‘Frightening’ findings foretell ills for ecosystems

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“When it comes to determining the causes negatively affecting the biodiversity of our ecosystems, a new interdisciplinary study at Western is putting numbers behind the devastation. And it’s not good.

“The study’s lead author, recent PhD graduate Beth Hundey (Geography), showed, for the first time, that 70 per cent of nitrates in high mountain lakes in Utah are from human-caused sources – with fertilizers having, by far, the most impact at 60 per cent, along with another 10 per cent caused by fossil fuels. The research suggests these findings could apply to other mountain ranges in western North America.”   phys.org

GR:  Putting fine points on specific human impacts is truly important, but we also need to search for ways to pierce the polluters’ political armor. We need to act, and we need to do it now.

Copper Mountain eyes alpine coaster amusement ride

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More snowmaking, bike trails to be studied by Forest Service Staff Report Citing a lack of recreational opportunities at Copper Mountain, the U.S.   summitcountyvoice.com

GR:  Wiping out natural vegetation for recreation and for the benefit of a commercial resort at a time when half all Earth’s animals have disappeared is wrong.  Close the trails and concentrate on protecting wildlife and its habitat.

One More Time – Here Is A Video That Tells It Like It Is When It Comes To The Serious Threat This Thing Government Reps Call “Biodiversity Offsetting” Poses To Niagara’s Natural Wetlands

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GR:  Experience has taught me that most governments represent business interests dominated by desire for short-term profits and growth-at-all-costs.  When individuals take public office, their new power over the wealth of the people elevates them to the society of investors and developers. Rather than becoming advisers that help the wealthy control their avarice, they become students and tools of the wealthy.  Whatever original thoughts they had about stability and sustainability fade away. There are exceptions, but they are rare and fleeting.

The only solution is heavy public participation and opposition to development proposals.  Without overwhelming threats from large numbers of people, individuals in governments will be most strongly influenced by their new society—the rich and ambitious.  Activism is the answer.

The following is by Doug Draper.

“The Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority – a government body created by the Province of Ontario decades ago and stacked with board members appointed by municipal governments in the region – is floating the idea of destroying at least some of that’s left of Niagara’s natural wetlands to make way for more development.
Only about 10 to 15 per cent of Niagara’s wetlands – vital to the survival of many birds, fish and other wildlife – remain in Niagara and a regional ‘Conservation Authority” is now looking at “offsetting” to make way for development. Photo by Doug Draper

“Only about 10 to 15 per cent of Niagara’s wetlands – vital to the survival of many birds, fish and other wildlife – remain in Niagara and a regional ‘Conservation Authority” is now looking at “offsetting” to make way for development. Photo by Doug Draper

“The NPCA says it is thinking of taking this idea to the provincial government for approval under the guise of something called “biodiversity offsetting” which involves (as best as one can determine from an explanation offered by Conservation Authority’s chief administrative officer Carmen D’Angelo at a public meeting this January) replacing some wetland for development and replacing it somewhere else with something the same or similar that someone would construct.
More than 200 citizens attended the January meeting, many of them to express their concern or outright opposition to the idea. And when one citizen asked NPCA representatives flat out for a definition of “biodiversity offsetting,” one Conservation Authority member stood to say they do not yet have a full definition of the term.” niagaraatlarge.com

Major Wildfire Outbreak in Central and Western Africa as Drought, Hunger Grow More Widespread

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Drought and heat combine to expand fire size and extend the burning season. In Arizona, in the 20th Century, lightning ignited the largest fires in early summer when low humidity and high temperature had prepped the vegetation combustion. Human-caused fires during the more-humid conditions of the rest of the year were smaller. However, as things have warmed up and the drought has intensified, large human-caused fires are beginning to flare up in other seasons. The devastating result is that the fire recurrence interval is becoming too short for regeneration by most native perennial plants. Much of the Sonoran Desert is becoming an annual weedland (https://garryrogers.com/2014/01/14/desert-fire/).

robertscribbler's avatarrobertscribbler

The major news organizations haven’t picked it up yet, but there’s a massive wildfire outbreak now ongoing over Central and Western Africa. These wildfires are plainly visible in the NASA/MODIS satellite shot — covering about a 1,400 mile swath stretching from the Ivory Coast, through Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon and on across the Central African Republic, the Congo, and Gabon.

Major Wildfire Outbreak Central Africa

(Very large wildfire outbreak in Central Africa in the February 10 LANCE-MODIS satellite shot. For reference, bottom edge of frame covers about 350 miles. Image source: LANCE MODIS.)

Smoke from these fires is extremely widespread — stretching over almost all of Western and Central Africa, blanketing parts of Southern Africa and ghosting on out over the Southern Atlantic Ocean. Together with these massive fires we have what appears to be a rather significant CO2 plume showing up in the Coperinicus monitoring system (see below). It’s a signature reminiscent of…

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Population News: El Niño

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Here’s another of Joe Bish’s Daily Emails (click and subscribe).

El Niño Is Fueling One of the Scariest Droughts In Recent History

By Joe Bish, Issue Advocacy Director for the Population Media Center

Joe Bish“Perhaps the best way to introduce today’s content is to quote from journalist Maddie Stone, writing for Gizmodo: “Imagine if crop yields across the United States dropped more than 50 percent in a single year. It’s difficult to fathom just how catastrophic this would be-but that’s exactly what’s happening in Ethiopia right now, thanks to a deadly, El Niño-fueled drought.”
“As you will see as you scan the headlines, . . .”

Wildlife: Wintry weather to take toll on Colorado mule deer

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“Harsh winter conditions in northwestern Colorado may take a toll on already struggling mule deer herds, state biologists said last week, explaining that they’ve started a limited feeding program to try and keep ungulates from invading cattle grazing areas.”  From: summitcountyvoice.com

GR:  The following was NOT overheard in a U. S. Forest Service Office:  “Deer might die, but please don’t feed them. They must not develop any dependency on us.  Moreover, you can rest assured that we will not let them eat a single weed that a cow might want.  The deer might die, but that’s nature.  They’re used to harsh winters, and we must protect the valuable cows.”

Population. Excerpt from Diana Coole

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Population in Modern Political Economics

populationHere’s a helpful review of the background for the refusal of political leaders to recognize the massive population problem and to propose solutions.  The refusal has a lot to do with grow-or-die economics (my term).  For more insight to the consequences of population, you might also take a look at this book:  Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot.

The following is from Joe Bish, Director of Issue Advocacy, Population Media Center.

“I have been meaning for several weeks now to recommend you read the latest from Diana Coole, Professor of Political and Social Theory at Birkbeck University of London. You may (or may not) recall the PMC Daily Email of September 7th, 2013, wherein I shared Professor Coole’s outstanding effort titled “Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question“. (PDF)

“Her latest effort is published in the Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory, and echoes many of the themes of found in “Too Many Bodies.” In other words, she starts by stating that “It would seem a logical inference that global ecologies would be more sustainable with a stable population and that population growth, especially when combined with rising living standards, is a significant factor in deteriorating environmental indicators,” — and then proceeds to map out why this obvious truth is continually fought tooth-and-nail by various ideologues and those with vested interests in the growth paradigm. In doing so, she provides a good history of population politics.

“Below, I have excerpted a few passages that should give you a sense of the chapter. Certainly, it is good to see this content in the Oxford Handbook, and hats off to Professor Coole for her important work.”–Joe Bish, Population Media Center

 

Population, Environmental Discourse, and Sustainability

“…The aims of this chapter are to present some of the arguments that have been made in favor of stable or declining numbers, to explain some of the reasons the issue has become so toxic, and to suggest some of the areas where it does seem pertinent to revisit this matter in the context of twentieth-first century conditions despite the significant obstacles to doing so.

“…If demographic remedies are rarely included among contemporary responses to scarcity (“insecurity”), another perspective that is noticeable for its absence from most policy reports is one that John Stuart Mill, another classical economist, introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Mill blamed over-population for depressing working class wages but drawing on romantic poets like Wordsworth, he also articulated more explicitly ecological concerns about the detrimental existential, aesthetic, and affective effects of growth on everyday experience. In his Principles of Political Economy (1848) he acknowledged that there may be no fixed threshold beyond which numbers become unsupportable, but he also questioned the benefits of continued population and economic growth for their own sake.
“…The concept of limits to growth was popularized by the title of the book published by scientists at MIT and commissioned by the Club of Rome. Feeding data of current trends into their World3 computer model and interpreting their findings from the perspective of systems theory, the authors warned of positive feedback loops and system overload in a finite planet. The only sustainable scenario to emerge was a steady-state economy and stable population; even with optimistic technological possibilities factored in, continued growth overwhelmed the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms. The political problem was that modern Western culture “has evolved around the principle of fighting against limits rather than learning to live with them.” (Meadows and Meadows 1972: 150) This last observation was borne out by the derision with which limits-to-growth discourses were treated.  Clearly their principal thesis offended pro-growth economic ideologies, but the question remains why an argument that briefly prevailed in the mid-twentieth century when world population was half its current total has been so comprehensively reviled since.
“…In addition, as feminist attention shifted during the 1980s from gender equality to sexual difference women’s nurturing capacities were revalorized: a position that was not exactly pro-natalist but that did reject the former anti-natalism. The old Left remained suspicious of arguments that attributed social problems to population rather than over-consumption or maldistribution and, as attention shifted to developing countries, postcolonialists judged neoMalthusianism indelibly racist. (Hardt and Negri 2004: 165-9)  This equation, which renders it shameful to ascribe blame for social or environmental  ills to overpopulation, has arguably been the most potent reason for deterring critical thinkers and publics from engaging with population matters. (Coole, 2013) Critics invariably ask who is being judged excessive and thus blamed; usually, they answer, it is the poor, especially those from the global South. The New Left, meanwhile, suffered a common fate with other radical ecological and limits-to-growth exponents as their positions were dismissed by an ascendant New Right.
“…In particular, though, it was the emergence of anti-Malthusian demographic and economic arguments, for which population and economic growth are mutually and positively reinforcing and the promise of equilibrium is embedded in a teleological modernization narrative, that had the greatest transformative effect in disavowing a population issue. Several interlocking strands of this still hegemonic discourse may be identified.
“…Meanwhile, the prospect of stabilization is being actively challenged from the perspective of a fifth argument that is more explicitly pro-growth and unhappy with the idea of completing [demographic] transition. Transitional stages affect age structure and toward the end, fertility decline plus longer life expectancy result in population aging. Because this means a shrinking labour force and higher dependency ratio it presents an acute, albeit temporary, fiscal challenge for developed economies. Nations that compete to increase GDP growth in a competitive global economy, while also striving to balance their budgets, are responding by trying to rejuvenate their populations. (Coole 2012b) Their motivation is encapsulated in the concept of a “demographic dividend”: a temporary feature of low-dependency cultures as they pass through a stage where fertility has declined but the population has not yet aged, thus yielding a disproportionately large working-age population. Countries whose dividend is passing are understandably reluctant to abandon this productive advantage and therefore strive to avoid the stable or even reduced numbers that transition entails. Pronatalism and net migration are their main strategies. (Grant and Hoorens 2006) The first is usually promoted in the form of family-friendly policies but the second has quickly become immersed in the circuits of racist politics that are a legacy of earlier hostilities. Suffice it to say that policies designed to expand the populations of post-transitional, affluent regions run contrary to suggestions that this is where falling numbers could be most environmentally beneficial.
“…One factor remains incontrovertible: world population increased massively during the twentieth century and although the growth rate has slowed considerably, barring some unforeseen catastrophe the number of bodies that planet Earth must sustain on a daily basis by 2100 will be immense, at three to four billion more than currently according to the latest estimates. Worldwide, this will require huge changes in political and economic capacity. It will also place enormous demands on the biophysical world, whose contribution we have become used to rendering as “natural capital” or “ecosystem services” and whose deficits are increasingly framed in terms of securitization or business opportunities. The environmental areas most vulnerable to this spread of humanity are probably biodiversity, especially inasmuch as it defies or fails to contribute to economic reckoning, and, related to its loss, a gradual aesthetic-existential impoverishment of everyday experience as the presence of nonhuman otherness is attenuated. Inhabiting more crowded, congested spaces and coping with infrastructural deficits yields some economies of scale and metropolitan exhilaration, but beyond a certain threshold it simply makes ordinary life more difficult, unpleasant, and competitive for most humans, especially poor ones, as well as for other species.
“…In any case, population projections give little succor to complacency. The last two UN world revisions (in 2010 and 2012) both revised totals upward. The difference between low and high variant projections is 2.5 billion people in 2050 and ten billion by 2100: disparities that rest on an average of merely one child more or fewer per woman. (UN 2013a) The implication is that while transition to a stable population cannot be guaranteed, there is scope to hasten it and thereby also to reduce the level at which it occurs. In its 2012-Revision the UN is explicit that an eleven billion peak (its medium projection) is contingent on taking urgent action: “without further reductions of fertility, the world population by 2100 could increase by nearly six times as much as currently expected”. Were 2005-10 fertility rates to be sustained then closer to 28 billion could be the tally.
“…But even if stabilizing or reducing numbers were endorsed, could this feasibly be achieved without coercive methods or the framework of population control associated with them? During the mid-1990s, macro-level demographic concern was reframed as primarily an issue of women’s reproductive health rather than in terms of resource shortages and environmental harm, thus helping to foreclose what was now defined as a “numbers game” antithetical to couples’ right to choose their family size. (Campbell, 2007) An indication of how this issue might be renegotiated appears in Return of the Population Growth Factor. Its Impact upon the Millennium Development Goals, a report issued by Britain’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development and Reproductive Health. In hoping that “we will find a way to speak, from a human rights perspective, about both the importance of population stabilisation and the importance of supporting the rights of individuals to reproductive freedom.”
“…Ultimately, whether a world with fewer people is more sustainable and more conducive to equality, social justice, and quality of life is not a question that can be settled solely by statistics, computer models, and objective calculations of capacity. It requires a sustained critical analysis of interests invested in population/economic growth and a holistic appraisal of its existential costs at the level of everyday lives and ecosystems. It invites normative reflection on the good life: a task for which political theorists are especially well-equipped. If they can construct a compelling, congenial vision of desirable lifestyles existing within realistic constraints under twenty-first century conditions, then today’s theorists might rescue overpopulation concerns from assumptions that they are solely the currency of pessimists, racists, and misogynists.  Or it may be the case that the conundrum mentioned at the start is simply irresolvable at present, especially as energetic migration flows vie with fertility as the main driver of population growth in developed regions and race combines with gender in new ways to render the topic unspeakable. In which case, Malthus might belatedly prove to have been right all along.”

Moorland Forum – Understanding Predation Report Launch

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Framing a new dialogue for biodiversity: science and local knowledge https://t.co/wWXE28S37p #BTO #GWCT #RSPB #NGO https://t.co/3Mk3cRlpT4... www.moorlandforum.org.uk

GR:  This work begins with an inventory of a select group of species.  And this is where research on the factors contributing to species numbers must begin (http://wp.me/p26kDO-xC).  Predation is mentioned, but many other factors could be involved.  Human impacts through habitat use and removal, climate change, toxic chemicals, livestock, and recreation are just a few of the possible explanations for wildlife population changes.

Sea-level rise ‘could last twice as long as human history’

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“The long-term view sends the chilling message of what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era,” said Prof Thomas Stocker, at the University of Bern, Switzerland and also part of the research team. “It will commit us to massive adaptation efforts so that for many, dislocation and migration becomes the only option.”

“The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, notes most research looks at the impacts of global warming by 2100 and so misses one of the biggest consequences for civilisation – the long-term melting of polar ice caps and sea-level rise.

“This is because the great ice sheets take thousand of years to react fully to higher temperatures. The researchers say this long-term view raises moral questions about the kind of environment being passed down to future generations.

“The research shows that even with climate change limited to 2C by tough emissions cuts, sea level would rise by 25 metres over the next 2,000 years or so and remain there for at least 10,000 years – twice as long as human history. If today’s burning of coal, oil and gas is not curbed, the sea would rise by 50m, completely changing the map of the world.”  www.theguardian.com

GR:  This report focuses on sea level.  It reaffirms previous realizations by climate scientists that even after we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere and limit global temperature rise to 2C, sea level will keep rising for thousands of years.  That’s not all, extreme storms, droughts, fires, and disease outbreaks, and the extinction of wildlife and ecosystems will also continue.  As frightening as this is, many have acknowledged that 2C is an optimistic value.  Human nature (avarice) and the inertia of our grow-or-die civilization will take us past 2C.  There is no doubt now that we have condemned our descendants to a stark future of uncertain survival. Thus we belatedly learn that the American Dream was a Pandora’s Box nightmare the pursuit of which has doomed human civilization to regret lasting for a thousand generations or more.

We may see civilization collapse before the seas rise by 150 feet.  A growing number of scientists foresee that our growing population and shrinking resources will soon join climate change as major destructors of our current economic, social, and cultural systems, our civilization (http://wp.me/p26kDO-j2l).

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T:  Even if global temperature rise is limited to 2C, the oceans will rise 75 feet

FB:  Like a kettle on the stove, current CO2 levels guarantee that global warming, sea-level rise, and wildlife extinctions will continue for thousands of years.