12.9: Resources and References
- Page ID
- 77146
Review
Key Points
- For centuries, humanity has been waging a war against non-human nature that culminated in the complex challenges that we are facing in the Anthropocene.
- The war has brought a catastrophic wave of species extinctions that occur at an unprecedented rate which is still increasing. This has led to the disintegration of food webs and ecosystems worldwide as a backdrop to the explosive growth of our populations and consumption patterns.
- The anthropogenic driving factors behind extinctions include human predation, pollution, resource extraction, and mismanagement of environments. Pollution in its many forms exerts adverse effects on climate and on the chemical composition of land and oceans.
- In order to sustain our growing numbers, humans have developed ever more intrusive and abusive practices of food acquisition that are beginning to feed back and affect public health. Especially the industrial production and processing of animal parts has reached such grotesque extents and procedures that they need to be hidden from the view of consumers.
- Human incursions into ‘natural’ ecosystems in pursuit of animal protein and industrial raw materials is driving further ecological deterioration. The continued ‘harvesting’ of body parts for cultural uses illustrates our incompetence at realizing the consequences of what we are collectively doing.
- The growth of economies has been driven by conceptual models that are outdated, harmful, abusive and utterly unscientific. Yet, those models and ways of thinking are continuing to dominate world politics and decision-making. This obstinate collective refusal to learn does not bode well for the coming decades, where rapid collective learning will be essential for our security and for the stability of the biosphere.
.Extension Activities & Further Research
- Speculate how the global plastic pollution might have been avoided if the packaging industries and recycling industries had been combined in a timely manner; how could that be accomplished at this late stage?
- In terms of ecological integrity and biodiversity, what are the most harmful industrial activities in British Columbia? Who controls them, and how?
- Formulate your own perspective on the mechanisms and manifestations of humanity’s War against Nature. How is this war different from other wars, and how is it the same?
- Explain what factors are at work in shaping the consumption level of a human individual. In what ways and to what extents are those factors affecting your own consumption?
- Express your ideas and hopes as to how this War might end or be ended. In what ways would humans need to ‘reinvent’ themselves?
List of Terms
See Glossary for full list of terms and definitions.
- acidification
- Allee effect
- apex predator
- CAFO
- defaunation
- deoxygenation
- extinction debt
- food web
- footprint
- neoclassical economics
- species
- utility
References
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Footnote
- Readers should recall the importance of “thinking in systems,” as discussed in Chapter 11.
- For an account of a large population of chimpanzees and other forest animals recently discovered in a remote forest of the DRC and now falling victim to the bushmeat trade, see Carrington, D. (2014), Huge Chimpanzee Population Thriving in Remote Congo Forest. The Guardian, 7 February, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/07/chimpanzees-congo-forest;video recordings of the chimpanzees (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBs6HGcL3Yk&feature=youtu.be), forest elephants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBpUxzmeknQ&feature=youtu.be), and worries about their fate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnxHzNWGfAM&feature=youtu.be) were made by researchers, and later followed up by NBC News (https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/video/on-assignment-one-more-thing-mystery-apes-of-the-congo-686499907922).
- For videos on the helmeted hornbill and efforts to save the species, see https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/magazine/year-of-the-bird/00000165-34b0-d8ac-a7fd-34f6a47d0000?cs and https://video/nationalgeographic.com/video/magazine/year-of-the-bird/180828-ngm-illegal-hunting-has-pushed-this-iconic-bird-to-the-brink?source=relatedvideo.
- The video “How Wolves Change Rivers,” narrated by George Monbiot, can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q.
- The bee waggle dance can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_KD1enR3Q.
- The effects of these changes on calcifying organisms at the base of many marine food webs will be considered in the next section.
- Thereby coining a term that is finding ever-widening applicability as changes accelerate in this Anthropocene epoch: as we all “shift our baselines,” forgetting how things used to be as we get used to the changes coming on all around us and stop trying to stave them off.
- See https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_pauly_the_ocean_s_shifting_baseline?language=en.
- Some amazing photographs of hand-collected live pteropods can be seen at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/amazing-sea-butterflies-are-the-oceans-canary-in-the-coal-mine-61813612/; Waters, H., (2013), Amazing Sea Butterflies Are the Canary in the Coal Mine. Smithsonian.com; for a short video on pteropods, see https://wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=3-40RU3iSkA.
- It should be noted that two molecules of bicarbonate (HCO3-) are used up for every calcium ion incorporated into the shell of a marine organism, lowering the pH and total alkalinity of the seawater and rendering it less able to absorb CO2; therefore, a decrease in the removal of carbonate ions by calcifying organisms dying and falling to the sea floor, presumably brought about by a dramatic decrease in their populations, “would increase the capacity of the oceans to take up CO2 from the atmosphere,” since there would be more carbonate ions available in the water and total alkalinity of the upper ocean would increase (Feely et al., 2004), a relationship that has been discussed for several decades. David Archer claimed in 2005 (Fate of Fossil Fuel CO2 in Geologic Time. Journal of Geophysical Research 110: C09S05. Doi 10.1029/2004JC002625. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2004JC002625) that, if the size of what he called “the anthropogenic CO2 slug” turned out to be 5000 GtC (the estimated size of carbon reserves at that time—they are now thought to be as much as three times greater), the calcium carbonate in the deep ocean will “near depletion,” after which atmospheric carbon dioxide would begin to rise again—by which he seems to mean, on a less than charitable reading, that, from a purely anthropocentric, reductionistic perspective, he can contemplate humanity letting all of the shelled organisms of the world’s oceans be killed off so that we can continue burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon into the air for just a little bit longer.
- For studies of the relationship between increasing acidity and shell decalcification of a number of marine organisms, see Orr, J., et al. (2005), Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification over the Twenty-first Century and Its Impact on Calcifying Organisms, Nature 437: 681-686 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature4095, Rivero-Calle, S., et al. (2015), Multidecadal Increase in North Atlantic Coccolithophores and the Potential Role of Rising CO2, Science 350 (6267): 1533-1537. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/350/6267/1533.full, and Davis, C., et al. (2017), Ocean Acidification Compromises a Planktic Calcifier with Implications for Global Carbon Cycling, Scientific Reports 7: 2225, 1-8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01530-9.pdf.
- These authors note that, unlike the order of reef-building corals, members of the Primate order “do not possess analogous ‘survival’ traits that enable some species to transcend major extinction boundaries,” referencing Estrada, A., et al. (2017). Impending Extinction Crisis of the World’s Primates: Why Primates Matter. Science Advances 3 91): e1600946 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1600946.full.
- A. Thompson (2018) provides a graphic illustrating the size range of plastic particles.
- Professor Bartlett explains the fundamentals of exponential growth and its relation to population and energy in the first few minutes of the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8.
- An animation of the growth of the human population over time is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE . Growth in real time is shown at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/.
- A panel discussion on these issues can be viewed at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/hotspots-population-growth-areas-high-biodiversity).
- See Cincotta, R., J. Wisnewski, and R. Engelman. (2000). Human Population in Biodiversity Hotspots. Nature 404: 990-992. Doi 10:1038/35010105 https://www.nature.com/articles/35010105, Cordeiro, N., et al. (2007). Conservation in Areas of High Population Density in Sub-Saharan Africa. Biological Conservation 134 (2): 155–163. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320706003211, and Burgess, N., Balmford, A., and Cordeiro, N. (2007). Correlations Among Species Distributions, Human Density and Human Infrastructure Across the High Biodiversity Tropical Mountains of Africa. Biological Conservation 134 (2): 164-177. Doi 10.1016/j.biocon.2006.08.024 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S006320706003326.
- See also two richly illustrated books, Mittermeyer, R., N. Myers, and C. Mittermeyer, eds. (1999). Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions. Mexico City: CEMAX, S.A. ISBN 968-6397-58-2, and Mittermeyer, R., et al. (2005). Hotspots Revisited: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions. Mexico City: CEMAX, S.A. distributed by Conservation International, Chicago. ISBN 9789686397772.
- Also see a podcast by Williams, J., V. Mohan, and D. Lopez-Carr. (2012). Hotspots: Population Growth in Areas of High Biodiversity. Podcast, Wilson Center Environmental Change and security Program. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/hotspots-population-growth-areas-high-biodiversity.
- See, e.g. O’Neill, B., et al. (2012). Demographic Change and Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Lancet 380: 157-164. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60958-1, O’Neill et al. (2014). A New Scenario Framework for Climate Change Research: The Concept of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Climate Change 122: 387-400. Doi 10.1007/s10584-013-0905-2. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10584-013-0906-1.pdf, Lutz, W. (2017). How Population Growth Relates to Climate Change. PNAS 114 (46): 12103-12105. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1717178114,and Casey, G., and O. Galor. (2017). Is Faster Economic Growth Compatible with Reductions in Carbon Emissions? The Role of Diminished Population Growth. Environmental Research Letters 12: 014003 doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/12/1/014003.
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change”
- A short video on the reasoning behind this conclusion is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTm-402a9dA, offering some telling insight into the reductive, highly abstract logic entertained by some schools of philosophy; the narrator ascribes this counterintuitive conclusion to “the recursive error”: “just because the first two examples are reasonable, it does not mean that the conclusion is reasonable”—“or even sane, to consider a huge, miserable population better than a small happy one.”
- A famous illustration by Ernst Haeckel (https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Haeckel_Anthropogenie_1874.jpg) has been the subject of some controversy, but developmental biologist Michael Richardson and colleagues, while criticizing the inaccuracies of his drawings, note that, “on a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct: all vertebrates develop a similar body plan (consisting of notochord, body segments, pharyngeal pouches, and so forth),” and that “he was also right to show strong similarities between his earliest embryos of humans and other eutherian mammals,” such as the cat and the bat (Richardson, M., et al. (1998). Haeckel, Embryos, and Evolution. Science 280 (5366): 983. Doi 10.1126/science 280.5366983c https://science.sciencemag.org/content/280/5366/983.3.full.)
- Concerned about the rapid depletion of the coal supply that was needed to maintain Britain’s hegemony as an industrial power, William Jevons observed in 1865 that improvements in the efficiency of deriving power from coal would not help the situation, maintaining “it is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”
- A similar warning about the increasing trade in virtual water and the threat posed by its decoupling from local feedback processes was raised earlier by D’Odorico, P., F. Laio, and L. Ridolfi. Does Globalization of water Reduce Societal Resilience to Drought? Geophysical Research Letters 31 (13): L13403. Doi: 10.1029/2010GL043167 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2010GL043167, and “alarming rates of groundwater depletion worldwide” embedded in the international food trade were reported by Dalin C., et al. (2017). Groundwater Depletion Embedded in International Food Trade. Nature 543: 700-704, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21403.
- Working as an undercover investigator at a pork processing plant, Scott David reports (2018) that he observed “workers—under intense pressure to keep up with high line speeds—beating, dragging, and electrically prodding pigs to make them move faster”; video from this pork-producing plant has surfaced showing many animals have not been effectively rendered unconscious before their throats are cut (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4NmCsvGrx0); Meanwhile, the USDA also has plans to increase the slaughter rates for chickens to 175 birds per minute, according to the ASPCA (2018); a similarly horrifying video of the rapid slaughtering of chickens can be witnessed (http://cok.net/inv/amick/).
- The IATP publishes an infographic entitled “Big Meat and Dairy’s Supersized Climate Footprint” (IATP 2017), showing the relative size of GHG emissions contributions made by just the top twenty livestock (meat and dairy) corporations, with a collective sum of 845 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MtCO2e), greater than all of Germany’s; see https://www.iatp.org/supersized-climate-footprint.
- Space limitations do not permit a review of other recent studies linking a reduction in meat-eating to improved human health and environmental sustainability, but see, for example, Clark, M., and D. Tilman. (2017). Comparative Analysis of Environmental Impacts of Agricultural Production Systems, Agricultural Input Efficiency, and Food Choice. Environmental Research Letters 12: 064016. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5/meta. [includes video], Springman, M., et al. (2018). Options for Keeping the Food System Within Environmental Limits. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0594-0, Poore, J., and T. Nemecek. (2018). Reducing Food’s Environmental Impact Through Producers and Consumers. Science 360: 987-992. https://science.sciencemag,org/content/36o/6392/987.full, and most recently the British medical journal The Lancet Willet, W., et al. (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems. The Lancet Commisions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.
- Some of them can be can be seen at the World Wildlife Fund (http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/about_thje_amazon/wildlife_amazon/ and Mongabay (https://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_wildlife.html websites.
- An estimated one billion wild mammals, birds and reptiles were estimated to have died in the Australian wildfires (partly tropical forest, partly not) by early January 2020; see Lewis, D. (2020). Ecologist Michael Clarke Describes Australian Wildfires’ Devastating Aftermath. Nature 577: 304. https://www.nature.com/magazine-assets/d41586-020-00043-2/d41586-020-00043-2.pdf.
- Nobre’s talk (mostly in Spanish) on this invisible river can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClesJyZUWTy.
- For more on the relationships among deforestation, drought, and wildfires, see Zemp, D., et al. (2017). Self-Amplified Amazon Forest Loss Due to Vegetation-Atmosphere Feedbacks. Nature Communications 8: 14681 doi: 10.1038/ncomms14681 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14681, Aragao, L., J. Barlow and L. Anderson. (2018). Amazon Rainforests that Were Once Fire-Proof Have Become Flammable. The Conversation, February 13. https://the conversation.com/amazon-rainforests-that-were-once-fire-proof-have-become-flammable91775, Brando, P., et al. (2019). Droughts, Wildfires, and Forest Carbon Cycling: A Pantropical Synthesis. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 47: 555-581, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-earth-082517-010235, and Fonseca, M., et al. (2019). Effects of Climate and Land-Use Change Scenarios on Fire Probability During the 21st Century in the Brazilian Amazon. Global Change Biology 25 (9): 2931-2946. https://onlinelibrary,wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.14709.
- Please note that the term bushmeat will be used here to indicate the result of animals being taken directly from the wild, whether for meat, the trade in live animals or their body parts, or hunting trophies; the term poaching is often used by authors to distinguish such killing when it is illegal, but, as will be discussed later in this section, sometimes the legality or illegality of the killing is contested, or unclearly related to the protection of the species.
- Much more can be learned about the bushmeat problem at Ammann’s website, https://karlammann.com.
- The terminology employed in this report—animals are referred to as “sources of biomass that move,” for example–is quite unsettling to those of us who think in terms of the subjective lives of the animals under the gun.
- A suggested way of effecting behavior change with the aim of curtailing the COVID-19 outbreak (Michie, 2020) could be adapted to this purpose, by creating (a) “an accurate mental model of the process of transmission,” expanded to display the global trajectory of bushmeat, showing potential points of interruption; (b) new social norms; (c) appropriate emotional responses at appropriate levels, such as anxiety and disgust; (d) replacement behaviors for the undesirable ones, and—the only one likely to be difficult in this situation; (e) a way to make the desired new behaviors easy.
- The helmeted hornbill, for example, is being pushed into extinction because of trade in its helmet-like casque; see https://video/nationalgeographic.com/video/magazine/year-of-the-bird/180828-ngm-illegal-hunting-has-pushed-this-iconic-bird-to-the-brink?source=relatedvideo.
- Space concerns constrain our ability to consider these issues further here, but for pro and con positions on using firearms and military tactics to defend remaining wildlife populations, see Lunstrum, E. (2014), Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (4): 816-832. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.912545, Lindsey, P., et al. (2013). The Bushmeat Trade in African Savannahs: Impacts, Drivers, and Possible Solutions. Biological Conservation 160: 80-96. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320712005186, and Mogomotsi, G., and P. Madigele. (2017). Live by the Gun, Die by the Gun: Botswana’s “Shoot-toKill” Policy as an Anti-Poaching Strategy. South African Crime Quarterly No. 60, June. https://journals.assaf.org.za/sacq/article/view/1787. For pro and con positions on trophy hunting, see Macdonald, D. (2016a). Report on Lion Conservation with Particular Respect to the Issue of Trophy Hunting. A Report Prepared at the Request of Rory Stewart OBE, Under Secretary of State for the Environment WildCRU, Oxford. https://www.wildcru.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Report_on_lion_conservation.pdf, Dickman, A., et al. (2019). Trophy Hunting Bans Imperil Biodiversity. Science 365 (6456): 874. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6456/874, Sills, J., ed. (2019) Letters [on Trophy Hunting]. Science 366 (6464): 432-435. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/366/6464/433.1.full.pdf, Batavia, C., et al. (2019a). The Elephant Head in the Room: A Critical Look at Trophy Hunting. Conservation Letters 12:e12565, https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/conl.1256.5, and Batavia, C. et al. (2019b). Trophy Hunting: Values Inform Policy. Science 366 (6464): 433. Doi: 10.1126/science.aaz4023 https://science,sciencemag,org/content/366/6464/433.1/tab-pdf., and Darimont, C., B. Codding, and K. Hawkes. (2017). Why Men Trophy Hunt. Biology Letters 13: 20160909. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0909. For discussions of value change in among conservationists and within the larger public on these issues, see Bruskotter, J., et al. (2019). Conservationists’ Moral Obligations Toward Wildlife: Values and Identity Promote Conservation Conflict. Biological Conservation 240: 108296, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320719312595, Manfredo, M., et al. (2019). How Anthropomorphism Is Changing the Social Context of Modern Wildlife Conservation. Biological Conservation online 2 December, 108297, https://www.sciencedirect.com/article/abs/pii/S0006320719311929, and Keim, B. (2019). America’s Views On Wildlife Are Changing. Anthropocene December 18 http://www.anthropocenemagazine.ord/2019/12/anthropomorphism-and-wildlife/.
- It should be noted that charging “interest” on loans was considered usury and outlawed by some Christian societies until well past the Middle Ages, and is still prohibited by some Islamic societies today.
- Czech has gone on to serve as president of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (www.steadystate.org).
- Images of both the embedded “circular flow diagram” and her new “doughnut model” can be seen at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/12/doughnut-growth-economics-book-economic-model.
- Adding the interest earned over each given time period to the base sum and then multiplying that larger sum by the interest rate over each subsequent time period
- The maneuver is something like subtracting the accumulated interest from the initial $10,000, but it comes out mathematically a little different.
- There is evidence that different parts of the brain are involved in valuing immediate versus delayed returns—the limbic system appears to be more involved with immediate outcomes, while lateral prefrontal and associated parietal cortices appear to become activated when considering loner time periods and more difficult decisions (see McClure et al., 2004). Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary Rewards. Science 306 (5695): 503-507. Doi: 10.1126/science.1100907 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/306/5695/503.full.pdf)
- See, e.g. Liederkerke, L. (2004). Discounting the Future: John Rawls and Derek Parfit’s Critique of the Discount Rate. Ethical Perspectives 11 (1): 72-83. http://www.ethical-perspectives.be/pahe.php?, Gowdy, J., J. Rosser, and L. Roy (2013). The Evolution of Hyperbolic Discounting: Implications for Truly Social Valuation of the Future. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90S: S94-S104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268112002727.
- Marginal utility is the additional amount of positive experience or “utility” a person gets from acquiring one additional unit of something.
- Utilitarian ethics can, however, be expanded to include the “disutility” of the impacts of climate change on nonhuman animals (or at least on humans who care about them); see Sunstein, C., and W. Hsiung. (2007). Climate Change and Animals. John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics Working Paper No. 324. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/106/Climate_Change_and_Animals.