Wild Free and Happy Sample 45

[Note: This is the forty-fifth sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

SACRED WATER

Like soil, water is essential for all life — no water, no life.  Access to wetness determines the essence of every ecosystem, from rainforests to deserts.  The plant and animal communities that inhabit them are species attuned to surviving in local conditions.  Wherever our wild ancestors wandered, they simply ate the healthy wild foods the land provided.  Until fairly recently, it never occurred to them to play the game of stewardship, and assume the role of owner and master.  They had no need to.  They were wild, free, and happy.  Life was good.

Everyone who reads these words has spent their entire life in a fossil-powered era of super-insanity, a temporary catastrophic blip in the human saga.  Many believe that oil is also essential — far more so than soil or water.  But in the coming decades, we’ll have no choice but to abandon our addiction to fossil energy — cold turkey — and migrate to a more traditional path that is much slower, simpler, saner, and far less crowded.  Joy!  It was a crazy-making bad habit.  It turned much of the mob into full-bore lunatics who lost all common sense and lived like they were the final generation.  I can assure you that we’ll always need water.  Water is good stuff.

J. R. McNeill wrote that salt water is 97 percent of all H₂O.  About 69 percent of all fresh water is frozen, mostly in Antarctica.  Of the 31 percent that is not frozen, about 98 percent is stored in underground aquifers, many of which are too deep to be molested by tropical primates and their boring gizmos.  The water in all lakes and streams is about a quarter of one percent of all freshwater.  An essential benefit of incoming sunbeams is desalination.  As salt water evaporates, water vapor is released into the atmosphere, where it can travel the world and become dew, rain, frost, or snow.

McNeill wrote that for almost the entire human saga, water was mostly used for little more than drinking and bathing.  Today, we use far more, waste far more, and pollute far more.  Three major guzzlers are agriculture (70%), industry (20%), and cities and towns (10%).  In 1990, we were using 40 times more water than in 1700.  In the twentieth century alone, water consumption increased 900 percent.

Similar to their abusive relationship with soil, clever control freaks are working like crazy to exploit water in every unsustainable way they can imagine.  Their objective is to keep the unsinkable Titanic, with its seven-point-something billion passengers, afloat for as long as humanly possible, by any means necessary (as long as it’s profitable). 

Irrigation

Water-guzzling agriculture began in places like southern Mesopotamia.  James Scott wrote a new and improved version of the story about the dawn of plant and animal domestication, and the eventual emergence of civilization.  He focused on southern Mesopotamia, where wild folks originally wandered into a region of thriving wetlands loaded with wild wheat, barley, and many other wonderful things to eat.  It was delicious paradise, full of wild game, and nobody owned it, so they decided quit wandering, build luxurious huts, and enjoy a life of prosperity.

By and by, the growing number of bambinos began to strain the party.  Their unfortunate solution was to increase food production by transforming desert into productive cropland.  In the following pages, we’ll examine some of the downsides of irrigation.  This was a daunting fork in the path.  Once again, some folks who, for centuries, were well adapted to prospering in a wild ecosystem, eventually became possessed by an urge to control and exploit it.  One lesson that environmental history teaches us, over and over and over again, is that some cultures can lurch out-of-balance, and develop an obsessive compulsion for cleverly controlling people, places, plants, and animals. 

Unfortunately, this devilish cleverness is not kept tightly caged by knowledge, understanding, wisdom, respect, or acute foresight.  (Hey, we’re just happy horny hungry savannah primates!  We didn’t know any better!)  Sometimes, it can make you wonder if Big Mama Nature deliberately conjured the dark juju of cleverness, because overseeing millions of years of ongoing sustainability was getting really monotonous and boring.  Bring in the clowns?

Sandra Postel is fascinated by a dirty and destructive habit called irrigation.  Today, about 17 percent of global cropland is irrigated, and it produces 40 percent of our food.  Crops can be grown in lands too dry for rain-fed agriculture, and they can produce higher yields.  Irrigation fans the flames of population growth, which is usually the opposite of helpful.  Since 1800, irrigated cropland has grown 30 times in area, and global population has soared from one billion to nearly eight.

In the early days, irrigation was a game of moving surface water into fields using low tech methods.  Keeping the irrigation channels from silting up was a major and never-ending job that gave legions of slaves and peons satisfying work to enrich their lives.  When enemies came to visit, a cruelly enjoyable way of destroying your society was to deliberately rubbish your irrigation system. 

After the Second World War, powerful electric and diesel powered pumps became affordable and popular.  So did drilling rigs, which were used to bore tube wells for the extraction of groundwater.  Cheap and abundant energy allowed far more water to be produced, compared to old fashioned muscle power or windmills.  This spurred a massive expansion of the area of irrigated land, which tripled between 1950 and 2000.

Today, the mining of underground aquifers makes possible about a tenth of world grain production.  Huge fossil aquifers are being drained in the U.S. Great Plains, the North China Plain, and under Saudi Arabia.  Ancient water is being extracted far faster than the aquifers can naturally recharge — a one-time reckless joyride. 

Walter Youngquist was no fan of aquifer mining, because it created “food bubbles,” where crops could be raised in locations where highly productive agriculture was otherwise impossible.  In 2011, the World Bank estimated that these temporary bubbles were feeding 175 million in India, and 130 in China.  The bubbles will inevitably burst.  Then what?

In the U.S., the huge Ogallala Aquifer lies beneath eight states in the Great Plains.  It now provides the water for about 27 percent of the irrigated land in the U.S.  The aquifer contains water that may be 25,000 years old.  After the Second World War, folks started using automotive engines to pump wells.  Rotating motorized center pivot irrigation systems sprayed water over large circular patches of land.  Irrigation transformed marginal grassland into a highly productive environment for ranching, and growing soybeans, corn, and wheat.

The Ogallala is mysterious, and humankind has yet to develop X-ray vision.  Writing in 2007, Clive Ponting reported that the aquifer could be depleted as early as 2010.  More recently, experts predict it could fail as soon as 2028.  What is measurable is that in some regions, since the 1940s, the water table has dropped more than 300 feet (90 m).  Youngquist noted that “in north Texas, some 15,000 square miles (39,000 km²) of agricultural land has had to be abandoned as the Ogallala aquifer is totally depleted.”  Luckily, what gets pumped out today will be replenished by nature in a mere 6,000 years, maybe.  Others say hundreds of thousands of years.

And so, as topsoil is taking a beating, aquifers and surface water are being overpumped, and population keeps zooming upward (oh-oh!).  Joel Bourne noted that agriculture guzzles most of the water used by humans.  Irrigated fields have yields that are two to three times higher than rain fed fields.  Demand for water is projected to increase 70 to 90 percent by 2050, but water consumption today is already unsustainable.  The solution is easy, all we have to do is “double grain, meat, and biofuel production on fewer acres with fewer farmers, less water, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts, floods, and heat waves” (and rising energy costs).  No worries!

Draining Rivers

Irrigation is draining major rivers.  For example, Erling Hoh described the Yellow River in China, which is 3,400 miles (5,472 km) long.  Its waters have been intensively overdrawn for irrigating cropland.  In 1972, for the first time in history, the flowing river never made it to its normal outlet in the Yellow Sea.  In 1997, lower sections of the river were dry for 227 days, reducing the harvest by an estimated 8.5 million tons.  Some sections have been so polluted by cities and industries that the water is unfit for both irrigation and human consumption.  Fish no longer survive in some regions.

Sandra Postel noted that a growing number of major rivers are, for months at a time, discharging little or no water into the sea.  They include the Colorado, Rio Grande, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Amu Darya, and Murray.  Rivers deliver both life-giving water, and death-bringing pollution.  As the volume of flow diminishes, there is less water to dilute the crud.

The Ganges is getting sucked dry.  Old fashioned irrigation, which moved river water to fields via canals, worked for centuries, when there were fewer people, and more forests.  As demand increased, the water level of the river dropped lower and lower, until the old canal distribution system could no longer work.  Luckily, our hero technology came to the rescue.  Tube wells were drilled, and motorized pumps began extracting water like crazy, and the crops prospered. 

Naturally, with this increased demand, underground water tables dropped.  Consequently, less groundwater naturally flowed back into the river.  So, to an increasing degree, the Ganges is looking less like a mighty river, and more like a big mudflat.  [LOOK]  Breezes drifting over the mountain from the future have the pungent aroma of food shortages.  Progress!

Subsidence

Clive Ponting noted that many folks today are still able to snatch as much water as they want, pay nothing for it, and not worry about waste.  Irrigating cropland with state of the art, maximum efficiency technology is prohibitively expensive.  It’s far more practical and affordable to continue using highly wasteful methods.  In India and China, two-thirds of irrigation water never reaches the plants, because of losses due to evaporation, or seepage from delivery canals.  U.S. farmers merely waste half of their water.

Postel wrote that water tables are dropping beneath large regions of northern China, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East, Mexico, and the western United States.  Ground water is being pumped out faster than the aquifers are naturally replenished.  When a well begins to wheeze, they keep drilling it deeper and deeper, until it finally goes dry.  Up to 10 percent of the global food harvest is made possible by aquifer mining.  This path does not have a happy ending.

Subsidence is a common but unintended consequence of aquifer mining.  It affects locations where the geology is not sufficiently rigid.  Underground, as the water is removed, it leaves behind an empty void that the land sinks to fill.  Aquifer compaction can be irreversible — nature may never again be able to recharge the aquifer.  Game over.

J. R. McNeill reported that in 1990, Mexico City was using 35 times more water than it did in 1900.  The land surface subsided.  On the streets, some locations have unevenly sank up to 23 feet (7 m), which damaged sewer pipes, streets, and buildings.  Walter Youngquist wrote that the entire San Joaquin Valley is sinking.  In some areas, the water table has dropped up to 500 feet (152 m).  Near Mendota, the land surface has sunk more than 28 feet (8.5 m).  [LOOK] 

Subsidence is an issue in many places, including Osaka, Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, Alexandria, New Orleans, Houston, Las Vegas, and southern Arizona.  Jakarta, Indonesia is the fastest sinking major city in the world.  It gets 300 days of rain per year, and it sits on a big freshwater aquifer, which its huge population is guzzling faster than it can recharge.  Because so much of the city is paved, not enough rain can soak into the ground to keep the aquifer full.

Around the world, farmers, industries, and cities engage in aquifer mining.  Subsidence is the shadow of overpumping.  The problem will increase as long as irrigation and extreme overpopulation continues.  While population continues growing, water mining makes it harder for food production to keep up with growing need.

Salinization

Big Mama Nature often presents prestigious awards to honor the great achievements of human cleverness.  One of her golden awards for the invention of irrigation is called salinization.  By around 6,000 years ago, irrigation was cleverly transforming the deserts of southern Mesopotamia into a (temporary) utopia of highly productive fields of wheat, barley, peas, and lentils.  The long and winding soap opera in this region could fill 100 pages.  Let’s boil it down to a quickie.

Southern Mesopotamia is a flat, hot, nearly rainless desert covered with fertile soil that has above average salt content.  The Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through the region.  To the north, a higher and wetter region, there is an annual rainy season.  When the rains arrive, both surging rivers move heavy loads of silt downstream.  Something odd happens here. 

Over the centuries, as silt dropped out of the water flow, layer upon layer accumulated in the flood plains, deeper and deeper.  Eventually, both rivers were travelling through channels that were elevated above the surrounding land.  Clever folks recognized the possibility that life-giving water could be diverted from the rivers into irrigation canals, via a labor saving magic called gravity.  So they did. 

Now, all they had to do was dig miles and miles of irrigation canals to deliver the water across the desert and start growing crops — good healthy exercise.  Unfortunately, year after year, the rivers continued to deliver more and more silt, which took great delight in repeatedly plugging up the tidy canal systems.  Keeping the canals clear was a never ending challenge. 

Big Mama Nature thinks this is hilarious.  She laughs until the tears flow.  Technology and progress always bites us on the ass.  It’s so much easier to simply adapt to elegantly sustainable wild ecosystems, like the rest of the family of life does.

Anyway, irrigation made it possible for folks to produce lots of food, and feed lots of people, which enabled the emergence of the first states, cities, and empires — and the endless bloody clashes between super ambitious, testosterone powered, glory-seeking control freaks.  Meanwhile, out in the fields, dissolved salt ions were deeply involved in a project to teach the too-clever critters important lessons about agriculture, irrigation, and unintended consequences.

Several types of mineral salts, at varying levels of concentration, are natural components of soils and water.  Even rain drops can contain traces of dissolved salts.  All irrigation water contains some salt.  Salinization is a process in which the accumulation of salt in the soil can reach levels that affect plant health, or even prohibit plant life.  When cropland is not well drained (as in Mesopotamia), irrigation can make the water table rise.  When this happens, water containing dissolved salts moves upward, closer to the root zone of the crops above. 

When salty moisture migrates close to the ground surface, the water evaporates, and the salt is left behind.  When plants are thirsty, their roots take in water, and leave the salt behind.  As salt levels intensify near the soil surface, eventually not even weeds can survive.  At the end of the road, evaporation of saline water can leave the ground surface covered with a white layer of salt crystals, looking a bit like fresh snow.  Coroners would issue these lands a death certificate.  They remain useless to this day.

Clive Ponting indicated that salinization can be a slow motion catastrophe that may remain largely invisible to multiple generations.  In Mesopotamia, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts in 3500 B.C.  Barley is more salt-tolerant than wheat.  By 2500 B.C., wheat was just 15 percent of the grain grown, indicating salt problems.  By 1700 B.C., wheat growing had gone extinct.  Around 2000 B.C., there were some reports that “the earth turned white.”  At its peak, Mesopotamia maybe had a population of 1.5 million.  By A.D. 1500, just 150,000 lived there.

Now, let’s fast forward to modern times, an era when folks built lots of big dams — a subject that fascinated Marc Reisner.  Many were built in the Colorado River basin, for flood control, hydroelectricity generation, recreational fishing and boating, and to store water for irrigation and municipal water systems.  Historically, salinization has been a tireless serial killer of civilizations.  In the big dam era, human cleverness achieved new levels of brilliant incompetence.  Irrigation grew explosively.

As water in the Colorado moves downstream, it is diverted multiple times to irrigate the land it passes on its long journey from the Rockies to Mexico.  The water is dumped on a field, where it keeps crops on life support, dissolves salts in the soil, and eventually finds its way back into the river.  The salty water flows down to the next irrigation project… and then the next, and the next.  Along its journey, the water takes rest stops in reservoirs, where about a tenth of it evaporates, concentrating what is left behind.  By the time it reaches trendy restaurants in southern California, the water is so salty that it’s sometimes served with a lemon slice.

Reisner noted that in the Grand Valley, when Colorado River water is diverted for irrigation, it contains 200 parts per million (ppm) of salt.  When it returns to the river, it has 6,500 ppm.  On rivers like the Colorado and Platte, the water may be used up to 18 times.  Eventually, the Colorado flows across the border into Mexico, where the water has become “liquid death.”  At the end of its journey, the river used to empty into the Gulf of California.  Today, it dries up before it can reach the finish line.

The salt problems could be reduced by installing state of the art drip irrigation systems, in which far more water actually makes contact with plant roots, but this option is insanely expensive.  Another option is installing drainage systems in irrigated fields, so dissolved salts can be leached out of the soil.  This is also insanely expensive, and it produces very salty dreck that should then be disposed of in a thoughtful mature manner.

Regions of salt damaged soils are found in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.  Writing in 2015, Pooja Shrivastava summed it up like this:  “It has been estimated that worldwide 20% of total cultivated and 33% of irrigated agricultural lands are afflicted by high salinity.  Furthermore, the salinized areas are increasing at a rate of 10% annually for various reasons, including low precipitation, high surface evaporation, weathering of native rocks, irrigation with saline water, and poor cultural practices.  It has been estimated that more than 50% of the arable land would be salinized by the year 2050.”  Hmmm…  Maybe we won’t be having ten billion for dinner after all.

Siltation

On the day you squirted out of the womb, you took your first breath, and began a fun-filled journey that will inevitably conclude with your final breath.  Likewise, the working life of every dam is also finite.  Brilliant engineers design them to survive earthquakes, landslides, and intense floods — and they usually do.  Most will peacefully die from a natural cause, siltation.  Rivers transport both water and silt.  When the water flows into reservoirs, it slows down, and the silt is dropped.  Year after year, the silt accumulates, displacing space for water storage — the purpose of the dam.

The Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) is an organization within the U.S. Department of Interior.  One of their areas of concern is dam sedimentation, and they have created an excellent document that addresses FAQs (frequently asked questions).

Every dam that doesn’t experience a catastrophic failure will eventually fill with silt, and become a concrete waterfall — as useful at the tits on a bull.  Engineers understand this.  Typically, dam project plans are calculated to have a sediment design life of 50 or 100 years — planned obsolescence.  So, mommy and daddy get to enjoy the wonderful benefits from their hard earned tax dollars, and the grandkids inherit a collection of concrete waterfalls that are obscenely expensive to properly dispose of, and increasingly prone to failure as they deteriorate with age. 

More than 5,000 large dams in the U.S. are over 50 years old, approaching the end of their designed lifespans.  Some are already goofy bull’s tit waterfalls, enduring monuments to shortsighted pork barrel politics — idiotic projects demanded by slick-talking legislators to delight their donors, and enrich the rich.  The folks who get most of the financial benefits are entrepreneurs who adore the golden benefits of socialism, but hate government, and are hysterically allergic to taxes. 

Marc Reisner wrote that President Jimmy Carter detested dam projects because the national debt was in the stratosphere, there was double-digit inflation, and dams made little or no economic sense.  He was cursed to frequently suffer from painful mental impulses known as principles.  “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built.  What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers?  What would happen when the dams silted up?  What if the climate changed?”  This didn’t win him many friends in the arid west.  He didn’t get reelected.

Anyway, the ACWI FAQs note that “proper maintenance” is required to provide dams with eternal life.  Proper maintenance involves periodically dredging out many tons of polluted sediment, hauling it somewhere, and disposing it in a thoughtful mature manner.  Proper maintenance is massively expensive.  This begs a follow-up FAQ:  “Is reservoir sediment managed in the USA?”  Answer: “With only a few exceptions, the answer is no.”  It is done at just two reservoirs that fill rapidly.  There is no dredging.  The dam gates are opened, and the sediment is flushed downstream, which blindsides the riparian ecosystem.  This proper maintenance is highly destructive.

An extreme example of “proper maintenance” is the Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River in China.  Its reservoir accumulates an estimated 30 million tons of sediment each and every year!  So, every year, a team of maintenance professionals open the base drains, and allow 30 million tons of muck to ooze downstream.  It’s much cheaper than dredging.

In 1950, there were about 5,000 large dams in the world.  Today, there are more than 45,000.  Big dams are enormously expensive, and the cost of decommissioning a hydropower dam can exceed the cost of building it.  Corporations have no interest in building them, because the odds for making meaningful profits are slim at best.  So legislators order them, and taxpayers enjoy getting the huge bills

Of course, dams can also be very exciting.  Reisner shared some thrilling stories.  In the summer of 1975, typhoon Nina blasted Asia.  In the vicinity of China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours.  The dam collapsed, and the outflow blew out a number of smaller dams downstream.  Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.  Today, everyone in the Southwest prays several times a day that there will not be a similar chain reaction failure on the Colorado River. 

In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation was running out of ideal sites for new dams.  For maybe 40 years, Idaho farmers had begged for a dam on the Teton River.  Conservatives who detested socialism were eager to have U.S. taxpayers buy them a dam, despite the fact that the costs would far exceed the expected benefits.  This was earthquake country, and the proposed site had highly porous bedrock, an unbelievably stupid place to build a dam.  It was OK’d in 1973, and built in 1976.  The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

The reckless and idiotic impulses that conjured the Teton Dam into existence, and non-existence, strongly resemble the impulses that have brought the twenty-first century global economy into existence.  It too was built on a dodgy foundation, and is now springing more and more leaks.

Damn Dams

Oh-oh!  I feel a rant coming on.  What right did we have to build the dams?  Who is going to pay to remove the ever growing number of useless concrete waterfalls?  Where are we supposed to put millions of tons of polluted silt where it will not poison life?  The dam building binge was an atrocious insult to younger generations of all species.  Why are we promoting sprawling cities in bone dry blast furnace climates, regions that import most of their food, and depend for survival on snowmelt water from faraway places?  Perpetual growth is not the purpose of life.  It isn’t even fun.

In my perception of reality, salmon lives matter.  Eel lives matter.  Sturgeon lives matter.  Vast regions of land are now used to grow corn and soybeans to feed cattle who are far happier eating the natural food they evolved to enjoy, grass.  Is the Extinction Rebellion complaining that the climate is being destroyed by salmon farts and belches?  Salmon need no ranchers or herders.  They feed themselves.  They don’t overgraze public lands, or rubbish riparian areas.  They don’t fill huge sewage lagoons.  They don’t need to be treated with antibiotics or pesticides. 

They are sacred wild and free beings, not enslaved feedlot meat machines.  Their flesh is highly nutritious, and organic.  When they return to the place of their origin to spawn and die, they leave behind enormous amounts of precious nutrients from the sea, not synthetic fertilizers from chemical plants.  Salmon carcasses enrich ecosystems, rather than running off into waterways, stimulating algal blooms, and creating sprawling oxygen-free dead zones where nothing can live.  Salmon rock!  Dams don’t.  Long live the salmon!

There!  I feel better now.  Sorry!

Tikopia



Tikopia (tik-o-PEE-a) is a wee island in the Pacific, quite close to the middle of nowhere, the remains of an ancient volcano.  Its area is 1.8 square miles (4.6 km²), much of it steep rugged hillside.  The closest neighbors live on Anuta, 85 miles away (137 km), a long and dangerous voyage in a dugout canoe.  Tiny Tikopia is eleven times larger than Anuta. 

Humans arrived in Tikopia maybe 3,000 years ago, and brought along pigs, dogs, fowl, rats, and the seeds of Polynesian foods.  For a while, folks ate well, dining on the abundant birds, fish, and shellfish.  As abundance faded, slash and burn agriculture gained momentum.  Deforestation crept up the slopes, and eroded soils washed down, accumulating near the shore.  Efforts were made to stabilize and expand the shoreline.  As a result, Tikopia’s land area is now 40 percent larger, and the reef area is 41 percent smaller.  There is much more land suitable for raising food.

The crater of Tikopia’s volcano used to be a saltwater bay linked to the sea, home to plentiful fish and shellfish.  Soil deposits have now blocked the connection to the sea, turning the bay into a lake.  This sharply reduced the marine life that formerly thrived in the bay.  The villages that depended on this food were screwed.  Around 1700, they exterminated a village having fertile land.  Another village fled in fear, paddling into the ocean, almost certainly drowning.  Conflict is hunger’s shadow.

The lake water is too salty to drink, as is the ocean.  Drinking water is obtained from springs flowing out of the hillsides, coming from sources above the villages and latrines.  Ashes, excrement, and kitchen wastes are used to return nutrients to the gardens and orchards.

Over time, folks planted more food-producing trees.  Eventually, they developed a clever three-story system of arboriculture, mixing tall, medium, and short tree species.  These included bananas, papaya, coconuts, sago, chestnuts, and almonds.  On the ground, they grew root crops, like taro, sweet potatoes, yams, and manioc.  This system maximized food production, reduced erosion, enriched the soil, was less vulnerable to cyclone damage, and did not require endless toil.  Pigs swiped too much human food, and were eliminated before 1800, as were the dogs.

Nature kept life interesting by sending drought years and frequent cyclones.  These could hammer the food supply.  Because Tikopia was so far from anywhere, importing food from elsewhere was not an option.  Folks preserved calories for famine years in two ways.  (1) They dug pits and fermented taro, breadfruit, and manioc into glop called masi, which could be stored for several years.  (2) The pith of the sago palm was dried and ground into storable flour.

Each house was assigned specific garden plots and orchards that comprised their primary source of nutrition.  If you ran short, you starved.  Carrying capacity expanded and declined in synch with food production.  When conditions got tight, older males in the household would set limits on reproduction.  The families complied, because everyone understood the painful consequences of having too many mouths to feed.

Because it encouraged social stability, population management was intelligent and ethical.  It was done in several ways.  Junior members of the family might be expected to remain bachelors or spinsters.  Everyone practiced coitus interruptus.  Efforts were made to induce miscarriages to end unwanted pregnancies.  Newborns were promptly suffocated.  It was usually OK to have two sons, but subsequent male offspring were strangled, to avoid conflicts over land inheritance.  Unmarried males sometimes jumped into a canoe and never returned.  Others swam out into the open sea and fed the sharks.  When all options failed, it was time to fetch clubs and go on the warpath.

I invite you to watch The Island of Tikopia, a pleasant 53-minute video.  It shows us cool people living in a tropical paradise.  Tikopia is blessed by being tiny, isolated, unsuitable for industrial agriculture, and having no valuable resources.  Hence, they have not been obliterated by modernity.  They will never suffer from automobiles or cell phones.  Even today, Tikopians live in functional communities, and enjoy an easygoing way of life that is unimaginable to frantic consumers thrashing through life in Crazyland.

The video does not focus on how contact with civilization has impacted their society.  On a different island, the Sentineli welcome all visitors with a shower of arrows.  They have learned from painful experience that outsiders can be bad juju.  Tikopians had no fear of visitors, because anyone who paddled in was a mellow islander like themselves.  Whites were different; following a visit in 1828, a quarter of the population died from disease.

Missionaries began to wash ashore in 1857, occasionally visiting the island.  Within 50 years, they had made a few converts.  Half were baptized by 1928, and by 1955, most were nominally Christian.  Chiefs who agreed to be baptized were rewarded with metal axes, knives, adzes, and other amazing stuff.  Heathens who preferred the ancient path were rewarded with self-righteous intolerance.

More destructive than dysentery, pneumonia, measles, and influenza was the deliberate introduction of European morality.  Much of the traditional culture managed to survive, but Christians were especially uptight about sex, family planning, and which deity to worship.  Naturally, the stern prohibition of premarital sex was disregarded by almost all youths, including horny young Christians.

Naturally, the mission’s opposition to population control had negative results.  Population soared 37 percent from 1,288 in 1928 (too many), to 1,753 in 1952 (way too many) — just in time for a devastating cyclone, and a bloody plunge into helter-skelter.  This drove anthropologist Raymond Firth crazy.  Christian culture was obsessed with compulsory conformity, but disinterested in the predictable results.  Tikopians had evolved a remarkably competent culture that adapted to the ecosystem and mindfully lived within limits.  Leave it alone, he shouted.

Anyone who has studied European history knows that this irrational morality of unrestrained growth has, over the centuries, led to the death of hundreds of millions via wars, famines, and epidemics.  Is this truly more ethical than intelligent family planning?  The principles of carrying capacity and overshoot apply to both tiny islands and the entire planet, as we are now in the process of discovering.

When the first humans arrived in Tikopia, there were no mammals.  There were no wild herbivores to freeload on their food supply.  The only man-eating predators were sharks, which swam outside the reefs.  In the absence of large predators, humans were the dominant animal.  There were no lions, jaguars, or hyenas to provide essential population control services.  Thus, a culture of mindful restraint was the preferred path to sustainability.

Today, Tikopia is one of 900+ islands in the nation of Solomon Islands, which is 95 percent Christian.  The Tikopian population crisis has been addressed by sending folks to establish colonies on other islands — islands that have been depopulated via exposure to the diseases of civilization.  Other Tikopians enjoy rewarding careers in manual labor at coconut plantations on larger islands.  How much longer can the consequences of European morality be sidestepped?  Sea levels are rising, cyclones are intensifying, and low-lying islands in the Solomons are vanishing.  Good luck islanders!

Firth, Raymond, We, The Tikopia, American Book Company, New York, 1936.

Firth, Raymond, Tikopia Ritual and Belief, Beacon Press, Boston, 1967.

Kirch, Patrick Vinton and Douglas E. Yen, Tikopia — The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, 1982.

The End of Plenty

Nothing is more precious than balance, stability, and sustainability.  Today, we’re hanging by our fingernails to a skyrocket of intense insane change, and it’s the only way of life we’ve ever known.  Joel Bourne has spent his life riding the rocket.  He grew up on a farm, and studied agronomy at college, but sharp changes were causing many farmers to go bankrupt.  Taking over the family farm would have been extremely risky, so he became a writer for farm magazines.  Later, he was hired by National Geographic, where he has spent most of his career.

In 2008, he was assigned to cover the global food crisis, and this project hurled him into full awareness of the big picture.  The Green Revolution caused food production to skyrocket, and world population doubled in just 40 years.  Then, the revolution fizzled out, whilst population continued to soar.  Demographers have told us to expect another two or three billion for dinner in 2050.  Obviously, this had the makings of an excellent book, so Bourne sat down and wrote The End of Plenty.

The subtitle of his book is “The Race to Feed a Crowded World,” not “The Race to Tackle Overpopulation.”  A growing population thrills the greed community, and a diminishing herd does not.  Overpopulation is a problem that can be solved, and will be, either by enlightened self-restraint, by compulsory restraint, or, most likely, by the vigorous housekeeping of Big Mama Nature.  Feeding the current population is thrashing the planet, and feeding even more will worsen everything, but this is our primary objective.  We are, after all, civilized people, and enlightened self-restraint is for primitive savages who live sustainably in roadless paradises.

As incomes rise, the newly affluent are enjoying a more luxurious diet.  To satisfy this growing demand, food production must double by 2050.  “We’ll have to learn to produce as much food in the next four decades as we have since the beginning of civilization.”  Meanwhile, agriculture experts are not bursting with brilliant ideas.  “Producing food for more than 9 billion people without destroying the soil, water, oceans, and climate will be by far the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.”  Bourne’s book describes a number of gigantic obstacles to doubling food production — or even maintaining current production.

Automobiles are more addictive than crystal meth.  Europeans guzzle biodiesel made from palm oil.  Americans are binging on corn ethanol.  The 2005 Energy Tax Act mandated the addition of biofuels to gasoline.  From 2001 to 2012, the ethanol gold rush drove corn prices from $1.60 to $8.28.  Not coincidentally, in 2008 food riots erupted in twenty countries.  The Arab Spring revolts began in 2011, a year of record harvests and record prices.  Today, almost 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is being fed to motor vehicles — enough corn to feed everyone in Africa.  Experts predict that we’ll need four times more land for biofuels by 2030.

Crops require cropland, and almost all places ideal for farming are already in use, buried under roads and cities, or have been reduced to wasteland.  Every year, a million hectares (2.4 million acres) of cropland are taken out of production because of erosion, desertification, or development.  So, 90 percent of the desired doubling in food production will have to come from current cropland.  At the same time, the farm soils still in production have all seen better days.  Agriculture is an unsustainable activity that normally depletes soil quality over time.

Another obstacle is yield, the amount of food that can be produced on a hectare of land.  Between 1961 and 1986, cereal yields rose 89 percent, due to the Green Revolution.  But per capita grain production peaked in 1986.  Since then, population has been growing faster than yields.  Crop breeding experts are wringing their hands.  A number of indicators suggest that we are heading for “agricultural Armageddon,” but the experts remain silent, praying for miracles.  The biotech industry is focused on making huge profits selling seeds and poisons, not boosting yields.

Agriculture guzzles 70 percent of the water used by humans.  Irrigated fields have yields that are two to three times higher than rain fed fields.  Demand for water is projected to increase 70 to 90 percent by 2050, but water consumption today is already unsustainable.  “Over the next few decades, groundwater depletion could cripple agriculture around the world.”

Crop production is already being affected by climate change.  Research indicates that further warming will take a substantial toll on crop yields.  If temperatures rise 4°C, maybe half the world’s cropland will become unsuitable for agriculture.  Rising sea levels will submerge large regions currently used for rice production.

Meanwhile, population continues to grow, and some hallucinate it will grow until 2100.  In a nutshell, our challenge is “to double grain, meat, and biofuel production on fewer acres with fewer farmers, less water, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts, floods, and heat waves.”  This must be done “without destroying the forests, oceans, soils, pollinators, or climate on which all life depends.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is an outstanding book, and easy to read.  Most people have blind faith that innovation will keep the supermarkets filled forever.  Those who actually think a bit are focusing on stuff like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric cars.  Food is something we actually need, and it gets far less attention than it deserves.  By the end of the book, it’s impossible to conclude that everything is under control, and that our wise leaders will safely guide us through the storm.  Surprisingly, a few additional super-threats were not discussed in the book.

Bourne mentions that insects and weeds are developing resistance to expensive GMO wonder products, but stops there.  Big Mama Nature is the mother of resistance.  She never tires of producing new forms of life that are resistant to every toxin produced by science: insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, antibiotics.  Every brilliant weapon we invent will only work temporarily.  In terms of breeding new varieties of plants that are resistant to the latest biological threat, there are only so many tricks available.  The low-hanging fruit has already been used.  Just three plants enable the production of 80 to 90 percent of the calories we consume: corn, rice, and wheat. 

The global food system is heavily dependent on petroleum fuels, which are finite and nonrenewable.  There is no combination of biofuels or alternative energy that will come anywhere close to replacing oil.  In the coming decades, we will be forced to return to a muscle-powered food system.  We are entirely unprepared for this, and the consequences will be very exciting for people who eat food.

There is a similar issue with fertilizer.  Of the three primary plant nutrients, reserves of mineral phosphorus will be depleted first, and this will blindside conventional agriculture — no phosphorus, no life.  A hundred years ago, Chinese farmers used zero commercial fertilizer.  Every morning, long caravans of handcarts hauled large jugs of sewage from the cities to the fields.

In the end, readers are presented with two paths to the future.  One path looks like a whirlwind of big trouble, and this is not just a comic book doomer fantasy — it’s already blowing and rumbling.  The other path is happy and wonderful.  Humans will discover their legendary big brains, turn them on, shift industrial civilization into reverse, speed down the fast lane to genuine sustainability, and live happily ever after.  Place your bets. 

Bourne, Joel K., The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed A Crowded World, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2015.

For more information:  Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Against the Grain, Topsoil and Civilization, Farmers of Forty Centuries, The Coming Famine, Cadillac Desert, Pillar of Sand.

Ten Billion

Stephen Emmott is a chief techno-wizard at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.  His brilliant young scientists are doing research in complex natural systems.  Their objective is to invent miracles.  They want to program ordinary cells to perform photosynthesis, so we can produce food from sunlight, without plows and seeds.  Agriculture can’t feed ten billion.  The goal is to delay the onrushing planetary emergency, and push aside annoying obstacles to perpetual growth.

Much of the public seems to be paying little attention to the emergency, if they are aware of it at all.  Biking around the university town where I live, I don’t sense a crisis of overpopulation.  I don’t sense that global carbon emissions have increased 400 percent in my lifetime.  The squirrels, opossums, ducks, and blue jays have not gone extinct.  Life seems normal.  Everything is OK.  Right?

A wealth of information can be found online, but many internet factoids are generated by slippery gangsters who accumulate riches by accelerating the planetary emergency.  You see their work hundreds of times every day.  Among their favorite tools are magical rubber stamps that imprint [SUSTAINABLE] with subliminal green ink — [SUSTAINABLE] soil mining, [SUSTAINABLE] forest mining, [SUSTAINABLE] fish mining, [SUSTAINABLE] growth, [SUSTAINABLE] development, and on and on.

Emmott’s clan of brilliant scientists is an oddity.  They do not have the rubber stamp.  They are not wearing choke chains that will be jerked if they express ideas that offend the mighty.  They will not lose their jobs if they conclude that we are in the midst of a planetary emergency.  When thinkers are free to learn without blinders and hobbles, they come to perceive reality as an intense whirlwind of out-of-control juju.  This can be a head-snapping experience.

Emmott realized that it would be good to share his disturbing discoveries with the world, to help others see.  Being present in reality, with eyes wide open, breaks the spell.  It provides vision, coherence, and empowerment unavailable to those who stumble in a fog of illusions.  So, in a burst of creative energy, he sat down and wrote Ten Billion, a most unusual book.

It’s 216 pages long, but it can be read in less than an hour.  There is more white space than text.  Some pages are home to five words.  In a normal book, the text might fill 25 pages.  Ten Billion resembles a PowerPoint presentation — an orderly stream of brief statements, decorated with attention-grabbing photos and charts.  He smelted down a mountain of raw data, reducing it to vital conclusions, the pure essence of his vision, and nothing else.

According to one review, readers have a love/hate relationship with the book.  Techies and scientists tend to be annoyed by bold statements unsupported by exhaustive explanations and scholarly citations.  Commoners are more likely to appreciate the simplicity.  It’s encouraging that the book is keeping the cash registers busy at Amazon — it’s attracting hungry minds.  For oddballs like myself, who have read several hundred books on the planetary emergency, Ten Billion is just basic information that every well-educated high school student should know by now.

For example, “We currently have no known means of being able to feed ten billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system.”  Indeed, experts expect food productivity to decline in the coming decades, “possibly very sharply.”  Why?  Reserves of phosphate, a mineral nutrient essential for agriculture, are no longer plentiful.  Desertification and urban sprawl are reducing cropland area.  Soils are being depleted, or eroding away.  Weeds, diseases, and insects continue to develop resistance to our latest chemicals.  Farmers are draining rivers and emptying underground aquifers.

To feed ten billion people, many of whom want more meat, food production must double.  Keeping a growing mob on life support will require far more water, energy, and cropland.  Kiss the tropical forests goodbye.  Kiss countless wild species goodbye.  Adding more people will also increase carbon emissions and accelerate climate change.

Don’t worry about Peak Energy.  Instead, worry that we’ll continue extracting and burning what we’ve already discovered.  Worry that we’ll discover even more, and burn that, too.  Worry about climate change.  A 2°C rise in the global climate would be catastrophic.  New research suggests that a rise of 4 degrees is likely, and 6 degrees is possible.  As the Arctic heats up, large amounts of methane are being released in thousands of plumes.  “This could be very big trouble on a very big scale.”

Even if miracles provided us with abundant clean energy, eliminated climate change, and inspired us to consume far, far less, we’re still doomed if population growth continues.  It is helpful to educate more women, and provide family planning services, but it is still very common for women have more than two children, often many more.  “The worst thing we can continue to do — globally — is have children at the current rate.”

Anyway, after a quick tour of our primary challenges, Emmott finally reveals two options for addressing them, (1) technological innovation, and (2) radical behavior change.  He warns that expecting techno-miracles requires “a staggering leap into fantasy.”  Science is unlikely to rescue us.  But radical behavior change requires a radical reduction in consumption, radically different governments, and a radically different economy.  The bottom line is on the last page.  “We urgently need to do — and I mean actually do — something radical to avert global catastrophe.  But I don’t think we will.  I think we’re fucked.”

For years, publishers have required eco-books to offer some light at the end of the tunnel.  “We only have 30 years to prevent disaster.”  Then, it was 20 years.  Then, it was 10 years.  Write letters to your legislators!  Change your light bulbs!  Let’s mobilize the nation, as we did during World War II, to sharply reduce consumption!  Those books failed to make enough people care.  The house was not on fire, yet.

If you spent months studying 500 channels of TV, you would not be blown off your couch by a fire hose of messages describing the planetary emergency.  “We’re not getting the information we need.  The scale and nature of the problem is simply not being communicated to us.”  A healthy dose of truth might encourage us to reflect upon how we live, and what we value, but that would slow economic growth.

A primary objective of our education system is to prepare the next generation for careers in [SUSTAINABLE] development, so they can live like there’s no tomorrow.  To expose innocent youth to full strength reality would plunge them into deep despair, reducing them to walking dead zombies, we claim.  Actually, despair is a normal, healthy, and rational response to today’s reality.  It’s not a terminal illness, it’s an opening of the heart that revives us as we recover from soul loss.  How can we interact intelligently with reality if we don’t comprehend reality?

There is no silver bullet cure for the planetary emergency.  There is no undo button.  But living mindfully, present in reality, is healing and empowering.  Our species did not evolve to be recreational shoppers.  We weren’t meant to spend our lives mindlessly hoarding frivolous status trinkets.  There’s no future in that.  It’s not even fun.  There are other paths.

Emmott, Stephen, Ten Billion, Vintage Books, New York, 2013.

Who Will Feed China?

Lester Brown is an environmental analyst, and founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and the Earth Policy Institute.  His grand plan was to observe global trends, and produce objective information.  Brown’s many books and reports have provided rational advice for the world’s irrational policymakers.  He has not sold his soul to corporate interests.

In 1994, Brown wrote an essay, Who Will Feed China?  It triggered an explosive response.  Chinese leaders angrily denounced him.  But behind the scenes, they realized that their nation was vulnerable, because they had not perceived the big picture clearly.  Brown expanded his essay into a book with the same title, published in 1995.  It became a classic.  Reading it 20 years later is eerie, because many of his warnings now sound like the daily news.

Before they industrialized, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were already densely populated.  Then, the growth of industry gobbled up a lot of cropland, which reduced food production, and forced all three to become dependent on imported grain.  In 1994, Japan imported 72 percent of its grain, South Korea 66 percent, and Taiwan 76 percent.

Brown saw that China was on a similar trajectory.  Cropland was limited, and it was rapidly being lost to sprawl, industry, and highways.  They were likely to lose half of their cropland by 2030.  They were also likely to add another 500 million people by 2030.  As incomes rose, people were eager to enjoy a richer diet, including more meat and beer.  This required even more cropland per person.

Freshwater for agriculture was also limited, and much of it was being diverted to growing cities and factories.  About 300 cities were already short of water.  China’s capitol, Beijing, was among 100 cities with severe water shortages.  Demand for water was sure to rise.  Only a few Chinese had indoor plumbing, and everyone wanted it.

Many farmers were forced to drill wells and pump irrigation water from aquifers, often at rates in excess of natural recharge — water mining.  As enormous amounts of water were removed underground, subsidence occurs.  The ground surface sinks, filling the void below, making it impossible for the aquifer to recharge in the future.  In northern China, subsidence affects a region the size of Hungary.  Irrigated fields produce the most food, but water mining will eventually force a reduction in irrigation.  Some regions may be forced to stop growing rice, a water-guzzling crop, and replace it with less productive millet or sorghum.

Grain productivity (yield per hectare) annually grew an average of 7.1 percent between 1977 and 1984.  The annual increase was less than 2 percent between 1984 and 1990, and just 0.7 percent between 1990 and 1994.  There were great hopes for biotechnology, but 20 years of efforts led to no significant increase in grain yields.  Meanwhile, the Yellow River moved 1.6 billion tons of topsoil to the ocean every year.

Now, assemble the pieces.  Population was likely to grow from 1.2 billion in 1995 to 1.66 billion in 2045.  Per capita grain consumption was growing, likely to increase 33 percent by 2030.  Cropland area was likely to decrease 50 percent by 2030.  Water for irrigation was limited, and certain to diminish.  Annual grain harvests may have been close to, or beyond, their historic peak.  The effects of climate change cannot be predicted, but might be severe.  In 1995, the notion of Peak Oil had not yet spread beyond the lunatic fringe, and Brown didn’t mention it, but at some point, it will make modern agriculture impossible.

Demand for grain was rising at a rate that would sharply exceed China’s harvests.  If their economy remained strong, they would have the money to import food.  But, would the food they need be available on the world market?  Following a century of catastrophic population growth, many nations were dependent on imported food.

As world population continued to grow, the ability to further increase food production was wheezing.  World grain stocks fell from 465 million tons in 1987, to 298 million tons in 1994.  At some point, surging demand for grain would exceed the surpluses of the exporters.  This would drive up the price of food.

Brown selected ten large developing nations where population growth remained extreme, and projected how much food they would need to import by 2030.  “By 2030, these countries — assuming no improvement in diet — will need to import 190 million tons of grain.  This is six times the amount they import today and nearly equal to total world grain exports in 1994.”

We were moving into an era of food instability.  “For the first time, an environmental event — the collision of expanding human demand with some of the earth’s natural limits — will have an economic impact that affects the entire world.”  Annual economic growth for the world was falling.  The global economy grew 5.2 percent in the ’60s, 3.4 percent in the ’70s, 2.9 percent in the ’80s, and 1.4 percent in 1990-94.  Slower growth, plus rising food prices, plus falling incomes, sets the stage for trouble.  “It could lead to political unrest and a swelling flow of hungry migrants across national borders.”

Agriculture was running out of steam.  The wizards of industrial civilization insisted that perpetual growth was possible, because our miraculous technology could overcome all challenges.  They were wrong.  Brown concludes, “The bottom line is that achieving a humane balance between food and people is now more in the hands of family planners than farmers.”  When Brown wrote, there were 5.6 billion of us.  Irrational policymakers disregarded the urgent need for family planning.  And so, today, at 7.2 billion, the world is a far more unstable place, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Twenty years before Brown’s book, China realized that population growth was a problem.  They were adding 13 million every year, and emigration was not a real option.  Their one-child policy was launched in 1979, and the transition was bumpy.  The birthrate fell from 2.7 percent in 1970 to 1.1 percent in 1994.  It succeeded in preventing much misery, but it didn’t stop growth.  Brown praised them for actually taking action, forcing the present generation to sacrifice for the benefit of future generations — a concept unimaginable to Americans.

Brown, Lester R., Who Will Feed China?, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1995.

Here are recent follow-up reports from the Earth Policy Institute:

Can the World Feed China?  Lester R. Brown, February 25, 2014

Peak Water: What Happens When the Wells Go Dry?  Lester R. Brown, July 09, 2013

Global Grain Stocks Drop Dangerously Low as 2012 Consumption Exceeded Production , Janet Larsen, January 17, 2013