BlogRivet.com

.

(Click for better resolution)

What does nature mean to you?

Is nature something out there that you occasionally interact with? Is the food that you buy in the store part of nature? What about your computer?

We humans have evolved to a point at which it becomes difficult to determine where the natural world ends and we begin. We are highly adept at manipulating the raw materials the world provides us. We extract decayed plant material that has been locked underground for hundreds of millions of years and use its energy to create massive alterations to our environment and produce materials that would not otherwise exist.

We are so adept at this that we sometimes forget we are in fact a part of nature. We forget that despite our technological gains, we remain dependent on what the world provides us.

The physical laws that govern our planet and all the life on it, however, do not operate on memory and perception. As I mentioned in part 1 of this series, the ways in which we manipulate our world have pushed us closer to thresholds at which ecosystems switch to altered states of function.

From lakes to oceans, from wooded lots to vast tracts of forests, all of nature has its tipping points. Part 2 discussed the risk to our oceans as human activities push them toward these thresholds.

The maps below show how modern agriculture has altered nitrogen levels worldwide through the application of fertilizers. As mentioned in the previous posts, these increased nutrient loads can have devastating effects on marine and freshwater ecosystems. They also exhaust the productivity of soil faster than would organic methods of farming.

Clearly these practices have altered the chemical makeup of ecosystems worldwide.

We may not be able to identify exactly where the threshold lies for a given ecosystem, at least not until it has already been reached. But it is possible to develop scenarios based on how society will react to these changes.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) does just that. But first, two definitions:

Ecosystem - a community of plants, animals (including humans) and micro-organisms that interact with the physical environment.

Ecosystem services - the benefits that people derive from the ecosystem, such as food, clean water, materials for shelter, flood control (e.g. marshes) and climate regulation.

The United Nations initiated the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in 2001. Its objective:

To assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and the scientific basis for action needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of those systems.

More than 1,360 experts worldwide worked on the project, which produced five technical volumes and six synthesis reports. The assessment examines the conditions and trends of the world’s ecosystems and their services. It then suggests options for the sustainable use of those ecosystems.

The MA was released in phases during 2005. By March 2006, reaction to the assessment appeared mixed. Some countries and institutions embraced it while others ignored it.

Three years later, the report seems to have been shelved.

But that shouldn’t underscore the thinking that went into the report. Rather, it indicates the difficulty of initiating change on a global scale.

The MA found that human activities are straining the earth’s natural resources to the point that its ecosystems are likely to lose the ability to sustain future generations unless action is taken over the next 50 years to reverse this degradation. That will require substantial changes in policies and practices.

The report states that:

• Over the past 50 years, rapidly growing demand for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in diversity of life.
• Increased use of ecosystem services to meet these demands has resulted in substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development but at the expense of intensifying degradation of these ecosystems.
• The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century.

The Scenarios

Whether the world actually implements the MA’s guidance in a meaningful way has little bearing on its four scenarios for our future.

Those scenarios are:

Global Orchestration

Worldwide connected society, well developed global markets. Institutions are in place to deal with global environmental problems such as climate change and depleted fish stocks. But they take a reactive approach and are vulnerable to surprises.

Order from Strength

A regionalized and fragmented world focused on security and protection. Regional markets are emphasized with little concern for global good. Characterized by an individualistic approach to ecosystem management.

Adapting Mosaic

A fragmented world with discredited global institutions. Rise of local ecosystem management. Investments into understanding ecosystem function and management at the local level.

Technogarden

A globally connected world that relies strongly on technology and on highly managed and engineered ecosystems to deliver goods and services. Overall eco-efficiency improves but large-scale engineered solutions are vulnerable to various risks.

The graphic below shows how each of the four scenarios is projected to respond in terms of ecosystem services. The MA divides ecosystem services into three categories:

Provisioning - Includes food, water, wood and fibers for clothes.

Regulating - Includes climate regulation, flood control and water purification.

Cultural - Includes aesthetic, spiritual, educational and recreational pursuits.

(Click for larger version)

What do you think?

Which of the four scenarios do you think is most likely? Do you think there might be an alternative scenario? How is it possible to bring these big picture issues into the spotlight in a way that people will actually pay attention?

Go back in time for a moment and think about the world as you experienced it when you were 10 years old. Where did you live? What did it look like? How has that landscape changed since then? What about the animal and plant life?

Now imagine that same place 50 years before you were born. What would it have looked like then? On the day you were born, how would somebody say it had changed?

That change in perspectives - seeing how the world has changed since you were 10 vs. seeing how the world has changed since 50 years before you were born - is known as a shifting baseline.

A baseline is a reference point from the past. When people lose track of the original conditions in an environment, the baseline for that environment shifts. We see only the changes that have occurred since the new reference point.

And that means we fail to comprehend the magnitude of the changes.

Back in the day

If your memories at age 10 are of driving down a four-lane highway with a handful of trees in the median on your way to the mall, then you will have one perspective on how your environment has changed. Someone 50 years older than you may remember the abundant fish found in the marsh where the mall’s parking lot now sits. That person would have a far greater sense of change.

Shifting baselines pose a real threat to our ability to perceive the changes taking place around us. And it explains a lot about why people can deny that these changes are taking place in any significant way.

How baselines shift: A look at Puget Sound

The first post in this series, Altered States: Your world on the brink, discussed widespread changes to our environment. These human-induced pressures threaten to force the natural world into altered ecological states that can be harmful to humans and the life forms we depend on for our survival.

Shifting baselines have everything to do with why you may not notice these changes.

For an example, take a look at this 5 min. 40 sec. video on shifting baselines in Puget Sound. Pearl Jam provides the soundtrack.

Shifting Baselines in the Sound

Oceans on the brink

The changes happening in Puget Sound are happening all over, even in our oceans. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that the world’s oceans are in a rapid downward spiral resulting from human activities.

Jeremy Jackson, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, says these changes are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions that will rival other massive ecological upheavals in the planet’s past.

Check out the news release: Oceans on the Precipice: Scripps Scientist Warns of Mass Extinctions and ‘Rise of Slime’

Jackson identifies three major causes of the oceans’ decline:

• Overfishing
• Pollution, especially nutrient runoff, which creates low oxygen “dead zones”
• Increased green-house gases, which cause ocean waters to be warmer and more acidic

Jackson’s paper examines a range of studies looking at marine ecosystem health. In it he writes:

All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems.

In this video (about 4 min.) he talks about these changes: Jackson on oceans on the brink

Just another eco-freak liberal scientist

The scientific method is conservative by nature. It involves developing hypotheses based on empirically driven scientific theories and then testing those hypotheses through careful methods of data collection and analysis. Most things move incrementally in the world of science, step by step, with corrections along the way.

So I’m always amused - and somewhat alarmed - when uninformed skeptics immediately denounce certain observations by scientists as alarmist environmental propaganda by liberal whackos looking for more money to fund their research.

I can’t even type that with a straight face.

If anything, most scientists have been too slow to sound the alarm. Rarely do scientists want to be known as advocates for anything. Most people, including me, see that as a potential violation of scientific principles.

Up to a point.

In a talk that Jeremy Jackson gave last year at Middlebury College, he said:

It’s arguably the case that the ecological profession utterly failed to anticipate the environmental crisis as we recognize it today.

When Jackson’s career began more than 30 years ago, he thought that his studies of coral reefs were pure science that had no practical significance for anybody. After decades of work, he one day realized that every single ecosystem he had studied had either completely disappeared or changed so significantly as to be unrecognizable.

Those ecosystems include coral reefs in the Caribbean and Pacific and sea grass beds in Chesapeake Bay.

Is that the realization of a “coral-reef hugger” or a marine scientist who over time sees a larger, troubling picture emerge?

Here’s a link to a video of his talk. It’s more than an hour long, but it’s good. The State of the Oceans

Now what?

What can we do as individuals? In short, not much. Addressing the ocean’s problems requires a major undertaking. As Jackson writes in his most recent paper:

The challenges of bringing these threats under control are enormously complex and will require fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practices and the ways we obtain energy for everything we do.

That’s a tall order.

Whether we can reverse any of it remains a question, he says. To do so will require carving out pieces of the problem that can be addressed quickly and effectively.

Are we there yet? I don’t think so.

But just being aware that shifting baselines have contributed to our collective inability to perceive the magnitude of the problems we face is a step in the right direction.

So spread the word.

In my next post I’ll talk about possible future scenarios developed by more than 1,360 experts worldwide in a project known as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Photo by NOAA

We live in an age when cataclysmic shifts are becoming an increasingly real possibility. The world is changing. Our biosphere, the thin sliver of our planet on which life can exist, is changing. And not for the better.

These changes are occurring on multiple fronts, pushing us up against thresholds that lead to different ecological states. These different ecological states are almost always bad for humans and the life forms we depend on for our survival.

Other life forms - blue-green algae, parasites, cockroaches, jellyfish - will thrive.

To understand what’s involved in a shift in ecological states, consider a lake. Housing developments surround the lake. Streams that feed into the lake run through vast tracts of farmland to get there. The lake’s waters contain ever higher levels of fertilizers and livestock waste and septic tank leakage.

Nutrient overload

The lake can handle a certain amount of these so-called nutrients and still function as a lake. But once its nutrient load hits a certain level, the lake switches into a eutrophic state.

Eutrophic lakes are easy to identify. They get clogged with algae blooms. This in turn depletes the lake’s oxygen supply. Fish die as a result.

The photo above shows that kind of state. You’ve probably seen it yourself.

Switching the lake back to its previous natural state of function is extremely difficult. It takes a whole lot of money, time and energy. On the other hand, fixing the problems before the lake makes the switch is much easier and less expensive.

Unfortunately, that kind of preemptive fix rarely happens.

Widespread damage

Now think about a similar kind of change on a much broader scale. Think not just of a lake but an ocean. Not just the sky over a city but the entire atmosphere. Not just the plants and animals that once inhabited a bulldozered forest but entire species and habitats. Imagine all of these being knocked into different ecological states all at the same time.

That’s what we face today.

Climate change, deforestation, species extinctions, air and water pollution, human population growth… these are real threats that are pushing our planet toward a different ecological state. And we are the fish in the lake.

Reason or hysteria?

I am an optimist at heart. My thinking tends toward solutions rather than dire consequences. My personal belief is that we humans have the ability to save our own skins. But we don’t have much time.

At this point you may be thinking this sounds like something Al Gore might write. But Gore is simply an echo of the conversations taking place in science labs and field research stations across the planet.

The changes we are currently undergoing are like one grand experiment in which we have no idea of the outcome. What are the thresholds? How many species can go extinct, how many gases and pollutants can we pump into our atmosphere, how much can we alter our water supplies before we begin to see irreversible changes on a massive scale?

We don’t know.

But what scientists and other careful observers of our planet do know is that we are closer than ever to hitting those thresholds. And consequences that seemed unthinkable 30 years ago are now reality.

What now?

Problems of this magnitude tend to paralyze. The enormity of it can quash the will to develop and test meaningful solutions.

No one acting alone can arrive at an answer for how to solve these problems. Even defining the problems can be a challenge. Fixing them will take multiple actions on multiple fronts.

Global and national discussions quickly get bogged down in politics and economic interests, so it seems doubtful that any real solutions will be realized at those broad scales. But that’s the scale where the problems are occurring.

So what do we do?

Do we focus all of our efforts on collective actions and hope they gain traction? Accept these changes as inevitable and prepare individually for the worst? Find some middle ground where networks of people link and adapt?

I’ll continue the discussion in my next post, which will look at the problem of shifting baselines and the threats facing our oceans. In the meantime, what do you think?

Photo by Pensiero