January 11, 2012 was the 125th anniversary of the birth of author, scientist, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold professed an ethics founded on the biotic community – a community encompasses and includes humans:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Leopold rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, who pursued a conservationism based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold was instead an advocate of wilderness, and of its conservation for its own sake. For Leopold, the relationship of humans to the land was an ethical one.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Leopold saw that humans are part of an ecological community. He saw that humans can thrive only if the entirety of the larger community of which we a part thrives.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Leopold preached “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature”, and warned that we should not stray too far from the land.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Leopold was a prophet for our times. We should have listened.

I’ve been working my way through the Autobiography of Mark Twain, and I can’t help but think how diminished the world is and how much poorer we all are after over 150 years of “progress” and “growth”.

Twain describes his uncle John’s farm outside of Florida, Missouri – where he was born, and where young Sam spent his summers until he was twelve or thirteen,after his family moved to Hannibal:

It was a heavenly place for a boy. that farm of my uncle John’s. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor., and the sumptuous meals – well, it makes me cry to think of them. Fried chicken; roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducks, and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie chickens; home-made bacon and ham; hot biscuits, hot batter-cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot “wheatbread,” hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, “clabber;” watermelons, musk melons, canteloups – all fresh from the garden – apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler – I can’t remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked up was perhaps the main splendor. [p. 210]

People without much money were wealthy nonetheless. The household economy was rich. Folks didn’t need much money to share in the riches that surrounded them – and they had the time and the skills to make use of it. They did and made things for themselves and for their neighbors.

Twain describes a life immersed in an environment yet unspoiled, teeming with diversity and abundance:

The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off-hammering of wood-peckers and the muffled drumming of wood-pheasants in the remotenesses of the forest, the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures skurrying through the grass, – I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end-fathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we plowed through them. I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawns to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down . . . [p. 216]

That healthy, intact ecological system was the foundation of people’s wealth – wealth money could never buy and cannot ever replace.

But things were starting to go wrong, even then.

I remember the pigeon seasons, when the birds would come in millions, and cover the trees, and by their weight break down the branches. They were clubbed to death with stick; guns were not necessary, and were not used. I remember the squirrel-hunts, and prairie-chicken hunts, and wild turkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go. [p. 218]

Passenger pigeons were once unimaginably abundant in the U.S., probably numbering 3 billion to 5 billion.  The slaughter was unmerciful. The last fully authenticated record of a wild bird was in Ohio in 1900. The species officially became extinct when the last known passenger pigeon died in in captivity in 1914.

Already in 1850, and the American dream was beginning its transformation into The Air Conditioned Nightmare. We’ve spent the 160 years since exploiting and destroying the ecosystems within which we live, converting them to money which we call “wealth”.

In Lane County at this very moment, a couple of already-wealthy “developers” have begun to rip down and crush up the entirety of Parvin Butte. They bought the whole butte a couple of years ago from Union Pacific for a pittance  ($360,000), immediately put it on the market for $30 million, and began destroying the forest, logging all the trees off the butte. Now they see the opportunity to turn their investment into even more millions, taking advantage of the opportunity offered by $50 million in state and federal government subsidies for the rehabilitation of the Coos Bay rail corridor which would enable them to ship their rock cheaply all the way to the coast. For the folks who actually live near Parvin Butte and in and around Dexter, it’s not a good deal at all. Their neighborhood and lives are being shot to hell, and there’s not a thing anybody can do about it. Oregon’ vaunted statewide planning program mandates that “protected” aggregate resources be made available for exploitation, just as it mandates that growth be accommodated, environment be damned.  If it’s not on a list, it doesn’t exist.  Except, of course, for aggregate.

When Earth’s ecosystems are degraded or destroyed, all the money in the world won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

Note: “Mark twain” was one of the calls sung out by the leadsman on a  Mississippi paddlewheel teamboat. It meant that lead line indicated the water was 2 fathoms (12 feet) deep and safe for passage.

Massive die-offs of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest show ocean acidification from an excess of CO2 emissions has already begun.

In Netarts Bay, from 2006 to 2008, oyster larvae began dying dramatically. Elizabeth Grossman, in an article in Yale Environment 360, quotes Netarts Bay hatchery owner Mark Wiegard:

Historically we’ve had larvae mortalities [usually related to bacteria] . . . My wife sent a few samples in and Hales [Burke Hales, a biogeochemist and ocean ecologist at Oregon State University] said someone had screwed up the samples because the [dissolved CO2 gas] level was so ridiculously high.

Taylor Shellfish Hatchery in Washington, the country’s largest producer of farmed shellfish and one of the largest oyster producers, has also reported dramatic losses.  Hood Canal has some of the Pacific Northwest’s highest levels of ocean acidification. Taylor’s hatchery there experienced the loss of about three-quarters of its oyster larvae, losses which are now being mitigated by buffering the high acidity.

Wild oyster beds in the Pacific Northwest are suffering, too.  Wild oysters in Willapa Bay,  Puget Sound, and off the east coast of Vancouver Island have seen reproductive failure because acidic waters have prevented oyster larvae from forming shells. Acidic water sometimes kills oyster larvae outright, so that they fail to survive past the egg stage. At other times the eggs hatch; but the larvae, stressed as they try to forms their first shells, fail after a week or two.

The water now washing ashore in Oregon and Washington actually absorbed its CO2 30 to 50 years ago. Oceans absorb about 50% of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels. Since then, emissions have been rising even more dramatically.

Ocean acidity has increased approximately 30% since the Industrial Revolution and is on track to be 150% more acidic by the end of the century than it has been for 20 million years. Ocean acidification depletes seawater of the compounds that organisms need to build shells and skeletons, impairing the ability of corals, crabs, sea stars, sea urchins, plankton and other marine creatures to build the shells they need to survive. Ocean acidification could destroy all of the globe’s coral reefs by 2050 and threatens the entire marine ecosystem.

Eating locally can do a lot to cut down on energy usage in the food system. But not for the obvious reason – savings on transportation energy. Rather, it’s mostly because you’d be eating real food. That’s the lesson to be gleaned from the report Energy Use in the US Food System, published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Energy is used throughout the U.S. food supply chain, which is divvied up into seven stages:  farm production and agribusiness (agriculture), food processing and brand marketing (processing), food and ingredient packaging (packaging), freight services (transportation), wholesale and retail trade and marketing services (wholesale/retail), away-from-home food and marketing services (food service), and household food services (households).

The processing stage seems to be where most of the low-hanging energy-saving fruit is to be found. Michael Bomford in an article titled Beyond Food Miles at Post Carbon Institute explains:

Buying from the local farmers’ market offers great opportunities to cut down on food system energy use, but it’s not because the food there has traveled less than the food at the grocery store. It’s because the aisles of a typical grocery store are mostly filled with highly-processed and packaged food, while farmers markets offer mostly whole or minimally-processed foods.

The energy intensity of our food system keeps getting worse rather than better. During 1997-2002, per capita energy use in the United States declined 1.8%, while per capita food-related energy use in the United States actually increased by 16.4%. As a share of the national energy budget, food-related energy use grew from 12.2% in 1997 to 14.4% in 2002 and is still growing, from 14.4 percent in 2002 to an estimated 15.7% in 2007.

Transportation is a small fraction of the food system energy budget.

However, the energy intensity of food transportation in the U.S. food system is growing. Food shipments are increasing in volume, at the same time average shipping distances are increasing significantly. These food-mile increases translate into substantial growth in energy use by food-related freight services.

A big culprit in the increase in energy usage in the food system is replacing human labor with machines. About half of the growth in food-related energy use between 1997 and 2002 is explained by a shift from human labor toward a greater reliance on “energy services” across nearly all food expenditure categories. The report blames “high labor costs” in the food services and food processing industries, combined with household outsourcing of manual food preparation and cleanup efforts through increased consumption of prepared foods and more eating out. Replacing humans with machines is also responsible for the increasing energy intensity in the “agriculture” stage.

Household operations – which is defined to include energy use for major kitchen appliances, auto use for food-related trips, and related energy flows for home food preparation and serving equipment – account for the highest food-related energy use. But food processing shows the largest growth in energy use, as both households and foodservice establishments increasingly outsource manual food preparation and cleanup activities to the manufacturing sector, which rely on energy-using technologies to carry out these processes.

The obvious way to cut down on energy usage in the food system is to cut out as many of the intermediate stages between “agriculture” and “household” as possible: buy directly from the farmer, cutting out processing, packaging, transportation (remember, your trip to the farm is already included in “household”), wholesale/retail, and food service entirely, or at least as much as possible. If we want a more energy-efficient agriculture we will have to reverse the historical trend and begin to once again employ people rather than machines.

Michael Pollan sums up everything we need to know about food and health in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

“Eat food” means to eat real food – vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fish, and meat, too, as livestock are an essential component of an ecologically sustainable food system.  Eating food would not only be healthier for us. It’s the only means to a healthy economy and a healthy planet.

David Korten has an extraordinarily perceptive and moving article in Yes! titled The Illusion of Money: real wealth or phantom assets? exploring the difference between real living wealth and phantom financial wealth – and points out that in the long run only real wealth matters and brings happiness.

Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include fertile land, healthful food, knowledge, productive labor, pure water and clean air, labor, and physical infrastructure. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and are unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy children, loving families, caring communities, a beautiful, healthy, natural environment.

Real wealth also includes all the many things of intrinsic artistic, spiritual, or utilitarian value essential to maintaining the various forms of living wealth. These may or may not have a market price. They include healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection.

The fact that in the U.S. it’s mainly phantom financial wealth that is idolized and protected by our political system is a measure of how far the U.S. empire has already fallen from the heights of its glory days.

Think of the trillions spent propping up the financial system, while the ecological and social systems that sustain us remain ignored and untended. Faced with a crisis and limited resources, our leaders threw the real economy overboard, believing that the illusory wealth of Wall Street was what really mattered.

The first hint that something was very wrong with our civilization was in the early 1970s (corresponding with peak oil in the U.S.). That crisis was dealt with by jettisoning the dollar’s link to anything real, and by selling our souls to the Saudis and Middle Eastern oil. The crisis appeared to have been averted, and was followed by 30+ years of stability. But below the surface, the economy was rotting out, and for the first time millions of Americans were growing poorer rather than richer. John Michael Greer pinpoints the beginning of the first wave of catabolic collapse at 1974:

[T]he question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

The current crisis is the beginning of the second wave of catabolic collapse.

At some point, we’ll have to let it all go: the far-flung military bases, the carrier battle groups, the manned space programs, the financial superstructures that girdle the globe, the freeway networks with potholed pavement and crumbling bridges, maybe even the creaking electrical grid that powers our TVs, computers, video games, and air conditioners.

But we’ve already seen who will be getting screwed. The financial bailout confirms that it won’t be any different this time around.

2010 has already been a transformational year, with the U.K., the German military, and the U.S. military all recognizing the immanence of peak oil. Here’s another shocker: the U.S. investment community is entertaining the idea that growth will inevitably come to an end. When the investment community itself begins to entertain the thought that the growth game is over, we should note this as the moment something really fundamental has changed.

Rex Nutting, Washington bureau chief of MarketWatch, has published an article titled The economy can’t grow forever: The whole planet must live within its means. You’d think these remarks were from the mouth of an ecologist:

We know that the only way to end unemployment at home and poverty around the world is to make the economy grow faster. But we also know that nothing can grow forever, that the faster the global economy grows, the sooner we’ll run out of essential resources, including fossil fuels, water, arable land, healthy ecosystems and moderate climate.

Economists and politicians can’t admit it, but the laws of physics apply, no matter what the latest polls tell us. The Earth has finite resources that will someday limit our economic growth.

The Earth cannot forever support 7 billion people consuming as much as Americans consume. And yet we’ve staked our future — individually, nationally, and maybe even as a species — on that impossible dream.

Nutting concludes we have but two choices: downsize the right way, or the wrong way. The right way is to voluntarily learn to live so we don’t consume more than the Earth can produce. The wrong way is Malthus’s way: War, famine and plague.

Nutting warns neither way will be easy. I fear only one way is possible.

MarketWatch is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Jones, which in turn is owned by News Corporation. MarketWatch is part of Dow Jones’ Consumer Media Group, along with The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, the WSJ.com and affiliated Internet properties.

Now here’s a surprise. From Science Daily:

Side-by-side comparisons of organic and conventional strawberry farms and their fruit found the organic farms produced more flavorful and nutritious berries while leaving the soil healthier and more genetically diverse.

The paper, titled Fruit and Soil Quality of Organic and Conventional Strawberry Agroecosystems, is published in the peer-reviewed online journal, PLoS ONE.

All the farms in the current study were in California, where conventional farms use the ozone-depleting methyl bromide (which is slated to be replaced by the highly toxic methyl iodide).

In addition to finding organic strawberries are tastier and better for your health, researchers found the organic soils excelled in a variety of key chemical and biological properties, including carbon sequestration, nitrogen, microbial biomass, enzyme activities, and micronutrients.

The Science Daily article quotes lead author John Reganold, Washington State University Regents professor of soil science:

Our findings have global implications and advance what we know about the sustainability benefits of organic farming systems. We also show you can have high quality, healthy produce without resorting to an arsenal of pesticides.

The authors offer a summation of the study’s methodology, findings, conclusions and significance:

At multiple sampling times for two years, we evaluated three varieties of strawberries for mineral elements, shelf life, phytochemical composition, and organoleptic properties. We also analyzed traditional soil properties and soil DNA using microarray technology. We found that the organic farms had strawberries with longer shelf life, greater dry matter, and higher antioxidant activity and concentrations of ascorbic acid and phenolic compounds, but lower concentrations of phosphorus and potassium. In one variety, sensory panels judged organic strawberries to be sweeter and have better flavor, overall acceptance, and appearance than their conventional counterparts. We also found the organically farmed soils to have more total carbon and nitrogen, greater microbial biomass and activity, and higher concentrations of micronutrients. Organically farmed soils also exhibited greater numbers of endemic genes and greater functional gene abundance and diversity for several biogeochemical processes, such as nitrogen fixation and pesticide degradation.

Our findings show that the organic strawberry farms produced higher quality fruit and that their higher quality soils may have greater microbial functional capability and resilience to stress. These findings justify additional investigations aimed at detecting and quantifying such effects and their interactions.

Amazingly, there’s one remaining, more or less intact stand of primeval forest left in Europe: the Bialowieza forest, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus.

Not surprisingly, that remnant 580-square-mile stand is under threat. Only 17% of the forest is protected as national park.  The rest is subject to selective logging, which proponents excuse as “good for the forest”.

The Bialowieza forest hosts a number of endangered species, including the European woodland bison, which lives nowhere else in the wild. The forest also provides habitat to wolves, boar, tarpan (a species of wild horse), badgers, moose, lynx, eagles and woodpeckers.

Greenpeace Poland is working to halt logging in the Bialowieza forest until new forest management plans are drawn up which would limit logging to the minimum required for local residents and ban it during the bird nesting season. Wish them luck.

Scientists predict in a new study that fewer than one in five of the plants and animals which currently live in the world’s rainforests will still be here in 90 years time. The culprits? Climate change and deforestation.

The study, “Correlative and mechanistic models of species distribution provide congruent forecasts under climate change”, is published in the June edition of Conservation Letters, an open-access journal. Here’s the abstract:

Good forecasts of climate change impacts on extinction risks are critical for effective conservation management responses. Species distribution models (SDMs) are central to extinction risk analyses. The reliability of predictions of SDMs has been questioned because models often lack a mechanistic underpinning and rely on assumptions that are untenable under climate change. We show how integrating predictions from fundamentally different modeling strategies produces robust forecasts of climate change impacts on habitat and population parameters. We illustrate the principle by applying mechanistic (Niche Mapper) and correlative (Maxent, Bioclim) SDMs to predict current and future distributions and fertility of an Australian gliding possum. The two approaches make congruent, accurate predictions of current distribution and similar, dire predictions about the impact of a warming scenario, supporting previous correlative-only predictions for similar species. We argue that convergent lines of independent evidence provide a robust basis for predicting and managing extinctions risks under climate change.

By 2100, climate change and deforestation could have altered two-thirds of the rainforests in Central and South America and about 70% in Africa. The Amazon Basin alone could see changes in biodiversity for 80% of the region.

A U.K. Telegraph article about the study quotes Daniel Nepstad, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, which studies climate change in Massachusetts:

This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes including severe alterations in their species composition through the combined influence of climate change and land use. Conservation of the world’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Land Institute near Salina, Kansas has been crossing selected strains of wild intermediate wheatgrass grain with annual wheat varieties to breed a commercially practical perennial grain. Gene Logsdon at OrganicToBe.org reports that pancakes made with flour (trademarked Kernza ™) from the resulting grain is pretty tasty.

The flour makes a light dough and the pancakes taste just a tad sweeter than ordinary wheat flour.  * * * It is exceptionally high in some nutrients known to be important to human health and deficient in many modern diets: Omega 3 fatty acids, calcium, lutein, and betaine. It is particularly high in folate, important for preventing stroke, cancer, heart disease and infertility. Folate is also believed to be important for maintaining good mental health in old age.  My mind generally glazes over when reading about nutrient values of various foods so that folate might come in handy. To me the important thing is that for once something that is good for me tastes good too. Kernza ™ does not have enough gluten in it to use alone for leavened breads, but as more and more crosses are made with it and regular wheat, all things are possible.

Being able to grow grain without plowing up millions of acres of soil every year would cut down on erosion and help build soil tilth while enabling farmers to cut way back on fuel and greenhouse gas emissions – saving farmers both time and money in the bargain.

But the search won’t be over until researchers come up with a good perennial bread flour.