Landcare 1: The Problem

[Part 1 of 3: see 2 and 3]

Why don’t Americans debate landcare with the same passion as we debate healthcare?  We should.  Both are critical to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Healthcare understandably feels more immediate: we want the best care possible for family and friends and for ourselves when we are sick, and we know, firsthand, the incapacitating effects of illness. Perhaps landcare just seems less pressing; its connections to our day-to-day lives less obvious.  Potential problems seem to be far away, impacting peoples in other countries or politicians in another election.

However, it is increasingly hard to deny our situation is desperate: the Earth is Full. Serious observers of trending conditions, even the optimists, now sound alarmist. An increasingly familiar list of woes suggests it might be time to put landcare higher on our agenda.

• Climate chaos seems inevitable.  Even if we implement the most progressive proposed policies being debated, we still are likely to attain an atmosphere with 450 parts of carbon per million, which will be both costly and hurtful. Rising sea levels will displace millions from coastal areas inland while expanding deserts pushing millions coastward.  Agriculture will be less efficient, relocated or destroyed.  Droughts will be more extreme and, paradoxically, floods more dangerous, with more intense and localize downpours. If carbon rises further or climate responds like some of the less conservative estimates suggest, then acidified oceans will dissolve coral and shells, disrupting food chains and ocean fisheries that feed millions.  Melting tundra and dehydrated rainforests will release their enormous stores of greenhouse gases, collected over millennia, triggering a significant climate flip, such as those that have caused previous mass extinctions, making modern civilization unsustainable. The Pentagon acknowledges that climate change might threaten US security more than terrorism.

• Several billion young, poor, hungry, thirsty people are cramming into exploding urban systems worldwide, searching in futility for security, opportunity, and hope.  Destabilized political states seem inevitable.  Our complex and tightly stretched global supply chains that fill our stores with food, clothing, and trinkets are in danger of disruption without stable, capable trading partners.  Complex challenges such as climate change, nuclear disarmament, and water shortages will be neglected if governments become preoccupied by civil unrest.  American national defense agencies play war games preparing for global disruptions.

• In 1950, only 5% of privately owned land had a structure every 40 acres; by 2005 it was 30%.  Nearly one million acres of productive farms and forests are “developed” every year.  Roads, roofs, and compacted soils become impervious to rain.  Gypsy moth, long-horned beetles, kudzu, fungi, disease, and other invasive species get inserted deep within native ecosystems, entirely rewriting species compositions.  House cats, no matter how well fed, destroy song bird populations.  Fences, property boundaries, and roads prevent plant and animal migration.  Water, schools, electricity and other municipal utilities get stretched, traffic congestion increased, and public transportation made infeasible.

• The income gap between the poorest fifth of humanity and the richest fifth increased from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 by 2000. The wealthiest 101 US families quadrupled the percent of wealth they controlled between 1980 and 2000[1].  In 2008, 13.2 percent of the entire US population, and 19 percent of people under 18, were poor and unable to afford basic necessities. More than 1 in 100 American adults were incarcerated at the start of 2008, the highest documented rate in the world, with perhaps an equal number on probation or parole.

• Fresh water is becoming sufficiently scarce to generate wars in some countries and legal action in ours.  Agriculture, in particularly the type supporting our meat rich diets, is depleting fossil aquifers faster than they can be recharged.  Biofuels, solar panels, and other green energy sources require intense amounts of water, which is not available where we most need it.   Major rivers no longer reach the sea, every drop diverted to human use.  Glaciers and snow packs no longer sustain summer flows.  Increased pavement and decreased vegetation speed away the rain into pipes, cement channels, and straightened rivers.

• Dumping and trade of toxic wastes is so widespread that the EPA has a website for America’s most wanted toxic fugitives, people who dump here and escape prosecution. Electric power plants generate six million pounds of toxic combustion waste each year that must be disposed, somewhere.  The size and capacity of lungs of LA children are stunted by chronic smog. Most every American waterway now contains toxic heavy metals and the fish caught in half our lakes have mercury concentrations exceeding safe levels. We each bear a body burden of toxins—known to cause cancer, disrupt immune systems, and create birth defects—such as pesticides, flame retardants, wood preservatives, lead paint, phthalates, PCBs, and mercury.  Only a modest percentage of chemicals used in our industrial and food systems are rigorously tested. The additive and interactive effects of these chemicals are rarely tested. New chemicals are created daily.

• The current rate of extinction is one of the fastest in all of Earth’s history—a rate comparable to the biodiversity collapse that vanquished mighty dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  Only a few of the world’s fisheries are healthy enough to sustain viable populations, most are heavily overfished, and many are imperiled or depleted.  Dead zones the size of New Jersey result from pesticide, nutrient, and soil running from our roads, yards and farms into the Gulf of Mexico. Bottle caps, plastic bags, medical wastes, and just about every other human artifact that floats aggregate on oceans into drifting monuments of neglect, one is twice the size of Texas.

• Globalization allows capital to flow freely, thus manufacturing, processing, agriculture and forest industries relocate where labor and resources are cheapest and productivity greatest. The intensification of production and massive economies of scale benefit consumers with low priced goods, but society loses the local skill, aptitude, equipment, and ethic required to sustainably manage local lands and staff local institutions. Rural communities get drained of their talent and capacity to care for the land.  The heartland is depopulating.  Only the farmers, fishers, foresters lucky enough to be located in the most productive sites make profit margins that reward serious stewardship.  The others—by far the majority—must abandon their work or work nature harder, take shortcuts, and slowly but ultimate degrade natural capital.

• Government capacity to tend and protect our green infrastructure is eroding.  National debt is mounting.  Agencies are retrenching.  Social and national security demand every greater portions of our budget, and investment through taxes has become unpatriotic.  The transportation system is starved and crumbling.  Water filtration systems are antiquated and inefficient. Healthcare costs now bankrupt middle class households, and will bankrupt the nation. Deliberative, respectful, civic discourse about land health has dissolve into bitter name calling: anyone worried about jobs is a greedy rapist of nature’s purity and anyone interested in nature is a watermelon—green on the outside and socialist red on the inside.

• Green consumerism seduces materialists with an easy way out.  People buying hybrid cars and florescent light bulbs feel freed to build bigger houses and take longer showers. Consumers that carefully buy carbon credits to offset their air travel fly further and more often. Organic food gets transported thousands of miles to be available in season.  Money saved in operating energy efficient appliances gets spent refurnishing the bedroom.  In times of crisis, Americans shop.

How should we respond?   Paths for navigating through these challenges are visible in the contours of popular culture.  Each path leads towards a different future with different opportunities and risks.  One path stays the course, accelerating development of wealth and technological capacities.  Another path places confidence not in human ingenuity, but in the Supreme Being:  God will provide.  A third path, increasingly ridiculed, but still well tread, asks a paternalistic state guided by wise science to fix market failures and impose limits on excessive, harmful behaviors.  The forth path, landcare, is harder but safer, and ultimately far more rewarding.  It requires compassion for others and for the larger land community as well as political engagement and personal sacrifice.   Most importantly, it is within reach.  All we need is the will to act.

These paths are compared in the next blog.