62 February 2015
I
N 2009, some months before the
ill-fated UN climate conference
in Copenhagen, an Earth system
framework was proposed by an
international collaboration of
environmental scientists. Their aim was
to establish a measurable set of ‘planetary
boundaries’ with a view to identifying a
’safe operating space’ for humanity.
The researcher team, involving sci-
entists from a range of disciplines,
developed a set of nine key boundaries,
beyond which lay the risks of “irrevers-
ible and abrupt environmental change”.
In January 2015, the team published an
in-depth update on their investigations in
the journal Science, and it was discussed
in depth at the recent World Economic
Forum in Davos. The findings took even
seasoned environmental commentators
and observers by surprise.
The paper confirmed that humanity
has already breached four of the nine
key boundaries, namely biodiversity loss,
deforestation, atmospheric CO2 levels
and the flows of nitrogen and phospho-
rus used in agriculture into the world’s
waterways and oceans.
The era known as the Holocene began
almost 12,000 years ago, just as the
last Ice Age was in full retreat and cli-
matic conditions favourable to humans
led to our exponential surge. Human
expansion was marked throughout
this period with spasms of extinctions,
as well as major changes in land cover
and use. Our mastery of fire in partic-
ular allowed humanity to alter entire
ecological systems radically, thousands
of years before the industrial revolution.
We have been a significant force on the
planet for millennia; what has so pro-
foundly altered in the modern era has
been the rate and scale of change.
In the last two centuries, human num-
bers increased more than seven-fold. In
the 20th century alone, we consumed
more energy than used by all humans in
the preceding 10,000 years. And in the
first decade and a half of the 21st century,
the exponential surge in human numbers
and impacts has continued unabated.
Growth, expansionism and the meet-
ing of human needs and desires primarily
by consumption is the dominant ideol-
ogy of this era in human history, and are
essential to the ever-expanding engine of
globalised capitalism. In this paradigm,
the entire natural world is both a quarry
from which we can extract an unlimited
supply of ‘resources’ to fuel the Age of
Man and a dump into which we can qui-
etly excrete the toxic by-products of this
whirlwind of activity.
To downscale the biosphere into a sin-
gle human body, you could also identify
nine key systems which operate both
independently and as part of a closely
integrated biological system. The heart,
lungs, liver, endocrine system, brain,
nervous system, kidneys and digestive
system are all ‘boundary’ systems, and
each in turn support myriad sub-sys-
tems, as well as combining to define our
overall health and well-being.
The ‘planetary boundaries’ report is
the planetary equivalent of the doctor
informing an individual that his heart
is badly damaged, his lungs are dis-
eased, his liver is barely functioning and
his kidneys are showing signs of acute
organ failure. The good news is that his
brain is still functioning well, his diges-
tive system is in reasonable shape and
Humanity has breached four of nine key
boundaries: biodiversity, CO2, deforestation
and water pollution by agriculture.
By John Gibbons
ENVIRONMENT CLIMATE CHANGE
Quarry and dump
February 2015 63
his neurological function appears nor-
mal. After the initial shock, how would
you expect the patient react to this news?
Humanity’s collective response thus far
has been to call the doctor a quack, accuse
him of faking the x-rays and lab results
and head out the hospital door with a bot-
tle of scotch in one hand and a cigar in
the other.
While all nine boundary systems are
important, by far the most critical are
biosphere integrity and climate change,
as these are what are known as overarch-
ing systems, upon which all other systems
depend, and “operate at the level of the
whole Earth System, and have co-evolved
for nearly four billion years”.
Prof. Will Steffen, lead author on the
‘Science’ study describes the pace of
change as the most striking aspect of
their findings. “Almost all graphs show
the same pattern; the most dramatic
shifts have occurred since 1950”. It is, he
added, “difficult to overestimate the scale
and speed of change. In a single lifetime,
humanity has become a planetary-scale
geological force”. This is genuinely new,
he pointed out, “and indicates that
humanity has a new responsibility at a
global scale”.
In a masterful piece of understatement,
the study authors advise: “The precau-
tionary principle suggests that human
societies would be unwise to drive the
Earth System substantially away from a
Holocene-like condition. A continuing
trajectory away from the Holocene could
lead, with an uncomfortably high proba-
bility, to a very different state of the Earth
System, one that is likely to be much less
hospitable to the development of human
societies”. That is scientist-speak for a
future that looks somewhere between
‘Mad Max’ and Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The
Road’.
Another of the report’s authors, Dr
Steve Carpenter argued that the study’s
findings mean “we’re running up to and
beyond the biophysical boundaries that
enable human civilisation as we know it
to exist. It might be possible for human
civilisation to live outside Holocene con-
ditions, but it’s never been tried before.
We know civilisation can make it in
Holocene conditions, so it seems wise to
try to maintain them”, he added wryly.
As one of 18 experts in the group which
completed this study, Carpenter’s main
focus was on nitrogen and phosphorus,
elements which attract far less headline
attention than they actually merit. “We’ve
changed nitrogen and phosphorus cycles
vastly more than any other element. The
increase is of the order of 200–300%.”
In contrast, he pointed out carbon has
‘only’ been increased 10–20%.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are the
inevitable byproducts of the ‘Green rev-
olution’, in which global agricultural
output increased dramatically as a result
of the massive input of fertilisers, pesti-
cides and herbicides. In the short term,
this bought humanity several decades
reprieve from the risk of widespread
famine, which had been predicted in the
1950s and 1960s, as world population
boomed.
The father of this revolution was a
gifted scientist, Dr Norman Bourlag.
In his speech accepting the 1970 Nobel
Peace Prize for his work in boosting food
output, he warned: “The green revolu-
tion has won temporary success in man’s
war against hunger... but the frighten-
ing power of human reproduction must
also be curbed.” Failure to rein in human
numbers and impacts, Bourlag added,
would mean that: “The (21st) century
will experience sheer human misery on
a scale that will exceed the worst that has
ever come before”.
It was a coincidence in timing if noth-
ing else that as the ‘Boundaries’ paper
was being debated, news came through
in joint statements from Nasa and the
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) that 2014 had
been confirmed as the hottest ever year
in the global instrumental record that
stretches back to 1880. Indeed, 14 of
the 15 hottest years ever recorded have
all occurred in the 21st century. The
statistical odds on that sequence being
a coincidence are reckoned to be of the
order of 27 million to one. What really
astonished researchers about 2014 is
that it occurred in the absence of an El
Niño warming event.
UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon
solemnly wrote in recent weeks that
“we are the last generation that can take
steps to avoid the worst impacts of cli-
mate change”, a theme echoed recently
by Mary Robinson.
What is truly difficult to believe is that
while we have the great misfortune of liv-
ing in an era of unprecedented ecological
and climate crisis, these extraordinary
facts are in no way impinging on our
national discourse, either through the
media, civil society groups or our polit-
ical classes. Instead, the gathering
ecological storm is fenced off into an
obscure corner tagged ‘environment’,
where it is left to a handful of activists
to try, against near-impossible odds, to
draw the attention this existential crux
so desperately demands. •
John Gibbons is a specialist environmental
writer and commentator and tweets @
think_or_swim
It’s the
planetary
equivalent of
the patient’s
heart being
badly
damaged,
his lungs
diseased, his
liver barely
functioning
and his
kidneys failing
“

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