A somewhat short-sighted view on planetary limits that purports to be long-sighted

This is an article by a biologist claiming that the current population of Earth, and the projected peak population that we will attain by mid-century, are not over-taxing the planet's natural carrying capacity.  In the most general sense, I agree that overpopulation is not the only nor even the prime factor destroying our planet (and thus its ability to sustain humans into the foreseeable future).  How we use resources is perhaps the major driver of planetary destruction.  That is to say that a large population where each person doesn't use that many natural resources often treads more lightly than a smaller population where each individual consumes a lot of resources for his or her daily life, so we can't well say that population in itself is the problem.  But in any case, having a lot of people on the planet, and especially when everyone is using more and more resources (think of a person who burns coal for electricity, uses mined minerals in his iPhone, eats meat three times a day, and burns gasoline in his car, as compared to his grandfather who had neither electricity nor iPhones nor car and ate meat a few times a week if at all), tends to tax the natural resource base.

At any rate, his central argument is "Many scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us... Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered 'natural' ecosystems."  This is where I would argue that he is mistaken.  It is in fact the author, Erle Ellis, who doesn't have a sufficiently large scope in his understanding of ecology, either natural or human.  It is true that human-altered systems manage to sustain larger human populations by tilting natural biomass production towards things that we can eat.  But however we modify that biomass production, it is all ultimately dependent on a whole myriad of natural processes, many of which we don't even understand.

This is where his argument becomes short-sighted.  First off, while it is true that many of the details of our modern comforts and sufferings are attributable to the successes and failures of human systems, these human systems are always, without exception, ultimately dependent on natural processes that enable everything else.  The recent fright about massive bee die-off is a case in point.  Yes, modern agriculture is impressive in its ability to escape from some of the conditions that the natural world has imposed on farming for millennia.  Even pollination has become largely human-controlled through the management of beehives.  But we are running into difficult-to-explain and even-more-difficult-to-control problems with our bees, both wild and domesticated, which could threaten the entire basis of fruit orchard production.  By the same token, irrigation has made deserts bloom and saved many Western US farmers from the vagaries of weather.  But as the Ogalalla aquifer, a natural resource underlying much of the country, is overtaxed and drawn down, all the technology in the world will not save those farmers nor the consumers that depend on them.

An extension of this refusal to acknowledge our ultimate reliance on natural resources are Ellis's discussions of ancient human history.  The author refers repeatedly to the gradual intensification of human activity ever since the invention of agriculture, and the subsequent humanization of the natural world, as proof that our current rampant destruction of the natural environment is nothing new and isn't that serious.  His error here is manyfold.  While humans have always modified their environment, this modification was never as total and far-reaching as it is today, and the relicts of natural systems were usually sufficient to maintain certain vital functions on which the human system depended.  Humanity has always externalized some natural consequences of its actions, and concentrated the bounty of larger, wild areas into smaller, humanized environments.  But in the cases where humans did overtax their natural resource base, or were no longer able to externalize their negative consequences, entire civilizations faltered, and many people died as the population had to readjust to a different way of living.  We can see this in many cultures of the Middle East where population crashed after destructive farming practices left barren wastelands where fields had once flourished, or in the Yucatan jungles where the avarice of Maya temple-builders felled entire forests and left the general populace without fertile land and natural ecosystems with which to subsist, and certainly not with which to sustain a gleaming empire.  Even in these cases, the negative human consequences of ecocide and social collapse were mitigated, because there were always other places, other natural systems, to which humans could migrate or otherwise shift their dependence.  Middle Eastern settlement has shifted from place to place as local environmental conditions became unbearable, and the post-prosperity Maya spread out into the forest to live a more primitive life.  But when environmental destruction happens on a large enough scale, there is no other place to run to.  We don't have another forest or plain just beyond this planet that can absorb us when we become refugees of our own folly.

Few development experts have focused on overpopulation as a planetary problem for the past decade or two, because it has become clear that poverty (and its alleviation) do indeed depend mainly on social factors like technology, access to certain rights and resources, and distribution of wealth.  So in that sense I'd say the author of the article that inspired this blog post is arguing something that few are arguing against.  That said, Ellis doesn't merely argue that today's problems (human, environmental, and otherwise) are mainly caused and will likely have to be solved by human solutions.  No, he goes on to repeat that old technophilic trope that our wits will somehow get us out of our current problems, and thus that it is an error to recognize that humans remain ultimately dependent on natural systems.  In this sense, I wonder if he is an honest commentator, or one more scientist hired gun enviro-complacent recruited and hyped by private interests that run contrary to the preservation of the natural environment.  At any rate, here is another bit from him attempting to clarify his arguments (though to me it seems to dilute them and lose any focused central thesis he might have started with).

Interesting thoughts from the Pope

My family and I have been in Washington, DC looking for an apartment and the start of a new job, a new life.  Usually when I write my blog posts I feel that I have some insight or have found out about something that other people may not have been exposed to, and I want to share with others.  I guess that my perch from a small town in Colombia allows me to feel like an in-the-know hermit, partly because the simplicity of our day-to-day life lets me filter out extraneous background noise.  To the contrary, being a new arrival to Washington makes me feel like an insignificant, clueless twit, and so I haven't been very motivated to write.  I will howeber share some articles that I've found interesting lately.  This one from the NYT is a brief summary of some quotes from the Pope, to the effect that he wishes to focus on the call of the Church to love and help our fellow human beings, before judging and berating them.  I feel like this is an appropriate direction for the Church to take after many years of doctrinal squabbles.

Third World Green Daddy 52: Comings and goings

By 6:30pm there is no trace left of daylight; night falls rapidly, pitilessly here on the Equator.  Tonight is chilly, like all nights in our high-mountain town, but the humidity in the air keeps the cold at bay, like a nappy grey fleece blanket that folds into rolls, never flat.  It’s not like the piercing nights following brutal sun-spicy days, when there are no clouds overhead nor moisture in the air to hold onto the day’s warmth.

I stumble home through narrow streets, most of them busy with chatty people returning from a good day’s work, then across the town’s wide-open tiled plaza, and finally down lonelier lanes to my house.  I say stumble because I have dined at the town’s only British-style pub, with artisan-made beer and diverse plates breaded and sautéed in said beer.  Since I drink about once a month, the half-pint of black porter I’ve had tonight has me reeling, floating like a college freshman in September high on newfound freedom and $5 all-you-can-drink parties.  It’s put me in a fanciful, literary mood.  In the pub I was one of LeCarre’s gloomy over-the-hill spies, mulling over complex webs of fact and deception at his local dinner club, and now I’m a Hemingway-style expat hammering out hard-nosed prose at the helm of my typewriter.

This all in the context of an empty house as I prepare to leave Colombia for a new job in the US.  My wife and son left today for Bogota in a suitcase-laden car.  And two nights ago Carlos, the young man who has lived in our unfinished back area for the past few months, moved back in with his brother in more decent digs.  I have stayed behind an extra day or two closing up house.  Caro has spent the last week packing up our things, some to come with us on the plane, some to be shipped by boat, and some to bide our absence in a crawlspace closet in our house.  Yesterday the moving company came to do a preliminary recon, and today I’ve been filling out paperwork for them.  I have also put to sleep my rooftop greenhouse (which was already mostly dead and dried-up after my two-month absence this summer), fixed nagging plumbing problems, organized my tools and our general storage area, and tomorrow I hope to get done about four big projects that I never got around to while we lived here.  In short I am trying to leave the house in better shape than it’s been in before, though I’m leaving some other repairs to my brother-in-law, who will take care of the place in our absence.

I wish I could say something romantic, like that on my walk home from the bar I thought through four years in half a mile, but that’s not quite true.  I haven’t been looking back much on our time in Colombia on this the eve of our departure.  I don’t know why that is—I am normally a very nostalgic guy.  In part it is perhaps because I already had a sentimental spell three months ago, as I prepared to leave for Chicago, knowing that by September we would have come back to Colombia and then left again, this time for the foreseeable future.  Another factor is surely that I’ve been so busy with last-minute preparations that I haven’t been able to ponder the implications of our going.  But probably most of all, it is because I don’t feel that we’re really leaving.  We will most likely not live in Colombia again for a few years, but for now I still feel like this is our home, this is where we are based.  We have our house here (which I finally painted in June, in a manic last week before I left for Chicago),

 

I’m slowly establishing a coffee plantation here (this is the hillside marked by green and white flags every ten meters where I’ll plant shade trees in December),



which I intend to be the first piece of a larger, integrated farm that we can eventually live off of. I have become an adult in my time in Colombia, started my own family here, and while I truly feel that my family is my home, such that I don’t mind moving around the world as long as they are with me, Caro and I seem to tacitly understand that Colombia is our geographic base. I guess that’s why I don’t feel too bad about leaving.  I'm still planning projects here, still thinking in the present tense about our life in Colombia.

Aside from that, of the four and a half years we’ve lived in Colombia, about two have been a chaotic whirlwind of moving, physical separation, construction, debts, and transitions of many types.  We’ve had deaths, taken on new members of our household, followed these young adults through joy and triumph and struggles with drugs and school and the ubiquitous violence that plagues our small town, and eventually sent all three of them off to college.  Only since January of this year have I felt that Caro, Sam, and I are really settled as a stable family unit, such that my “official” memories at this point only go back about that far.  Given this, tonight I did reflect on Sam’s leaving his school here, where he’s only been since April, the projects we’ve undertaken and finished on the final leg of our house rehab, and Carlos’s stay with us since January.  Yesterday I picked up Sam from his preschool for the last time.  The teachers were a bit teary, and Caro couldn’t even face the prospect of going there.  Sam’s teacher Andrea handed over the portfolio of his work this year, which includes the homework assignments he did with us and Carlos at home, as well as a few handicraft items he did in class with his teacher.  As Andrea showed me each perfectly-executed rattle or painting or model made from toilet-paper tubes, I exclaimed to Sam, “These are really great!  Who made them?”  To which he replied, “Andrea,” though upon further probing he did allow that he helped her.  This was better than the cover of his portfolio, a pristine glitter-and-cotton-ball bas-relief of Santa Claus, which according to Sam’s conversation with Caro was Andrea’s doing, with no help from him!

That leaves me here on my last night (or second-to-last, depending on how far I get with tomorrow’s handyman projects).  I am excited at the prospect of a new life, a new career, and I feel that I’ve left a decent legacy here in Colombia.  I’ve worked on jobs I believe in, I’ve gotten to know the state of Boyaca very well, and I’ve convinced myself that I really can relate and work with farmers in a culture not my own.  I've even figured out how to coax fruit from recalcitrant pineapples, and even to get them to send up new little shoots after the first harvest.  




And I've finally finished the Melissa fence I started some months ago while thinking of a recently-departed friend. 

Last weekend as I stumbled down a muddy track on my father-in-law’s farm (stumbling this time due to the dark and the rain and the steep terrain, and perhaps fatigue from hours of lifting sacks of ground limestone), I marveled at how far I’ve come. Just over ten years ago I was stumbling down similar tracks in a similar climate in Haiti, my first bewildering exposure to the agrarian, tropical world outside the bounds of my US homeland. Everything in Haiti was so new, above all the plants, which had little to do with my knowledge of corn and soybeans and Midwestern weeds. But on my recent nighttime walk back to the farmhouse, I realized that in ten years I had learned a lot about the rural tropics. This night I was coming back from tracing terraces for a coffee plantation, confident in my ability to manage the acid tropical soil. I was dressed unironically and un-self-consciously with the essential Colombian rubber boots and a machete in its scabbard hanging at my side. In the daytime I was able to identify on sight the different trees and crops and weeds I passed, and at night to remember where they lay in the darkness. This land was no longer alien to me. I was a part of it. Maybe that’s why I’m not sad at leaving it—it can never leave me now.

Third World Green Daddy 51: Busy after the storm

A week ago Friday my family and I breathed a sigh of relief.  After two tense weeks of the agrarian strike, the peasants lifted their road blockades, and life started to return to normal.  We didn't let down our guard immediately that Friday, because the official word from the peasant representatives was that the strike was still in effect, but they were lifting the road blockades thanks to the good faith that the government had shown in the first few days since official negotiations had started.  We interpreted this as meaning that the blockades would be lifted, but that the peasants would be at the ready to re-establish them at a moment's notice if the government backed out of honest negotiating.

This made sense; the peasants were tired and getting hungry after two weeks at the barricades.  I assume they had plenty of potatoes and other locally-produced basic food to tide them over, but things like coffee and panela and rice that they had to bring from elsewhere was running low.  Of course it would have been great if the peasants blocking the roads in different climate zones had been able to coordinate food exchanges from one area to another, but the whole protest was very grassroots and spontaneous to begin with, and it evolved as it went along.  I'm sure that if the blockades had kept up much longer, they would have come up with interesting ways of supplying the protesters with food produced by other protesting peasants in each region.  At any rate, everyone needed a chance to regroup and relax, even if they were to resume the blockades after the weekend (which was presented as a very real possibility).

So Friday the 31st we went about our normal errands, hoping to take advantage of the blockade lift to travel on Saturday.  As I walked around our town's center, I sensed a palpable relief and joy in the bustle of shops and shoppers, people finally able to take care of their day-to-day affairs after what had felt like a two-week state of suspended animation.  Most people in our department of Boyaca supported the agrarian strike, but even so, two weeks with dwindling food, halted transport, and many businesses and offices closed wore all of us down.

My family had fared particularly well during the strike.  We'd stocked up on groceries, both fresh produce and dry goods, just before the blockades started, and we had some 2000 gallons of water stored up in our rainwater collection system, just in case the city water got cut off for a while.  It didn't, though the week after the blockades our neighborhood was without water for a few days (due to an unrelated technical issue), and I was very happy to have our home system to provide high-pressure hot and cold water for our showers and daily needs.  I had also recently had our stopped-up chimney cleaned out, so we were able to enjoy almost nightly fires.  It was a wonderful defense against the rainy cold of this particular season, and we were able to read a lot around the fire with Sam at night.  It reminded me of cold nights at my family's weekend house in central Wisconsin.

Anyway, we were fine for food, though fresh fruit consumption and juices became somewhat scarce toward the end of the blockade.  We sent out Sam's sometime-nanny to find eggs one day, and as she brought back the tray of 30 eggs, one of the last left in the last store in our town to still have eggs, passers-by eyed her tray hungrily.  Not besieged Leningrad by any means, but things could have gotten ugly with another week or two of the blockade.

There were little things that affected us though during the strike.  Sam's school was shut down for over a week.  One day, when it looked like things were getting back to normal, we took him to school, only to find that all the teachers were there but no other kids had arrived.  He spent the morning alone with his teachers, and then we took him back home for the afternoon.  The lack of school wasn't that traumatic for Sam though, since our friend's two daughters came over many days to play with him all day in the park in front of our house.  We did have a slight problem with his Curious George book, which has become one of his favorites of late.  Just before school was shut down at the end of the strike's first week, he'd taken the book to school to share with his classmates.  The school didn't return it that afternoon, and we just figured on getting it the next day.  But that was when school was canceled, and so he spent a whole weekend plaintively asking from time to time (and sometimes wailing) about his Curious George book.  We finally got it back on the day he was the only kid at school.

Speaking of books, in the early days of the strike I'd requested a book and two movies from the Bogota branch of the national library to be sent for us to pick up at our local branch.  This is a wonderful service that the system provides, such that I can get any book in the whole country with just a click of the mouse in the online catalog system.  I didn't expect these items to get to our town once the blockades were consolidated.  But to my great surprise, at least the book did get through!  I wondered how that might have happened--if there was one brave library courier who'd made the run to Boyaca just before the roads were definitively shut off.  If so, why didn't the movies get here?  Maybe they just barely missed that last shipment.

In any case, I was able to read John Lecarre's The Looking Glass War during the strike.  I've been on a Lecarre kick since the beginning of the summer.  My dad was a big fan, and had always had many of his books on our shelves, but I'd never gotten into them.  Lately I've been obsessed with spy history and spy culture (in part the result of my having exhausted the Pritzker Military Library's podcasts and moved on to the International Spy Museum's Spycasts), so the logical step was to start reading Lecarre.  I'm now about eight books into reading his entire opus of 23 books or so.  I've nevere done that with an author, read his or her entire production.  Anyway, the Looking Glass War was entertaining during the doldrums of the strike.

And there were doldrums.  I've shown that we weren't negatively affected in any major material sense, but there was a mental strain from being cooped up all day in the house.  Just the loss of the routine of taking Sam to school every day messed me up mentally.  With no set time we had to wake up by, and no first task to start the day, it was hard for me to get into work mode.  Furthermore, we had to take care of Sam during the day, which took away from other things we had to get done.  Really though, Sam is pretty autonomous, and when his older friends came over to play, they effectively took care of him for the better part of the day.  So I guess the most debilitating mental issue was a type of cabin fever, joined to a sense of impotence.  Caro and I have spent most of our professional lives working with peasants, often without great effect, and now that things were really moving in a tangible way to improve life for the peasants, we didn't know how we could help.  We obviously weren't going to go out and throw rocks at the riot police, and even participating in the peaceful daytime marches didn't seem like a very productive use of our talents.  On the nights that there were civil protests where people banged on pots for an hour to show their support for the peasants, we went out to the front stoop with Sammy to add our own banging to the cacophony.  But that was more about having fun with Sam, and teaching him to be aware of and concerned about social causes.

We wanted to create a synthesis document of the peasants' demands, to circulate among Colombians and foreigners so they could pressure the government to negotiate in good faith.  But as the talks got underway, and seemed to be going really well, we didn't know if this would be very useful, and we were unable to get in touch with the peasant leadership to know what they would like from people like us and the public at large.

So for the most part we stayed in the house, kept up to date on the latest developments of the strike, and tried half-heartedly to get other work done, too.  We are preparing to move to the US in the next week or two for me to start a new job, so we have to take care of a lot of paperwork and logistical organization regarding travel, moving, apartment-hunting, and my wife's upcoming childbirth.  But much of this we couldn't do with our city shut down, and especially with our not knowing whether the roads would be open or not in the foreseeable future.  Even for things that I could have done from home, like working on an article that I need to submit to a scientific journal, it was hard for me to get motivated to do them given the general languor pervading our household and our town.  Likewise, my wife found it hard to be enthusiastic about packing and getting ready for the move, given all the uncertainty about when we could leave, where we'd live, how we'd manage two kids in a strange city, etc.

All this changed last Friday when the blockade lifted.  I got a fire in my ass and ran a bunch of errands, exhilarated with the newfound sense of freedom.  I weatherproofed a window, organized my personal files, all things I could have done before but didn't feel like doing.  On Saturday we went to my father-in-law's farm.  We ate at our favorite Swiss restaurant on the way, we marveled at the felled trees and rocks that peasants were clearing from the road.  This blockade was serious!  It wasn't like you could have sneaked through--there were maybe three sets of massive entire trees crossing the highway at key spots, and these had surely been manned by a lot of peasants.  As we passed by though, they had been sawn up and moved by the last ranks of the farmers, and no one was manning them except a family now and again clearing out the last bits of barricades, so all we saw was the debris after the storm.  We were able to eat well and relax at the farm, though it was an exhausting type of relaxation.  Caro cooked up a storm and played vigorously with Sam all day, and I hauled manure and compost and lime up and down a hill to organize what I hope will become a nice coffee plantation over the next few years.  By the time we returned to our town Sunday night, laden with pounds and pounds of fresh produce and wary of a possible re-commencement of the blockades the next day, we were dog-tired.  It took us a few days to catch up on our sleep, due I think not only to our hard work at the farm but also to the latent mental strain we'd put up with for the past two weeks.

This past week then has been free and productive.  I've finished my article, my wife has been packing up our stuff, and Sam has been thrilled to go to school.  Even our last traces of reticence about the possible resumption of the blockade has faded, as today, after a session lasting until 4am last night, the peasants and the government have declared their official agreements and the end of the agrarian strike.  I'll write more with the details of this agreement in another post, but the bottom line is that the parties have figured out ways of satisfying both the peasants' demands and the government's other commitments (free trade agreements and so forth).  We had been and continue to be a bit worried about whether this will actually be respected by the government, or if it's just a quick way to get the peasants off their backs, but it seems promising.

Now after a hearty breakfast, we plan on going back to the farm, where I can finish liming my field's acid soil, and cleaning up the weeds around my pineapples.