Quarry and dump - Village Magazine

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