The future will be green… or black. (3 of 4)
A down-to-earth vision of how to avoid the worst
***THIS IS PART III OF IV***
Click to go to Part I, Part II, or Part IV
The world we know is falling apart. It is being torn apart, in fact, by us modern humans and our improvidence. Reading the newspaper, watching the news, or simply walking through a town these days easily awakes this feeling us. Climate breakdown is devastating the planet, wildlife disappears at ever-increasing rates, and social polarization and the worldwide trend towards political authoritarianism sets the stage for civil unrest or even war.
The underlying problem and the most existential threat we face today is the annihilation of ecosystems through destruction and pollution. This massive anthropogenic disruption causes unprecedented global warming and a myriad of other accompanying problems, such as the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, the degradation of ecosystems and the concomitant food insecurities and social instability, and soaring inequality.
The situation is so dire that some scholars start concluding that it is too late, and that nothing can be done anyway. Climate breakdown, despite being ‘fought’, ‘battled’, and ‘combatted’ by the public for decades, is raging on at breakneck speed and is now considered ‘out of control’ and ‘unstoppable’.
Renewables won’t save us, technology won’t save us, and it is fairly realistic that even our worst-case scenarios might be true and the Earth will turn into a hothouse. Despite all our recycling, reduced meat consumption, cycling, and showering, CO2 emissions continue to rise, more oil is being extracted and burned, more species go extinct, more forests are being razed, and more rivers polluted year after year.
We pass threshold after threshold, yet nothing happens to change our course towards extinction. Public mood slowly shifts towards desperate- and hopelessness.
To find a way out of the mess we’ve created, four questions are of utmost importance:
1. Who is responsible for this ecological crisis?
2. What does ‘living sustainable’ even mean?
3. What the hell do we do about all those problems?
4. And, more importantly, how do we do this?
In the following, I will attempt to answer those fundamental questions from my own perspective and knowledge, and draw up a rough draft of one (but not the one) possible solution, or at least a direction. I don’t consider myself an expert of any kind — I’m just a man who loves his natural habitat — and I am fully aware that my proposals are still sketchy and fragmentary — but I feel like time is running out fast. Our situation has no precedent in history, so we’ll just have to try what works, and how. If we have a vaguely defined goal (which is what I’m trying to outline in the following chapters), we can just start working towards that head over heels and figure out the exact methods in the process. If we just stick to a few basic principles, the range for failure is limited to a minimum. There is no time to lose.
I will deliberately refrain from talking about any political issues, because it should be evident by now that this is undeniably an ecological — not a political! — problem. It therefore needs ecological solutions, not political ones. Talk about political “solutions” is a waste of time, an unnecessary detour with limited possibilities for success. ‘The environment’ does not care about more petitions, protests, agreements, talks, promises, reports, meetings, campaigns, discussions, laws and regulations, about humans talking to humans about humans, men in suits in offices in cities, nor does it about who’s being called president or prime minister. Politics is too bureaucratic, too theoretic, too alienated from the real world, takes too long, is too corrupt, and too unreliable. There is too much opposition and too much self-interest.
We are on our own on this one, and no politicians will magically save the world for us.
Because I live in the tropics, I am most familiar with this particular ecology, and consequently many examples will be drawn from tropical settings. While certain examples or techniques are clearly limited to the tropics, they might be applied in other climates as well in one form or another — thinking this through is up to the interested reader. The outline of the ideas presented here should be sufficient to adapt them to almost all climate zones that can be sustainably inhabited by modern humans.
Not all of my thoughts on this topic are easy to digest, some sound quaint at first, and some are highly controversial. But for lack of alternatives to the current way of living (and slightly altered versions of it), I will try to lay out a roadmap to a better world for us and every other organism. This obviously includes a good bit of unprecedented optimism — and I will be accused of utopianism, idealism, naivety, and probably a few other, less friendly things. But the world I have in mind is not a bad one, and maybe you happen to find some of my ideas soothing and nurturing as well. The problem is not humanity by and large, it is merely our current culture of death and destruction.
There is no reason to give up all hope yet.
For reasons of convenience, I have published the answer to each of the four questions separately, so you can read one at a time whenever you have a few minutes. For the full version, click here.
All parts of this essay are of course completely free to access and not hidden behind a paywall. If you are more comfortable reading offline or on an ebook reader, you can also download the .pdf, .epub, and .mobi file here.
Part III: What can we do?
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
— Albert Einstein
The answer to this might surprise you, anger you, or make you laugh.
Truth is, the vast majority of people have absolutely no idea just how radically they will have to change their life. We will have to give up plenty of so-called ‘comforts’ and ‘luxuries‘ (which are utterly unimportant and useless anyway, as anyone who has seriously tried can confirm).
We will have to go back to the land, get to know it, and learn how to live with it and within it.
First, let us explore the core problem (greenhouse gasses, or, more accurately, atmospheric carbon levels that perpetuate climate breakdown) in greater detail:
There are five important carbon sinks (or stores): the atmosphere, the lithosphere (fossil deposits), the hydrosphere (oceans), the forests (biosphere), and the soils. Carbon was cycled through the ecosystems for literally billions of years, with Nature keeping the balance (with the exception of the occasional Mass Extinction Event, of course, which usually had something to do with a rapid atmospheric carbon de- or increase, or the greenhouse effect in general).
Ever since our agricultural culture (the first civilizations) entered the scene 10,000 years ago, things changed a lot: we started burning and clear-cutting forests on a massive scale, multiplied without constraint, modified the landscape to serve our will, and ultimately dug up all the fossil fuels Nature had so carefully placed in safe distance deep underground — just to let our machine slaves spew them back out into the atmosphere.
This time, for the first time in the planet’s history, the major imbalance was not only avoidable, but is entirely the fault of one single species. Each day that we fail to act despite knowing the effects of our misdeeds contributes to the increasingly unsurpassable consequences of our blind hedonism, our incapability, stupidity and arrogance.
If we want to avoid our own extinction (and that of millions of other species), we would have to find a way to quickly transfer vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere to the carbon pools we can easily influence in a positive way: the forests and the soils.
The atmosphere is already more than oversaturated with CO2, and even the ocean, the biggest carbon sink, has difficulties coping with the sheer scale — acidification and the concomitant loss of marine life are among the consequences. The depletion and combustion of fossil deposits of carbon are what caused the extremely high levels of CO2 in our atmosphere in the first place, so if we want to change anything, we better stop extracting and burning any more fossil fuels, leave them where they are, shut down the mines, factories and refineries, and send the workers on leave.
Only 25 corporations (all of which are in the fossil fuel business) are responsible for over half of greenhouse gas emissions, so the first step would be to abandon those workplaces. Seriously, just quit.
They depend on the workers, not the other way around. If we would just find a way to satisfy our basic needs without being dependent on their money, we could set ourselves free. It should be of course a priority for all those who already produce food or own sufficient quantities of land to take those freed workers under their wings, and anybody taking this drastic step can be considered a hero.
If all this sounds “too radical”, ask yourself this: do you want your children (and yourself) to die of old age, or of premature, possibly violent causes? Do you want to starve, dehydrate, die from disease, or from excessive, inescapable heat, eyes burning, mouth dry, and tongue swollen? If we fail to act now, this is where we’re heading.
The two remaining carbon sinks we humans can most easily work with are the forests and the soils. Both of those are already under constant threat, and both lost a great amount of carbon once stored within them. Deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices are to blame for that (and, as previously learned, the rich people behind those efforts).
A hint to what needs to be done is the so-called Orbis Spike, a short but noticeable dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide captured in the Antarctic ice core around the year 1610. The Orbis Spike (from the Latin ‘orbis’: world) can be contributed to one of the most famous destroyer of a world (and consequently the creator of a new one): Christopher Columbus. When he and his men arrived in the “New” World, they carried smallpox and other diseases that quickly spread over the whole continent, killing over 50 million people in a matter of a few years. Many of the societies affected were horticultural or even agricultural ones, and the following gradual conversion of farmland back to forest was what caused this spike. The newly emerging trees sucked up so much carbon from the atmosphere that this led to a temporary cooling of the planet. This was the last time the climate cooled down before the anthropogenic exponential warming period began whose consequences we now start feeling in our everyday lives. Of course, carbon levels quickly went up again as new settlers arrived, clearcut the forests, and started farming themselves, but the lesson the Orbis Spike holds is important.
Luckily for us, we can achieve something similar without epidemic disease and the death of millions. All we have to do is convert monoculture farmlands to forests and learn to live with and in them, on an unprecedented scale.
After the collapse of the USSR something similar happened: about 110 million acres of farmland were abandoned, and started to rewild. Forest succession slowly converted the barren land, which started to fix more and more carbon. New estimates show that this abandoned farmland soaks up about 50 million tons (!) of carbon every year (that’s 0.05 Gt C — almost equal to the amount of the combined biomass of all humans on Earth), ever since it first fell fallow in 1990. To put this number into a broader context: that’s about 10 per cent of Russia’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions. This is remarkable, Jonathan Sanderman, soil chemist at CSIRO Land and Water in Australia, points out, since “most nations are only committed to 5 per cent reduction targets. So by doing absolutely nothing — by having depressed their economy — they’ve achieved quite a bit [emphasis added].” He also considers abandoned farmland the largest human-made carbon sink (!). The above-linked study’s co-author Irina Kurganova deems it possible that another 261 million tons will be sequestered over the next 30 years, until the forest reaches an equilibrium and releases almost as much carbon as it takes up.
The lesson this holds for us is that Nature can easily soak up vast quantities of carbon — as long as we don’t stand in her way. The key is, again, inaction towards natural processes.
On a similar note, the during the ‘Younger Dryas’ about 12,800 years ago, the climate suddenly cooled notably (by a few degrees Celsius). In this period, the atmospheric methane levels fell rapidly from about 680 to 450 ppb (by comparison, in November 2017 we reached 1887.7 ppb). So far, this was attributed to a reduction in methane emissions from wetlands due to cooler temperatures, but a promising new theory might explain what caused those initial cooler temperatures in the first place. This new theory holds that the plummeting of global temperatures was very likely caused by humans reaching the American continent and the subsequent ‘megafauna extinction’ of 114 species (amounting to millions of individuals) of large herbivores that took place when the emerging human population started overexploiting those enormous animal populations. Herbivores, especially of course in large numbers, are a notorious source of methane, so a rapid decline in herbivore population levels would cause an equally rapid drop in atmospheric methane levels. It has ben calculated that those megafauna losses during the Younger Dryas could explain anywhere between 12.5 and 100 (!) per cent of the decline in atmospheric methane, or up to 0.5° C of the cooling. While the exact numbers are still subject to some scientific controversy, it seems obvious that the loss of so many large herbivores over such a short time period must have some global effect.
Methane (CH4, a major constituent of natural gas) is between 28 and 32 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas — but much more short-lived. While CO2 stays in the atmosphere for anywhere between 20 and 200 years, methane breaks down in a mere 9 to 12 years. It seems like on the short run, we can accomplish a lot when we reduce methane emissions.
The easiest way to do this is to end factory farming of animals (without becoming overly dogmatic vegans in the process!), which would cause an unprecedented decline in atmospheric methane levels (and therefore a noticeable cooling in only 10 years from now), relieve billions of fellow animals from unimaginable suffering, free up a lot of land for humans to cultivate and take care of, reduce algae blooms and concomitant aquatic dead zones, and allow us to have one last big barbecue before our meat consumption will drop to more sustainable levels.
If we all were to become subsistence farmers, meat consumption would drop anyway because many people wouldn’t slaughter animals in the first place, and because keeping animals often requires more effort and care than planting crops (even though in colder climates other animals might be crucial to a regenerative diet). Some domestic animals would automatically rewild, and roam the countryside again. Once they reach sufficient, stable numbers, ‘limited hunting’ (obeying prohibitions to ensure that animal number stay constant) becomes an option again.
Domesticated animals and humans together make up 96% of all terrestrial mammals (60% is livestock, 36% are humans), and the combined biomass of livestock is about 0.1 gigatons carbon (compared with the combined biomass of all humans, about 0.06 Gt C, and that of wild mammals, 0.007 Gt C). Plants make up 450 (!) Gt C, and bacteria about 70 Gt C.
There is too much carbon (either as CO2 or as CH4) in the atmosphere, and atmospheric carbon needs to be fixed (“sequestered”) in large amounts in the soil or in living beings (“biomass”, e.g. trees) to stop CO2 and other greenhouse gasses from heating up the planet. Nature’s solution is to grow forests, our scientists’ solutions are geo-engineering and more technology (to sequester carbon). It is utterly ridiculous to think that we humans, one single species, can do this better than the system that has been doing it for eons.
Without human interference (starting with deforestation 10,000 years ago, but taking off especially after the Industrial Revolution) there would be no noteworthy global warming today (possibly even another Ice Age), so we can conclude that Nature, if left alone, would outbalance slight changes in the atmospheric carbon concentration quickly, and therefore prevent runoff climate change in the most efficient manner. If atmospheric carbon levels increase slightly, this can be easily reversed by faster-growing trees. But this natural rebalancing cannot happen if we humans cut those trees and burn them.
Unlucky for us, human development has outpaced Nature’s capability to restore equilibrium, so that even if she does whatever is in her power, she cannot undo the damage caused by our civilization. If we want to invert the damage done by us, the answer can and should not be more human interference with natural systems. Since the dawn of civilization, we have managed to cut down almost half of the world’s forests in our futile attempt to ‘tame the wild’.
We have to let Nature take control once again, and do as little as possible to distract her while doing what she wants. Even more so, we have to actively help her achieving her goals.
But what does Nature herself want? To answer this question, we can perform a simple thought experiment: let’s stake out a few hundred hectares of land on each continent and in each climate zone. Now we reduce all human activity (including pollution) to zero, retain current levels of temperatures and precipitation, and fast-forward a few hundred or a few thousand years. In all places with enough rainfall we will see our imaginary plot of land covered in trees and inhabited by a multitude of different species.
Without human intervention and assuming the climate stays stable, Nature will always try to create forests. Forests are the most diverse and most resilient land ecosystems. It is safe to say that creating diverse forests is Nature’s will.
Nature is a self-regulating system, and if we just let Nature do her job, she will sequester all the carbon necessary to restore the balance. Literally all a tree does is sequester carbon and provide animals with vital oxygen in the process. The older a tree is, the more (and the faster!) she stores carbon in her body. Nature has been sequestering carbon for hundreds of millions of years, and it resulted in the vast underground reserves of fossil fuels that we are now depleting. This magnificent example of natural carbon sequestration is now being trampled on by humans who want more merchandise and want to travel more and travel faster. In the process of satisfying alleged “needs” we have successfully converted almost all fossilized carbon back into atmospheric carbon, then realized that it will render the planet uninhabitable — and now we need a way to store it in the soils and forests again.
But where do we start? How can we get out of Nature’s way, and, more importantly, how can we help Nature achieve her goals?
Richard Heinberg’s proposed ”50 million farmers [in the US]” would be a good beginning, but I personally think we shouldn’t stop there. The majority of people will have to adapt the self-sufficient lifestyle of subsistence farming if we want any long-standing chances.
Agriculture is, as previously explored, one of the fundamental parts of the problem — so farming itself has to be overhauled, redefined and transformed, from monocropping few selected varieties to polycropping a broad spectrum of perennials, vines, wild vegetables, and trees. Instead of extracting the absolute maximum quantity of food from the ground, we will have to make the fast recovery of the tree cover and the restoration of biodiversity our top priority. Food security will be ensured automatically along the way. This way we will sequester carbon, repair the natural water cycle, increase species diversity, and get some delicious food to feed ourselves and our community.
There are two alternatives to conventional agriculture that are of utmost importance for us, yet whose meaning we partly have to redefine to exclude potentially harmful tendencies:
Silviculture (from the Latin ‘silva’: wood + culture) is the practice of helping with the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests to meet diverse needs and values of whole ecosystems and the humans inhabiting them. If we need more trees, we will have to plant them and take care of them.
Until now, modern silviculture exerts plenty of control and domination over the forest ecosystem, uses heavy machinery, and is often highly influenced by economic factors and motivated by making profits for rich people. As soon as trees reach a desired height, they are cut and sold, without considering the needs of the forest itself. Forests need old trees to maximize their efficiency and resilience, and the older a forest is, the more habitat there is for a diverse mix of other species, and the better and more efficient it gets at sequestering carbon and producing oxygen.
We will have to change the definition and applicability of silviculture to include respect and reverence the wild and untamed, and cooperation with Nature for the benefit of the whole ecosystem (not just a few selected members of one species).
Permaculture is a system of horticultural and social ethics and principles centered around imitating or directly utilizing the patterns, systems and features observed in natural ecosystems. Instead of working against Nature, you try to cooperate with her to reap the greatest possible benefits for the greatest possible number of species. Permaculture means gardening with Nature, learning and understanding how Nature works, what she wants, accepting her, and trying to compromise and work together so that the both of you are happy.
Currently there is a trend towards a kind of organic agri-culture, orderly planting only human crops in neat rows (on fields), in a way that is hardly natural (meaning it cannot be found in Nature like that). Originally, permaculture ethics had a much stronger focus on the wild, and on letting Nature take things in her own hand. We humans should just assist with — not dictate — the direction in which the ecosystem is moving.
We also have to break up the monotony and homogeneity of our current diet. That means examining and revaluating all species that we eat, drop the ones which we can’t grow ourselves, include more wild and local food plants, and explore little-known food plants with promising attributes (like drought resistance).
Food is much more abundant all around us than most people realize. Even in our cities, edible, drought-resistant plants are literally everywhere — and they are, according to new research, even more nutritious than store-bought food. We just have to re-learn how to eat them. Many have a bitter, sour or astringent taste (which is an indicator for vital phytonutrients), and people who are not used to those tastes might dislike them at first. But just as you slowly get used to spicy food when you eat it every day, you will get used to the bitter taste as well. Only then will you discover that there is a whole new spectrum of flavors hidden behind the initial bitterness, a world of distinct and pleasant flavors that slowly surface the more bitter foods you eat.
Many primitive tribes consider bitter food as having the “grown-up taste”, and you can only consider yourself a real adult once you can eat even the most bitter things.
There are well-intentioned efforts underway to identify “resilient foods” and to show that they are indeed not only edible but delicious. But so far, the events that got the most media attention (like the recent “Food Forever Experience NYC” hosted at Google’s New York City offices) have been mostly disappointing, meaningless, and superficial, a random assembly of hipsters and techies, by wealthy city people for wealthy city people, who all feel like they really accomplished something and contributed to “sustainability”. They agree that “things must change”, and they are ready to consume different foods — as long as they themselves don’t have to change anything apart from what they buy.
I ask myself: how do those people think food is grown? A farmer in a straw hat on his knees, ripping out weeds from around the seedlings? Small, diverse farm-gardens with black soil, singing birds, and happy farmers?
Only people who have absolutely no idea about how our civilization’s food supply works can be that delusional and naïve. Reality looks much different, and changing this reality requires much more effort than “foodies” in New York can even imagine.
If they want more diversity, more exotic, resilient, organic and nutritious food on the supermarket shelves, how do they think it will get there? Our current way of food production can only sustain such large populations because it focusses intensively on a handful of crops, which are grown on gigantic scales, sown and harvested by monstrous machines, and regularly doused in toxic chemicals. Only by farming this way can a few farmers supply all our cities.
Planting a wider variety of crops requires much more people working on food production, completely different techniques, less automation and more manual work, and a significant reduction in the scale of farming and the use of agricultural machines. The city people can sit around and wait for “sustainable” food to appear in their stores as long as they want — but as long as they don’t go and help growing it, all this will never happen.
Right now, one average farmer in the technologized and industrialized world feeds between 120 and 170 people (for example 133 people in Germany, and 165 in the US).
Average farm size is 16 hectares in 2010 in the European Union (56 hectares in Germany), and a staggering 180 hectares in the US. This is merely the median size — there are many farms that are considerably bigger than that.
In any human-friendly climate zone, one can easily feed a small family with one or two hectares of land (one hectare is equal to a square of 100m by 100m) on a plant-heavy (but flexible omnivorous) diet obtained from a silvi-permacultural agroforestry system. It would be possible for large numbers of people from the city to resettle on agricultural land to cultivate it themselves. This would require far less fossil fuels and no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, as long as permacultural techniques (such as companion planting, composting, biochar, vermicompost, legume intercropping, eating weeds and pests, etc.) are applied.
If we crunch the numbers — which of course does not say much about actual applicability but merely acts as a statistical visualization — we see that, at least in theory, it might as well be possible. There is enough space for a world of self-sufficient permacultural subsistence farmers.
Going with the latest official numbers of how much arable/livable land is available and dividing this number by the human world population, we arrive at a number between 0.7 and 1.5 people per hectare, depending on whether we include forests and shrublands (which are definitely sustainably or even regeneratively habitable, as we see with many primitive tribes) or if we constrain our thought experiment to agricultural land.
This of course is a gross oversimplification and merely serves illustrative purposes. But what it shows is that, at least in theory, there would be enough space for people to live in a regenerative way.
Many might not want move away from the city, because they say they “like it there”. To what extend this preference for the city is actually their unbiased personal opinion — and to what extend it is fabricated by advertising — remains debatable, but maybe those people would soon realize that life in Nature is our only option if we want to survive as a species, and that life in Nature is no more difficult and exhausting than city life once you get used to it.
Ancient and contemporary primitive people surely were not less happy than today’s urban population.
All of us have ancestors that were at one point or another forest dwellers with unique and highly sophisticated modes of subsistence and a rich forest culture. We will need to rediscover how to obtain food from forests and how to stay within its boundaries. After cutting down three quarters of the world’s trees since we first started building civilizations, we’ve come a long way — and there is much to be repaired in terms of physical and spiritual connectedness to our environment and knowing it and all its parts intimately.
As a general rule of thumb, we can look at and learn from the native populations that inhabit(ed) the same land we live on now. How do they feed themselves? What species do they eat, and how do they harvest/hunt and prepare them? How do they build their shelters? What hunting/fishing restrictions do they follow? Which species have a high spiritual significance and why?
In the tropics, this means eating plenty of forest foods like fruit, leafy greens, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, small game, fish, and insects, but also crops that can be planted in small plots of land called swiddens. The crops planted in those gardens include bananas, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, cassava, papaya, pineapple, passionfruit, and literally hundreds of herbs and vegetables.
Those forest gardens are traditionally cleared with the slash-and-char method often employed by primitive, semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer-horticulture communities like the Dayak, the Yanomami, the Zo’é, or the Huaorani — controlled burning of the understory to create charcoal which enrichens the soil as biochar and stores carbon for hundreds of years in it.
Of course, we will have no tropical forest in our backyard to begin with, so planting trees would be the first step. Instead of slash-and-char, we would use fast-growing woods and bamboo to make charcoal, which can be mixed with excrement (see Part IV), added to the soil, and has the same positive effect on soil fertility.
There is plenty of work to be done: land needs to be restored, biodiversity needs to be revived, topsoil needs to be built, and carbon needs to be sequestered (in a natural way!), so implementing silviculture paired with permacultural techniques will be our best shot.
I know that this all seems like we’ve been there before, but this is not, or at least only partly, correct. While our subsistence mode will have to resemble something we’ve done at one point or the other in the distant past, the big difference is what we’ve learned in the meantime. Nobody can predict where ancient techniques paired with new knowledge about the world and our place in it will lead us, but it sure will be better than what we have right now.
I am not a big fan of the whole backward-forward language, and what I propose here is not a “return” to a former way of life — we don’t have to “go back”. Life in preindustrial agricultural societies certainly had its flaws (albeit higher levels of free time), but most of the drudgery came from having to support an elite, their standing army, and the city. What I propose is: don’t support the city. Cities are inherently unsustainable, and there is no realistic future scenario where the majority of humans live in cities in a sustainable fashion.
Fancy architectural drawings of shiny, semi-green urban areas with vertical farms and forests, white rounded buildings and maglev trains are little more than science-fiction aimed at keeping the masses docile through empty promises of a better, brighter, and “sustainable!” tomorrow. Similar drawings were produced throughout the 19th and 20th century (supposedly depicting the year 2000), yet only the fewest innovations presented actually ever materialized. So far, our world has become nothing like those predictions, quite to the contrary.
When we talk about proposed technological solutions (commonly termed “going forwards”), it is of utmost importance to consider that projects on the required scale would take decades to be realized. An example for the sheer timescale of infrastructure projects I recently read about was the last phase of the three-stop extension of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line — a relatively miniscule change — which nonetheless took twelve entire years to be realized.
Instead of throwing all of our manpower, creativity, energy, efforts, and waking hours at large-scale infrastructure and technology projects that will not be finished in time to make a difference anyway, we better give up those things in the first place. What do those projects accomplish? Does building a surge barrier around costal cities magically stall the warming and prevent further sea level rise? Do carbon-sequestering machines automatically inhibit the production of further emissions and pollution?
Quite the contrary, you can be sure if any of those technologies is in sight, it will be an excuse for rich people and their corporations to go on exploiting and destroying — since all you have to do to “save the planet” from that point on is an arms race between carbon emitting and carbon sequestering machines. Technological solutions for a problem largely created by technology is opium for the people. It means that if you just continue with your normal life, go to work, eat out, share your life on social media, wear fashionable clothes, binge-watch Netflix, buy the latest tech gadgets, the solution is just around the corner — created by the same people who get you high on digital opium. You’d have to be one hell of a fool to believe this line of reasoning.
All of what I propose here does not mean “going back” to anything, since there is no precedent for our situation in history. It means drawing upon all our knowledge, abandoning what we don’t need and going straight ahead into the future.
Epidemics and famines are another aspect that scares people from thinking about a simpler life, yet both are (with very few exceptions) almost entirely agricultural phenomena.
Famines are usually caused by agricultural monocropping, which is notoriously susceptible to crop damage. Planting one single crop on an area spanning several hectares is like an open invitation for diseases, fungi, and insect “pests” preying on this particular plant. All it took was one microorganism (potato blight) to kill over a million Irish people heavily relying on this one crop. Were something similar to happen to todays wheat or corn crops, the consequences would be unimaginable.
On the other hand, the higher the number of species that make up your diet, the higher your chances to have enough food even in difficult times. When Richard Lee visited the !Kung-San people in Botswana for his famous study, the Kalahari desert they inhabit was suffering from a severe drought. The neighboring Bantu people, pastoralists (semi-nomadic herders), were dying of starvation, whereas the bushmen hunter-gatherers (whose diet includes over 150 different plants and animals) merely complained that they had to work so much (three hours per day!) to find food.
When talking about epidemics it is noteworthy to remember that most epidemic diseases were a byproduct of the shift to a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle. By not moving around, living under the same roof as domesticated animals (and therefore living in their own and their animals’ excrement without having any idea what basic hygiene is), increasing population, and building ever-larger cities, people created optimal conditions for new diseases to emerge, cross the species barrier, and spread. Cholera, smallpox, mumps, measles, influenza, chicken pox, tuberculosis, typhus, bubonic plague, and even malaria epidemics were the direct result of the Agricultural Revolution. If it wasn’t for this lifestyle change and its consequences, most of those diseases wouldn’t even have emerged in the first place, and the few diseases present before this shift were local phenomena that never killed more than a handful of people.
At the same time, the variety of foods that made up the diet — and concomitantly the health of the people — declined sharply when humans transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. There is a direct correlation between the diversity in your diet and your overall health. The greater the number of foods we consume, the higher the chances that our body gets exactly the nutrients, vitamins, minerals it requires in any given situation. A diverse diet ensures that our immune system works at its best, therefore reducing the fatality of even the deadliest diseases. Those early farmers could have planted a bigger variety, but — if your crop survives until harvest — the surpluses are much larger if you focus on only one single crop.
Early city states encouraged, coerced or forced people to plant grains not because of their nutritional value, but because they are easy to transport and store, have a high calorie-per-hectare ratio, and, most importantly, are the easiest to count and measure — and therefore the easiest to tax.
In the present, it is antibiotic-resistant “super-bugs” who pose the biggest threat to humankind. If they would spread, hundreds of millions could die. Yet without international travel and transportation, and without cities with millions of inhabitants coughing and sneezing at each other in the subway, those superbugs would be a local phenomenon at most. Many of them are byproducts of factory farming (large quantities of antibiotics are added to animal feed because they inhibit mass epidemics, and, coincidentally, promote growth in certain animals) or industrial antibiotic production (waste products of those factories pollute local rivers and constantly expose people in the area to antibiotics, which leads to bacteria having more time to develop resistance).
Without international transport, densely populated cities, factory farming, and mass-produced antibiotics, the chance of a deadly worldwide epidemic would be reduced to a minimum.
For our future it is important to remember that staying healthy by eating diverse, minimizing exposure to pollutants, and leading an active lifestyle reduces the risk of contracting, and, if it comes to the worst, limits the severity of diseases. Further, most modern medicines are based on chemical compounds found in plants or fungi anyway. There are plenty of plants that act as natural antibiotic or anti-inflammatory in every climate, the ability of our body to heal itself and recover from diseases or injuries is grossly underestimated in today’s world, and with general knowledge about medicinal herbs and a little self-care you won’t ever need a doctor. Humans survived and thrived for three million years without healthcare, hospitals and aspirin.
As we figured out before, we cannot rely on doctors, government officials and business executives to get us out of this mess — we will have to do it ourselves. In any given tribe, everybody takes care of the sick, the young and the old, because they know that they are being cared for when they are young, old, or sick. The aboriginal version of social security and healthcare is a functioning tribe that supports each other — this was true even for Neanderthals, and most likely for all earlier humans, too.
All this might sound utterly unrealistic and naïve, but so are the proposed plans of the techies. We won’t get out of this mess following them (whether to Mars, into ‘the cloud’, or into shiny sci-fi techie-wonderland), and if we likewise don’t follow the drastic drop in consumption and radical switch to a low-impact lifestyle proposed here, we might as well place the barrel in our mouth and pull the trigger.