Welcome to the web version of Need to Know: Science and Insight, a newsletter on what we all need to know about climate impacts, energy transitions, the decline of nature’s support systems, living safely during a pandemic and more. It comes with a personal story and some useful ideas, all in 10 minute or less read in your inbox every Tuesday and Saturday morning.
Hello Friends,
This is the second of a two-part look at what’s happening to our life-support safety net — Nature — and what we can do to stop poking holes in it. Part One, Blowing Holes in Our Life Support System, began with my semi-voyeuristic encounter with Lonesome George, a Galápagos giant tortoise, who was the rarest creature on the planet. Now, in Part Two, a look at the underlying causes, what can be done, and how you and I can help. But first, breakfast with a cassowary.
Breakfast with a Cassowary
I was about to enjoy a bleary-eyed breakfast when a cassowary walked in.
Cassowaries are very large, very rare flightless birds with more than a passing resemblance to those Jurassic Park raptors. Known as “the world's most dangerous bird,” each foot has a long, sharp, raptor-like claw and can disembowel other animals, including humans, with a single kick.
The big female was eyeing my fruit-filled breakfast bowl. Lowering her head I got a cold stare as if I’d stolen the fruit from her children. In retrospect perhaps I, as representative of the human race, had in fact.
My partner Renee and I had just spent the night in tented accommodation in the coastal rainforest in north Queensland, Australia. The night sounds from an array of frogs, insects, birds and other unseen creatures were wondrous. As the night wore on, the chorus got louder and more varied. Fascinating but exhausting. Hence my bleary-eyed breakfast in the open-air ecolodge.
Cassowaries are only found in the forests of northeastern Queensland and in New Guinea. They can be 1.5 to 1.8 m (5 to 6 feet) tall and weigh up to 60 kilograms (130 pounds). In the past cassowaries had been know to use their surroundings to conceal their movements and out-flank organized groups of human predators. Considered a keystone species for their critical role in maintaining the ecological balance of the rainforest, cassowaries are sadly now an endangered species in Australia. There’s likely less than 4,000 individuals left due to loss of habitat. Lately, however the main cause of death has been getting run over by cars and trucks.
Back in the ecolodge, it was a scene out of Jurassic Park: A big, fierce raptor-like bird eyeing me hungrily. Eyeing my breakfast bowl that is. I got the impression it expected me to put the bowl on the floor. And, maybe that cassowary had a right to my breakfast. Instead, I slowly backed away, bowl in hand. She began to come towards me when the owner, carrying a large serving tray as a shield, shooed her out.
“Unfortunately we’ve had the odd guest feed her and now she comes looking for hand outs,” the owner said unhappily. It puts the cassowary at serious risk because it might injure a guest she said.
That feeding wild animals is dangerous for them ought to be an obvious need-to-know. The more challenging need-to-know is we ought to modify our activities and ways of living so that cassowaries and other species can thrive. There’s a moral argument for that but I’m going with the pragmatic: Cassowaries and other species are part of our life support system. We need them.
Double trouble
“The evidence is crystal clear: Nature is in trouble. Therefore we are in trouble” That’s what Sandra Díaz told me nearly 18 months ago. Diaz is an ecologist at the National University of Cordoba in Argentina, and a co-chair of a multi-year global assessment of the health of world’s ecosystems.
Nature, in the form of ecosystems comprised of a stunning variety of animal, plant and other species, are our life support system. Nature provides our air, food, clean water, air, energy, materials and so on. Our life support system is falling apart because some species are going extinct and the abundance of remaining species are in sharp declines.
According to Ms. Diaz, there is overwhelming evidence that shows human activities are behind nature’s decline. The specific causes or drivers of decline: land conversion for agriculture and urban settlements; deforestation; overfishing; bush meat hunting; climate change; pollution; and invasive alien species.
Who is driving the drivers of extinction?
We’re driving the drivers of extinction. More precisely, what we consume, what we buy, is what drives the drivers. That’s an inescapable need-to-know. This is greatly facilitated by an economic system that ignores its impacts on nature and facilitated by governments spending billions in subsidies to prop up that system.
So does this mean there too many people on the planet? When it comes to household consumption emissions, the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for more than twice the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions compared to the poorer 50% of the world in 2015. This is according to new research from the Stockholm Environment Institute, a world-leading research organization.
In the study, the wealthy 1% were defined as households with incomes over US $100,000 a year. I’m sure many of those households would never consider themselves wealthy but they certainly are relative to the poorer half of the world — 3.6 billion people — whose household incomes are less than US $1,000 a year.
This graph shows the shares of annual global carbon emissions in each year that are attributed to individuals in three global income groups. The global population is arranged by income vertically, and the corresponding share of annual global carbon emissions is represented horizontally. Source: Stockholm Environment Institute and Oxfam.
The inequity in household consumption emissions are pretty stark:
…the average per capita consumption emissions linked to the top 1% in 2015 were over 100 times greater than the average per capita consumption emissions of the poorest half of the world’s population.
Let’s look at the richest 10% — those with incomes above US $35,000. They total around 630 million people and were responsible for 49% of global carbon emissions in 2015. How much came from the 3.6 billion at the bottom? A mere 7%.
“The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis,” said Tim Gore, Head of Climate Policy at Oxfam and co author who worked with Stockholm Environment Institute on the report.
While this study looked at carbon-related consumption emissions, they’re a good proxy for consumption of goods and services in general. It shows there are too many who are consuming far too much. This is not the same thing as blaming everything on overpopulation. It shows who really is driving the drivers of species decline that are unravelling our life support system. This unravelling matters because we have yet to create an artificial life support system. No one is growing food on the International Space Station.
So what can be done?
Stop doing dumb things
This could be a big list. But I’m just going to look one really big dumb thing: The US $500 billion a year in public subsidies for the fossil fuel, fishing, agriculture, and transportation industries that damage our living environment. Industries that cause harm ought to be modified, phased out and replaced. Green energy is replacing fossil energy but not nearly fast enough. The smart thing would be to use that $500 billion to help all those industries go green.
“Sure, but what can I do about that?” is something I hear all the time. My answer: Never vote for anyone who doesn’t promise to eliminate these harmful subsidies. And tell anyone who complains or worries about the weather, lack of songbirds or butterflies, plastic in the oceans etc, etc that we citizens are paying companies twice to do these things, once through our taxes and again with our purchases.
2. Stop buying stuff, especially cheap stuff
China is the world’s top furniture and flooring maker, and particularly of low-cost products. Surprisingly China doesn’t allow logging in its forests so it is the world’s biggest importer of logs, mainly from poorer countries. This is often done illegally resulting in deforestation as I reported on for Nat Geo a couple of years ago.
Everything we buy has an ecological cost — another need-to-know. If we buy only what we truly need it would make a big difference. What households earning over $100,000 think are necessities probably aren’t when 3.6 billion live on less than $1000 a year. To be clear, poverty isn’t the solution. It’s about the bottom 50% being able to consume a little more while the wealthy consume a lot less. Combined with smart and careful transformations of destructive industries and we’re on our way to securing our life support systems. And that would be a very good thing.
Thanks for listening.
Until next time, stay safe.
Stephen