The past 10,000 years has been an uncharacteristically ‘stable’ period which enabled us to evolve into an agricultural, urban civilisation, and to breed like never before. Our history tells us that stability and sustainability are transient phenomena at best. And that stability now seems to be shifting. The climate made us what we are. It moulds us, it nurtures us, it destroys us. It will do so again. In times gone by, when opportunity or threat arose, we were able to get up and migrate into more amenable territory. But now, as human migrations continue, it is no longer into unoccupied lands. Conflict seems inevitable.
It’s in our nature to destroy. We look at an empty landscape and we see opportunity: farms, plantations, housing estates, shopping malls, networks of highways, tower blocks. This is what we proudly label as development and progress. We rarely if ever stop think “Hey wouldn’t it be amazing to leave this wonderful tract of land as it is and work our own existence around it.”
Unlike most other occupants of Planet Earth, humans are deeply programmed to modify the environment. Drop a group of naked human beings into a wild place on a mission to survive and their first essentials are clothing, housing, food and water. There is no easy co-existence with nature. We have to change it to survive and more so to attain a degree of comfort. Our pursuit of food entails picking, plucking, digging, planting – and killing.
We are hardwired to exploit our natural environment, to modify it for our own benefit and, in sufficient numbers, to destroy it. And often we do this knowingly. It’s as if we have a built in algorithm: if you can’t change the climate, you can change the landscape. There is a powerful survival benefit in landscape modification, in agriculture and technology, which means we are unlikely to consciously stop doing those things, even though our survival may now depend on not doing them.
We’re not good neighbours with other species. That algorithm wants us to kill nearly everything we encounter. Throughout much of our great migration across the planet, the arrival of humans coincided with the extinction of larger mammals. Giant forms of kangaroo and other marsupials existed in large numbers in ancient Australia but had all gone soon after humans arrived. Woolly mammoths, giant oxen and most of the once vast herds of bison were progressively eliminated from northern Europe and Siberia after the last glacial maximum. Giant camels and horses became extinct in North America and the great herds of buffalo were deliberately decimated right into modern times. The dodo and the passenger pigeon went the same way. These species had no prior experience of humans and were accordingly easy to hunt, so easy that they were hunted to extinction. In Africa by contrast, the human species had emerged alongside indigenous wild mammals and each had formulated its own avoidance and survival strategies over a very long period.
The present day destruction of elephant and rhino populations has been well documented. Less well known is that 99% of Pacific salmon have disappeared through over-fishing and habitat modification. The world population of Right Whales has been hunted to the verge of extinction. There are just a few hundreds left in scattered communities at the extremities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Even their name – ‘right’ – was coined in recognition they were the ‘right’ ones to kill. The monarch butterfly, known for its remarkable and spectacular mass migrations between the USA and Mexico, has lost 97% of its numbers in the past 20 years because its food plant, the common milkweed, is being killed off by the widespread use of herbicides. Its overwintering sites are under threat because of people felling their preferred trees to build roads, houses and farms.
Cutting down trees is another ingrained habit, though depleting forests seems to take us a little longer than killing off animal populations. America has destroyed 95% of its Pacific Northwest redwood forests. Madagascar has lost 97% of its forest cover. Most of Britain’s forests were transformed into ships and buildings a long time ago. I was told of a Kenyan flower farmer who can no longer meet export quality specifications because they cut down nearby forests in order to expand their operations. The local microclimate lost its rainfall and their rose stems no longer grow long enough.
A number of studies have looked at climate change and landscape modification in regard to the the collapse of civilisations. Amongst others, the collapse of the Maya, Khmer and Assyrian societies has been attributed to climatic and environmental factors. In Mesopotamia, sediment evidence shows that around 4,200 years ago, there was a 300-500% increase in wind blown sand, salt and dust which swathed the fields and destroyed the pastures. Forests died back and topsoil washed down the rivers. The drought lasted more than a hundred years and brought the Akkadian empire to a close.
In the remote Pacific Ocean, the inhabitants of Easter Island depended on their indigenous forest for, amongst other purposes, making canoes to go fishing. When the forest was down to its last few trees, the islanders had a choice: preserve them and modify their way of life, or cut them down and seal their doom. They chose the latter.
As territories like USA and Australia were occupied by settlers, indigenous landscapes were bulldozed to make farms in the image of those back home. But the local climate meant that new agricultural practices had to be devised. Huge areas of those landscapes became little more than barren deserts.
More recently, an intense drought between 2007 and 2010 in the Eastern Mediterranean area was the worst for 900 years. Low rainfall drove a steep decline in agricultural productivity and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, mainly in Syria. The IPCC report notes that many historical periods of turmoil have coincided with severe droughts.
Collectively, we’ve been issuing warnings, signing agreements and consistently ignoring them since the 1972 Stockholm Declaration. The absence of action is laughable. In 1988, James Hansen, then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the US Senate: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.” That year was the hottest year since records began, but it has been successively beaten in 1990, 1998, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018 (and 2019, 2020 and 2021). Hansen was right but the Senate chose to ignore him.
Margaret Thatcher espoused the climate bandwagon in a 1992 speech, but backtracked when she realised the implications for capitalism. The Rio Declaration repeated the earlier ‘commitments’, and that same year the Kyoto Protocol obliged member states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But we went on to emit more since then than we ever had before. In 2015, 195 countries adopted the first legally binding agreement to limit global warming to well below 2°C. Russia and Iran (amongst others) refused to ratify and the USA later pulled out.
Tim Flannery warned in 2005 that if the world didn’t take decisive action with a decade we’d be in trouble. We didn’t, and we are.
