Reading New Thoughts: What Do We Want the World to Be When We Grow Up? (Hiss, “Restoring the Planet”)

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I have recently been reading “Restoring the Planet,” by Tony Hiss, and it has prompted some far more general thoughts about the endgame of successful climate change efforts.

Hiss book lays out, more or less, a global if North-America-centered effort to “set aside” 50% of all land from human use, to be achieved by 2050 (giving a nice slogan, “50 by ‘50”.)  He then discusses the ways in which people are using that effort to identify ecosystems and then as far as possible preserve or restore them, free from humanity’s touch. In other words, the areas being saved are then altered if necessary to create, as far as possible, functioning ecosystems having long-term viability without needing constant human intervention.

For example, one such effort seeks to “carve out” existing spaces where animals roam in fixed patterns and connect these via “corridors” that ensure that humans will not decimate the animals but still allow the animals sufficient range to be viable.  Another seeks to reserve remaining “wilderness” by establishing ownership of the property involved by entities dedicated to keeping it human-unaffected.

These efforts, and others, seem to me today to follow disparate ideas of what the endgame is and how to get there, only loosely coordinated if at all.  I believe that what I have seen can be more or less classified into five approaches, or movements:

1.       Sustainability

2.       Regeneration

3.       Human-designed ecologies

4.       No-human ecologies (more or less the approach described by Hiss)

5.       Human-included ecologies

Terms of Ecological Endearment

The approaches I have listed above overlap in some cases – a human-designed ecology may be aimed at creating a long-term sustainable ecosystem, or simply at regenerating an area to repair the damages of the recent past.  What matters, I think, is the goal of the approach, as an exclusive focus on one approach may or may not lead to the promised land of a low-carbon-emissions steady-state global set of ecosystems.  So it seems appropriate to examine each approach in that light.

Sustainability, it seems, it the most-known approach.  It explicitly requires setting up steady-state ecosystems, and only by inference those with low carbon emissions, since otherwise (one guesses) carbon-emission-induced climate change will make ecosystems unsustainable.  There is an unmistakable air of “whatever works” about the sustainability approach – it is thus entirely agnostic about regeneration and human-designed vs. human-included vs. no-human ecologies.

Regeneration, by contrast, seems to say that simply by restoring a previous state of an ecosystem will automagically result in a steady-state low-carbon-emissions environment, because the previous state of the ecosystem had this characteristic.  What makes this questionable is that one can’t walk through the same river twice: due to the Columbian Exchange, few ecosystems are the way they were 500 years ago, before carbon emissions started rising.

Human-designed ecologies is very much, I think, the province of the “new environmentalists”, those who think that we cannot restore ecosystems to a previous state and therefore we are forced to design new ecosystems, using existing tools, that will achieve a steady state.  Since this is a pragmatic approach, it leans toward leaving humans where they are and/or accommodating but constraining them as they continue expanding into the world’s ecosystems.  However, the question arises as to who decides what’s an appropriate end game – clearly, indigenous populations are not on the priority list of those who advocate human-designed ecologies.

No-human ecologies, by contrast, is the ideological leaning of the “old environmentalists”, who based on their experiences in the 1970s at the advent of the environmentalist movement tend to worry that humans, by and large, blight everything they touch.  I believe that this approach accords with the effort, in the US at least, to buy up everything possible not owned by the government (in Massachusetts, the aim is to acquire 80% of the land area) and turn it into places where humans go either not at all or only rarely.  Of course, the lands involved for the most part right now are the ones least subject to carbon pollution.  I would also guess that the main sticking point in the immediate future is places involved in mining, including those minerals involved in solar-power generation, not to mention installation of solar arrays in these areas.

I admit that I am fond of the human-included ecologies approach, because it seems to me more flexible than either the human-designed or no-human approaches.  That is, we make an exception to the no-humans approach where indigenous peoples have a strong track record of living sustainably on the land.  In many cases, these indigenous peoples have been strongly tainted by the modern economy and nation-state institutions, but there is clearly a case to be made that they still are the quickest way to restore a low-carbon-emissions steady state – not to mention the irony of visiting the worst consequences of a no-human-ecology approach on the worst sufferers from our previous “civilizing” emissions-hungry system.

In Which I Vote For All of the Above

I look at all of these approaches from the point of view of a climate-change person who is primarily concerned that we mitigate as fast as possible – that we reduce carbon emissions as fast as possible, with the ultimate steady state, if any, a secondary consideration for now.  Viewed in that light, I believe that each of these approaches is appropriate in a wide range of particular cases, and thus I am happy to “let a thousand flowers bloom” – i.e., encourage each of these movements.

At the same time, each time one of these movements comes into conflict with another, I think it is the right thing, not to commit to one side or another for the long term, but rather to establish rules of thumb for when a particular approach is most appropriate.  I would suggest that among these rules of thumb are:

·         When there are vested human interests in an area, pick the approach that impacts them least (but still minimizes carbon emissions)

·         Likewise, pick the approach that involves the quickest path to a healthy ecosystem (i.e., consider the needs of non-human animals and plants first)

·         Focus sustainability efforts on what seems irretrievably human-dominated – in other words, cities and their irreducible agricultural hinterland.  Since, in the foreseeable future, that comprises much more than half of humanity, but far less than a quarter of all of the land, that means both a human-designed and human-dominated ecology.

I would also bear in mind that each of these approaches, unlike mitigation, asks and tries to  answer the questions:  What do we want the world to be like if and when we cease our immature destruction of ecosystems and achieve a low-carbon-emissions world?  And, how can we ensure that we act maturely from now on and never again risk ourselves and our planet in this way?  For that reason, I would say that, while I would not prioritize any of these approaches over mitigation, they are every bit as important as adaptation to climate change’s effects.  If not more so.