Lance Kinseth, 2018, pencil
Monday, April 30, 2018
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Monday, April 16, 2018
Insect Armageddon
Scientists Warn of ‘Ecological Armageddon’ After Study Shows Flying Insect Numbers Plummeting 75%
Tom Embury-Dennis summarizes the following study in Independent [See independent.co.uk] entitled “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,” by
Caspar A. Hallmann ,
Martin Sorg,
Eelke Jongejans,
Henk Siepel,
Nick Hofland,
Heinz Schwan,
Werner Stenmans,
Andreas Müller,
Hubert Sumser,
Thomas Hörren,
Dave Goulson,
Hans de Kroon
Published: October 18, 2017
The number of flying insects has plummeted by 75 per cent in the last 25 years, according to a study that suggests we are approaching an “ecological Armageddon”.
The implications for humanity are profound, with insects providing an essential role for life on earth as pollinators of plants and prey for larger animals.
Although it was known species such as bees and butterflies were declining, scientists were left shocked by the drop in numbers across nature reserves in Germany.
While no single cause was identified, the widespread destruction of wild areas for agriculture and the use of pesticides are considered likely factors. Climate change was also cited as playing a potential role.
Dave Goulson, professor of life sciences at the University of Sussex and the study’s co-author, said: “Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth but there has been some kind of horrific decline.
“We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”
The researchers were able to rule out weather events and changes in the landscape of nature reserves as possible causes.
The results are based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany, who have been catching insects in malaise traps – large tent-like structures that funnel insects into a collecting cylinder.
When the weight of the samples taken from the malaise traps was compared to samples taken in 1989, an average loss of 76 per cent was recorded. The decline was even starker in summer – when insect numbers are at their highest – with a loss of 82 per cent.
“The fact that the number of flying insects is decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an alarming discovery,” said Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University who led the new research.
Scientists believe the fact the declines were recorded in well-managed nature reserves makes the results even more troubling, as numbers outside them, where wildlife has less or no protection, are likely to be even worse.
Mr Goulsen said a possible explanation would be insects dying when they fly out of nature reserves into farmland “with very little to offer for any wild creature”.
“But exactly what is causing their death is open to debate. It could be simply that there is no food for them or it could be, more specifically, exposure to chemical pesticides, or a combination of the two,” he said.
A UN report in March warned that pesticides, which are “aggressively promoted” by chemical industries, were found to have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health and society as a whole”.
It said the idea that they were necessary to feed the world’s growing population was “inaccurate and misleading”.
The study into insect decline was published in the journal Plos One.
[Kinseth: In another study “Wet summers drive five British butterflies close to extinction,” which corresponds with several other studies of losses of bees and insects in various ecosystems. See another insect loss summary article: at e360.yale.edu: Christian Schwagerl, "What is causing the sharp decline in insect populations and why it matters, July 6, 2016]
Friday, April 6, 2018
To Cherish What Remains
To cherish what remains of the Earth
and to foster its renewal is our only
legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
HUMAN LIFE HAS MADE many positive strides: increased life expectance, lower global violence and poverty, [See Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now] and even a reduction of release of ozone into the atmosphere. And yet, in 2016, there are, for example, continuing steep global declines in freshwater resources (water scarcity now for 3 billion is anticipated to increase for 5 billion), forests, vertebrate species (declined by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012), marine catch (with fishing effort increasing), as well as steep increases in ocean dead zones, CO2 emissions, temperature change and human (+2 billion since 1992, +35.5 percent) and ruminant livestock population (+20.5 percent), and toxic chemical application on landscape. (See William Ripple, et al.{15, 364 scientist signatories], World Scientists‘ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, BioScience, 67, 12, Dec 2017, pp. 1026-1028. This report follows “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992).
Ecocide: These impacts are reaching a point where the decimation of the biosphere has caused a mass extinction event and a failing, very rapid trajectory in sustainability efforts that may have already crossed the point where desecration can be reversed.
The Phoenix-level challenges (i.e., to ascend out of ashes rather than simply improve) to cease pushing the limits of what the biosphere can tolerate to support the web of life are critical mega-changes that are needed immediately. For example, these challenges involve limiting population growth by reducing fertility rates, reduced greenhouse gases, incentivizing renewable energy and promoting new green technologies, a well-funded restored ecosystem and halting conversion of forests, grasslands and other native habitats, pollution curbing, halting defaunation, reduction of food waste and dietary shifts toward plant-based foods. While such efforts are typically viewed as taking away from human needs, the good news, first, is an unrecognized sense that the cost of making such changes will cost far less than not making these changes (i.e., natural ecosystem provides rich economic value) and, second, that these changes are essential for human health and human sustainability rather than for a nature that is perceived to be “outside” of human life.
Short of explosive human decimation, the critical need to re-prioritize human actions will involve a shift from the domination of a homo-centric orientation rather than an ecocentric one.
Improving or reducing the quality of human life involves more than attention to human life. The needed shift is a realization that the Earth is a living being rather than a physical planetary stage-set that is separate from human life (based on strong beliefs that human life originates outside the physical Earth). Therefore, for human life and the biosphere, the first priority in human actions is the emphasis on not doing anything that degrades the biosphere. We now have the global technological monitoring that reveals the whole Earth to be one ecosystem so that what happens on another side or in a variety of places affects everywhere else. Without this vision and having peopled the Earth, we essentially commit ecocide in most of our actions that we might blindly assume “improve” human life.
Perhaps the bio-destiny and natural bio-purpose of human life is to degrade the Earth, causing ecocide that degrades (and even extinguishes human life) and the Earth ecosystem. And yet, perhaps a good chance remains that human life can make an abrupt turn toward a deep economy that is eco-centric first.
The Great Renascent Work of the 21st Century involves the reintegration of human life into the larger Earth Community. [See Thomas Berry, The Great Work]. To what do we belong in the long run of things, and what is our true home?
I pledge allegiance to the biosphere of the Earth
And to the cosmos that expresses and nurtures it.
Seeing the many as one, indivisible,
I pledge grace toward all beings and landscapes
Seeking legal standing and justice for all.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
(Freya, Nordic) Spring Goddess / Tears For A Desecrated Earth
Lance Kinseth, Spring Goddess / Tears For A Desecrated Earth, 2018
Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected
See fastcodesign.com
03.27.18EVIDENCE
Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected
Researchers are sounding the alarm after an analysis showed that buying a new smartphone consumes as much energy as using an existing phone for an entire decade.
Before you upgrade your next iPhone, you may want to consider a $29 battery instead. Not only will the choice save you money, it could help save the planet.
A new study from researchers at McMaster University published in the Journal of Cleaner Production analyzed the carbon impact of the whole Information and Communication Industry (ICT) from around 2010-2020, including PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones, and servers. They found remarkably bad news. Even as the world shifts away from giant tower PCs toward tiny, energy-sipping phones, the overall environmental impact of technology is only getting worse. Whereas ICT represented 1% of the carbon footprint in 2007, it’s already about tripled, and is on its way to exceed 14% by 2040. That’s half as large as the carbon impact of the entire transportation industry.
Smartphones are particularly insidious for a few reasons. With a two-year average life cycle, they’re more or less disposable. The problem is that building a new smartphone–and specifically, mining the rare materials inside them–represents 85% to 95% of the device’s total CO2 emissions for two years. That means buying one new phone takes as much energy as recharging and operating a smartphone for an entire decade.
Yet even as people are now buying phones less often, consumer electronics companies are attempting to make up for lost profits by selling bigger, fancier phones. The researchers found that smartphones with larger screens have a measurably worse carbon footprint than their smaller ancestors. Apple has publicly disclosed that building an iPhone 7 Plus creates roughly 10% more CO2 than the iPhone 6s, but an iPhone 7 standard creates roughly 10% less than a 6s. So according to Apple, the trend is getting better, but the bigger phones companies like Apple sell seem to offset some gains. Another independent study concluded that the iPhone 6s created 57% more CO2 than the iPhone 4s. And despite the recycling programs run by Apple and others, “based on our research and other sources, currently less than 1% of smartphones are being recycled,” Lotfi Belkhir, the study’s lead author, tells me.
In any case, keeping a smartphone for even three years instead of two can make a considerable impact to your own carbon footprint, simply because no one has to mine the rare materials for a phone you already own. It’s a humbling environmental takeaway, especially if you own Samsung or Apple stock. Much like buying a used gasoline-fueled car is actually better for the environment than purchasing a new Prius or Tesla, keeping your old phone is greener than upgrading to any new one.
Smartphones represent a fast-growing segment of ICT, but the overall largest culprit with regards to CO2 emissions belongs to servers and data centers themselves, which will represent 45% of ICT emissions by 2020. That’s because every Google search, every Facebook refresh, and every dumb Tweet we post requires a computer somewhere to calculate it all in the cloud. (The numbers could soon be even worse, depending on how popular cryptocurrencies get.)
Here, the smartphone strikes again. The researchers point out that mobile apps actually reinforce our need for these 24/7 servers in a self-perpetuating energy-hogging cycle. More phones require more servers. And with all this wireless information in the cloud, of course we’re going to buy more phones capable of running even better apps.
As for what can be done on the server end, Belkhir suggests that government policies and taxes might make a difference–whatever needs to be done to get these servers migrated over to renewable energy sources. Google, Facebook, and Apple have all pledged to move to 100% renewable energy in their own operations. In fact, all of Apple’s servers are currently run on renewable power. “It’s encouraging,” says Belkhir of these early corporate efforts. “But I don’t think it’d move the needle at all.”
If this all sounds like bad news, it’s because it absolutely is bad news. To make matters worse, the researchers calculated some of their conclusions conservatively. The future will only get more dire if the internet of things takes off and many more devices are hitting up the cloud for data.
World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice
William J. Ripple Christopher Wolf Thomas M. Newsome Mauro Galetti Mohammed Alamgir Eileen Crist Mahmoud I. Mahmoud William F. Laurance 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries
BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, 1 December 2017, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125
Published: 13 November 2017
Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” (see supplemental file S1). These concerned professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.” In their manifesto, they showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human population growth. They proclaimed that fundamental changes were urgently needed to avoid the consequences our present course would bring.
The authors of the 1992 declaration feared that humanity was pushing Earth's ecosystems beyond their capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast approaching many of the limits of what the biosphere can tolerate without substantial and irreversible harm. The scientists pleaded that we stabilize the human population, describing how our large numbers—swelled by another 2 billion people since 1992, a 35 percent increase—exert stresses on Earth that can overwhelm other efforts to realize a sustainable future (Crist et al. 2017). They implored that we cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and phase out fossil fuels, reduce deforestation, and reverse the trend of collapsing biodiversity.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by exploring available time-series data. Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse (figure 1, file S1). Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change due to rising GHGs from burning fossil fuels (Hansen et al. 2013), deforestation (Keenan et al. 2015), and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption (Ripple et al. 2014). Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.
{UNABLE TO DOWNLOAD FIGURE 1: GRAPHS OF VARIOUS STEEP INCREASES AND DECREASES THAT DRAMATICALLY ILLUSTRATE CRUCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION--GOOGLE POST TITLE TO SEE FIGURE 1}
Trends over time for environmental issues identified in the 1992 scientists’ warning to humanity. The years before and after the 1992 scientists’ warning are shown as gray and black lines, respectively. Panel (a) shows emissions of halogen source gases, which deplete stratospheric ozone, assuming a constant natural emission rate of 0.11 Mt CFC-11-equivalent per year. In panel (c), marine catch has been going down since the mid-1990s, but at the same time, fishing effort has been going up (supplemental file S1). The vertebrate abundance index in panel (f) has been adjusted for taxonomic and geographic bias but incorporates relatively little data from developing countries, where there are the fewest studies; between 1970 and 2012, vertebrates declined by 58 percent, with freshwater, marine, and terrestrial populations declining by 81, 36, and 35 percent, respectively (file S1). Five-year means are shown in panel (h). In panel (i), ruminant livestock consist of domestic cattle, sheep, goats, and buffaloes. Note that y-axes do not start at zero, and it is important to inspect the data range when interpreting each graph. Percentage change, since 1992, for the variables in each panel are as follows: (a) –68.1%; (b) –26.1%; (c) –6.4%; (d) +75.3%; (e) –2.8%; (f) –28.9%; (g) +62.1%; (h) +167.6%; and (i) humans: +35.5%, ruminant livestock: +20.5%. Additional descriptions of the variables and trends, as well as sources for figure 1, are
included in file S1.
included in file S1.
Humanity is now being given a second notice, as illustrated by these alarming trends (figure 1). We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats (Crist et al. 2017). By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.
As most political leaders respond to pressure, scientists, media influencers, and lay citizens must insist that their governments take immediate action as a moral imperative to current and future generations of human and other life. With a groundswell of organized grassroots efforts, dogged opposition can be overcome and political leaders compelled to do the right thing. It is also time to re-examine and change our individual behaviors, including limiting our own reproduction (ideally to replacement level at most) and drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of fossil fuels, meat, and other resources.
The rapid global decline in ozone-depleting substances shows that we can make positive change when we act decisively. We have also made advancements in reducing extreme poverty and hunger (www.worldbank.org). Other notable progress (which does not yet show up in the global data sets in figure 1) include the rapid decline in fertility rates in many regions attributable to investments in girls’ and women's education (www.un.org/esa/population), the promising decline in the rate of deforestation in some regions, and the rapid growth in the renewable-energy sector. We have learned much since 1992, but the advancement of urgently needed changes in environmental policy, human behavior, and global inequities is still far from sufficient.
Sustainability transitions come about in diverse ways, and all require civil-society pressure and evidence-based advocacy, political leadership, and a solid understanding of policy instruments, markets, and other drivers. Examples of diverse and effective steps humanity can take to transition to sustainability include the following (not in order of importance or urgency): (a) prioritizing the enactment of connected well-funded and well-managed reserves for a significant proportion of the world's terrestrial, marine, freshwater, and aerial habitats; (b) maintaining nature's ecosystem services by halting the conversion of forests, grasslands, and other native habitats; (c) restoring native plant communities at large scales, particularly forest landscapes; (d) rewilding regions with native species, especially apex predators, to restore ecological processes and dynamics; (e) developing and adopting adequate policy instruments to remedy defaunation, the poaching crisis, and the exploitation and trade of threatened species; (f) reducing food waste through education and better infrastructure; (g) promoting dietary shifts towards mostly plant-based foods; (h) further reducing fertility rates by ensuring that women and men have access to education and voluntary family-planning services, especially where such resources are still lacking; (i) increasing outdoor nature education for children, as well as the overall engagement of society in the appreciation of nature; (j) divesting of monetary investments and purchases to encourage positive environmental change; (k) devising and promoting new green technologies and massively adopting renewable energy sources while phasing out subsidies to energy production through fossil fuels; (l) revising our economy to reduce wealth inequality and ensure that prices, taxation, and incentive systems take into account the real costs which consumption patterns impose on our environment; and (m) estimating a scientifically defensible, sustainable human population size for the long term while rallying nations and leaders to support that vital goal.
To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world's leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.
Epilogue
We have been overwhelmed with the support for our article and thank the more than 15,000 signatories from all ends of the Earth (see supplemental file S2 for list of signatories). As far as we know, this is the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article. In this paper, we have captured the environmental trends over the last 25 years, showed realistic concern, and suggested a few examples of possible remedies. Now, as an Alliance of World Scientists (scientists.forestry.oregonstate.edu) and with the public at large, it is important to continue this work to document challenges, as well as improved situations, and to develop clear, trackable, and practical solutions while communicating trends and needs to world leaders. Working together while respecting the diversity of people and opinions and the need for social justice around the world, we can make great progress for the sake of humanity and the planet on which we depend.
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