need to increase shareholder value for their investors.

In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth production to one based on the health of living systems: an ecological civilization.

An ecological civilization

The crucial idea behind an ecological civilization is that our society needs to change at a level far deeper than most people realize. It's not just a matter of investing in renewables, eating less meat, and driving an electric car. The intrinsic framework of our global social and economic organization needs to be transformed. And this will only happen when enough people recognize the destructive nature of our current mainstream culture and reject it for one that is life-affirming-embracing values that emphasize growth in the quality of life rather than in the consumption of goods and services.

A change of such magnitude would be an epochal event. There have been only two occasions in history when radical dislocations led to a transformation of virtually every aspect of the human experience: the Agricultural Revolution that began about twelve thousand years ago, and the Scientific Revolution of the 17 th century. If our civilization is to survive and prosper through the looming crises of this century, we will need a transformation of our values, goals, and collective behavior on a similar scale.

An ecological civilization would be based on the core principles that sustain living systems coexisting stably in natural ecologies. Insights into how ecologies self-organize offer a model for how we could organize human society in ways that could permit sustainable abundance. Organisms prosper when they develop multiple symbiotic relationships, wherein each party to a relationship both takes and gives reciprocally. In an ecology, energy flows are balanced and one species' waste matter becomes nourishment for another. Entities within an ecology scale fractally, with microsystems existing as integral parts of larger systems to form a coherent whole. In a well-functioning ecosystem, each organism thrives by optimizing for its own existence within a network of relationships that enhances the common good. The inherent resilience caused by these dynamics means that-without human disruption-ecosystems can maintain their integrity for many thousands, and sometimes millions, of years.

In practice, transitioning to an ecological civilization would mean restructuring some of the fundamental institutions driving our current civilization to destruction. In place of an economy based on perpetual growth in GDP, it would institute one that emphasized quality of life, using alternative measures such as a Genuine Progress Indicator to gauge success. Economic systems would be based on respect for individual dignity and fairly rewarding each person's contribution to the greater good, while ensuring that nutritional, housing, healthcare, and educational needs were fully met for everyone. Transnational corporations would be fundamentally reorganized and made accountable to the communities they purportedly serve, to optimize human and environmental wellbeing rather than shareholder profits. Locally owned cooperatives would become the default organizational structure. Food systems would be designed to emphasize local production using state-of-the-art agroecology practices in place of fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides, while manufacturing would prioritize circular flows where efficient re-use of waste products is built into the process from the outset.

In an ecological civilization, the local community would be the basic building block of society. Face-to-face interaction would regain ascendance as a crucial part of human flourishing, and each community's relationship with others would be based on principles of mutual respect, learning, and reciprocity. Technological innovation would still be encouraged, but would be prized for its effectiveness in enhancing the vitality of living systems rather than minting billionaires. The driving principle of enterprise would be that we are all interconnected in the web of life-and long-term human prosperity is therefore founded on a healthy Earth.

Cultivating a flourishing future

While this vision may seem a distant dream to those who are transfixed by the daily frenzy of current events, innumerable pioneering organizations around the world are already planting the seeds for this cultural metamorphosis.

In China, President Xi Jinping has declared an ecological civilization to be a central part of his long-term vision for the country. In Bolivia and Ecuador, the related values of and sumak kawsay ("good living') are written into the constitution, and in Africa the concept of ("I am because we are") is a widely-discussed principle of human relations. In Europe, hundreds of scientists, politicians, and policy-makers recently co-authored a call for the EU to plan for a sustainable future in which human and ecological wellbeing is prioritized over GDP.

Examples of large-scale thriving cooperatives, such as Mondragon in Spain, demonstrate that it's possible for companies to provide effectively for human needs without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model. Think tanks such as The Next System Project, The Global Citizens Initiative, and the P2P Foundation are laying down parameters for the political, economic, and social organization of an ecological civilization. And the core principles of an ecological civilization have already been set out in the Earth Charter-an ethical framework launched in The Hague in 2000 and endorsed by over 6,000 organizations worldwide, including many governments. Meanwhile, visionary authors such as Kate Raworth and David Korten have written extensively on how to reframe the way we think about our economic and political path forward.

As the mainstream juggernaut drives our current civilization inexorably toward breaking point, it's easy to dismiss these steps toward a new form of civilization as too insignificant to make a difference. However, as the current system begins to break down in the coming years, increasing numbers of people around the world will come to realize that a fundamentally different alternative is needed. Whether they turn to movements based on prejudice and fear or join in a vision for a better future for humanity depends, to a large extent, on the ideas available to them.

One way or another, humanity is headed for the third great transformation in its history: either in the form of global collapse or a metamorphosis to a new foundation for sustainable flourishing. An ecological civilization offers a path forward that may be the only true hope for our descendants to thrive on Earth into the distant future.

Watch Jeremy Lent's talk on the principles of an ecological civilization

Presented at Parliament of World Religions, Toronto, November 2018

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a sustainable worldview. For more information visit jeremylent.com.

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We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It's Too Late

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In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of "green growth" are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an "ecological civilization": one that prioritizes the health of living systems over short-term wealth production.

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World heritage forests burn as global tragedy unfolds in Tasmania

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World heritage forests burn as global tragedy unfolds in Tasmania

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Fires in Tasmania forest

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World heritage forests burn as global tragedy unfolds in Tasmania

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'Devastating' long-term prognosis for ancient Gondwana ecosystem as bushfires turn trees more than 1,000 years old to tinder

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How vegan evangelists are propping up the ultra-processed food industry

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How vegan evangelists are propping up the ultra-processed food industry

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Agribusiness gets a new lease of life

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Ultra-processing hands food manufacturers a licence to print money.

Take potatoes.

There's only so much you could charge for them in their natural form, even if you were to market them as exclusive heirloom varieties, hand polished in mineral water by virgins.

But transform them into crisps, or microwaveable chips, and the sky's the limit.

It's what food engineers refer to as "adding value": the more you can break down whole foods into biddable component parts, which you then endlessly manipulate to produce a series of more lucrative configurations, the more the Stock Market loves you.

"Value engineering" (keeping down ingredient costs) is the food manufacturer's overweening objective. You do it by replacing the costlier items, eggs, butter, meat, milk, for instance, with pre-processed industrial substitutes, artfully employed, using all the tricks in the food technologist's manual, to create a similar effect.

Why, for example, use real eggs in your formulation when you can choose instead cleverly confected starches, which, along with synthetic egg flavouring and yellow colouring, will give your product an egg-like effect?

Ultra-processing is a tried-and-tested formula for skinflint spending and profit generation. But now that over half the food we eat in the UK falls into this category.

This strong financial incentive to reduce raw material costs is the reason why ultra-processed products as seemingly dissimilar as fish fingers, mayonnaise and chocolate mousse frequently share so many common ingredients: added water, protein flours, industrially refined oil, gums, chemically-altered starches, and sugar, in multiple, often less than candidly expressed, forms.

All the above are tarted-up with man-made food additives - preservatives, emulsifiers, flavourings, colourings - and further confected with unlabelled "processing aids", such as enzymes.

Ultra-processing is a tried-and-tested formula for skinflint spending and profit generation. But now that over half the food we eat in the UK falls into this category, manufacturers find themselves in the dock, judged guilty of making the population fat and sick with their creations.

Then, just in the nick of time, along comes the vegan-driven, "plant food" army, handing them a "Get out of jail free" card, a chance to recast their industry as saviour of the nation's health. And while they're at it, why not also go for gold and reinvent health-wrecking junk under a new green banner, as rescuing the planet?

It's an excuse to slash their ingredients costs even further by replacing everything real, pricy and of animal origin with everything that is fake, cheap and from a plant.

Plant-food evangelism - at its most righteous and vituperative recently with the grandiose launch of the EAT-Lancet diet, which advocates that every soul on the planet should transition to a plant-based diet - is music to the ears of Big Food.

However cheap, low grade and factory farmed the animal foods in its omnivore products, they still cost considerably more than the plant equivalents: corn, wheat, soya.

No wonder many controversial junk food manufacturers, chemical and biotech companies, additives corporations, and commodity food processors are so supportive of EAT-Lancet.

They must scarcely be able to believe their luck. They've been handed a massive rebranding opportunity free of charge, courtesy of the vegan desire for plant-based junk pretending to be dairy, meat, fish, and eggs.

An excuse to slash their ingredients costs even further by replacing everything real, pricy, and of animal origin with everything that is fake, cheap and from a plant, has just fallen into their laps. Seriously, they must be laughing all the way to the bank.

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Joanna Blythman is an award-winning investigative journalist, the author of seven landmark books on food issues, and one of the most authoritative, influential commentators on the British food chain. A great believer in basing your diet on whole, unprocessed food that you cook yourself, Joanna is a passionate supporter of independent shops, markets and similar non-supermarket outlets. Guild of Food Writers Food Writer of the Year 2018.

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How vegan evangelists are propping up the ultra-processed food industry - Mouthy Money

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Ultra-processing hands food manufacturers a licence to print money. Take potatoes. There's only so much you could charge for them in their natural form, even if you were to market them as exclusive heirloom varieties, hand polished in mineral water by virgins. But transform them into crisps, or microwaveable chips, and the sky's the limit.

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Britain has lost half its wildlife. Now’s the time to shout about it

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Britain has lost half its wildlife. Now’s the time to shout about it

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Modern farming has wiped out billions of insects and birds. Plans to restore them will only work with public pressure

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Britain has lost half its wildlife. Now's the time to shout about it | Michael McCarthy

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Modern farming methods have exacted a terrible price on insects and birds, says naturalist and author Michael McCarthy

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Os pássaros estão a desaparecer dos campos da Europa

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Os pássaros estão a desaparecer dos campos da Europa

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Nos últimos 30 anos, o número de aves nas zonas rurais dos países da União Europeia sofreu um decréscimo de 55%

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Não o perceberemos nas cidades onde a maioria das populações passa grande parte das suas vidas. Mas sabem os que habitam as zonas rurais, e irão percebê-lo os que as visitam regularmente. Irão perceber como, se nada for alterado, se tornarão progressivamente menos ricos em diversidade e menos variados os sons que enchem o ar. Esta semana foi dado o alerta: a biodiversidade das zonas rurais europeias está ameaçada. Nas últimas três décadas, os 28 países da União Europeia viram a sua população de pássaros nessas áreas sofrer um decréscimo de 55%. Em Portugal, os dados recolhidos apontam para o mesmo fenómeno. As causas? Os pesticidas, a agricultura intensiva e as monoculturas promovidas pela Política Agrícola Comum da União Europeia.

Na terça-feira, o Le Monde dava a notícia. Dois estudos franceses, um do Museu Nacional de História Natural, outro do Centro Nacional de Pesquisa Científica, feitos de forma independente e aplicando metodologias diferentes, apontavam para as mesmas conclusões. Nos últimos 15 anos, desapareceu um terço da população de aves nas zonas campestres do interior do país - a perdiz registou um decréscimo de 80%, a migratória petinha-dos-prados diminui a sua presença em 70% e um quarto das cotovias também desapareceu. Em Inglaterra, noticiava o Guardian na quarta-feira, a situação é igualmente alarmante: 56% da população de pássaros rurais perdida entre 1970 e 2015. A situação é descrita no jornal inglês como "catastrófica", o francês alerta para a "proximidade de uma catástrofe ecológica".

Em Portugal, diz ao PÚBLICO Joaquim Teodósio, coordenador do Departamento de Conservação Terrestre da Sociedade Portuguesa para o Estudo das Aves (SPEA), o panorama não será substancialmente diferente. "Confirma-se esse declínio das espécies associadas aos habitats agrícolas, embora, pela falta de recolhas no terreno, seja difícil ter dados robustos para a maioria das espécies". Ainda assim, é possível classificar como "preocupante", por exemplo, a situação da rola-brava e do picanço barreteiro: entre 2004 e 2014, registou-se um decréscimo de 54% e 65% nas respectivas populações de pássaros.

O declínio deve-se a um conjunto de factores, centrados nas políticas promovidas pela Política Agrícola Comum (PAC) da União Europeia (EU). A generalização de pesticidas, em particular os neonicotinóides, tem dizimado as populações de insectos de que muitas espécies de pássaros se alimentam. No ano passado era notícia o decréscimo na ordem dos 75% de insectos voadores nas reservas naturais alemãs e, no artigo do Le Monde, surge a informação de que a população das vulgares carochas decresceu 85% nos últimos 23 anos.

"Na última década e meia tem havido uma intensificação agrícola e políticas relacionadas com a floresta que contribuem para estas situações", explica Joaquim Teodósio, referindo os "olivais intensivos, que têm substituído outras culturas", ou "o desaparecimento das culturas de sequeiro". As vastas áreas de monocultura contribuem também para a realidade actual. "As espécies [de pássaros] granívoras perdem a alimentação que lhes garantiam as culturas que produzem essas sementes". Os efeitos nefastos das políticas promovidas pela PAC são evidentes quando comparados com outras realidades. "Nos países do Leste europeu e nos países que entraram há menos tempo na União Europeia ainda se mantém uma diversidade bastante elevada e os dados não são tão alarmantes", aponta Joaquim Teodósio. Refere que algumas espécies de aves têm visto as suas populações aumentar, "especialmente espécies oportunistas, com maior capacidade de utilização dos recursos". Tal situação, porém, "é um indicador do que se passa à nossa volta": "Haver espécies oportunistas, que estão mais adaptadas às zonas urbanas, que se alimentam em aterros de lixo, mostra que os habitats naturais estão a desaparecer".

Conseguir uma inversão desta realidade passará, defende o membro da SPEA, pelo "incentivo a culturas e práticas agrícolas que contribuam para a manutenção da biodiversidade" e pela "protecção de zonas importantes a nível de recursos naturais". Protecção que terá que passar pelo apoio aos proprietários que as detenham. "Não têm retorno da manutenção dessas áreas e preferem criar amendoais ou olivais. É preciso que tenham incentivos e apoios para as manter".

O desenvolvimento de estratégias que permitam combater esta perda generalizada em toda a Europa depara-se com obstáculos em Portugal. Um deles é a falta de informação detalhada da realidade local. "Temos muita falta de informação e de informação robusta. Era necessário ter uma boa cobertura do país, com dados de boa qualidade recolhidos anualmente, mas não é fácil consegui-lo quando não há investimento", lamenta Joaquim Teodósio.

Os dados agora fornecidos ao PÚBLICO resultam do Censo de Aves Comuns que a SPEA lançou em 2004 e são actualizados por voluntários que se disponibilizam para fazer monitorização de áreas de terreno que lhes são atribuídas. "Em Espanha são mil voluntários, nós temos 40, 50 por ano a fazer um trabalho essencial e a recolher informação que o país é obrigado a fornecer". Ocasionalmente, surgem possibilidades de candidatura a fundos de apoio rural, o que é insuficiente para um trabalho que exige continuidade. "Hoje em dia já se fazem coisas como a monitorização do ar nas cidades, mas outras são esquecidas, talvez por não ser tão evidente e próximo à maioria da população o impacto que têm. Depois, quando surgirem anos de seca mais prolongada, quando se sucederem as grandes chuvadas, aí que se ouvirá o 'ai Jesus'", alerta.

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Os pássaros estão a desaparecer dos campos da Europa

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Nos últimos 30 anos, o número de aves nas zonas rurais dos países da União Europeia sofreu um decréscimo de 55%. Nos últimos 15, França perdeu 80% das suas perdizes. Em Portugal, entre 2004 e 2014, desapareceram mais de metade das populações de rola

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UNCTAD Trade & Environment Review 2013. Small-scale organic farming is the only way to feed the world

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Food Independence & Planetary Evolution: Zach Bush, MD

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Food Independence & Planetary Evolution: Zach Bush, MD

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Interview on the link between the rise in chronic disease and environmental degradation

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Food Independence & Planetary Evolution: Zach Bush, MD | Rich Roll Podcast

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The EAT-Lancet Commission's controversial campaignA global powerful action against meat?

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The EAT-Lancet Commission's controversial campaignA global powerful action against meat?

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The powerful push to shift global diets by discouraging animal products is fuelled by large budgets and will be mediatised for a long time to come. But a closer look into its background reveals some perturbing elements

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A global powerful action against meat?

The kick-off meeting will held on January 17th in Oslo
EAT is a global, non-profit startup dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships. According to the website, "the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health brings together more than 30 world-leading scientists from across the globe to reach a scientific consensus that defines a healthy and sustainable diet". But the campaign, that will be launched in Oslo on January 17th, sounds like a powerful push to shift global diets by discouraging animal products. It is fuelled by large budgets and will be mediatised for a long time to come, scheduling more than 30 events around the world. But a closer look into its background reveals some perturbing elements. The danger is that the overstatement of certain concerns will result in an anti-livestock narrative, create a false impression of scientific consensus, and do more harm than good in a world in need of nutrient-rich meals and sustainable food systems. EFA News has received this text which we gladly publish to encourage public debate. These crucial issues, in our humble opinion, should be the responsibility of public authorities, rather than private associations that inevitably act as pressure groups. By Frédéric Leroy, Martin Cohen
Will 2019 be remembered as the year of the EAT-Lancet intervention, arguing for a planetary shift to a so-called "plant-based" diet? Isn't it remarkable how meat, symbolizing health and vitality since millennia, is now often depicted as detrimental to our bodies, the animals, and the planet? Why exactly is the minoritarian discourse of vegetarianism and veganism currently all over the media? This widespread representation of meat as intrinsically harmful is worrying, to the point that some academics, health professionals, and expert committees are now expressing concern that it will add to malnutrition in wealthy countries, and sometimes even act as a cover or trigger for disordered eating. As a rising societal trend, "plant-based" lifestyles have of course a complex raison d'être and display heterogeneity among their mostly well-intentioned adherents. Nonetheless, the main discourses look remarkably script-based and some of the soundbites are coming from well-respected actors.

Take Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC). She has compared meat eaters to smokers - who likewise were once role models but later became pariahs - and believes that they should be having their meal outside of the restaurant. Or Harvard's professor Walter Willett, who has claimed that one on three early deaths could be saved if we all gave up meat, and Oxford's vegan researcher Marco Springmann who has called for a meat tax to prevent over "220,000 deaths" and save billions in healthcare costs.

Remarkable statements, all the more when coming from prestigious universities, as such calculations are based on weak and confounded epidemiological associations that do not allow for causal claims. Furthermore, they ignore the need for risk assessment and disregard inconvenient data, such as the lack of harmful effects on markers for cardiovascular risk and inflammation during intervention studies. The nutritional robustness of animal products is persistently undervalued, especially for the young and elderly, and the same is true for the ecological advantages of well-managed livestock. Comparable "meat-is-bad" narratives are spread by authorities as the World Wide Fund for Nature ( WWF) and the World Health Organisation. An editorial in The Lancet ("We need to talk about meat") centred on the advice that meat eating should be reduced to... "very little" and concluded with a cryptical message: "The conversation has to start soon". But hold on, is it a conversation or a lecture?
EAT-Lancet: new kid on the block with all the latest gear
To be able to answer this question, one needs to find out where the action is. All of the scientists and organisations mentioned in the previous paragraph have a common background: they belong to the EAT-Lancet Commission (with the exception of Figueres who will nonetheless be a speaker at their upcoming Stockholm 2019 Food Forum). What exactly is EAT, now incontournable in food policy debates? Its origin is surprising: it was founded in 2013 by Gunhild Stordalen, an animal right activist for the Norwegian Animal Welfare Alliance and wife of hotel tycoon Petter Stordalen. The couple is among Europe's richest and - according to an article in Forbes - displays a particularly lavish lifestyle despite its image of green avengers.

The Stordalens have both the means and networks to put their ideas into action, as their contacts include CEOs, politicians, and royalties. And if budgets allow it, influence can be purchased: 3.5 million NOK was paid to Bill Clinton - who went vegan in 2010 - for a one-hour speech at an EAT conference in 2014. Another scheduled speaker, at the Stockholm 2019 Food Forum, is Khaled bin Alwaleed. Khaled is a Saudi Prince who sees dairy as " the root of all environmental evil" and is on a " mission to veganize the Middle East". The portfolio of investments of this powerful ally includes companies that develop... fake meat and dairy. Such as the Beyond Burger, which Gunhild happily endorses on social media. When talking about vegan junk food, the otherwise primordial issue of healthy diets suddenly seems to matter a lot less? After the 2018 Nexus Global Summit, held at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York, Khaled posted a photo of himself alongside self-proclaimed "vegan political leaders". Proudly posing among them: Gunhild Stordalen. The meeting's aim was to "expedite the transition", now that a tipping point is within reach, and make it permanent, instead of just a passing trend. Khaled also serves on the Advisory Council of the Good Food Institute, among "scientists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and lobbyists, all of whom are laser focused on using markets and food technology to transform our food system [...] toward clean meat and plant-based alternatives."
The road to a plant-based future is paved with good intentions... and business calculations
This is the point where "Big Ag" steps in, having discovered that the "plant-based" lifestyle market generates large profit margins, adding value through the ultra-processing of cheap materials ( e.g., protein extracts, starches, and oils). The world's leading food multinationals are related to the EAT network via FReSH, a bridge to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development ( WBCSD). The WBCSD is a CEO-led organization of over 200 international companies. Unilever, for instance, offers nearly 700 vegan products in Europe and has now also acquired the Dutch Vegetarian Butcher. The latter's marketing activities, by the way, have been designed by a key politician of the Dutch Party for the Animals and a Seventh-day Adventist.

WBCSD's origins go back to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, where it was created by the industrialists Stephan Schmidheiny and Maurice Strong, the controversial architect of global climate policy. Strong was both a top diplomate for the United Nations and a businessman, for instance as president of Petro-Canada. As a strange hybrid product of the oil industry and environmentalism, he fostered some outspoken ideas (not to mention the bizarre esoteric beliefs of his wife and friends, with whom he supported the Lindisfarne group). Strong's desire was to strengthen the grip of the UN on global affairs and to accommodate crisis-ridden capitalisms, with environmental alarm being ideal to set the machine in motion. Starting with the Stockholm Conference in 1972, he managed to establish sustainability as part of an international development agenda and became a key member of a long list of organisations, of which many now constitute... the EAT-Lancet constellation. Except for the WBCSD, Strong was instrumental in the development of the World Resources Institute (a close partner of EAT, see below) and the Stockholm Environment Institute and Beijer Institute (now both incorporated in EAT's co-founder, the Stockholm Resilience Centre). In this shared ecosystem, we also encounter the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, the WWF, etc. Strong stepped down in 2005 after he was mentioned in the Oil-for-Food scandal, but his legacy lives on.

In addition to its alliance with WBCSD and FReSH, EAT is closely working together with another food campaigning group called the Barilla Centre for Food and Nutrition ( BCFN). Both Gunhild Stordalen and Walter Willett have been keynote speakers at its International Forum on Food and Nutrition. BCFN defines itself as an "independent think tank", even if the owners of the pasta giant Barilla are on its board of directors. The authors of a study promoting BCFN's double food pyramid have declared that they acted "in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest". The model discourages the eating of meat and recommends... cereals. The more critical issue here is how something that resembles a marketing tool can end up as a scientific instrument for global policy development? And become part of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Italian Ministry for Education, to be presented as an " educative project " targeting primary schools?
"Social engineering" via the Shift Wheel, or: how to direct the public toward fake meat?
Taken together, EAT seems to have all it takes to implement its global agenda. In January 2018, a multi-stakeholder event was organised in Davos, to "improve synergies and accelerate progress" of food system change. In 2013, Stordalen had already contacted the Stockholm Resilience Centre with the demand to create a " Davos for food". Co-organizers of the event included the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the inevitable BCFN, and the International Food Policy Research Institute. The strategy was clear: market forces have to be shaped, consumers redirected. This is a task taken up by the Food and Land Use Coalition, an umbrella organisation where the broader strategic lines are divided between EAT, WBCSD, GAIN, IIASA, and a crucial EAT partner: the World Resources Institute. The WRI is funded by several governments, companies, and foundations ( e.g., Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society, Bill & Melinda Gates, Shell), aiming to interfere in society at large. Particularly intriguing is its focus on something called the Shift Wheel in one of its working papers, as "a new framework based on proven private sector marketing tactics". Some suggested options are to "disguise the change", open up "new markets", and make meat "socially unacceptable". Potential interventions are familiar (in order of increasing compulsion): influencing nutritional labelling and dietary guidelines, 30-day diet challenges, taxing meat, and... removing meat from restaurant menus.

At first, the EAT-Lancet agenda seems to be a noble, academic endeavour. On second sight, however, it shapeshifts into a more ambiguous mix of honest scientists and researchers with an agenda, and of philanthropic ideologists and various vested interests. Moreover, the fact that the entire cluster is reassembling the remnants that were once developed by a Machiavellian oil businessman do not inspire confidence. Be that as it may, the pervasive influence of various industry platforms and Foundations, that have been funding this constellation over the years, have been criticised for directing policies toward quick-win methods. As such, they are pushing the system toward "market-based and techno-fix solutions to complex global problems". Bill Gates-backed biotechnology efforts to produce fake meat and lab meat are telling examples.
Conclusion: what's really going on?
The initial effect of the EAT-Lancet campaign seems to be not so much to promote animal welfare as to open up for "Big Ag" lucrative new markets and feed the hunger of governments for new tax bases. What start as academic and scientific debates become political arguments that are dangerously simplistic and may have several detrimental consequences for both health and the environment. Of course, climate change is real and does require our attention. And, yes, livestock should be optimized but also be used as part of the solution to make our environments and food systems more sustainable and our populations healthier. But instead of undermining the foundations of our diets and the livelihoods of many, we should be tackling rather than ignoring the root causes, in particular hyperconsumerism. What we should avoid is losing ourselves in slogans, nutritional scientism, and distorted worldviews.

Frédéric Leroy, Martin Cohen
Frédéric Leroy (B) (@fleroy1974) is a professor of food science and technology, investigating the scientific and societal aspects of animal food products, writing in individual capacity. Martin Cohen (UK) (@docmartincohen) is a social scientist whose latest book "I Think Therefore I Eat" (2018) takes a philosophical and sociological look at food science and argues for a more holistic approach to food and health debates.
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© World Food Press Agency Srl

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The kick-off meeting will held on January 17th in Oslo EAT is a global, non-profit startup dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships. According to the website, "the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health brings together more than 30 world-leading scientists from across the globe to reach a scientific consensus that defines a healthy and sustainable diet".

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EAT-Lancet report’s recommendations are at odds with sustainable food production

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EAT-Lancet report’s recommendations are at odds with sustainable food production

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Due to a fundamental lack of agricultural understanding, some of the main dietary recommendations are incompatible with the food production outcomes of truly sustainable farming systems

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The Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) [1] welcomes the analysis in the EAT-Lancet report, [2] published today, which illustrates why diets and global food systems need to change. However, due to a fundamental lack of agricultural understanding, some of the main dietary recommendations are incompatible with the food production outcomes of truly sustainable farming systems. For instance, in prioritising reductions in beef and lamb consumption over poultry consumption, the resulting environmental and health outcomes will both be negative.

If fully implemented, the recommendations would make it impossible to introduce sustainable and restorative farming systems in countries like the UK, where a high proportion of farmland is only suitable for growing grass. In addition, grass and grazing animals need to be reintroduced into many all-arable crop rotations to address the serious problems of soil degradation and biodiversity loss.

The failure to make a stronger recommendation in relation to reducing poultry meat consumption is misguided. We recognise that meat consumption overall needs to be reduced, but poultry are in direct competition with humans for grain. Although intensive cattle in some countries are fed on grain, ruminants in many countries predominantly eat grass and arable by-products which humans cannot digest. In relation to the environment, our analysis is that for net greenhouse gas emissions, soil degradation, biodiversity, diffuse agrochemical pollution and human health, reductions need to be made in meat that is largely fed on grain, not meat that is predominantly fed on grass. [3]

Patrick Holden, chief executive of the SFT said, "We welcome the fact that the report highlights the urgent need for fundamental change in farming systems and diets. However, it does little to inform the public about the path to a sustainable future and in some key respects will make things worse. A key weakness in the report is the failure to fully differentiate between livestock that are part of the problem and those that are an essential component of sustainable agricultural systems. This results in messages that are likely to add to existing confusion around what constitutes a healthy and sustainable diet.

The report also places blind faith in the vague and unproven concept of 'sustainable intensification'. It assumes this will bring dramatic increases in yield and reductions in pollution claimed by the agrochemical and seed companies which expect to benefit financially from a range of new technologies, each of which will bring its own additional problems, as well as some possible advantages."

Many of the report's recommendations, such as increased consumption of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes are all sound, but when it comes to protein and fats the recommendations to depend so heavily on plant sources, poultry rather than red meat and unsaturated fats compared with saturated fats are fundamentally flawed. Humans have evolved as red meat eaters and, providing this is part of a balanced diet, beef and lamb provide superior types of protein and fat to plant sources. [4]

Fats make up 36% of daily energy intake in the UK. But rather than getting these from UK grassland via meat and dairy products in an environmentally friendly way as we once did, consumers currently get these from palm oil and soyabean oil, associated as they are with devastating environmental destruction, and from rape and sunflower oil, the production of which have been major causes of pollinator decline due to the high need of these crops for insecticides when grown as monocultures. Over the last decade a large number of studies in leading peer-reviewed journals, including one in the Lancet itself [5] have challenged the belief that saturated fats are inherently harmful. The fact that this evidence has been completely overlooked by authors suggests that, in this area at least, they may be driven more by ideology than a balanced assessment of the evidence.

We are also particularly concerned by the report's recommendations in relation to nitrogen fertiliser use. The authors correctly identify that excessive nitrogen fertiliser use in farming has caused humanity to exceed sustainable planetary boundaries for reactive nitrogen. Yet they fail to advocate forage legumes as a sustainable alternative source of nitrogen and instead recommend maintaining current fertiliser usage levels by increasing use in developing countries to match any decreases that can be achieved in developed countries. We feel this is a fundamental error which will accelerate the rate of soil degradation and loss and ultimately reduce yields in some of the most vulnerable communities.

Many studies have shown that in drought-prone regions of the world, in particular, and areas with poor soil quality, the most important thing is to maintain or build soil organic matter and this can only be achieved sustainably by integrating crop and livestock production and introducing nitrogen by deep-rooting leguminous plants rather than soluble fertiliser.

ENDS
For more information please contact:
Megan Perry - Communications Manager, Sustainable Food Trust
megan@sustainablefoodtrust.org
07761804341
Notes for Editors
[1] The Sustainable Food Trust is a registered charity, founded in 2011 by Patrick Holden CBE, that works globally to accelerate the transition to more sustainable food systems. For more information see: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org

[2] Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Commissioned by The Lancet, published 17 th January 2019 and authored by scientists and researchers from around the globe. http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/EAT

[3] You can read Richard Young's response to the study by Poore and Nemecek here: https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/claims-against-meat-fail-to-see-bigger-picture/

[4] Encouraging a dramatic shift to plant-based diets risks a rise in nutritional deficiency diseases. Plants do not contain the full range of essential amino acids, or adequate levels of some B vitamins and a number of other important micro-nutrients. Vegans can compensate for these with supplements and careful dietary choices, but need a higher than average knowledge of nutritional science in order to do so.

[5] Dehghan et al. 2017, 'Association of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five countries (PURE): a prospective cohort study, Lancet 390:2050-62 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/fulltext
Photograph: Otwarte Klatki

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EAT-Lancet report's recommendations are at odds with sustainable food production - Sustainable Food Trust

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The Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) [1] welcomes the analysis in the EAT-Lancet report, [2] published today, which illustrates why diets and global food systems need to change.

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The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact

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The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact

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Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

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The Holocene - or "wholly recent" epoch - is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch - informally dubbed the Anthropocene - has begun.

In a recent paper titled " The New World of the Anthropocene," which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet - lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.

Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet "on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale."

Are we living in the Anthropocene? The answer, the group of geologists concluded, was probably yes.

Prompted by the group's paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation.

"Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth," Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. "We are leaving a clear and unique record."

The term "Anthropocene" was coined a decade ago by Paul Crutzen, one of the three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. In a paper published in 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, a professor at the University of Michigan, noted that many forms of human activity now dwarf their natural counterparts; for instance, more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is fixed by all the world's plants, on land and in the ocean. Considering this, the pair wrote in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, "it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term 'anthropocene' for the current geological epoch." Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article in Nature titled "Geology of Mankind."

The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, "could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane."

Soon, the term began popping up in other scientific publications. "Riverine quality of the Anthropocene" was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences.

"Soils and sediments in the anthropocene," read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments.

One argument against the idea is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain's University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. "I noticed that Paul Crutzen's term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony," he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At a luncheon meeting of the commission, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea.

"We simply discussed it," he said. "And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term."

In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene... as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization." (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to "global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary," the period that ended 2.6 million years ago.

"What's going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant," a geologist says.

Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record - by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary - the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene - ought to exist, or if the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the International Commission on Stratigraphy decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.)

In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy.

Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes.

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists - most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia - have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

"We're still now debating whether we've actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what's going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant," observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. "Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we've spoken with think it's a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant."

Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. "Really it's a piece of science," he said. "We're trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context."

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The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity's Impact

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Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

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Insect collapse: we are destroying our life support systems

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Insect collapse: we are destroying our life support systems

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Earth’s bugs outweigh humans 17 times over and are such a fundamental foundation of the food chain that scientists say a crash in insect numbers risks “ecological Armageddon”

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Insect collapse: 'We are destroying our life support systems'

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Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

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Rattan Lal at Global Institute for Food Security conference 2016 on peak soil

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Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS)

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Soils and World Food Security by Rattan Lal at #GIFSconf2016

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Aboriginal Australian society - the true picture

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Aboriginal Australian society - the true picture

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Bruce Pascoe, an edited version of the 2017 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture given at the State Library of Victoria.

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Bruce Pascoe

Spring 2018

The deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop, supported the idea in 2006 that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own culture and language because it would retard them. Her fellow ministers and advisers weighed in with the opinion that Aboriginal culture was flawed because we hadn't invented the wheel or done anything useful with the land. Some went so far as to say child abuse was one of our cultural traits.

There is nothing postcolonial about Australia. It still has a Raj mentality and a vindictive adherence to colonial myth. Our country has never really investigated the colonial legacy, preferring to express horror at the inadequacy of the Indigenous population and the need to control their destiny and band-aid the wounds. If a crisis in health and education is perceived it is better to send in the army rather than teachers and doctors.

Taking the land from people as the spoils of religious wars, made more efficient and lethal by the creation of great ships, allowed the Europeans to extend their influence to all continents. That the Chinese visited many of those continents before the Europeans but chose to socialise and trade with the inhabitants rather than murder them and steal from them is another story and another psychology.

The European brain was so intrigued by its own superiority that it rendered every civilisation they encountered as savages. It didn't matter that the First Nations people of Vancouver built two-storey houses, that the Pueblo had advanced cities, that the Aztec and Mayan were as wealthy as any other nation on Earth, that the Australians invented bread and society. Yes, society, for the world's oldest town, and oldest by many thousands of years, is found in western New South Wales. Of course Australians refuse to visit the fount of civilisation because it questions every myth we make about ourselves.

For Christians to remain Christian and worthy of their religion the people they kill must be asking for it and the land they steal must be handed to them like a windfall apple. But the church had a way of helping the Christian conscience sleep at night in dreams of civilised excellence. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI decreed a papal bull called the Doctrine of Discovery. In response to the voyages of Columbus the Pope decided the church must explain and ratify the attacks on Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands.

The rationale goes like this. If a people do not recognise the name of Jesus Christ, and you'll be surprised how many people on different continents did not, then it is the duty of the Christian to take their land and bring them into the light. Most of those brought into the light had that light extinguished immediately by Christian swords. Many Christians still yearn for the same solution. As do many Muslims.

Christians had many bland formulae for explaining away the imperial deeds. The English artist Edward Hicks painted countless versions of the kingdom of the branch, with quaint scenes of lambs and lions lying down with each other, a trick incidentally that has been very difficult to repeat, and then one of them being led from the wilderness.

I was familiar with the stupid kid lying down with the spotless leopard and just accepted it as part of the smarmy kitsch of Christianity until I peered into that dark corner and saw the fine print of the Christian promise. In the version of that trope prepared for the Americas, the Puritan William Penn of Pennsylvania fame is talking to a group of First Nation Americans after the end of the Indian wars. The Indians have lost everything but a bunch of feathers and are forced to treat with Penn from a position of hopeless disadvantage.

They decide that if Penn walks from sunrise to sundown in a straight line then that line should form the side of a square of land that Penn can call his own. Of course the Penn family trained sprinters to race across the land in relay and thus increase tenfold the area claimed. Ah the Christian spirit, the Puritan genius.

The poverty of the European spirit and the devilry of its intelligence created a massively unequal world and that inequality is blamed on indigenous peoples instead of on the nature of the European mind. In Australia that meant crushing the oldest civilisation on Earth and the creators of bread, language and democracy.

Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years. Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it. Imagine the organisation required in the publishing industry to fail to mention Aboriginal agriculture, science and diplomacy. Don't blame Pauline Hanson, don't blame Geoff Blainey and Keith Windschuttle, blame Manning Clark, Gough Whitlam and every editor of Meanjin and Overland, for they too were guilty of that omission.

What omission? Well let's look at what the explorers reported of the Aboriginal agricultural economy and see if you can remember any priest, parent or professor alluding to it. Lieutenant Grey in his 1839 'exploration' of parts of Western Australia, so far unseen by Europeans, saw yam gardens more than five kilometres wide and extending a distance past the horizon and because the land had been so deeply tilled he could not walk across it. Sir Thomas Mitchell in the country that is now the Queensland-New South Wales border area rode through 17 kilometres of stooked grain that his fellows described as being like an English field of harvest. Isn't that word 'stook' interesting when applied to what we thought we knew about Aboriginal history?

Isaac Batey saw that the hillsides of Melbourne were terraced in the process of yam production and that the tilth of the soil was so light you could run your fingers through it. Mitchell saw these yam fields stretching as far as he could see near Gariwerd (Grampians). He extolled the beauty of these plains assuming that God had made them so that he could 'discover' them, not once thinking how peculiar it was for the best soil in the country to have almost no trees. This was a managed field of harvest. George Augustus Robinson saw women stretched across those same fields of horticulture in the process of harvesting the tubers.

Charles Sturt had his life saved in Central Australia when he came upon people who were harvesting a river valley and supplied him with water, from their well, roast duck and cake. Both Mitchell and Sturt described the baked goods as the lightest and sweetest they had ever tasted. How many historians have read those comments and yet not one has considered that it would be in the nation's commercial and culinary interests to find out the particular grasses from which those flours were made?

E.M. Curr noticed that as he brought the first vehicle into the plains south of Echuca his cart wheels 'turned up bushels of tubers'. Once again some of Australia's best soils were almost bereft of trees, the plains having been horticulturally altered to provide permanent harvests of tubers. Unlike Mitchell's self-indulgent congratulations, Curr was aware who had produced this productivity and later recognised that it was his sheep that destroyed it.

James Kirby is one of the first two Europeans in the country of the Wati Wati near Swan Hill. They pass gigantic mounds of bulrushes stacked up and steaming and wonder about the vast enterprise but never think about the productivity of that plant. Aboriginal people were harvesting the base of the stem as a delicious salad vegetable and making mounds of the leaves to process starch, just one more source of baking flour.

Kirby notices a man fishing on a weir his fellows have built across the river. Well, Kirby assumes with great reluctance that blacks built it, but only because he knows he is the first white man to see them. The construction of the dam included small apertures at the bottom so that water and fish movements could be controlled. Kirby describes the operation:

a black would sit near the opening and just behind him a tough stick about ten feet long was stuck in the ground with the thick end down. To the thin end of this rod was attached a line with a noose at the other end; a wooden peg was fixed under the water at the opening in the fence to which this noose was caught, and when the fish made a dart to go through the opening he was caught by the gills. His force undid the loop from the peg, and the spring of the stick threw the fish over the head of the black, who would then in a most lazy manner reach back his hand, undo the fish, and set the loop again around the peg.

The man refuses to look at Kirby even though he knows Kirby is watching. Already the Wati Wati have decided correspondence with Europeans is not to their advantage but he seems proud of his technique. You could say his manner was insouciant.

But how does Kirby explain the operation? He writes, 'I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow fish in such a lazy way, that what I had heard was perfectly true.' So Kirby renders weirs and constructions, machinery and productivity as laziness. Wasn't he describing an operation that would fit neatly into any description of European inventiveness and industry?

Now, for reasons that are almost impossible to explain, I recently found myself at the meetings of two different universities where staff were asked to beam with excitement because their university had been rated twenty-third and seventeenth in the world for a particular area of scholastic endeavour. The first ten horses at the Melbourne cup win something. I think the tenth horse gets a biscuit of hay and the jockey a wallet that Uncle Alec knocked back last Christmas and I've seen underage soccer teams where every child got a trophy, but twenty-third and seventeenth, isn't that a bit like every toddler gets a Kinder Surprise?

We seem desperate for the world to acknowledge our excellence but unable to investigate our own history. We have had 230 years of scholarship in Australia from more than 25 universities but no scholar has wondered about the Aboriginal domestication of plants and the vast fields of agriculture witnessed by the explorers, the so-called unchallengeable founts of knowledge of Australian history.

We stab out our eyes rather than regard Aboriginal achievement in this country. Our best citizens go to extraordinary and understandable lengths to protect the innocent refugees from war but we still allow First Australians to have their money quarantined for crimes that have never been tested by our courts.

The reason for the national apathy to racial politics in this country stems, I believe, from the national ignorance of Aboriginal culture and economy and that ignorance has to be laid in part at the feet of our learning institutions. A legion of professors and other academics at our universities decided it would be unnecessary for our golden youth to know what the explorers witnessed of Aboriginal excellence.

Today we wring our hands because the Darling River stops flowing in January; we seemed bemused when the overploughed soils of the Wimmera blew about our heads in Melbourne in the sixties, seventies and eighties; we wonder why we cannot get a second yield of hybrid blue gum from the forests of Tasmania, Western Australia and Victoria, so in apparent wrath at the vagaries of nature we poison that weedling second crop. We have ruined the soil but blame Greenies for crop failure and unemployment rather than poor science and the massive and soil-destroying machinery.

But like the baker's blinkered horse we cannot look behind, we cannot admit that First Nations land management, finely tuned over 100,000 years, might have the ability to clear fog from our brain. Even today our agricultural scientists seem to be surprised when the Aboriginal domesticates thrive in the soils and climate to which they were born.

Oh we love to talk about bush tomato, lemon myrtle and wattle seed because they fit our venal understanding of hunting and gathering, but when asked to consider the virtues of agricultural products grown on fields so wide the explorers could see neither their beginning nor their end we become flummoxed and querulous. These crops are perennial, they were staples of Aboriginal diet and economy. The word 'staple' suggests permanence and utility and both of the latter two words were the sole basis for the application of terra nullius.

*

I don't mean to berate but the hour is late. Aboriginal health and education continue to fall far below the national average and the incarceration rate of Aboriginal Australians should be the shame of the nation instead of a prickly nuisance. Australia seems to wash its hands of this state of affairs, never seeming to wonder how dispossession and the failure of the nation to believe our pre-colonial and postcolonial histories works on the psyche of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike.

If we are to make a nation rather than a mere economy we have to absorb the history. Aboriginal people don't need to worry about how we got here, because archaeology seems to be proving our own opinion that we've always been here. The issue is how the rest the rest of the population got here ... and who to thank.

Australia is a drying continent. World and national inaction on the human contribution to climate change is leading to a situation where we will soon be growing mangoes in Canberra. Aboriginal domesticates do not require any more moisture than the Australian climate provides, no more fertiliser than our soils already contain and as they are adapted to Australian pests they need no pesticide. These plants are an environmental boon to the nation, apart from the fact that, as they are all perennial with the large root masses of plants adapted to dry conditions, they sequester carbon. If we dedicated only 5 per cent of our current agricultural lands to these plants we would go a long way to meeting our carbon emission reduction targets. You have to believe my maths in this regard because I failed form three arithmetic at Fawkner High School. My father thought that qualified me to study accountancy at university.

These are achievements and opportunities and the biggest opportunity is the chance to begin a conversation with Aboriginal Australia about the real politics of our history. Forget the gnashing of teeth and the gushes of tears for this state of affairs, let's get down to tin tacks. We can and will provide employment for remote Aboriginal communities, we can and will provide health and education professionals, we can and will enjoy the improvement in national wellbeing and we will do it as a public because the political system is failing us.

We know politicians will refuse to consider anything that challenges their control. Parliamentary vision is dead. When any prime minister wrings their hands and sheds tears of remorse you know at the first drop of moisture that they intend to do nothing. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people meet at Uluru and despite the diversity of opinion, the frustration, the old human enmities, they thrash out a statement so modest, so considerate of reality that many Indigenous people are appalled that something so vague and general can be the product of such long consideration. And Prime Minister Turnbull dismisses it out of hand as being too ambitious.

Australians will have to make the hard yards themselves. A parliament that includes lawyers can draft legislation, they just can't imagine what has to be drafted. We might allow the politicians to think our plan is their own idea, sometimes it's the only way to make them concentrate, but we have to formulate that idea and it has to be done after long consultation with Aboriginal Australia. Real talk, equal talk, not Reconciliation or a Recognise or Close the Gap formulated on the assumption of inadequacy, but a true conversation about what has been lost and what gained, and how that has forged the national schizophrenic psychology.

We have to read Sturt, Mitchell, Warburton, Giles and Gregory and we have to try to quell the triumphal urge while we read; we have to try to read beyond the daring and hardship of the explorers and the vast riches they discovered; we have to read for the cultural economy of Aboriginal Australia that they witnessed and described.

We also have to restore the sections in Lieutenant Grey's journal where he speaks about Aboriginal housing, irrigation, agriculture and road-making, because when the journal was edited for publication those were the only items left out. Maybe that's the job of a university that doesn't want to be satisfied with a Kinder Surprise for being twenty-seventh in the world at something, maybe there's a university that wants to investigate the roots of the oldest civilisation on Earth, the civilisation that invented bread, society, language and the ability to live as 350 neighbouring nations without land war, not without rancour, for that is the human condition, but without a lust for land and power, without religious war, without slaves, without poverty but with a profound sense of responsibility for the health of Mother Earth for more than 120,000 years.

This is not a noble savage sentiment, it is the iron-clad rigour from reading the true history of the country. I think Australia is capable of this rigour. I think we must absorb the pain and weariness such rigour will demand of us.

Temper democratic, bias Australian.
Editor's note: this essay originally stated that Julie Bishop has expressed a view on the teaching of Indigenous languages in 2017. The reference was to 2006. This has been altered in the text.
Bruce Pascoe is a writer of Bunurong/Tasmanian heritage. He is a board member of the Aboriginal Corporation for Languages and was awarded the 2018 Australia Council' s Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Dark Emu (2014), a history of Aboriginal agriculture, won the 2016 NSW Premier's Book of the Year Award.

Note: This essay is an edited version of the 2017 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture given at the State Library of Victoria.

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The deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Julie Bishop, supported the idea in 2006 that Aboriginal children should not be taught their own culture and language because it would retard them. Her fellow ministers and advisers weighed in with the opinion that Aboriginal culture was flawed because we hadn't invented the wheel or done anything useful with the land.

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A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems

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A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems

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Critique of the article Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits, published in Nature 10 October 2018

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"We should eat less meat in order to save the planet", has almost become a dogma. There is no doubt that industrial animal production is harmful for animals and nature. But the framing of the path to a sustainable agriculture system in terms of how many grams of potatoes, wheat and meat per day we should eat is to start in the wrong end of the stick. Instead we should focus our interest into the transition to a sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture system. Such a system would exclude or substantially reduce those foods which are wasteful regardless if those are eggs from caged hens or asparagus flown from one side of the globe to the other. With the right design animals, especially ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats, can be companions in this transition rather than a problem.

Climate change cannot be sufficiently mitigated without dietary changes towards more plant-based diets. Adopting more plant-based "flexitarian" diets globally could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system by more than half, and also reduce other environmental impacts, such as those from fertilizer application and the use of cropland and freshwater, by a tenth to a quarter.

In addition to dietary changes, improving management practices and technologies in agriculture is required to limit pressures on agricultural land, freshwater extraction, and fertilizer use.

Finally, halving food loss and waste is needed for keeping the food system within environmental limits.

Not surprising, media featured the "eat less meat" message strongly. But, what does the article really tell us? The article is building scenarios to 2050. That is a nice method to visualize possible implications of trends and possible options. However, the food system is a very dynamic socio-ecological system where changes in one place will trigger a cascade of changes in other places. "Small" details such as the invention of the shipping container, a bird flu pandemic, antibiotic resistant bacteria, or a populist president in the White house can have enormous impact, even on people's diets. It should be very clear that scenario building is not predicting the future.

The results are determined by the data put into the model and the assumptions made, and will not prove anything else than what is already determined by those, therefore it is essential that the assumptions are clearly expressed and communicated together with the results. The choice of assumptions, the model and the data put into the scenarios have some major flaws as follows (first the main points of criticism, which are expanded upon later).

- The assumption for economic growth doesn't seem very realistic. The projection for land use is to no extent based on a historical trend and disregard the enormous increase in productivity in the farm sector.

- Their own data show that livestock products don't have a disproportionally big environmental impact on four of the five impact categories compared with their contribution to human nutrition, but their conclusions are implying the opposite.

- The allocation of all environmental impact associated with livestock to meat and milk omits that livestock has many other functions.

-When calculating greenhouse gas emissions, Springmann et al do that only based on methane and nitrous oxide emissions, thus excluding carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas with the biggest impact of them all. This systematically misrepresent livestock and in particular ruminants.

- The expression of methane emissions as carbon dioxide equivalents can be questioned, especially when used for making scenarios for many decades.

- There is no mention of the enormous variations and uncertainties regarding nitrous oxide emissions, which potentially have a huge impact on the results.

- The research is supposedly for the food system, but the results and comparisons between diets are about agriculture raw materials. There are massive emissions in the rest of the food chain which thus are neglected. Again, this systematically misrepresent livestock, and in particular ruminants.

The article assumes that population will grow with 50 % and global income grow three times. Considering the strong link between GDP and the minor decoupling of growth from greenhouse gas emissions that can be observed, one could argue that we are doomed with such projection regardless if we fix the food system or not.

The researchers also assume that the demand for crop land will increase by a whopping 67 percent. Looking back, that assumption seems unsubstantiated. The gross output of global agriculture grew from 3,760 calories per capita to 5,740 calories per capita between 1960 and 2012 while the population more than doubled and consumption of animal products increased a lot. But during the same period global crop land just increased by around 15 percent. The authors don't give any convincing explanation for this mismatch between their projection and historical trends.

This is not so much an error of the research, but an error with the conclusions as they are communicated by the lead author (see above). According to their own figures the proportion of livestock's impact for the five categories are (2010):

Greenhouse gas emissions 72%

Phosphorus application 20%

Animal products contributes 18 percent of all calories, 40 percent of all protein and 45 percent of all dietary fats (FAOSTAT). The environmental burden of livestock products is therefore not disproportionally high with the exception of greenhouse gases (see more below). Considering that protein and dietary fats are more limiting factors in the food system than calories or kilos are, one could clearly argue the opposite.

While it is true that in most developed countries the purpose of livestock keeping has, largely, been reduced to the production of meat and milk, that is not a fair representation of the real value of livestock. Increasingly, other functions of livestock are recognized, such as maintaining bio-diversity, circulation of nutrients, use of wastes, carbon sequestration etc. In many cultures where livestock keeping is still a way of life the main purpose of livestock can be for draught power, transport, insurance and savings and for cultural and religious reasons. In some cultures livestock provides housing (yurts, and manure/clay adobe) in others they are a source of cooking fuel. Livestock also provide clothing, shoes and leather. It is arrogant and culturally insensitive to brand animals primarily as commodities (do that to dogs or horses and see which reactions you get in the Sweden, UK or the USA!). If other functions and values of livestock are recognized, the costs and impacts of livestock also needs to be distributed across those categories instead of being seen as a result of diets.

The authors base their calculation of greenhouse gas emissions only on methane and nitrous oxide, thus leaving carbon dioxide out of the equation. They don't provide a reasonable explanation for why they do like that. The reason is probably how the IPCC classify emissions. Most people would assume that for agriculture, emission data would include pumping of water for irrigation and the production of artificial fertilizers, but they don't. Production of artificial fertilizers is booked under "industry" and if you use an electric pump irrigation power falls under "power generation". As a matter of fact not even the fuel for tractors or dryers or any other fuel used in a farm is booked under "agriculture" in the IPCC methodology. Essentially there are no emissions at all as a result of farming according to this methodology. But of course there is in real life. Lifecycle analysis will include those emissions under agriculture, and they tell quite a different story. For most crop production systems, emissions are much bigger than methane and nitrous oxide emissions. A recent study of Chinese agriculture shows that it is only in paddy rice production that methane and nitrous oxide emissions exceed emissions. In most cropping systems, nitrogen fertilizer production was the main source of greenhouse gas emissions. Research from Australia shows that 65 % of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the growing of vegetables comes from electricity for irrigation, cooling, washing etc.

By excluding from the calculations the proportional contribution of ruminants to greenhouse gas emissions is grossly exaggerated.This can be seen in the values used in the calculations in the article (which are find in the extended data table 3). For beef, the authors use the figure 32 kg carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) per kg while for vegetables the figure is just 0.06 kg CO2e per kg. But lifecycle analyses of vegetable production mostly end up with 1 kg or more, twenty times the value used in this research. If vegetables are grown in heated greenhouses or air-freighted the emissions will be up to 100 times higher. Also for the other crops values are much lower than the results of LCAs, e.g. wheat in the study has 0.23 kg CO2e GHG intensity, while LCA analysis normally will rate it 0,5 kg to 1 kg. Intensive livestock systems based on cultivated crops, e.g.poultry and pigs, are also assigned proportionally very low emissions due to the methodology chosen. The researchers use 1.41 kg CO2e per kg of poultry, while the FAO estimates the global average to around 6 kg CO2e per kg.

The authors mechanistically express methane emissions as carbon dioxide equivalents. While this is common and follows an established standard, it is not appropriate in general and in particular not for such a long period of time. In the article in Nature Climate Change, Myles Allen (one of the authors of various IPCC-reports) and colleagues demonstrate how the calculations for expressing methane in carbon dioxide equivalents misrepresent the real impact on climate. For short-lived greenhouse gases the comparison with carbon dioxide based on a pulse of emissions of both gases (which is the basis for the recalculation to carbon dioxide equivalent emissions) gives a reasonably correct result only in a time span of a few decades. In the longer term, the more correct comparison is between a pulse of carbon dioxide and a New use of global warming potentials to compare cumulative and short-lived climate pollutants constant rate of methane emissions. Constant methane emissions do not cause any increase in global temperatures after a few decades, while constant carbon dioxide emissions lead to cumulative increases for thousands of years. The article should have based its calculations on the actual impact on global temperature (which is the real planetary boundary) instead of taking the detour via carbon dioxide equivalents.

The data used in the calculations are based on fixed emission of methane and nitrous oxide per kg product. For methane the main problem is described above, but for nitrous oxide the problem is that the values used are so uncertain. Lifecycle analysis and the IPCC use emissions factors which are calculated as if there were linear relationship between the amount of manure applied and nitrous oxide emissions and the use of chemical nitrogen (N) fertilizer and the emissions. But research show that there is no such linear function , and in most cases low N-intensity leads to much less emissions per kg N than high N-intensity. Through the use of constant emission factors, nitrous oxide emissions for extensive production (e.g. pastured ruminants, or low yielding grain cropping) are grossly exaggerated, while emissions from intensive production such as industrial pork or poultry production or conventional vegetable farming are underestimated. How dubious the emission factors are best shown that when New Zealand recalculated its nitrous emissions based on actual measurements instead of the IPCC emissions factors, nitrous oxide emissions from its big dairy sector was reduced with 60 %. The uncertainties in the calculation of nitrous oxide emissions from soils puts into question if the kind of detailed calculations made by the authors is meaningful at all. In any case it would have been reasonable to declare and discuss the huge uncertainties regarding nitrous oxide emission, following good research practice.

The article talks about the "food system", but ultimately, apart from the food waste, the article is about the agriculture production of raw materials. The rest of the food chain, however, has many impacts, use of water, effluents and emissions. In developed countries the greenhouse gas emissions post farm gate may well equal those at the farm gate. Those emissions are caused by transport, food processing, storage, cooling and cooking. There is no reason to believe that livestock products are overrepresented here. This means that if you are to replace meat products with more vegetables, fruits, vegetable oil and legumes, which is what the article suggests, there will be no big potential for savings in the post farm stage. By omitting the impact of post farm emissions, the relative impact of meat in general and ruminant meat in particular, for the emissions of the food system, is exaggerated.

According to the article, emissions from animal products cause 77 % of the "food-related" greenhouse gas emissions. However, that is the projection for 2050. If we take the figure for 2010 they cause 72%. But is this really correct?

If we add emissions in agriculture and emissions in the rest of the food chain we increase total emissions with 100-200 %. This is in line with global estimates by Vermeulen et al 2012 . An assessment of the emissions in the EU food chain by Camanzi et al , concluded that CH4 and N20 contribute less than half of total emissions in the whole chain and that emissions post-farm are much higher than previously estimated. If we assume, rather conservatively, that emissions of from agriculture and all greenhouse gases post farm gate corresponds to 150 % of the methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture, around 40 % of the total emissions can be attributed to livestock (with all the reservations stated above) - coincidentally the same proportion as their contribution to global protein supply. If we skip animal products altogether the net "saving" of emissions will not be that high as livestock products have to be replaced by other products. The net saving will depend on which products that will replace animal products, but it likely to be in the range of 20%. It will be higher if animal products are replaced by pulses, root crops and grains, and lower if animal products are replaced by exotic fruits, soft vegetables and processed foods, i.e. the kind of non-animal foods that dominates in developed countries.

By phasing out fossil fuels, including its use for fertilizers and global transports but with no change in global diets, total emissions would be reduced by more than 50 % of the current emissions, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations. It is strange that scenarios for our future food system don't include the phasing out of fossil fuels, as that would have a huge impact.

As little as we can predict the real outcome of a phase-out of animals from the food system can we predict the outcome of a total de-carbonization. Food and agriculture are very dynamic systems where you can't change just one thing. In reality, phasing out fossil fuels would also change diets a lot, as it would change both availability and relative prices of food. Poultry and pork would become much more expensive. Pasture raised animals would be less costly. Global competition in foods would be much less intensive and prices will go up, which would stimulate local production and it would reduce waste etc. Use of artificial fertilizers would fall dramatically. They could still be produced with non-fossil fuel processes, but they would be considerably more expensive, which in turn would reduce nitrous oxide emissions considerably.

The assumptions and limitations of the article Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits give it a very strong bias against ruminants. The conclusions of the article as communicated by the lead author are not supported by their own research.

I have no problem with "eating less meat" as such. But it is the wrong entry point for an intelligent analysis of our food system. Increase in meat consumption is primarily caused by a massive overproduction of staple crops driven by the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Those cheap staple crops form the basis for the industrialization of meat production and a production model where animals have been separated from the land and the land has been put into monocultures. That kind of livestock system is wasteful and unethical, and "we" should not eat its products - at all. But livestock which is properly integrated into an ecologically sound agriculture system is not wasteful. It can clearly increase productivity of the whole system, it can vitalize the soil and sequester carbon at the same time. Even the last IPCC report concludes that : "Overall, there is high agreement that farm strategies that integrate mixed crop - livestock systems can improve farm productivity and have positive sustainability outcomes."

1.3 billion people depend on livestock for their livelihoods and some 200 million are agro-pastoralists. In arid and semi-arid lands, mountainous areas, non-arable land and natural rangelands, pastoralism is the only possible production system that allows to transform non-edible plants and marginal lands into nutritious food (meat and milk). These lands cannot be used in any other way for human consumption if not grazed by animals. Many of the pastoralists consume very high levels of animal products.

The environmental impact of the food chain is too high. The main driver of destruction is the globalized fossil fuel economy and industrial agriculture of plants and animals. Once we redesign agriculture into sustainable and regenerative systems where land, people and food are "re-coupled", diets will be diverse and adapted to the local ecological conditions, population densities, etc. The notion of some kind of globally averaged diet is flawed. The share of animal products in peoples' diets will vary from very high to very low depending on the conditions, in the same way it has always done.

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A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems

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"We should eat less meat in order to save the planet", has almost become a dogma. There is no doubt that industrial animal production is harmful for animals and nature. But the framing of the path to a sustainable agriculture system in terms of how many grams of potatoes, wheat and meat per day we should eat is to start in the wrong end of the stick.

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Industrial-scale farming denounced by international experts

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Industrial-scale farming denounced by international experts

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The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) has said input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past, to put global food systems on a sustainable footing

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© Design Pics Inc/REX/Shutterstock

An international think-tank has called for a move away from industrial farming systems, arguing that they pose a threat to human health and the environment.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) has said input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past, to put global food systems on a sustainable footing.

The group has called for a shift to diversified agroecological systems that would involve replacing chemical inputs, optimising biodiversity and stimulating interactions between different species.

See also: British farmers can 'learn from the Third World'

It suggests this would build long-term fertility, healthy agroecosystems and secure farmers' livelihoods.

Many of the problems in food systems are linked specifically to the uniformity at the heart of industrial agriculture, and its reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides Olivier De Schutter, co-chairman, IPES-Food panel

The call for a different model for world agriculture is included in a report titled From Uniformity to Diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems.

The report acknowledges the contribution industrialised agriculture has made in improving the diets of consumers and improving food safety.

However, it points out some two billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies as current food systems produce an abundance of energy-rich, nutrient-poor crops.

It adds that modern food systems also contribute about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and about 20% of land on earth is now degraded.

Olivier De Schutter, former UN special rapporteur on the right to food and co-chairman of the IPES-Food panel, said tweaking industrial agriculture would not provide long-term solutions to the challenges the world was facing.

"Many of the problems in food systems are linked specifically to the uniformity at the heart of industrial agriculture, and its reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides."

The report calls for a shift in subsidies towards supporting diversified agroecological production systems and to prioritise the needs of those willing and able to practice such an approach.

It also recommends a moratorium on large-scale land acquisitions which it said "accentuate highly-specialised large-scale agriculture and industrial modes of production".

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Industrial-scale farming denounced by international experts - Farmers Weekly

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© Design Pics Inc/REX/Shutterstock An international think-tank has called for a move away from industrial farming systems, arguing that they pose a threat to human health and the environment. The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) has said input-intensive crop monocultures and industrial-scale feedlots must be consigned to the past, to put global food systems on a sustainable footing.

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Industrial farming is driving the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth

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Industrial farming is driving the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth

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Professor Raj Patel said mass deforestation to clear the ground for single crops like palm oil and soy, the creation of vast dead zones in the sea by fertiliser and other chemicals, and the pillaging of fishing grounds to make feed for livestock show giant corporations can not be trusted to produce food for the world

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Industrial agriculture is bringing about the mass extinction of life on Earth, according to a leading academic.

Professor Raj Patel said mass deforestation to clear the ground for single crops like palm oil and soy, the creation of vast dead zones in the sea by fertiliser and other chemicals, and the pillaging of fishing grounds to make feed for livestock show giant corporations can not be trusted to produce food for the world.

The author of bestselling book The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy will be one of the keynote speakers at the Extinction and Livestock Conference in London in October.

Organised by campaign groups Compassion in World Farming and WWF, it is being held amid rising concern that the rapid rate of species loss could ultimately result in the sixth mass extinction of life. This is just one reason why geologists are considering declaring a new epoch of the Earth, called the Anthropocene, as the fossils of soon-to-be extinct animals will form a line in the rocks of the future.

The last mass extinction, which finished off the dinosaurs and more than three-quarters of all life about 65 million years ago, was caused by an asteroid strike that sent clouds of smoke all around the world, blocking out the sun for about 18 months.

Prof Patel, of the University of Texas at Austin, said: "The footprint of global agriculture is vast. Industrial agriculture is absolutely responsible for driving deforestation, absolutely responsible for pushing industrial monoculture, and that means it is responsible for species loss.

"We're losing species we have never heard of, those we've yet to put a name to and industrial agriculture is very much at the spear-tip of that."

Speaking to The Independent, he pointed to a "dead zone" - an area of water where there is too little oxygen for most marine life - in the Gulf of Mexico that has grown to the same size as Wales because of vast amounts of fertiliser that has washed from farms in mainland US, into the Mississippi River and then into the ocean.

"That dead zone isn't an accident. It's a requirement of industrial agriculture to get rid of the sh*t and the run-off elsewhere because you cannot make industrial agriculture workable unless you kick the costs somewhere else," he said.

"The story of industrial agriculture is all about externalising costs and exploiting nature."

The Amazon and surrounding lands in South America are also under increasing pressure from soy plantations.

"Extinction is about the elimination of diversity. What happens in Brazil and other places is you get green deserts - monocultures of soy and nothing else.

"Various kinds of chemistry is deployed to make sure it is only soy that's grown on these mega-farms.

"That's what extinction looks like. If you ever go to a soy plantation, animal life is incredibly rare. It's only soy, there's nothing there for anything to feed on."

And that soy is then turned into food for humans, often by "passing it through cattle and chickens", Prof Patel said.

Some of the world's most iconic animals, such as elephants, jaguars and penguins, are threatened due to these current farming practices.

In Sumatra, forests that are home to elephants and jaguars are being destroyed to make way for palm plantations, often to make feed for livestock kept in industrial meat factories.

And small fish like anchovies and sardines are being caught on a massive scale to be ground into fishmeal for farmed salmon, pigs and chickens. That means animals like penguins, which normally feed on them, are in trouble.

The South African penguin population alone has plunged by at least 70 per cent since 2004.

Asked what people could do "as a consumer" to try to avoid contributing to such problems, Prof Patel said people needed to think on a bigger scale.

"'As a consumer' you are only allowing yourself a range of action. 'As a consumer' you can buy something that's local and sustainable, that's labelled as organic or fair trade," he said.

"But 'as a consumer', you don't get to do a whole lot of good. As a citizen, as a decent person, you can demand more from your government, from one's employer, from yourself.

"Be more aware of your power as part of a society where we can change things. We have this power to change things in the future. What we have to do is make that change."

He said some people thought being a vegetarian avoided contributing to the extinction crisis.

"I'm vegetarian but it's not enough. If you are vegetarian and you walk around with your halo of virtue but you are eating tofu that comes from Brazilian soy, then you're just as complicit in all of this as if you are eating the beef fed on Brazilian soy," Prof Patel said.

Vegetarianism did not provide a "pure and simple" route out of the problem.

"Capitalism is involved. The capitalist will take your vegetarianism and make money from it with the same kind of techniques they've honed in meat manufacture," he said.

Instead, Prof Patel argued it was time to switch to a world in which resources were shared and looked after, harking back to the days when people had access to common land.

"The commons is only a tragedy because the commons in England were eliminated. Before they were eliminated there were people who could manage resources and nature in ways that were sustainable," he said.

"The idea of a commons that is managed collectively and the way in which nature is managed well and sustainably, that's a memory that needs to be recuperated."

Admitting that changing society so radically would be a challenge, he argued it was essential as people's current aspirations were based on "images of consumption that are entirely unsustainable".

Humans, Prof Patel said, would need to find a way to live with less material wealth.

"Re-imagining a world with less stuff but more joy is probably the way forward," he said.

"There's a strong case for saying there's room for ... less individual consumption and loneliness ... and more sharing and communality, getting together around the table, rather than sitting alone in front of the TV."

"For information about the Extinction and Livestock Conference, go to www.extinctionconference.com.

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Industrial farming is driving the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, says leading academic

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Industrial agriculture is bringing about the mass extinction of life on Earth, according to a leading academic.

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Interview with Charles Massy, author of Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture. On agrochemicals and Holistic Management

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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'

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Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says - yet chemicals used in agriculture are 'causing millions of deaths'. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food

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Deserts now cover more than a third of the entire surface of the earth, thus 65% of arable lands. This program shows how desertification is changing the balance of the earth and affecting two continents in particular: Asia and Europe

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Deserts in Europe – Destroyers of Civilization Pt. 2 | Full Documentary

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Brooke Jarvis, November 2018. Insect populations across the globe have crashed, even in ecosystems where habitat loss and pesticides are not a problem

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Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

Feature

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn't eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car's windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn't see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn't recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn't he noticed?

Riis watched his son, flying through the beautiful day, not eating bugs, and was struck by the melancholy thought that his son's childhood would lack this particular bug-eating experience of his own. It was, he granted, an odd thing to feel nostalgic about. But he couldn't shake a feeling of loss. "I guess it's pretty human to think that everything was better when you were a kid," he said. "Maybe I didn't like it when I was on my bike and I ate all the bugs, but looking back on it, I think it's something everybody should experience."

I met Riis, a lanky high school science and math teacher, on a hot day in June. He was anxious about not having yet written his address for the school's graduation ceremony that evening, but first, he had a job to do. From his garage, he retrieved a large insect net, drove to a nearby intersection and stopped to strap the net to the car's roof. Made of white mesh, the net ran the length of his car and was held up by a tent pole at the front, tapering to a small, removable bag in back. Drivers whizzing past twisted their heads to stare. Riis eyed his parking spot nervously as he adjusted the straps of the contraption. "This is not 100 percent legal," he said, "but I guess, for the sake of science."

Riis had not been able to stop thinking about the missing bugs. The more he learned, the more his nostalgia gave way to worry. Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. Riis was not alone in noticing their decline. In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period. With other, less-studied insect species, one butterfly researcher told me, "all we can do is wave our arms and say, 'It's not here anymore!' " Still, the most disquieting thing wasn't the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. "We notice the losses," says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. "It's the diminishment that we don't see."

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night - familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren't seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

To test what had been primarily a loose suspicion of wrongness, Riis and 200 other Danes were spending the month of June roaming their country's back roads in their outfitted cars. They were part of a study conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a joint effort of the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and North Carolina State University. The nets would stand in for windshields as Riis and the other volunteers drove through various habitats - urban areas, forests, agricultural tracts, uncultivated open land and wetlands - hoping to quantify the disorienting sense that, as one of the study's designers put it, "something from the past is missing from the present."

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren't sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Riis learned about the study from a group of his students in one of their class projects. They must have made some kind of mistake in their citation, he thought. But they hadn't. The study would quickly become, according to the website Altmetric, the sixth-most-discussed scientific paper of 2017. Headlines around the world warned of an "insect Armageddon."

Within days of announcing the insect-collection project, the Natural History Museum of Denmark was turning away eager volunteers by the dozens. It seemed there were people like Riis everywhere, people who had noticed a change but didn't know what to make of it. How could something as fundamental as the bugs in the sky just disappear? And what would become of the world without them?

Anyone who has returned to a childhood haunt to find that everything somehow got smaller knows that humans are not great at remembering the past accurately. This is especially true when it comes to changes to the natural world. It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago: It is not the same river, but we are also not the same people.

A 1995 study, by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way: "With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm." In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called "shifting baseline syndrome." The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen's faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.

By one measure, bugs are the wildlife we know best, the nondomesticated animals whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. We sometimes feel that we know them rather too well. In another sense, though, they are one of our planet's greatest mysteries, a reminder of how little we know about what's happening in the world around us.

We've named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can't even name. (Technically, the word "bug" applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking - and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don't: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet - that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

With so much abundance, it very likely never occurred to most entomologists of the past that their multitudinous subjects might dwindle away. As they poured themselves into studies of the life cycles and taxonomies of the species that fascinated them, few thought to measure or record something as boring as their number. Besides, tracking quantity is slow, tedious and unglamorous work: setting and checking traps, waiting years or decades for your data to be meaningful, grappling with blunt baseline questions instead of more sophisticated ones. And who would pay for it? Most academic funding is short-term, but when what you're interested in is invisible, generational change, says Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, "a three-year monitoring program is no good to anybody." This is especially true of insect populations, which are naturally variable, with wide, trend-obscuring fluctuations from one year to the next.

When entomologists began noticing and investigating insect declines, they lamented the absence of solid information from the past in which to ground their experiences of the present. "We see a hundred of something, and we think we're fine," Wagner says, "but what if there were 100,000 two generations ago?" Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who helped design the net experiment in Denmark, recently searched for studies showing the effect of pesticide spraying on the quantity of insects living in nearby forests. He was surprised to find that no such studies existed. "We ignored really basic questions," he said. "It feels like we've dropped the ball in some giant collective way."

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If entomologists lacked data, what they did have were some very worrying clues. Along with the impression that they were seeing fewer bugs in their own jars and nets while out doing experiments - a windshield phenomenon specific to the sorts of people who have bug jars and nets - there were documented downward slides of well-studied bugs, including various kinds of bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. In Britain, as many as 30 to 60 percent of species were found to have diminishing ranges. Larger trends were harder to pin down, though a 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent.

Entomologists also knew that climate change and the overall degradation of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other, better-understood species that suggested that the insects associated with them might be declining, too. People who studied fish found that the fish had fewer mayflies to eat. Ornithologists kept finding that birds that rely on insects for food were in trouble: eight in 10 partridges gone from French farmlands; 50 and 80 percent drops, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all farmland birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed the familiar culprit of habitat destruction was at work, but then they began to wonder if the birds might simply be starving. In Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was the one who came up with the idea of turning cars into insect trackers for the windshield-effect study after he noticed that rollers, little owls, Eurasian hobbies and bee-eaters - all birds that subsist on large insects such as beetles and dragonflies - had abruptly disappeared from the landscape.

The signs were certainly alarming, but they were also just signs, not enough to justify grand pronouncements about the health of insects as a whole or about what might be driving a widespread, cross-species decline. "There are no quantitative data on insects, so this is just a hypothesis," Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explained to me - not the sort of language that sends people to the barricades.

Then came the German study. Scientists are still cautious about what the findings might imply about other regions of the world. But the study brought forth exactly the kind of longitudinal data they had been seeking, and it wasn't specific to just one type of insect. The numbers were stark, indicating a vast impoverishment of an entire insect universe, even in protected areas where insects ought to be under less stress. The speed and scale of the drop were shocking even to entomologists who were already anxious about bees or fireflies or the cleanliness of car windshields.

The results were surprising in another way too. The long-term details about insect abundance, the kind that no one really thought existed, hadn't appeared in a particularly prestigious journal and didn't come from university-affiliated scientists, but from a small society of insect enthusiasts based in the modest German city Krefeld.

Krefeld sits a half-hour drive outside Düsseldorf, near the western bank of the Rhine. It's a city of brick houses and bright flower gardens and a stadtwald - a municipal forest and park - where paddle boats float on a lake, umbrellas shade a beer garden and (I couldn't help noticing) the afternoon light through the trees illuminates small swarms of dancing insects.

Near the center of the old city, a paper sign, not much larger than a business card, identifies the stolid headquarters of the society whose research caused so much commotion. When it was founded, in 1905, the society operated out of another building, one that was destroyed when Britain bombed the city during World War II. (By the time the bombs fell, members had moved their precious records and collections of insects, some of which dated back to the 1860s, to an underground bunker.) Nowadays, the society uses more than 6,000 square feet of an old three-story school as storage space. Ask for a tour of the collections, and you will hear such sentences as "This whole room is Lepidoptera," referring to a former classroom stuffed with what I at first took to be shelves of books but which are in fact innumerable wooden frames containing pinned butterflies and moths; and, in an even larger room, "every bumblebee here was collected before the Second World War, 1880 to 1930"; and, upon opening a drawer full of sweat bees, "It's a new collection, 30 years only."

On the shelves that do hold books, I counted 31 clearly well-loved volumes in the series "Beetles of Middle Europe." A 395-page book that cataloged specimens of spider wasps - where they were collected; where they were stored - of the western Palearctic said "1948-2008" on the cover. I asked my guide, a society member named Martin Sorg, who was one of the lead authors of the paper, whether those dates reflected when the specimens were collected. "No," Sorg replied, "that was the time the author needed for this work."

Sorg, who rolls his own cigarettes and wears John Lennon glasses and whose gray hair grows long past his shoulders, is not a freewheeling type when it comes to his insect work. And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. "We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists," Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg's on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn't want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them. "We normally give life histories when someone is dead," he said.

There was a reason for the wariness. Society members dislike seeing themselves described, over and over in news stories, as "amateurs." It's a framing that reflects, they believe, a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist - what it means to be a student of the natural world.

Amateurs have long provided much of the patchy knowledge we have about nature. Those bee and butterfly studies? Most depend on mass mobilizations of volunteers willing to walk transects and count insects, every two weeks or every year, year after year. The scary numbers about bird declines were gathered this way, too, though because birds can be hard to spot, volunteers often must learn to identify them by their sounds. Britain, which has a particularly strong tradition of amateur naturalism, has the best-studied bugs in the world. As technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big and complex place, and the best way to learn what's going on is for a lot of people to spend a lot of time observing it. The Latin root of the word "amateur" is, after all, the word "lover."

Some of these citizen-scientists are true beginners clutching field guides; others, driven by their own passion and following in a long tradition of "amateur" naturalism, are far from novices. Think of Victorians with their butterfly nets and curiosity cabinets; of Vladimir Nabokov, whose theories about the evolution of Polyommatus blue butterflies were ignored until proved correct by DNA testing more than 30 years after his death; of young Charles Darwin, cutting his classes at Cambridge to collect beetles at Wicken Fen and once putting a live beetle in his mouth because his hands were already full of other bugs.

The Krefeld society is volunteer-run, and many members have other jobs in unrelated fields, but they also have an enormous depth of knowledge about insects, accumulated through years of what other people might consider obsessive attention. Some study the ecology or evolutionary taxonomy of their favorite species or map their populations or breed them to study their life histories. All hone their identification skills across species by amassing their own collections of carefully pinned and labeled insects like those that fill the society's storage rooms. Sorg estimated that of the society's 63 members, a third are university-trained in subjects such as biology or earth science. Another third, he said, are "highly specialized and highly qualified but they never visited the university," while the remaining third are actual amateurs who are still in the process of becoming "real" entomologists: "Some of them may also have a degree from the university, but in our view, they are beginners."

The society members' projects often involved setting up what are called malaise traps, nets that look like tents and drive insects flying by into bottles of ethanol. Because of the scientific standards of the society, members followed certain procedures: They always employed identical traps, sewn from a template they first used in 1982. (Sorg showed me the original rolled-up craft paper with great solemnity.) They always put them in the same places. (Before GPS, that meant a painstaking process of triangulating with surveying equipment. "We are not sure about a few centimeters," Sorg granted.) They saved everything they caught, regardless of what the main purpose of the experiment was. (The society bought so much ethanol that it attracted the attention of a narcotics unit.)

Those bottles of insects were gathered into thousands of boxes, which are now crammed into what were once offices in the upper reaches of the school. When the society members, like entomologists elsewhere, began to notice that they were seeing fewer insects, they had something against which to measure their worries.

"We don't throw away anything, we store everything," Sorg explained. "That gives us today the possibility to go back in time."

In 2013, Krefeld entomologists confirmed that the total number of insects caught in one nature reserve was nearly 80 percent lower than the same spot in 1989. They had sampled other sites, analyzed old data sets and found similar declines: Where 30 years earlier, they often needed a liter bottle for a week of trapping, now a half-liter bottle usually sufficed. But it would have taken even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in the bottles. So the society used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which told a powerful story simply by showing how much the overall mass of insects dropped over time. "A decline of this mixture," Sorg said, "is a very different thing than the decline of only a few species."

The society collaborated with de Kroon and other scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who did a trend analysis of the data that Krefeld provided, controlling for things like the effects of nearby plants, weather and forest cover on fluctuations in insect populations. The final study looked at 63 nature preserves, representing almost 17,000 sampling days, and found consistent declines in every kind of habitat they sampled. This suggested, the authors wrote, "that it is not only the vulnerable species but the flying-insect community as a whole that has been decimated over the last few decades."

For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. "Scientists thought this data was too boring," Dunn says. "But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us."

The current worldwide loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the sixth extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species have disappeared in unusually rapid succession, caused this time not by asteroids or ice ages but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think of the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards, of polar bears on dwindling ice floes. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: There is no coming back from it. The guilt of letting a unique species vanish is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we're living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In "The Once and Future World," the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: "In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship's captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes." There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that's there now. "These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice," MacKinnon writes. "We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory."

What we're losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity. While I was writing this article, scientists learned that the world's largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, that more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.

Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction. Tigers still exist, for example, but that doesn't change the fact that 93 percent of the land where they used to live is now tigerless. This matters for more than romantic reasons: Large animals, especially top predators like tigers, connect ecosystems to one another and move energy and resources among them simply by walking and eating and defecating and dying. (In the deep ocean, sunken whale carcasses form the basis of entire ecosystems in nutrient-poor places.) One result of their loss is what's known as trophic cascade, the unraveling of an ecosystem's fabric as prey populations boom and crash and the various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check. These places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment - an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes. A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species' abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct - in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade concerns sea otters. When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Steller's sea cow.

Conservationists tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but it is common ones, because of their abundance, that power the living systems of our planet. Most species are not common, but within many animal groups most individuals - some 80 percent of them - belong to common species. Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: "Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change."

In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place's absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted "negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization" and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world's wild fauna: "biological annihilation."

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth's various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members. Zeroing in on the category we most relate to, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate and burrowed and raised young, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We've begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Wilson began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects - about as far as you can get from charismatic megafauna - are not what we're usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson's words, "the little things that run the natural world." He means it literally. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of the common.

Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn't count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species - including freshwater fish and a majority of birds - that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?

Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it's not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn't until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn't handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don't know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of "collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems" - spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where "the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing" despite mass starvation and resource wars. "Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age," he adds, "the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs."

But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn't have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia. In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line, "Holy [expletive]!" and an attachment: a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico." The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards - and, crucially, their prey - 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It's easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it's sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.) "It was, you know, devastating," Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported "a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web." Lister's inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: "I didn't even know about the earthworm crisis!"

The strange thing, Lister said, is that, as staggering as they are, all the declines he documented would still be basically invisible to the average person walking through the Luquillo rain forest. On his last visit, the forest still felt "timeless" and "phantasmagorical," with "cascading waterfalls and carpets of flowers." You would have to be an expert to notice what was missing. But he expects the losses to push the forest toward a tipping point, after which "there is a sudden and dramatic loss of the rain-forest system," and the changes will become obvious to anyone. The place he loves will become unrecognizable.

The insects in the forest that Lister studied haven't been contending with pesticides or habitat loss, the two problems to which the Krefeld paper pointed. Instead, Lister chalks up their decline to climate change, which has already increased temperatures in Luquillo by two degrees Celsius since Lister first sampled there. Previous research suggested that tropical bugs will be unusually sensitive to temperature changes; in November, scientists who subjected laboratory beetles to a heat wave reported that the increased temperatures made them significantly less fertile. Other scientists wonder if it might be climate-induced drought or possibly invasive rats or simply "death by a thousand cuts" - a confluence of many kinds of changes to the places where insects once thrived.

Like other species, insects are responding to what Chris Thomas, an insect ecologist at the University of York, has called "the transformation of the world": not just a changing climate but also the widespread conversion, via urbanization, agricultural intensification and so on, of natural spaces into human ones, with fewer and fewer resources "left over" for nonhuman creatures to live on. What resources remain are often contaminated. Hans de Kroon characterizes the life of many modern insects as trying to survive from one dwindling oasis to the next but with "a desert in between, and at worst it's a poisonous desert." Of particular concern are neonicotinoids, neurotoxins that were thought to affect only treated crops but turned out to accumulate in the landscape and to be consumed by all kinds of nontargeted bugs. People talk about the "loss" of bees to colony collapse disorder, and that appears to be the right word: Affected hives aren't full of dead bees, but simply mysteriously empty. A leading theory is that exposure to neurotoxins leaves bees unable to find their way home. Even hives exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids have been shown to collect less pollen and produce fewer eggs and far fewer queens. Some recent studies found bees doing better in cities than in the supposed countryside.

The diversity of insects means that some will manage to make do in new environments, some will thrive (abundance cuts both ways: agricultural monocultures, places where only one kind of plant grows, allow some pests to reach population levels they would never achieve in nature) and some, searching for food and shelter in a world nothing like the one they were meant for, will fail. While we need much more data to better understand the reasons or mechanisms behind the ups and downs, Thomas says, "the average across all species is still a decline."

Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to Dutch entomological societies, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told me that before Krefeld, he, like most entomologists, had never been interested in biomass. Now he is looking for historical data sets - many of which began as studies of agricultural pests, like a decades-long study of grasshoppers in Kansas - that could help create a more thorough picture of what's happening to creatures that are at once abundant and imperiled. So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that could be resampled.

In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. "And so here I am in Year 46," he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere - even species that "everyone regarded as a junk species" only a few decades ago - all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. "But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe," he added. "I cover I-80."

There are also new efforts to set up more of the kind of insect-monitoring schemes researchers wish had existed decades ago, so that our current level of fallenness, at least, is captured. One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study. To analyze what is caught, the researchers turned to volunteer naturalists, hobbyists similar to the ones in Krefeld, with the necessary breadth of knowledge to know what they're looking at. "These are not easy species to identify," says Aletta Bonn, of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who is overseeing the project. (The skills required for such work "are really extreme," Dunn says. "These people train for decades with other amateurs to be able to identify beetles based on their genitalia.") Bond would like to pay the volunteers for their expertise, she says, but funding hasn't caught up to the crisis. That didn't stop the "amateurs" from being willing to help: "They said, 'We're just curious what's in there, we would like to have samples.' "

Goulson says that Europe's tradition of amateur naturalism may account for why so many of the clues to the falloff in insect biodiversity originate there. (Tottrup's design for the car net in Denmark, for example, was itself adapted from the invention of a dedicated beetle-collecting hobbyist.) As little as we know about the status of European bugs, we know significantly less about other parts of the world. "We wouldn't know anything if it weren't for them," the so-called amateurs, Goulson told me. "We'd be entirely relying on the fact that there's no bugs on the windshield."

Thomas believes that this naturalist tradition is also why Europe is acting much faster than other places - for example, the United States - to address the decline of insects: Interest leads to tracking, which leads to awareness, which leads to concern, which leads to action. Since the Krefeld data emerged, there have been hearings about protecting insect biodiversity in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. European Union member states voted to extend a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and have begun to put money toward further studies of how abundance is changing, what is causing those changes and what can be done. When I knocked on the door of de Kroon's office, at Radboud University in the Dutch city Nijmegen, he was looking at some photos from another meeting he had that day: Willem-Alexander, the king of the Netherlands, had taken a tour of the city's efforts to make its riverside a friendlier habitat for bugs.

Stemming insect declines will require much more than this, however. The European Union already had some measures in place to help pollinators - including more strictly regulating pesticides than the United States does and paying farmers to create insect habitats by leaving fields fallow and allowing for wild edges alongside cultivation - but insect populations dropped anyway. New reports call for national governments to collaborate; for more creative approaches such as integrating insect habitats into the design of roads, power lines, railroads and other infrastructure; and, as always, for more studies. The necessary changes, like the causes, may be profound. "It's just another indication that we're destroying the life-support system of the planet," Lister says of the Puerto Rico study. "Nature's resilient, but we're pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system."

Scientists hope that insects will have a chance to embody that resilience. While tigers tend to give birth to three or four cubs at a time, a ghost moth in Australia was once recorded laying 29,100 eggs, and she still had 15,000 in her ovaries. The fecund abundance that is insects' singular trait should enable them to recover, but only if they are given the space and the opportunity to do so.

"It's a debate we need to have urgently," Goulson says. "If we lose insects, life on earth will. ..." He trailed off, pausing for what felt like a long time.

In Denmark, Sune Boye Riis's transect with his car net took him past a bit of woods, some suburban lawns, some hedges, a Christmas-tree farm. The closest thing to a meadow that we passed was a large military property, on which the grass had been allowed to grow tall and golden. Riis had received instructions not to drive too fast, so traffic backed up behind us, and some people began to honk. "Well," Riis said, "so much for science." After three miles, he turned around and drove back toward the start. His windshield stayed mockingly clean.

Riis had four friends who were also participating in the study. They had a bet going among them: Who would net the biggest bug? "I'm way behind," Riis said. "A bumblebee is in the lead." His biggest catch? "A fly. Not even a big one."

At the end of the transect, Riis stopped at another parlous roadside spot, unfastened the net and removed the small bag at its tip. Some volunteers, captivated by what the study revealed about the world around them, asked the organizers for extra specimen bags, so they could do more sampling on their own. Some even asked if they could buy the entire car-net apparatus. Riis, though, was content to peer through the mesh, inside of which he could make out a number of black specks of varying tininess.

There was also a single butterfly, white-winged and delicate. Riis thought of the bet with his friends, for which the meaning of bigness had not been defined. He wondered how it might be reckoned. What gave a creature value?

"Is it weight?" he asked, staring down at the butterfly. In the big bag, it looked small and sad and alone. "Or is it grace?"

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The Insect Apocalypse Is Here (Published 2018)

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Feature What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images. S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss.

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60% of the planet's wildlife has been wiped out since 1970

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The Living Planet Report documents the state of the planet-including biodiversity, ecosystems, and demand on natural resources-and what it means for humans and wildlife. Published by WWF every two years, the report brings together a variety of research to provide a comprehensive view of the health of the Earth.
We are pushing our planet to the brink. Human activity-how we feed, fuel, and finance our lives-is taking an unprecedented toll on wildlife, wild places, and the natural resources we need to survive.

On average, we've seen an astonishing 60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 40 years, according to WWF's Living Planet Report 2018. The top threats to species identified in the report link directly to human activities, including habitat loss and degradation and the excessive use of wildlife such as overfishing and overhunting.

The report presents a sobering picture of the impact human activity has on the world's wildlife, forests, oceans, rivers, and climate. We're facing a rapidly closing window for action and the urgent need for everyone-everyone-to collectively rethink and redefine how we value, protect, and restore nature.

"This report sounds a warning shot across our bow," said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF-US. "Natural systems essential to our survival-forests, oceans, and rivers-remain in decline. Wildlife around the world continue to dwindle. It reminds us we need to change course. It's time to balance our consumption with the needs of nature, and to protect the only planet that is our home."

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The Living Planet Report documents the state of the planet-including biodiversity, ecosystems, and demand on natural resources-and what it means for humans and wildlife. Published by WWF every two years, the report brings together a variety of research to provide a comprehensive view of the health of the Earth.

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"You only talk about green eternal economic growth, for fear of being unpopular. You are not mature enough to tell it like it is. Even that burden you leave to us children.”

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Greta Thunberg  @ COP 24 "not mature enough to tell the truth."

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Eco-crises: Doom and Gloom, Truth and Consequences

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Eco-crises: Doom and Gloom, Truth and Consequences

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Kristine Matthis, October 2018. Despair or denial? With an appendix listing possible lines of action

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...We can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today....To all the politicians that pretend to take the climate question seriously, to all of you who know but choose to look the other way every day because you seem more frightened of the changes that can prevent the catastrophic climate change than the catastrophic climate change itself... Please treat the crisis as the crisis it is and give us a future.

- Greta Thunberg, 15 year-old climate activist speaking at the Helsinki climate demonstration, October 20, 2018

When I entered my interdisciplinary environmental graduate program, I already had years of work experience behind me as well as a lifetime of informal environmental education. I recognized the grim ecological picture. Some of my professors, however, were quick to admonish, "We can't be gloom and doom." Their other refrain was, "We can't go back." They offered no evidence for those two prescriptions with regard to the climate and ecological crises, yet their commands were common among environmental scholars. More than a decade later, we face far more dismal prospects for the future of humanity, but we are still loath to truly address them.
Doom and Gloom
In 1972, the Club of Rome, a consortium of scientists, economists, politicians, diplomats, and industrialists, produced a lengthy scientific report entitled Limits to Growth. Their work predicted a collapse of the human population due to our unchecked economic growth and resource depletion. While their estimates were condemned as alarmist and overreaching, independent researchers have updated the report for the 50 th anniversary of the club's inception, and have largely found that the conclusions from the original still hold.

Nevertheless, in July of 2017, David Wallace-Wells' New York magazine article, " The Uninhabitable Earth," about the worst-case scenarios resulting from the climate catastrophe created an uproar. Frenzied scientists and science communicators (positivity adherents one and all) raced to the media to denounce the highly accurate piece as scare-mongering, even as they could not dispute the validity of the information therein.

Then came the most recent report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which, more than any of their other previous papers, finally conveyed the true immediacy and urgency of the climate crisis. It largely validated Wallace-Wells' assessment of impeding large-scale catastrophe to all of humanity if we do not act promptly. For some of the more muted voices who study, work on, or otherwise follow the many environmental crises concurrently embroiling (and broiling) our planet, the IPCC report was surprising, not because of how drastically it portrayed the severity of the predicament we are in, but because of how it no longer pulled any punches about our dire circumstance. While still likely conservative in its forecast, as scientific predictions tend to be, this assessment finally painted the very bleak picture in store for us all if we don't change our way of life radically and immediately.

The staunch belief in the field of science communication, based upon a small number of studies, is that depicting the climate problem as it stands makes it appear too big and overwhelming, which incites hopelessness and inaction. Thus, we must keep the information simple and hopeful in order to effect change.

Indeed, Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update supported these notions in the wake of the IPCC news:

Colin Jost: Scientists basically published an obituary for the earth this week and people were like, "Yeah, but like what does Taylor Swift think about it"....We don't really worry about climate change because it is too overwhelming and we're already in too deep.

Michael Che: That story has been stressing me out all week. I just keep asking myself "Why don't I care about this?" I mean, don't get me wrong, I 100% believe in climate change yet I am willing to do absolutely nothing about it.

On first glance, it would seem that the science communication scholars are correct: the devastatingly huge nature of the problem leads to despair and inaction. But is that really what we are seeing? Are we seeing despair - or denial? I don't mean the sort of denial that claims climate change is not occurring at all or that it is a natural phenomenon. I am talking about denial in the form of not willing to admit that you, personally, have a role to play in the problem and in the solution - that in addition to so many changes necessary on large-scale political, economic, industrial, occupational, and social levels, every one of us also needs to change our way of life in innumerable ways, and none more so than the wealthy.

One of the issues with the science communication research that emphasizes carefully crafting optimistic messages about environmental crises so that people will act on solutions is that it tacitly assumes that solutions have been articulated. How can we conclude that people's despondency results in inaction when very few real actions have been offered? All that we offer are minimal, usually consumer-based alterations to what we buy. As we can see, these small, manageable, incremental changes have done nothing. Perhaps that is where the despair comes from? Al Gore's conclusion in The Inconvenient Truth gave us recommendations to change our light bulbs and drive hybrid cars. This sort of advice, while Gore himself hypocritically continues to own multiple large homes and travel around the world with the excuse of educating the public about the crisis, rings false because it is false. The truth is that the public has not taken action because no one dares to explain what to do, and no one dares to explain what to do because what to do inevitably involves radical changes to the daily lives of the majority of people in the western world, most especially the richest among us who contribute the most to all of our ecological calamities. But even more importantly, no one with money, power, and influence dares to walk the walk when it comes to personal environmental action.
Truth and Consequences
The climate crisis, as many other environmental issues, isn't a scientific problem; it is a social, political, and economic one. As they say, "it isn't rocket science." It is greed. A Green New Deal will not cut it because it leaves capitalism, corporatism, imperialism, and consumerism in place. We aren't going to "science" our way out of these crises. We can't advertise or market our way out, shop our way out, sing and dance or entertain our way out, fundraise our way out, engineer (and genetically engineer) our way out, protest our way out, text, tweet, snapchat or instagram our way out, pray our way out, or even vote our way out. Our way out is to dramatically alter much of our way of life. It is to prioritize ecological concerns and do our best to conduct every aspect of our lives sustainably, rather than just pay lip service to our belief that climate change is real or that plastic pollution is a problem or that fossil fuel use is unsustainable. In many, if not most ways, we just simply need to stop. Our way of life is incompatible with the continuance of life.

Donald Trump blatantly admitted to prioritizing the multibillion-dollar sale of arms to Saudi Arabia over the life of an assassinated journalist (not to mention the lives of millions of Yemeni people). While Trump overtly admits placing the importance of economic values over social and environmental ones, the rest of us do much the same every day as we go about our "normal" lives and activities without considering their proximal and distant repercussions.

We know well the myriad problems - global climate change, extinction of species, ecosystem disruption, overuse of natural resources, massive pollution from toxicants and plastic. Scientists have done a wonderful job of documenting the fall ™, but they have not offered many concrete solutions besides ending our use of fossil fuels and placing restrictions on certain toxics and pollutants so that they continue to harm us and our ecosystems chronically rather than acutely.

A far from exhaustive list of some of the things we might try to accomplish, personally and collectively, in order to avert total climate catastrophe (and tackle other environmental issues) is in the appendixto this piece. Suffice it to say, much of what we are used to in our lives is antithetical to sustainable life and probably has to go. Besides reduce, reuse, and recycle, we should add slow down, simplify, and stop.

Our modern technological, consumerist, lifestyle must be massively curbed. We may not be able to curtail environmental disaster completely, but we can at least try to greatly mitigate and adapt to it while also addressing poverty and massive inequality and attempting to reduce the suffering and pain of as many people as possible. Changes that would help the environment and changes that would bring more social justice go hand in hand, because it is precisely the industries, occupations, and lifestyles of the rich that create the enormous environmental, economic, and social crises. Therefore, restraining or removing their enterprises is the ultimate solution to our troubles.

As it is, market forces that enrich the wealthiest not only permit, but demand that food goes wasted rather than to the hungry, that clothing is destroyed rather than worn by those who have need for it, and that homes are left empty rather than housing the millions of homeless and marginally-sheltered around the country. This sort of economic model should be unconscionable because it is not only morally reprehensible but ecologically unsustainable. And we are all complicit in this when we work for these companies and industries that allow for such atrocity.

Along his current book tour, Chris Hedges seems to be repeating a (paraphrased) quotation from Sartre: "I don't fight fascists because I think I will win; I fight fascists because they are fascists." Similarly, there are people who live every moment of their lives with environmental sustainability in mind. They might say "I don't live this way because I will save the world; I live this way because it is the only way to live." In both cases, while the individual choice is a moral and ethical one, if we all, or at least the majority of us, were to come closer to making those moral and ethical choices, we might have a fighting chance against both fascism and environmental devastation.

Besides which ... Are you happy? Polls and surveys suggest that the answer to that question for the vast majority of Americans is a resounding "No." While the poor struggle to get by day to day, what's left of the middle class live paycheck to paycheck. And even the upper-middle class and rich are not completely satisfied, probably because they have actual experience that money does not buy happiness in an atomized, unjust, and environmentally degraded world. But they will never admit to this reality and will continue to strive for more wealth and dominance in a futile quest to fill the voids in their lives.

All of those I know who are truly despairing about the environmental situation are the same people who are doing the most about it. Their desperation comes not as much from the overwhelming nature of the problem, but more from the fact that so many around them do not seem to notice or care.

Nearly all of the changes that can potentially help mitigate our environmental crises will also mitigate our social crises and our misery. So exactly why are so many people so reluctant to change? The mega-rich generated their massive fortunes by exploiting the environment and all of us, so clearly they are averse to change. For them to change, the rest of us will have to work together to force their hands. But what is everyone else's excuse, given that we are all so unhappy and unsatisfied? Why can't we seem to give up our palliatives (shopping, driving, television, social media, selfies, online gaming, etc.) that wreck our ecosystems as well as our physical and psychological well-being?

Scientists' best estimates suggest Homo sapiens, the species of modern humans, emerged between 300-200 thousand years ago. While we are an extremely young species in the context of geological time, we have nonetheless exacted a powerful toll on the planet during our relatively short stint here on Earth. The majority of that toll only occurred in the past few hundred years. Not only have we altered geology, chemistry, and biology across the globe, we have left a wasteland of ecosystem destruction, species decimation, acute and chronic toxic pollution, and of course, global climate change. But these alterations were not inevitable.

For most of our 200,000 years, Homo sapiens, like the other species living among us, affected local areas in limited ways that were not completely detrimental and irreversible. We didn't leave traces of persistent organic pollutants at the poles of the globe, having manufactured and used them thousands of miles away. We didn't leave radioactive vessels at the bottom of the ocean and heaps of radioactive materials in piles that we hope will not be touched for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. We didn't deforest and desertify swathes of land the size of states and countries. We didn't drastically reduce the number of insects and pollinators of our food supply. We didn't kill the majority of species of large mammals. We didn't leave a supply of chemical and plastic waste in the oceans, the quantity of which will soon outnumber the productive biota of the sea. And we didn't drastically alter the gaseous concentrations of the atmosphere, thereby transforming the entire planetary climate. Some humans never did.

To be sure, not all humans created this problem. Ironically, it is the ones who have all but been obliterated across the globe - the indigenous - who hold the keys to our salvation. They did not exploit natural resources to the point of collapse; they honored and respected other species and their place in our global ecosystem. They considered more than quarterly earnings; they considered the consequences of their daily actions and looked forward toward the preservation of life for a minimum of seven generations of their people. Rather than revere the psychopathic, narcissistic, members of society who hoard all of the wealth, resources, and power to the detriment of people and planet, many indigenous cultures would shun and ostracize them. This is not an exaltation of the myth of the "noble savage." Even the current IPCC report advises that indigenous knowledge and wisdom have important roles to play if we are to survive.

It is not inexorable that human activity will obliterate all life on earth. There are subsets of our species who lived, and still live, largely sustainably on the planet. These indigenous cultures are models for different, more viable alternatives. We should be striving to adjust our lives to be more like theirs rather than forcing them to adopt our corruptive, toxic, homicidal, and suicidal paradigms. All evidence suggests that we do, indeed, need to "go back," or at the very least, massively scale back.

Right before I received my doctoral degree, I had to meet with the graduate dean for a sort of exit interview. Seeing my field of study, she commented, "So, you are going to go out there and save us." No. There are no individuals of any field or discipline who can save us. Likewise, to combat utter ecological devastation, people often say "we need our leaders to step up." If it is not abundantly clear by now, our leaders have little incentive to do anything, and they have accomplished appallingly less.

The truth is, we must all take the lead. We must eat, sleep, and breathe with our environment in mind. In doing so, we will have to support one another in a battle against the rich and powerful who resist - with more fervor than any other type of resistance - all of the changes necessary that might stand half a chance of making this world more equitable and ecologically sound. We should do so not because we will necessarily save the world, but because as moral, ethical, rational, human beings, how can we not do so? And we do so because, unless we are mere sociopaths, we are clear about the truth of our situation and the consequences of not doing so.
Appendix.
Some potential goals to help avert environmental calamity:

+ Remember that the economy is a human construct which does not have to exist

+ Prioritize the environment, humans, and ecosystems over economics

+ Drastically reduce all production and consumption

+ Drastically reduce or eliminate extractive industries

+ Localize economies

+ Eliminate new production and consumption of fossil fuels

+ Eliminate production of arms and weapons

+ Drastically reduce or eliminate plastics

+ Eliminate advertising and marketing

+ Reduce offspring to one-two children at most

+ Make housing a human right and eliminate housing as a market commodity

+ Own no more than one (modest-sized) home per person

+ Own no more than one (functional, modest) car per person

+ Drastically reduce all automobile travel, air travel, boat travel

+ Drastically reduce entertainment production and consumption, such as replacing film, television, and video games with more local forms of entertainment, art, and leisure play

+ Drastically reduce the production and consumption of fashion and apparel

+ Produce only long-lasting products of high quality, mainly necessities (food, clothing, shelter)

+ Drastically reduce or eliminate superfluous, excess, unnecessary, disposable, and low-quality products

+ Eliminate industrial agriculture, monocultures, and industrial livestock operations replacing them will small scale, organic multi-crop farms and abundant public and personal food gardens. (i.e., Agroecology)

+ Drastically reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides

+ Drastically reduce the consumption of meat and animal products

+ Compost all organic materials, including human bodies

+ Utilize our engineering expertise for only sustainable production

+ Eliminate waste with cradle to cradle production of goods

+ Utilize reclaimed, refurbished, recycled, and/or biodegradable materials for production and for art

+ Eliminate all unnecessary medical procedures, over-diagnoses, and overmedication

+ Drastically reducing the size of or eliminate multinational, global monopolistic corporations such as Google, Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc.

+ Permanently halt the roll-out of 5G and the Internet of Things

+ Drastically reduce our use of computers, tablets, smart phones, and electronics

+ Overhaul education, prioritizing sustainability in all disciplines at all levels and eliminating unsustainable fields

+ Drastically reduce or eliminate computers and internet from schools

+ Have corporations automatically account for and pay for all detrimental externalities that result from their products

+ Drastically shorten political campaigns, eliminate all private funding for campaigning, and divide public funds equally among all candidates

+ Eliminate useless jobs

Three important means to facilitate these goals:

+ Raise the marginal income tax rate for the rich to 90%, as it used to be

+ Provide a universal basic income (at a level higher than the proposed $12K per person per year)

+ Provide universal, single-payer, government-subsidized medical care for all

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Eco Crises: Doom & Gloom, Truth & Consequences

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We can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change.