How Green Were Their Valleys

E.O.Wilson, that prodigious biologist from Harvard, has written a must read essay, “Reflections on the Future of Life,” in an indispensable new anthology, Roads to Reconciliation: Conflict and Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Amy Benson Brown and Karen M. Parenski (M.E.Scharpe, 2005). Wilson has parlayed a life-long study of ants into a virtual Metaphysics. His new concept is “the ecological footprint” defined as “the average amount of productive land in coastal marine environment appropriated by each person, but not in a single block.”

This includes land around where you live, say in Massachusetts or Georgia, but also bits and pieces from around the world needed to produce your food, water, housing, energy and transport, commerce, and waste management. Each person, for example, draws a little bit of land in Costa Rica for coffee, a little bit of Saudi Arabia for oil, and so on. The ecological footprint of the average person in the developing world, which includes more about 5 billion of the earth’s 6 billion people, is about two and a half acres. The ecological footprint of the average person in the United States is ten times as much, about 24 acres. With our present levels of technology, if every person in the world were to reach American levels of consumption, we would need four more planet earths. I stress this fact because there is still the notion floating around in the discussion of our consumption that the human biomass is extremely small and that we have more than enough space left on the ice-free surface of the earth.

The clarity of Professor Wilson’s analysis of our global predicament appears at a crucial moment. The United States, in its omniscient arrogance, has been driving its Hummers full speed ahead towards the the Ultimate Cliff, ever since it snubbed the Kyoto Protocol. But in George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address, he seems prepared to concede that his insolent ploy of American Exceptionalism has been 180 degrees wrong,finally setting up gasoline limits for automobiles, after blindly supporting the oil and automobile industries for six years. The time is opportune for a massive greening of American politics.

The world media are striking up an unignorable chorus: The International Herald Tribune has just started a special “The Greening of Business” feature. Ditto Time, Newsweek, and The Economist. When even Wal-Mart goes green, the polar bear may indeed have a new lease on Arctic life. The intellectual phonies and bought off “scientists” who have shrieked that Global Warming was a left-wing con job are finally being exposed for the charlatans they are. The most significant aspect of this new Green Tsunami is that it depends not on grandiose theories, but points out how every human has a stake and a responsibility for diminishing the Greenhouse Effect.

Yet it is striking how little the artistic community contributes to illumination of this crisis. Back in the early nineteenth century, when the first signs of the destructiveness of industrial civilization, our poets celebrated Nature. Our poets, novelists, and playwrights are mostly bogged down in their own esoteric psychic disorders. Where are or composers and songwriters who are teaching our children to value Nature rather than their packaged noisy alternatives?

Incidentally, archeologists have recently discovered, analyzing ice cores, that over the millennia there have been many greenhouse effects. Plagues and epidemics which wiped out substantial populations in Europe meant that much arable land reverted to forests, thus giving the earth breathing spells. William F. Ruddiman, who recently retired as Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, has discovered that human activity has not been influencing climate for the past two hundred years: we’ve been creating an “increasingly anthropogenic atmosphere” ever since the invention of agriculture 8,000 years, made possible by slash and burn land clearance. “Before we built cities, before we invented writing, and before we founded the major religion,” Ruddiman explains, ”we were already altering climate. We were farming.” (Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum,” Princeton, 2006). Wholesale deforestation, usually through planned burning, plus agricultural irrigation, generated millions of tons of carbon and methane.

It is fascinating how he formed his hypothesis. “Mysterious oscillations” in the world’s carbon content (which he could determine through the study of ice cores) sent him to history books. After the practically global Justinian Plague (540-542 AD) wiped out perhaps 40 percent of European and Middle Eastern populations. The ice-core record shows that the first extended CO2 minimum ensued. And the CO2 rebounded during the plague free period between the 740s to the mid 1300s. The Black Plague of the late 1340s obliterated at least a third of the European population, followed by an analogous reduction in CO2. The 600 year cooling interregnum that followed ended with modern coal-fired technology. If his Hypothesis is correct, it will give us an entirely new understanding of climate change “since it show that rampant human activity has been capable not only of warming our world, but of cooling it down when it stops.” (Richard Hamblyn, ”Saved by the plague,” TLS, January 12, 2007, pp5-6.)

Tim Flannery’s book, “The Weather Makers” (Allen Lane, 2006), makes the further point that we already know how to counteract such up to now unconscious destruction of our environment. During the 1970’s researchers discerned that the ozone layer was fast disappearing so that ultraviolet radiation at the poles was exponentially increasing. Soon the “anthropogenic culprit” was found. Chlorofluorocarbons, discovered by industrial chemists in the 1920’s were cheap and remarkably stable, ideal for use in refrigerators, air conditioners, solvents and propellants. By 1975, spray cans were unleashing half a billion tons of the stuff into the atmosphere and by 1985 worldwide production of CFCs had reached almost 2 billion tons a year.

Then climate scientists observed that ultraviolet rays in the stratosphere released their chlorine atoms. A single chlorine atom could destroy 100,000 ozone atoms. Government and industrial policies were devised to find substitutes for CFC’s. Every developed nation in the world agreed in Montreal to ban them by 1996. Ten years later the ozone hole has healed by 20 per cent and it is expected to entirely fixed by the middle of the twenty-first century. Flannery praises the Montreal Protocol for being “the first even victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.” The defectors from the Kyoto Protocol (especially the developed United States and Australia and the fast developing China and India) makes similar salvation unlikely by the tipping point year of 2050. Even Al Gore’s “Ten Things to Do” seems woefully unhelpful in that time frame.

Worse is the newly observed phenomenon of “greenwashing” in which major sinners like the oil companies finance expensive media PR campaigns to appear green. Scientists like Ruddiman and Flannery make it impossible for us to say we weren’t warned. And the antics of Senators like James Inhofe of Oklahoma, awash in campaign cash from the same suspect sources, make the argument over ID and creationism look trivial by comparison. President Bush has been mouthing conservation mottoes lately, but his eye is still on the profit balances of the power companies. What a pity if the epitaph of American civilization will be the gas guzzling SUV.