“The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them” – Michael O’Leary
Wastefulness, it seems, is endemic to life on Earth. Of the sun’s incoming energy, about half reaches the Earth’s surface, with the other half reflected or absorbed by particles in the atmosphere. Of the solar energy captured by plants, no more than 5% is turned into biomass via photosynthesis and 1% is more typical of modern crops. Of the chemical energy in the food that we eat, about 25% is converted into useful mechanical work by the human metabolism. So if all of the sun’s energy that reaches the surface were to be captured by plants, and if all of the plant life in the world were to be consumed by people, then around 0.1%, or one part in a thousand, of the incoming solar energy would be converted into useful human energy: breathing, hearts beating, growing, thinking, talking, running, working, playing, reproducing, … The proportion is much less than that because plants only capture a small portion of the non-reflected solar energy (most of which goes into the oceans) and we only eat a fraction of plant life (and much of that indirectly).
Given how wasteful this is in energy terms, why do we worry so much about the wastefulness of human activity, which seems pretty minor in comparison? Because before the second Industrial Revolution, there at least appeared to be a natural balance: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere had varied in the range 200-300 ppm for half a million years depending on the Ice Age cycle; in just 150 years, the concentration has increased by about 40% and is now over 400 ppm.
If the Earth’s existence were scaled to one day, then human beings have been around for about the last 4 seconds, and the time since the second Industrial Revolution corresponds to the last three thousandths of a second. Large changes to our biosphere in such a short fraction of planetary history are unlikely to be sustainable.
There is a nice metaphor in David Mackay’s “Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air”, which he uses to explain why it matters if human activity leads to emissions of say 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere annually when the oceans are emitting (and absorbing) over 300 billion per annum. It is an image of an airport that has been designed to cope with a maximum of 1000 passengers per hour: if for some reason the flow increases to say 1050 passengers per hour, then queues will build up and the airport becomes dysfunctional, even though the increase in passenger numbers is small compared to the airport’s capacity.
A loss of nutrition?
One consequence of tipping the natural balance appears to be that human foodstuffs are gradually losing (on average) their nutritional value, at least those produced through intensive farming practices. It seems that nature does not like it if we try to increase output all the time – eradication of “weeds”, greater yields from arable land, faster growing chickens, bigger beef cattle.
Maybe less is more, as an old Heineken advertisement used to say. Maybe too much of anything causes it to lose its value, whether it is the food that we eat, goods that we buy, or Gross Domestic Product. Charles Dickens had the right instinct with education in his creation of M’Choakumchild in Hard Times, a caricatured teacher bursting to the brim with facts to stuff children with. More recently, Alain de Botton also highlights the virtues of economy with respect to eduction in Religion for Atheists, and with respect to verbal expression and architecture in The Architecture of Happiness. We need to “notice what we have already seen” (The Art of Travel), which perhaps becomes harder when we are obsessed with increasing the amount of travelling that we do.
The idea that “less is more” doesn’t really convince us though. Reducing our consumption and travel sounds pretty negative, and so when it comes to environmentalism there’s a part of us that sympathizes with the immortal words of Michael O’Leary, the embattled Ryanair chief executive: “The best thing you can do with environmentalists is shoot them”. Frugality is depressing, or so it seems; we need to live and enjoy life!
Permaculture
But maybe what seems plain is really rich but unappreciated. A patch of garden, or a lifestyle, that seems poor and insipid to me is not innately so, but I perceive it as such because I am insensitive to its innate value. Maybe it’s a case of learning how to be positive about a way of life that can be sustained. This begins with seeing ourselves as part of nature, and having to live within nature’s limits.
I was recently introduced to permanent agriculture, or ‘permaculture’, which is both a set of techniques and a mindset for living off the land without ruining it. One of the principal techniques of permaculture is trapping water. This can involve reshaping the landscape, building swales (even small ones in one’s own garden) so that water does not rush off into drains, leaching nutrients rapidly into water courses and ultimately the sea. The water is saved, along with the nutrients of the soil.
In permaculture, diversity is appreciated and plants are grown in combinations that are mutually supportive and keep nutrients locked in. Productivity is much less than in intensive farming techniques, but does that necessarily matter if the produce is better quality?
Everything matters and has value, but needs to be in its right place. With this mindset, pollution is simply resources in the wrong places or wrong combinations: carbon dioxide and methane that are in the atmosphere rather than the land or sea; energy that is in the atmosphere in the form of heat rather than in the ground in the chemical structure of hydrocarbon molecules; plastic bags that are in the sea or landfill rather than in their constituent components of fossil fuels, or as plastic bags retained for useful purposes in the house or garden.
Life can prosper in seemingly barren settings if we nurture it, not by using invasive techniques because we are impatient to see progress (e.g. smothering a flower bed in manure, planting things we want to see without enough thought as to whether they are well suited to the garden) but by following a more thoughtful and patient process of experiment and adaptation (e.g. making and adding our own compost, planting flowers and crops that suit the soil, temperature, aspect and water level).
In permaculture, our own ecological footprint is not minimized, but maximized in a good way. It is not that we leave nature alone but that we try to improve the health of the soil and everything that depends on it, taking into consideration the wider ramifications of our actions (energy use, waste, and so forth). The concept that everything has value extends from plants to people. Far from being negative, surely this is the most positive of all possible philosophies of life?
How to bring about change?
How do we make this happen, though? How do we bring about a way of life that is gentler and more sustainable, in accordance with permacultural principles?
I do not know, but the Quaker teaching always to admit you might be mistaken seems like a good place to start. Change is thwarted by the habits we get into – which do not seem to make us happy – and by defensiveness. To make significant change in one’s life can be tantamount to admitting the past life was faulty in some respects. Rather than admit that, we continue as we are.
When it comes to the environment, this defensiveness manifests itself at a national and European level in a tendency to blame China. At the Bonn summit in November 2017, a number of European researchers involved in the Global Carbon Project concluded that there will be a 2% increase in global CO2 emissions in 2017 driven by an increase in China’s smokestack industries. This is shamefully disingenuous. On a per capita consumption basis, we in the West contribute much more to global warming than the citizens of China. If Chinese emissions increase, it is largely because China is producing what we consume. (And parenthetically, it is interesting to note that in the last year, China has increased its renewable energy capacity three times as much as the whole of Europe combined.)
Before we can really change, we probably have to summon up the honesty and self-awareness that we need to do so.