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.

The key findings of the International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts Summary Report should be enough to shake any cognizant being out of their lethargy:

• Human actions have resulted in warming and acidification of the oceans and are now causing increased hypoxia – symptoms that indicate disturbances of the carbon cycle associated with each of the previous five mass extinctions on Earth.
• The speeds of many negative changes to the ocean are near to or are tracking the worst-case scenarios from IPCC and other predictions. Consequences matching those predicted under the “worst case scenario” include decrease in Arctic Sea Ice, melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of trapped methane from the seabed.
• The magnitude of the cumulative impacts on the ocean is greater than previously understood, as interactions between different impacts can be negatively synergistic.
• Timelines for action are shrinking. Delays will mean increased environmental damage with greater socioeconomic impacts.
• Resilience of the ocean to climate change impacts is severely compromised by the other stressors from human activities, including fisheries, pollution and habitat destruction.
• Ecosystem collapse is occurring as a result of both current and emerging stressors including chemical pollutants, agriculture run-­off, sediment loads and over-­extraction of many components of food webs.
• The extinction threat to marine species is rapidly increasing due to overexploitation, habitat loss, and, increasingly, climate change.

But don’t count on any response from our political or economic elites, other than wanton disregard. They have proved to not be cognizant beings.

A press release quotes Dr. Alex Rogers, Scientific Director of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), which convened the workshop:

The findings are shocking. As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the ocean the implications became far worse than we had individually realized. This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s, and generations beyond that.

Co-author Dan Laffoley issued a call for action:

The world’s leading experts on oceans are surprised by the rate and magnitude of changes we are seeing. The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast, but unlike previous generations we know what now needs to happen. The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent.

The chances of any significant action being taken are precisely zero. The sad reality is the ocean and its ecosystems are doomed to succumb to a constantly bombardment of multiple attacks.

Dan Allen at Energy Bulletin scathingly observes that humans have proved to be less than rational:

[A]ny sane society . . . when faced with such an overwhelming abundance of scientific evidence, would be gnashing its collective teeth and running for the powerdown-exits en masse at this point. No sane society would ignore the screaming warnings of every single Earth system. No sane society would knowingly doom their children and grandchildren to misery and starvation. No sane society would stand by and do NOTHING — NOT ONE DAMN THING!! — while their very life-support systems eroded away before their eyes.

But we are surely not sane.

Political solutions have failed us, are failing us, and will certainly continue to fail us. The only option we have – to slam on the brakes and to stop burning coal, tout de suite – won’t be undertaken voluntarily; to think otherwise is delusional. Climate catastrophe is where we are. As Allen says, that’s the bed we’ve made:

So, sadly, at this late hour, we just flat-out NEED the dark angel of economic collapse to swoop down onto the stage, ‘Deus ex Machina’ style, and save the day.

God help us.

Pray for the collapse of the global industrial economy. And do what you can to begin fashioning a replacement.

All the work that’s been done over the past century to preserve some wild ecosystems in national parks etc, is going to be mostly subverted.  The park may still be there, but what grows in it will, in most cases, be nothing like the thing that we were originally trying to save.

As the impacts of global warming manifest themselves over the coming century, warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will result in just about every landscape in the country changing radically.

Staniford’s piece exposes the flaw in the approach environmentalists took in the 70s, the approach (taken by Oregon’s statewide planning Goal 5 , for example): identify a “significant” resource, draw a line around it, and protect it from conflicting uses. Protecting a living resource requires much more than drawing a line around it.  Rather, you have to maintain the health of the ecosystem within which it is embedded.

Within a global climate system wildly disrupted by human greenhouse gas emissions, how could we possibly expect that more local ecosystems could remain unaffected?

“Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for the losses.”

Photo: Charles Pezeshki

The quote is from an article by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

A press release explains:

In their paper, the authors outline severe environmental degradation taking place at mining sites and downstream. The practice destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests and buries small streams that play essential roles in the overall health of entire watersheds. Waterborne contaminants enter streams that remain below valley fills and can be transported great distances into larger bodies of water.

The paper calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop removal mining permits unless new mining and reclamation techniques “can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

That will never happen. The only rational response: No more coal.

Daly’s ten policy prescriptions are summarized below – but be sure to read the entirety of his speech at The Oil Drum to catch the flavor and nuance of his argument.

1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Caps limit biophysical scale by imposing quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas captures scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses.

2. Ecological tax reform—shift tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution).

3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution—a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Set fair limits to the range of inequality.

4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for part-time or personal work so as to maximize enjoyment of life.

5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition. Trade and capital mobility must be balanced and fair, not deregulated or “free”.

6. Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO to something like Keynes’ original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seek balance on current account, and thereby avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers.

7. Move away from fractional reserve banking toward a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would put control of the money supply and seigniorage in hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest.

8. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, but also stop treating the non-scarce as if it were scarce. Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital (e.g. atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, public lands) in public trusts, and price it by a cap-auction–trade system, or by taxes, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information.

9. Stabilize population. As a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere.

10. Reform national accounts—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

This passage is attributed to the report Prosperity Without Growth, recently released by the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission – the government’s “independent watchdog on sustainable development.” The mystery is, I can’t find anything like it anywhere – in the report itself, in the summary, in any press releases, in any interviews with the report’s author. WTF?

Oops – there it is, right in the Forward.

In effect, underdeveloped countries such as Bolivia are paying dearly for the massive energy consumption of the United States and the industrialized world. The so-called “carbon footprint” of the average Bolivian peasant is negligible, yet Bolivia’s poor are not only among the first to feel the harsh effects of climate change, but also are sorely lacking the resources to adapt to it.

That’s the indictment Carolyn Kormann lays out in her article at Environment 360, Retreat of Andean Glaciers Foretells Global Water Woes.

The great Andean ice caps are swiftly vanishing. Global warming will cause many of the Andes’ tropical glaciers to disappear within 20 years, not only threatening the water supplies of 77 million people in the region, but also reducing hydropower production, which accounts for roughly half of the electricity generated in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Agriculture in the region relies on irrigation during the annual five-month dry season. Water is stored in the Andean glaciers, which melt throughout the year and so provide water throughout the year. No glaciers, no storage, no water for farmers or city dwellers.

On the opposite side of the world, two billion people rely on meltwater from the Himalayas. Himalayan glaciers are the main source of water for five major river systems – the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and the Yellow – whose flow irrigates and supplies drinking water to China, India, and Pakistan. Himalayan glaciers have lost 21% of their glacial mass since 1962. The Himalayas’ smaller glaciers will be gone by 2035 and many large ones will disappear by century’s end.

Kjell Aleklett writes, there’s Not enough oil for the G20 package. If the stimulus package that the G20 group decided on is to achieve its stated objective and return us to the growth path we’ve come to expect, then we will need an increase of 8 to 9 million barrels per day during the next 5 years. Such an increase is not possible. He says what the G20 group should be discussing is the investments required to transform the energy system to renewables.

George Monbiot writes the G20 forgot the environment. Climate breakdown, peak oil and resource depletion all dwarf the financial crisis in financial and humanitarian terms.

Monbiot sums up the G20 communiqué:

We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don’t possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth’s living systems. Now we’re going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.

Oh – and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don’t have any definite plans as yet, but we’ll think of something in due course.

Monbiot accuses the G20 of engaging in “magical thinking”, believing that getting the economy back to where it was – infinite growth on a finite planet – can somehow be reconciled with the pledge “to address the threat of irreversible climate change”.

Friends of the Earth’s executive director Andy Atkins laments:

“Once again world leaders have short-changed people and the planet. The economic system and the global environment are on a devastating collision course – but despite pledging to build an inclusive, green and sustainable recovery little has been done to change direction.

Greenpeace executive director John Sauven said:

Tacking climate change on to the end of the communiqué as an after thought does not demonstrate anything like the seriousness we needed to see. Hundreds of billions were found for the IMF and World Bank, but for making the transition to a green economy there is no money on the table, just vague aspirations, talks about talks and agreements to agree.”

And here’s David Norman, World Wildlife Fund campaigns director:

Any argument that climate change should be moved down the political agenda until the current economic crisis is addressed is incredibly shortsighted. Finance and the climate are inextricably linked, and if we don’t address climate change now, we will certainly pay later.

A 2003 USGS study, using 1992 temperature predictions by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had estimated that the park’s glaciers would disappear by 2030. But the temperature rise in the area has been twice as great as assumed in the 1992 model.

Nonpolar ice is disappearing all over the globe. Major glaciers have entirely disappeared from the Andes, and the Himalayas have lost a third of their snow.

The glaciers of Glacier National Park have shrunk by 67% in the past hundred years.

A lot of sensitive and rare plants are associated with the edges of glaciers. Reduced water is expected to cause drying and die-offs, especially for aquatic species.

Engelhardt points out that nobody seems to be noticing the extreme and even record-breaking droughts that are presently affecting large and disparate parts of world:

• Southeastern Australia has been burning up, its already dry climate growing ever hotter. Its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.
• Central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain.
• Iraq is another country in severe drought. The lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.
• Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.
• In Latin America, Argentina is experiencing the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years. Soybeans and corn crops are withering away, and cattle are dying.
• Much of the state of Texas is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Cattle herds may be slaughtered come summer.
• The American southwest could fall into “a possibly permanent state of drought.” A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”
• Northern California – which produces 50% of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes, is in the third year of an already monumental drought.  Water deliveries to farms have been cut by up to 85%. New Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has warned that “California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century.”
• East Africa and the Horn of Africa are experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and crop failures.

The U.N. concurs that global warming is already contributing to rising food prices and food shortages. A new Rapid Response Assessment released by the U.N. Environment Program reports grain production has leveled off and fisheries are declining. It warns global food production could fall 25% short of demand by 2050 due to the combined impacts of climate change, land degradation, cropland losses, water scarcity, and species infestation.  The report is seeing through rose-colored glasses, as it projects food production will need to increase by 50% by 2050. It gives no clue how this feat is to be accomplished, only by unspecified “new ways to increase food production.”  Good luck with that.

Scientists agree that climate change will accelerate throughout this century – and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. At best, we can slow down the rate of increase and eventually (hopefully) avoid passing an irreversible “tipping point.” Extreme weather of every sort – which has already arrived – will become ever more the planetary norm.

We’re going to wake up in 2010, or maybe 2012, after a few years of inexorable depletion and cutbacks of investment in additional capacity, to find that we don’t have enough oil to maintain life as we know it, dependent on auto and truck transportation. Maybe we’ll find ourselves short of electricity generating capacity, as well.

The world as we have known it has already changed. Any economic recovery will find us in an unfamiliar and increasingly unfriendly new world.