Today's subject will cover an unpleasant topic: extinction! That’s right, we’re going to talk about the elimination of entire species from the global ecosystem. More specifically, I intend to address the impact of human pollution beyond dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because in tandem with the impacts of human climate change, there's also the impact of people using the natural world as a dumping ground for everything that is inconvenient or sometimes outright dangerous to human life. This includes all varieties of pollution from sewage, untreated runoff from agriculture, plastics trash gyres in the oceans, the micro plastics that are now show up in rainwater all over the world. And to be clear and unfortunately honest, no additional natural parks or marine reserves will get humanity out of from under our own boot-heel.
Once again let us get an obvious caveat out of the way; human beings have always impacted the natural environment. In fact, it's likely that since modern humans evolved approximately 400,000 years ago, no place where humans lived has been a pristine natural ecosystem since. To use a local example, the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve, in my home state of Oklahoma, explicitly seeks to restore grasslands of the central plains to the way the ecosystem functioned after the arrival of Native Americans.
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| We've been doing this quite a while. |
If you really want to interrogate the idea of the ’natural world’, in the Remembrance of Earths Past trilogy, author Cixin Liu debates the idea wether nature itself can even be ‘natural’. In the book Death's End, one character runs computer simulation looking at what would happen on Earth if natural life never existed. The simulation found that such a simulation cannot produce a conclusion, because simply by existing, the natural world influences even the basic laws of physics. This is a lot to wrap your head around, so I'll simply leave a link to the story and you can read it for yourself. The whole trilogy (Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End) is fantastic, and really pushes one to think about big ideas from a whole variety of perspectives. The trilogy takes place over millions of years, but focuses on the next four hundred or so.
This blog is focused on just the next hundred right now, so let’s get back to the task at hand. The problem today isn’t that people impact the natural world. The problem is a messy trifecta of scale, pace and the feedback loop from climate change.
Taking these issues in order, we should first look at the scale of the problem; human beings currently dump billions of tons of CO2 into the giant areal sewer we collectivity refer to as ‘the sky’, along with millions of tons of other problematic particles and molecules from NOX, mercury sulfates, to VOCs and micro-plastics which, as mentioned earlier, can now be found in rainwater all over the world. All these molecules make their way into the water cycle. And we haven’t even gotten to the mountains of trash we dump directly into the oceans, as well as the massive amounts of waste runoff from agricultural operations, which very often includes huge amounts of pesticides and fungicides, was well as fertilizers and animal waste. All of which flows back, eventually, to us humans.
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| ^Carcinogens not shown |
Not only are these pollutants building up in the world’s ecosystems, the rate of the pollution buildup can only accelerate, because the economic model we operate demands perpetual growth. With limitless growth, comes limitless pollution. There is of course another factor at play beyond the rapacious growth of capital intensive industries and the byproducts that they produce. A great many people outside of the industrial world want to join in the prosperity that is modern industrial civilization. From the outside looking in, modern (industrial) life, with its easy access to clean-ish water, sanitation, cheap food, and a smorgasbord of fashionable consumer goods, looks like an endless party. And for those in the ‘developing world’ wanting to attend, that party will end sometime over the next 150 years. For a great many of them, they will never get let in the door. I don't want to use ecological consciousness as a rhetorical tool with which to bludgeon the poor peoples of the world into accepting shorter lifespans, unhealthy environments and material poverty. The fact that there are things to life other than material prosperity, isn’t much of a consolation to someone living in a shanty town in a tropical metropolis.
This estimate, that fossil-fueled industrial civilization has about 150 or so years left, roughly mirrors the 150 years it has existed. Prior to 1870 or so, industrialization was limited to the East Coast of North America, and a corner of Northwest Europe, from the midlands of England, down to Lyon, France, then back up to roughly Hamburg, Germany. These little slivers of humanity lived on barely 5% of the world’s landmass, and constituted maybe 5% of the population. And in five to seven generations, depending on how you count, the industrial way of living spread to every major city and decent-sized population around the world. I would estimate the percentages of land and people engaged in industrial economic activity has reversed, with only 5% of land and people NOT engaged in some step in the industrial food web.
And this scale of change is reflected in the natural world as well. This recent study found that roughly like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. That leaves 4-5% for every other form of mammalian life. While the scale of impact by agriculture is slightly better, about 37% of Earth’s surface is used for agriculture, that figure jumps to 50% when you count only ‘habitable’ land. Yes, the Sahara desert is huge, but no people want to live or farm there. On the high seas, which make up 70% of the Earth’s surface, 40% is considered effected by human activity, with much of that activity concentrated in shallow areas where marine life is most abundant. As it is on land, so it is on the seas; no one wants to live in the desert. |
Except camels. They don't mind living
in the desert. |
Compounding the scale and pace of human pollution are the impacts from climate change, which compounds other forms of pollution. As the climate destabilizes, ecosystems must shift to accommodate a hotter planet. But the problem is twofold; first, the rate of change is so much faster than natural ecosystems can handle without devastating species loss. If we could say the current warming will to happen over the next thousand years or so, then many ecosystems might (emphasis on might), be able to move north or up on their own. The natural world has done this before, after all.
Second, the impacts of climate change will likely force human beings to double down on the mistakes of industrial civilization. The reason is core to the predicament in which industrial civilization finds itself; almost all humans alive to today, with very few exceptions, serve the industrial machine in one way or another.. This is true from elites who operate the systems of finance all the way down to the janitors and scavengers and trash collectors who work at what might be considered the very bottom of the economic pyramid. For example, consider the ship breakers in India whose job is, as it sounds, to break up old ships for salvage. Even groups like the Amish, who live as far outside the modern system as possible, still use modern power tools (they just can’t own them) and earn incomes outside their local communities.
Everyone’s material livelihood depends on the maintenance of industrial civilization, and as of right now industrial civilization has only one operating imperative; the conversion of raw materials into sellable products, many of which constitute one time use products which humans immediately throw away. To some extent this is avoidable, and my family and I make a point to avoid single-serving products, but in other cases, avoidance would mean going without. Who hasn’t bought a product that DIDN’T come packaged in single-use plastic? In a morbid bit of irony, even when we find a bio-degradable form of single-use plastic, customers can reject the arguably better product because it’s too noisy to open. I wish I was joking, but this actually happened with Sun Chips. |
| I wish this story was some lame satire... |
But someone makes money off those plastics, and the companies whose products go into those plastics make money off of selling those products. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself. This is all a roundabout way of saying that as climate change pushes industrial civilization with compounding problems such as disasters, crop failures, famines and desertification, combined with rising sea levels and increased soil erosion from a more active water cycle, humanity will have very little choice but to double down on the existing model of operating a fossil-fueled economy.
This all paints very bleak picture, and indeed in some sense the future is bleak, but there is, I suppose, one minor silver lining. We're talking about impacts that will only last a few thousand years. That's not much consolation to anyone reading this, or i anyone multiple generations in the future, but it is a silver lining. How is it a silver lining? Thanks to radiative adaptation, new life forms will evolve to fill the gaps and niches of the ecosystems left behind by the extinction of a great many species that exist today. Ecologists posited on and off since at least the 1990s. and probably earlier. that humanity is pushing the natural ecosystems of the planet towards a sixth great extension. This is almost certainly in progress, but it doesn't have to end up with a full-blown extinction event.
Humanity could choose to make different choices. We could reduce, reuse and recycle. Indeed, here in the US, we almost took that path in the 1970s. While I did mock National Parks and Marine Reserves earlier, such efforts are worth making. I believe nature is worth conserving for its own sake, but there's also a self interested reason for conservation. A great number of pharmaceutical products derive directly from the natural biodiversity of our planet. A poster child for this would be the horseshoe crab. The blood harvested from the horseshoe crab is key to many (human) life-saving drugs. If we wipe out the natural habitat of the horseshoe crab, it’s not an all clear that modern pharmacology could replace the compounds produced for us for free by this amazing crustacean. |
| Dirty hippies, being right about something! |
I do want to take a paragraph to dispel any notion you may have that discussion of mass extinction is synonymous with the end of humanity. The Chicxulub impact, which wiped out the dinosaurs except for the avian branch that gave us delicious chickens. Modern mammals arose to fill the many of the ecological gaps left by the now extinct land dinosaurs, eventually giving rise to the great apes, and, after millions of year, anatomically modern humans. So while it was a defining event in the natural history of our planet, it was nowhere near as devastating as the Permian Extinction, which resulted in the extinction of roughly 57% of all biological families on the planet. It’s ironic that the Permian extinction was responsible for a significant amount of the fossil fuel reserves that human beings are now using to push the planet towards a sixth extinction. All that weird irony aside the point is that extinction level event does not have to be in a complete ecological collapse. A few human beings would survive an extinction level event on par with the Jurrasic extinction. Humanity would most certainly not survive an event like the Permian Extinction.
Speaking of dying, one of the impacts of all of this pollution ending up in our natural ecosystems and water cycles is that the rates of cancer will almost certainly skyrocket for hundreds of years. While living creatures have always had to contend with malignant tumors, the degree to which cancer has become a cause of death around the world is truly out of line with previous human experience. While written historical records are incomplete, and the archaeological record can only shed so much light on the subject, in the preindustrial context most human beings died of infectious diseases in the first few years of life. A great many died of malnutrition and famine. War, that third horsemen of the apocalypse came in a distant third. And cancer itself was, we would guess, a rare problem reserved only for people who lived an extraordinarily long life by pre-industrial standards. Granted, “extraordinarily long life” by pre-industrial standards would have meant living into one’s forties, but the point remains. Today cancer is in the top five, along with heart disease, accidents, lack of health insurance, and respiratory illnesses as a top-five killer of Americans. I would imagine that by the turn of this century, cancer will be the leading cause of death across all age brackets.
This predicament is best exemplified by the weed killer Roundup. Because genetic modification focused on creating plants which can survive a hefty does of the stuff, Roundup is becoming inseparable from modern agriculture. Any farmer who does not want their fields overrun by weeds must apply multiple rounds of Roundup to keep down the undesirable plants. As a result, glyphosate, the cancer-causing chemical which also makes Roundup such a potent weed killer, persists in soils for weeks to months after use. In one study, 36% of 154 tested municipal water supplies in the Midwest showed detectable amounts of glyphosate. While the detectable level is not officially considered harmful to humans, I would take that as a small consolation. And as weeds develop resistance to glyphosate, every year farmers must spray more of it just to keep the 8 billion fed. Once again we can see how the modern farming, like many aspects of industrial civilization is caught in a bind. Human beings need the calories from corn and soy, the two crops on which Roundup is primarily used for, but natural methods of weed control, while viable, are not nearly as profitable nor efficient as spraying Roundup ready crops, to keep a hungry world well fed. I suppose the one upside, is that even if weeds become completely Roundup resistant, one can always go out and pull weeds by hand. And that will require a much larger agricultural workforce.
To avoid setting too dark of a tone for this post I would like to circle back to the notion that the natural world isn't natural or at least the natural world always seeks to find some new form of ecological balance. Yes in the centuries of head to pollution and ecological devastation that humans are visiting upon the natural world of North America and by extension upon our selves will be devastating. Great number of species will go extinct a great number of ecosystems will collapse and will never return and the world that human beings would have it in for instance 1000 years will be an ecologically impoverished landscape. What do I mean by this well for instance the recent study found that something like 96% of all mammal life on earth today is made up of human beings and our livestock. The natural world is already tragically impoverished and I don't see any reason to think that the current trajectory will not make it even more so. Also it's worth noting that as equal ecosystems encounter disequilibriums there are often massive almost tidal wave like events where a disruptive or what we might deem invasive species will invade and ravage an ecosystem but then also experience a die-back of its own as it overshoots what the ecosystem to naturally carry. Eventually, a new equilibrium is reached. Unfortunately for the natural world and for the humans dependent on it, that will involve a great deal of unpleasantness before the new equilibrium takes hold.
So what might an ecologically impoverish North America look like in 100 years? I think two of the best, most instructive examples, are the islands of Iceland and Rapa Nui.
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They didn't just pillage and burn Saxon towns,
they enjoyed a quiet life on the farm too! |
Iceland is a decent-sized volcanic island located between Scotland and Greenland in the North Atlantic. The first known human inhabitants, the Norse, arrived sometime in the eighth century. Based on fossil and very limited written records, the island was covered by fairly lush forests. The Norse loved keeping cattle and eating beef (who doesn’t?) so they immediately began clearing the trees for pasture land. What the Norse did not take into account was that unlike their native Scandinavia, Iceland had very thin soils. So as they imported cattle and plows and began to practice European-style agriculture in an ecosystem that was not fit to support it, they quickly destroyed most of the topsoil of the island. The largely barren, rocky ice-covered landscape we know today did not look like it did 1,300 years ago.
The island of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island and located about 1,300 miles west of Chile in the South Pacific, suffered a similar fate. When the Polynesians arrived on Easter island approximately 1,000 years ago, they two found an island covered in trees and home to a rich marine ecosystem. And for a number of centuries they managed to live in some degree of symbiosis with the natural world. But as almost always happens, this story does not have a happy ending for the natural ecosystem of Easter island. Eventually, all the trees were cut down and in their place there was very little other than thick-stemmed grass to hold down the topsoil. But the Polynesians couldn’t eat the grasses needed to hold onto the topsoil, sot the Easter Islanders had to become very good at dry rock gardening agriculture and became even more dependent on the sea to provide them with food. By the time Europeans visited Easter island, their written records mention that Easter islanders operated canoes made of reads grasses bound together with twine, while their ancestors likely arrived piloting sturdy, large, and most importantly, wooden canoes made from trees. in the case of Rapa Nui, the worst ecological devastation took place after the arrival of Europeans. Diseases, against which the the Polynesians had no immunity, ravaged their population. In the name of ‘economic development’, the 19th century Chilean government decided that it would be a good idea to start raising sheep on Easter island. But that's a story for another time. |
| Seriously. Chile brought sheep here. On Purpose. |
Both the Polynesians and the Norse adapted to a more ecologically impoverished reality. Depending on how one looks at the situation, one could even argue that both peoples thrived in the face of adversity. In these two examples, I think we can glimpse the future of North America. Barring some cataclysm, the human population will survive and indeed in some places will thrive. But over the near term, they will do so on a continent with a devastated ecosystem, a host of tropical diseases and staggeringly high rates of cancer. These factors will combine with plummeting birth rates and mass migration-drive conflict, to put the human population into a steep nosedive.
As of writing this post, the population of North America sits at 618 million people, and will grow to a projected 709 million by 2100. At this point, most projections assume the population stagnates, with the figure for 2125 being roughly the same, about 700 million people. These models rely on two variables: expected birth rates and life expectancy, and, most importantly, assume the future will look like the past. As countries urbanize and industrialize, birth rates drop, but life expectancy increases, so overall populations still grow. But as we’ve discussed over the past few posts, the future will likely not look like the past at all. Or, more accurately, the future will look like the past, only the direction of all trends, including population, will go into reverse. A modest -0.4% annual population decline gives us a 2125 population of 405 million, with populations in each sub-region coming in at 254 million for the US and Canada, 121 million for Mexico and Central America, and 29 million for the Caribbean.
While the numbers seem stark, a 0.4% increase in the death rate would only see annual deaths in the United States increase from about 3.28 million annually, to just over 3.29 million deaths annually. And this population decline rate relies solely on a slight uptick in annual deaths. I didn’t even touch expected birth rates.
But brith and death rates do not remain static. Humans, like every other population of animals, respond to their environment. I expect the human population in North America hit a low point between 300 and 400 years from today, at between 5 to 10% of the current population, or between 31 and 62 million. Once again, it wouldn’t take a cataclysm to reach that number. If population decline accelerated from -0.4% to -0.8% annually, we would bottom out at 67 million in 2375 and 34 million by 2450. The biodiversity of the continent will be similarly impoverished, with huge tracts of land either barren desert or tropical wetlands with ecosystems dominated by the most opportunistic, aggressive forms of life.
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| Just replace the column with a McDonalds sign. |
Next week, we will take a walk, as the impacts of climate change, ecosystem chaos, de-industrialization and resource scarcity push more and more people from their homes greater and greater numbers. Check back next Friday as we go on a folk-wandering.
