By Jeanne Roberts
Posted on April 27, 2010. Listed in:
It’s a dire warning , coming from a reputable environmental site aggregator that advocates strongly against industrialization in an effort to advance an era of ecological sustainability, and – were it simply the site issuing the warning – we might be able to ignore it. But the cautionary information also comes directly from some highly reputable climate scientists, many of whom make it their business to identify ecological crises.
According to Ecological Internet, “On the basis of overwhelming new ecological science indicating Earth is past the tipping point and key global ecosystems and life-support systems are failing, EI calls for an immediate and escalating people’s power Earth Revolution on behalf of Earth, all her life, and the human family.”
The group draws support for its warning from a recently published paper called: Planetary Boundaries: A Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Appearing in the journal Ecology and Society in 2009, in Scientific American’s April 2010 issue, and in NewScientist , the paper delineates the research work of 28 environmental scientists who jointly identified nine planetary life-support systems that, once overloaded by human activity, might represent a “tipping point” beyond which earth itself could not recover stasis.
The scientists, under the auspices of Stockholm Environment Institute Director Johan Rockström , include such notables as NASA climate scientist James Hansen, Gaia scientist and earth system modeling specialist Tim Lenton, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief climate advisor, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber.
James Hansen , who has been warning on climate change since 1988, when he addressed a congressional committee, most recently told U.S. President Barack Obama that he and his administration had four more years to act on climate change before a threshold was crossed that would likely lead to climate catastrophe.
Tim Lenton , Professor in Earth System Science at the University of East Anglia in the UK, is identified as the scientist closest to modeling these tipping points via grid computing or e-Science. He is also the creator of a carbon cycle climate computer model called GENIE (Grid-ENabled Integrated Earth model), and is current head of the GENIEfy project.
Paul Crutzen is credited as the individual who coined the term “anthropocene ” to refer to the earth’s current geological age, in which humans are the driving force behind climate change. According to Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, it is “more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” during this epoch.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber , who is also the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, and one of nine members of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, is another expert on climatological tipping points, and as harsh a critic of human behavior (in terms of environmental sustainability) as Jansen and Crutzen.
The premise is that Earth (as Gaia, a living entity) is an organized web of ecosystems, each dependent upon, and influencing, one another. Or, to take the Butterfly effect into new territory, every jellyfish on the coast of Australia is one less tree in New Guinea.
The scientists, after identifying systems that are vital to human survival – that is, the Earth’s survival – then calculated how far we humans have managed to push them toward the edge, and how much farther we can push before the environment collapses like a house of cards when the door slams (the chart is available at the end of this article, and should disconcert all but the oblivious).
The failure of the environmental movement to prevent these depredations is laid on the doorstep of too much compromise and accommodation, and inequitable consumption. Read: we gave the oil companies free reign in exchange for financial support to pay our directors and consultants, and we in the “first” world took more than our share of the earth’s resources, because we believed might (wealth) equaled right.
It’s a perfectly good, if harsh, assessment, and the recommendation is that we who truly love the Earth consider “carefully targeted sabotage and insurgency of the growth machine” that is the cause.
IE’s President, Dr. Glen Barry, admits he doesn’t want to lead the revolution, and also says that he doesn’t want to incite any “imminent illegal activities”, but it is clear that compromise, accommodation and worship at the alter of wealth haven’t accomplished anything either.
This revolutionary impulse on behalf of Earth is spreading. Halfway across the world from Germany and the UK, Bolivian President Evo Morales is currently hosting talks on climate change, and will close the conference on April 22 with a Declaration of Rights of Mother earth.
Morales, who refused to sign the Copenhagen climate change treaty that wrapped up in December of 2009, is following closely in the footsteps of Ecuador on this issue. That nation, which drafted the first-ever Bill of Rights for Earth in 2008 as part of its constitution, is part of an advance guard for climate defense emerging from South America.
It might seem a surprising source, given the area’s general poverty and perceived lack of industrialization and technological sophistication, but in fact South America was the first “victim” identified by mega-national corporations in their eternal quest for cheap raw materials and even cheaper labor.
This victimization, now being seen in Asian nations, is perhaps the primary reason for the area’s “rising up against privatization”, in the words of Latin American water activist Adriana Marquisio , who fights la guerra del agua (water wars), as evinced by the Third Annual Feria del Agua held on April 10 and was the premier event to put Cochabamba on the international environmental protest map.
In fact, South American countries are remaking the face of environmentalism, creating – in the words of Bolivia's ambassador to the U.N., Pablo Salon – a way for civil society (as opposed to policy makers and politicians) to get climate negotiations back on track.
“The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy.” Salon is quoted as saying by the Huffington Post's Robert S. Eschelman.
But is the current climate change situation an ecological emergency? Let me ask another question: how would you and I know if it was? The mainstream media doesn’t go there anymore, unless it is to parrot some self-styled environmental guru, and the government has trouble releasing information a decade out-of-date into the public sphere.
We might get a tipoff from YouTube, like this one , but otherwise we would be reduced to the level of our ancestors, who searched the sky and the earth for signs of imminent, disastrous change.
And that, of all the importunities and excesses of the current world, is the worst sign; that we will be prevented from knowing about our own demise because of conflicting interests and internecine power struggles until it is too late to effect meaningful change.
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