by Ibon » Mon 14 Dec 2015, 11:00:44
Human landscapes are fixed entities. Today there is a massive physical infrastructure that supports humanity covering more than 50% of the terrestrial land on the planet and increasingly exploiting marine environments. Cities, agricultural lands, mining, roads, etc . For all other life forms (maybe bees, termites and beavers as exceptions) home is the very habitat they live in. Home for humans is the landscape they create and this has been true for the majority of our species history. Initially the human landscape was the tribal village, outside of which was the natural habitat we moved in to extract resources. Starting some 10,000 years ago we increased our footprint with agriculture and we all know more or less the history since then.
Tribal arrangements in the past would locally over exploit their habitats and move to new areas. Many tribal cultures persisted for hundreds of thousands of years in a rotating equilibrium staying within carrying capacity by allowing over exploited areas time to regenerate. Modern human overshoot has pretty much used up all available habitats and like a huge straw we are sucking out resources in a one way direction not allowing any regenerative processes to occur. Aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to form are being exploited and not regenerated. Fossil fuel exploitation has reached volumes that it has affected the regenerative ability of our biosphere to sequester carbon fast enough to maintain stasis. Fossil fuels have also been the primary energy source allowing the build out of the current infrastructure which is highly dependent on these fuels for its maintenance. Fuels that are nonrenewable and approaching their peak of exploitation. Biodiversity is being lost with permanent extinctions as we do not allow enough conservation of forests, wetlands and marine fisheries in order to regenerate. That is really the definition of overshoot when you degrade your resource base down to a minimum beyond which it can regenerate with a population bloom that only is then corrected with a crash. In the case of industrial civilization it is population boom plus consumption boom. Add to this that technology allowed us to overcome our predators, germs and famine for the past two hundred years through germ theory and sanitation, antibiotics etc. Nature does not tolerate a one way linear exponential growth for long without corrections. Ours has lasted more than 200years.
Human landscapes are made up of our species plus our domesticated crops and livestock. This “habitat” is made up of very few players, about a hundred species at best. In addition, the genetic diversity within these domesticated crops and livestock has been reduced as we have applied selective breeding and recently GMO techniques to maximize yields. These techniques have greatly increased yield but at a huge cost in vulnerability to the resiliency of these modified crops. You only have these phenomenal yields of corn and soy or beef and milk or chicken because of the codependency these crops and animals have with specific chemical inputs and specific industrial methods. Left alone these crops and livestock would die off in less than two generations, taken over by pioneer species in nearby fields (keep this point in mind).
Like their modified domestic crops and animals humans are equally codependent on the technology that supports industrial civilization. Not only are we dependent on the low resiliency crops mentioned above but also on the very technology that has built our modern civilization. There is very little redundancies in modern civilization in terms of scalable alternatives to the food we eat, the energy we consume and the resources we exploit. Rare earth elements, water, soil, fossil fuels, copper, helium, you name it , we are at critical thresholds.
Due to our dependency on a very limited number of primary resources that lack redundancies and alternatives our species is highly vulnerable to disruptions especially as we approach the bottom of the barrel on many resource fronts. It is well known that there are higher inputs of energy required to extract resources in severe depletion and this applies to all resources not just oil. It is also well known that there are higher maintenance costs as a civilization ages. The very physical infrastructure of human landscapes have no alternative places to move or go in the event of external vulnerabilities. Rising sea levels as an example effecting coastal areas where by the way the majority of humanity lives.
The above is a summary of humanity’s current habitat and its inherent vulnerabilities. Now let’s contrast this with native intact ecosystems.
Unlike human landscapes there are no clear boundaries in native ecosystems. Edge habitats between field and forest, desert and riparian habitat, marine, brackish and freshwater are fluid. There is gradual transition between habitats and many species have genetic variability that is a response to this gradual transition. Go from a valley to an alpine mountain top and you will see within the same species and genus, genetic variability in size, growth habits and temperature tolerances the higher or lower you go. This is natural selection at work.
Any given habitat has few players that are keystone in the role in the ecosystem. In every function of the food chain, be it producers, consumers, parasites, predator or prey there are many redundancies present with multiple players filling the same role. Toward the top you do have keystone predators whose presence or lack thereof can have a profound effect on the habitat but generally habitats have many players and therefore many redundancies.
So within each species we have broad genetic variation as outlined above and within each ecosystem we have the redundancies of many players fulfilling the same role. The web of life in a healthy intact ecosystem is therefore highly resilient.
A real world example would be helpful to explain the above principals, it is one I have mentioned before on this site but it is worth repeating as it is highly relevant to rising sea levels which we can expect with reasonable confidence this century.
The army corps of engineers created a vast canal system in The Everglades in Florida in the 40’s and 50’s. The vast flow of fresh water moving south from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay was disrupted by this massive drainage project of canals. In 1930 Florida Bay in the Everglades was a fresh water lake lined with sawgrass and bald cypress trees. As the flow of fresh water moving south was disrupted this allowed the encroachment of sea water. Today Florida Bay is salt water and brackish and the shoreline is pure red mangroves, black mangroves, buttonbush and other salt tolerant vegetation.
In less than 50 years a vast area of freshwater became a marine habitat. What is interesting is that the marine habitat is as healthy as the former fresh water habitat. Perch and bass have been replaced with red fish, snook and sea trout. Cypress and sawgrass replaced with mangroves. A resilient ecosystem remains having adapted to this short term abrupt change caused by humans draining the flow of fresh water. This resiliency we see has everything to do with the redundancies mentioned above and the inherent resiliencies present in natural ecosystems.
Take a moment and reflect on how several billion humans will be displaced from coastal areas this century and consider the migration, the infrastructure and energy required to undertake this massive migration, the available resource base to support such a change in the human landscape. Look how natural ecosystems coped in the example of the change in Florida Bay. Now consider humans forced to make a similar adaptation. This illustrates a principal that human landscapes are far more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than natural ecosystems are.
I am not saying that natural ecosystems will be spared climate change. They wont. There is likely to be a massive extinction event. But even within this extinction event we will see the inherent redundancies and resiliencies at work to mitigate the disruption which is totally lacking in human landscapes.
This takes us to the next conclusion. As we all recognize the monumental catch 22 inherent in the advanced stages of human overshoot as our poster Onlooker recently outlined, we have to look square in the face at the reality that we are too deep in the territory of human overshoot to maintain the energy hungry status quo at the same time as we attempt the drastic mitigation that is required. We are effectively check mated any painless solution.
This has lead me to the counter intuitive conclusion that the very consequences that we are fearing actually become the solutions to the catch22 we are trying to figure out. Climate change being the sexiest consequence at the moment will serve this purpose well exactly because it will be somewhat more selective in disrupting human landscapes vs than natural ecosystems.
That is why I embrace climate change as an agent of mitigation of human overshoot. Desperate times require desperate measures and our biosphere is serving up a cornucopia of consequences to selectively depopulate our species. We should embrace climate change and all the other external human agencies that are coming our way.
Not from a fatalism. But from a deeper understanding that these external human agencies in the forms of consequences will do their work on two fronts, first in physical reducing our population and consumption and secondly molding our ethics and morals around our relationship with our biosphere. These are the very two fronts that we are hamstrung to do ourselves on our own. It is the portal through which we have the only chance of coming out on the other side with a set of cultural tools to live in balance with our biosphere.
Patiently awaiting the pathogens. Our resiliency resembles an invasive weed. We are the Kudzu Ape
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