The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (4 page)

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The idea that something might be done about this, that a way might be found to hold back the tide of human destruction across the globe, has been one of the great moral and intellectual challenges of the last quarter of a century, given that the pressures involved are intractable and that the problem itself is fully acknowledged by relatively few. They are usually classed as environmentalists or conservationists. They are in every country,
and they are often loud, and sound influential, but they are small in number in global terms. Most ordinary individuals do not care, because the consequences are not yet visited upon them (although they will be), and also because people are quite naturally focused on their own concerns, which often seem harmless enough, and do not grasp that the essence of the trouble to come is their own individual choices, multiplied seven billion times.

Furthermore, the destruction of humanity’s home by humanity’s own actions is not something that can be coped with adequately – and that means, confronted – by our current belief system, which we might term liberal secular humanism. This creed, which has held sway since the Second World War, has a single, honourable aim: to advance human welfare. It wants people everywhere to be free from hunger and fear and disease, and in so far as is possible, to be happy and to live fulfilled lives. It is principled and upright. It is admirable. But there is a gap at its core: the failure to acknowledge that humans are not necessarily good. Still less does it admit that, more, there may be something intrinsically troubling about humans as a species: that
Homo sapiens
may be the earth’s problem child.

Many, indeed, would be outraged by the suggestion, for poverty and hunger and disease are terrible enough without proposing that people as a whole are in some way flawed. Yet for the Greeks, the founders of our culture, this idea was central to their morality. There was a continual problem with man. Man was glorious, almost godlike, and continually striving upwards; yet only the gods were actually Up There, and if man tried to get too high, as he often did, the gods would destroy him. The gods represented man’s limits. We think of Icarus, of course, but there are deeper lessons to be learned. The principal fault of Oedipus in Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
, remember, was not that he murdered his father and married his mother; those were the incidentals of his fate. His real fault was that he thought he
knew
everything, he had answered the riddle of the Sphinx, he was beyond peradventure wise. The gods showed him he was not (and in the greatest of all tragic ironies, he puts out his eyes to punish himself for having been blind to his true situation, which now he can see).

In the modern consensus, in liberal secular humanism, this spiritual view of man as having limits, as not being able to do everything he chooses, and of potentially being a problem creature – for what else is a species which destroys its own home? – is missing entirely. There is no trace of it whatsoever. To suggest it, is absolute anathema. For with the dying of religion and the vanishing of spirituality we have become our own moral yardstick: at the heart of our notions of good and bad lies human suffering, and what we can do to avoid it. This is so deep-rooted in us now, so instinctive, that it has been internalised in the language: one of our most prized virtues is humanity, one of our deepest tributes to another person, that they are humane. He, or she, is a humane human. It’s only one letter, one squiggle away from saying he, or she, is a human human. Our morality now is entirely anthropocentric: we automatically define objective good by what is best for ourselves. So where humanity’s interests clash with other interests, the other are likely to get short shrift from us, even when they involve the proper functioning of the planet, which is the only place we have to live.

This has made the effective defence of the natural world very difficult in recent decades, especially in the face of development imperatives which may seem overwhelming. Environmentalists and conservationists, the people concerned with the fate of the earth’s natural systems, have often been contemptuously dismissed by the development movement as middle-class birdwatchers, and it has long been hard to counter the assertive battle-cry of those turning rainforest, with its miraculous numbers of species, into nutrient-poor, soon to be exhausted farmland:
We Need It!

What the defenders have tried to do, therefore, is construct
a convincing response, to find an answer to the simplistic mantra of human necessity, which might bring to a halt the unthinking destruction of the natural world. There have been two serious attempts at this. The first has been the theory (or the project) of sustainable development. It has been a failure.

Mothered into the world by Gro Harlem Brundtland, sometime prime minister of Norway, via the 1987 United Nations’ report on linking environmental and developmental concerns, ‘Our Common Future’, sustainable development seeks to let the mammoth human enterprise carry on growing, essentially to relieve poverty, without trashing its natural resource base. Some times referred to as ‘green growth’, it is officially ‘development which meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Again, this is admirable, and it can probably be done, as long as you think hard about it, and try; moreover, the theory accurately diagnoses both the problem and the potential solutions. The weakness is in the implementation. For sustainable development relies on the goodwill of people, and by extension, governments, to be put into practice; it relies on them changing their behaviour. It does not take into account that people are not necessarily good – and as such it was a perfect fit for liberal secular humanism, which does not take that into account either – and that people do not voluntarily change, if that means, stop acting out of self-interest. You might as well ask cats to stop chasing birds.

It would of course be unthinkably glib to dismiss out of hand the efforts of thousands of dedicated people, and the pursuit of sustainable development has made a real difference: above all, it has embedded, in governments and companies, the crucial idea, as a policy objective, that the environment must be taken into consideration, which was not there before. But what it has not done is alter fundamentally the general direction or the pace of the destruction of the natural world. It was thought that that
might be possible when, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, more than one hundred world leaders came together to endorse the theory and the gigantic work programme put together to implement it around the globe, Agenda 21; there was a moment of high hope and self-congratulation, as if drawing up the detailed solution to the problem were the same as carrying it out. I remember it vividly. I was there. But two decades later, in the follow-up conference, Rio+20, nothing was clearer than how complete, in terms of Saving The World, had been sustainable development’s inability to deliver.

By 2012 little if anything had got better: with an additional 1.5 billion people added to the world, annual emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide had increased by 36 per cent and were rushing upwards, another 600 million acres and more of primary forest had been chainsawed, pollution was soaring, especially in the developing world, and more species than ever were being threatened with extinction. Although there might have been successes at the margins, the main direction of destruction had not been diverted, and Rio+20, which convened in the Brazilian city once again and was the biggest meeting ever held by the UN – attended by 45,000 delegates, observers and journalists, including 130 heads of state and government – made a very weak, renewed commitment to sustainable development as a principle, and then was forgotten the instant it was over.

However, the second attempt at finding the answer is not yet a failure, and is currently sweeping the globe.

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Sir Arthur Tansley is by no means a household name, certainly nothing like as familiar to us as his inventive contemporaries Ernest Rutherford, John Logie Baird and Alexander Fleming;
yet in the period of scientific ferment between the wars when all were active, Tansley, Professor of Botany at Oxford, conceived and popularised a concept which was to be just as influential as Rutherford’s nuclear physics, Baird’s television or Fleming’s penicillin: it was the ecosystem.

It had taken natural scientists, obsessed with classifying things, a long time to realise that individual species of plants and animals do not exist in isolation, but in close communities formed with other living organisms, which all interact not only with each other but also with their surroundings; it was a perception not formalised, as the new science of ecology, until the beginning of the twentieth century. Tansley was one of the first prominent ecologists, and his introduction of the
ecosystem
term (in a 1935 paper devoted to an abstruse argument about ecological terminology) made graspable, even to non-specialists, the powerful idea of a living complex of animals and plants, working together with non-living parts of the environment such as the soil or the climate, as a functional unit.

Such units could be as large as a lake or as piddling as a puddle, they could be a forest or a single tree, but it was clear that they were real and they did indeed have functions, and in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, as they began to be studied intensively, biologists started to appreciate that they played major roles in modulating the way water, and nutrients, and sediments, and carbon all flowed through landscapes, from living things to the soil and the sea and the atmosphere and back again.

This understanding eventually crystallised into the even more pertinent perception that ecosystems and their associated wild-life did things for
us
, things which were vital: they provided life support services which we might always have taken for granted, but which we could not do without. Pollination of crops by bees and other insects is perhaps the most obvious example: without it, swathes of global agriculture would collapse. But by the 1990s scientists were starting to list more and more of these
services: they included climate regulation, composition of the atmosphere, provision of fresh water, flood defence, control of erosion, maintenance of soil fertility, detoxification of pollutants, pest control, provision of fisheries, waste disposal, nutrient recycling, and more subtly, provision of a vast genetic library offering potentially life-saving new drugs and other products.

All that and more, we took from nature, without a thought. We had being doing so for aeons, because it was all free and so it was unnoticeable. The elucidation of the real role of ecosystem services, and even more, of our absolute dependence on them, has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in our understanding of the natural world, and what gave it peculiar force and relevance was that it came just as many of these services, for the first time in history, were under threat or actually being degraded.

Take the toppling rainforests. They could no longer be dismissed by their destroyers as mere pleasure gardens for bourgeois birdwatchers. Now we understood that they not only provided fuel and water and food, but also helped to regulate climate for us, and in a time when human carbon emissions were threatening to alter the atmosphere with disastrous consequences, they constituted a colossal carbon store which, many scientists and policymakers began to argue, it would be suicidal to sacrifice. (And their myriad plant species might very well hold an undiscovered substance which would save your child’s life, like the rosy periwinkle from the forests of Madagascar, which gave us vincristine, a cure for childhood leukaemia.)

Our utter dependence on nature: here was nature’s best possible defence, potentially far more effective than the hopeful pieties of sustainable development. The significance was seized on by conservationists, and the science of ecosystem services quickly grew into a discipline of its own: we might say it was formalised with the publication in 1997 of a compendium of essays entitled
Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems
,
edited by Gretchen Daily, a biologist at Stanford University in California. Since then it has exploded, being brought to popular attention globally by the United Nations with its Millennium Ecosystems Assessment, a vast survey published in 2005 which looked at twenty-four natural support systems for human life across the world, and asserted that at least fifteen of them were in serious decline. But our dependence upon them, vital though it may be, is not the only aspect of ecosystem services which has caught people’s imagination. There is another perception abroad about nature which is exciting many: there’s money in it.

Across the globe an extraordinary exercise is being carried out, one of the most remarkable society has ever undertaken: a great universal pricing. All over the planet, price tags are being affixed to grand chunks of nature, just as they are affixed to items on the shelves by a supermarket worker with a label gun, yet these are not the prices you might see on a can of beans or a packet of cornflakes, these are of a quite different order and say things like Pollination, 131 billion dollars, Coral Reefs, 375 billion dollars, Rainforests, 5 trillion dollars.

For the developing science of environmental economics has enabled us to accord ecosystem services value, real-world financial value, and this has woken up even more people than has the knowledge that we rely utterly on them. Take the example of mangroves, the salt-water woodlands found fringing many coastlines in the tropics. Imagine that the authorities in coastal zone X, with a rapidly expanding city behind it, decide to cut down its mangrove swamps because the shallow waters in which they are rooted provide an ideal site for shrimp farms, and if developed properly, those shrimp farms might produce, let us say for the sake of argument, 2 million dollars’ worth of exports over five years.

But mangroves aren’t just floppy trees with their feet in the water. They provide substantial natural protection against storms
and tidal surges. Let us say that after the mangroves have gone, a tidal surge occurs, perhaps even a tsunami, which sweeps effortlessly over the shrimp farms and inundates the coastal region, and its city, to disastrous effect, and leaves the authorities of X with no alternative but to provide future protection by building a long sea wall. How much will the sea wall cost you? Say it’s 200 million dollars, over five years.