Fresh lettuce in the stores - Village Magazine

62 July 2022

HE WORLD is dangerously overheated

and overpopulated, the oceans are

dying due to global warming and

food shortages are becoming ever

more acute. Vast corporations and

the super-rich control most of the world’s

assets and operate a virtual surveillance state

to keep their populations in order while billions

live and die in abject poverty.

This might sound like a fair summary of the

state of the planet today, but the above

scenario is in fact the storyline from half a

century ago, for the 1973 ﬁlm, ‘Soylent Green’,

which I re-watched recently. And that far-

distant year in which it was set? 2022.

One of the main protagonists, an elderly man

called Sol, old enough to remember days of

plenty, describes the vanished world: “You

know. When I was a kid, food was food. Before

our scientiﬁc magicians poisoned the water,

polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal

life. Why, in my day you could buy meat

anywhere. Eggs, they had. Real butter. Fresh

lettuce in the stores”.

His younger counterpart, Detective Thorn

Fresh

lettuce

in the

stores

By John Gibbons

Whether you buy into the slightly cheesy

premise of human remains being a key

part of the food chain, the ﬁlm did tap into

the very real ecological anxieties of the

early 1970s

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drank was a good idea.

For all the subsequent failures, the original

Earth Day was the foundation event for the

modern environmental movement, and

ushered in enduring changes in public and

political attitudes towards pollution in

particular, especially where the evidence of its

eects were impossible to conceal.

Air and water quality in the developed world

improved markedly from the 1970s onwards,

ENVIRONMENT

replies wearily: “I know. Sol. You told me

before. A heat wave all year long. A greenhouse

eect. Everything is burning up”.

The amazing new foodstu, Soylent Green is

supposedly made from plankton, but the

detective unearths the grim truth, and the ﬁlm

ends with him uttering the famous line:

“Soylent Green is people!”.

Whether you buy into the slightly cheesy

premise of human remains being a key part of

the food chain, the ﬁlm did tap into the very real

ecological anxieties of the early 1970s.

These came to a head on Earth Day in the US

in April 1970. This seminal event prompted

president Nixon to establish the US

Environmental Protection Agency, and with it,

a raft of important environmental and anti-

pollution legislation.

Viewed through the political prism of today’s

deeply dysfunctional and hyper-partisan US

politics, it seems almost quaint to recall a time

when people, irrespective of their politics,

religion or skin colour, broadly agreed that

eliminating deadly toxins from the air that they

breathed and the water that their children

Apocalyptic 1970s movies coming true, mostly

July 2022 63

partially due to new regulations, but also

thanks to the oshoring of much of the West’s

highly polluting heavy industries, which had

triggered the crisis.

So, wealthy countries began to

de-industrialise, not by consuming less and

living more modestly, but by shifting the axis

of production – and pollution – over the

horizon, to poorer countries where

environmental standards were mostly non-

existent and where desperate workers could be

more easily exploited.

Missing entirely from the environmental

movement of the early 1970s was any

consideration of global warming. While the

concept was understood within the scientiﬁc

community by then, it had zero traction among

the wider public, and much of the scientiﬁc

establishment treated it more as an academic

conundrum about what could possibly happen

in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

The trace gas carbon dioxide (CO2) is the

atmosphere’s key chemical thermostat. Dial it

up, and temperatures rise, almost in

lock-step.

In the 50 years since Soylent Green was

released, global CO2 levels have climbed

inexorably, and now stand at 420 parts per

million, a rise of 50% versus pre-industrial.

This may well be the most rapid shift in

atmospheric chemistry in Earth’s history.

The last time CO2 levels were this high was

in the Pliocene, an era several million years

ago. Then, sea levels were 20 metres higher

than today and global average temperatures

were 3-4ºC higher than today.

The unprecedented spike in atmospheric

CO2 levels since 1970 will continue to aect

temperatures on this planet for centuries into

the future.

Already, it has led to a rise in global surface

temperature of nearly 1.2ºC versus

pre-industrial.

The red line for dangerous and irreversible

changes to the Earth’s climate system lies at an

increase over pre-industrial levels of around

1.5ºC. Today’s levels are perilously close to

that.

Based on current emissions, the global

‘carbon budget’ for +1.5ºC will have been

exhausted by 2030. To avoid breaching this

danger line, global emissions will need to have

fallen by a staggering 60% by then.

Nothing short of a highly improbable global

political, economic, social and cultural

revolution could deliver such a profound

transition in time. In reality, our current

economic model sees emissions actually

accelerating at the time we need to be hitting

the brakes and bracing for impact.

However dramatic the rise in global

emissions and temperatures have been in the

last five decades, this almost pales into

insigniﬁcance when measured againstthe toll

humanity has taken on the natural worldover

this period. We have eradicated almost two

thirds of all the wild mammals, birds, ﬁsh and

reptiles in just 50 years.

The last time a global mass die-o on this

scale occurred was some 66 million years ago,

in the wake of the asteroid impact that led to

the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.

Researchers used the term ‘biological

annihilation’to describe the nature and extent

of what they term the ‘frightening assault on

the foundations of human civilisation’. While

this carnage ultimately threatens humanity, it

has already laid waste to hundreds of millions

of years of evolutionary progress and, in the

process, brutally simpliﬁed countless once-

complex ecosystems.

Today, over three quarters of the entire

world’s land surface has been ‘signiﬁcantly

altered’ by human actions, with tens of millions

of hectares of forests razed and cleared for

agriculture. The hunting of wildlife for food is

another force accelerating extinction, withat

least 300 species of mammals facing near-term

extinctionsas a direct result of the bushmeat

trade.

At sea, the anarchy is even worse. Over 90%

of the world’s large predatory ﬁsh, from sharks

to tuna, marlin and swordﬁsh, are already

gone, with many species now on the brink of

extinction.

The vast ﬁshing ﬂeets that scour the oceans

have the capacity to catch and destroy ﬁsh far

more quickly than species can recover. Further,

ocean acidification as a result of global

warming is accelerating, while surface water

temperatures are rising quickly, adding to the

disruption of marine life.

On top of this, tens of millions of tons of

plastic waste is ending up in the world’s oceans

every year, contaminating the base of the entire

marine food chain. One estimate states that by

2050 there will bemore plastic in the world’s

oceans than ﬁsh.

In what amounts to a zero-sum game, the

human footprint has expanded as natural

systems are eradicated. Since 1970, the global

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population has more than doubled, to over 7.8

billion today, while GDP of the world economy

has quadrupled, to almost $90 trillion.

Californian environmentalist and authorPaul

Hawken put it bluntly: “we are stealing the

future, selling it in the present, and calling it

GDP”.

While the original Earth Day was inspired by

people’s experience of ecological degradation

they could see and even smell all around them,

and while it achieved some notable successes,

its ultimate legacy is one of failure.

We humans have so far proved unable to

extend our empathy to other species, to nature

itself, and to act unselﬁshly on behalf of people

in other places, or indeed of all future

generations. This was neither accidental nor

inevitable.

Generations of neo-liberal thought have

helped inure humanity against the pain of the

natural world and the suering of others, both

humans and sentient animals, while shielding

the billionaire predators, who have proﬁteered

from this ruin, which is the consequences of

their actions.

Our species achieved spectacular

evolutionary success not just by brute force

and violence, but primarily by our ability to

cooperate, and the strength and complexity of

our social structures. These have been worn

threadbare by decades of atomised

consumerism.

This too did not happen by accident. Back in

1955, USretail economist, Victor Lebowlaid

out the brave new world of manufactured

consumerism: “our enormously productive

economy demands that we make consumption

our way of life, that we convert the buying and

use of goods into rituals, that we seek our

spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction

in consumption. We need things consumed,

burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded

at an ever-increasing rate”.

Dystopian Soylent fantasies

notwithstanding, the future, in the words of

environmentalist Jonathon Porritt “will either

be green, or not at all”.