3241. Excerpt from The Patterning Instinct: Can We Transform Our Society for a Flourishing Future?

By Jeremy Lent, Resilience, May 9, 2019


Resilience editor's note: Excerpted from the final two chapters of Jeremy Lent’s award-winning book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, (Prometheus, 2017) which explores the different ways cultures have patterned meaning into the cosmos, and reveals how various worldviews arose and shaped the course of history. The book uncovers the hidden foundations of our modern unsustainable worldview, and offers a potential vision for a more harmonious future. Jeremy is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to flourish sustainably on the earth. More info: jeremylent.com.

 

Ideological lock-in

The reasons our civilization continues hurtling towards a precipice are multi-layered. There are some readily identifiable factors; underpinning these are certain structural characteristics of our global system that lock in our current momentum; and underlying these are cognitive frames –  mostly concealed – that form the basis for our collective behavior. Each of these layers must be addressed to make a meaningful course correction.

The easily identifiable forces propelling humanity on its current course are the special interests that gain financially and politically – at least, in the short-term – from continued economic growth and use of fossil fuels. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually in political lobbying and funding for those who deny the threat of anthropogenic climate change. They currently exert enough power over the U.S. legislative process to thwart meaningful legislation at the national level.

However, even without these special interests, some structural characteristics of our global system make it very difficult to change direction. One of these is known as technological lock-in: the fact that, once a technology is widely adopted, an infrastructure is built up around it, making change prohibitively expensive. A frequently cited example is the QWERTY keyboard, which was originally designed for its inefficiency, in an attempt to slow down the rate of typing and therefore prevent early typewriter keys from hitting each other. More efficiently laid out keyboards can double typing speeds, and yet it has been impossible for them to make inroads because everyone is used to the older, inefficient design. In the case of fossil fuels, an obvious example of technological lock-in is the network of gas stations for vehicles with conventional engines. Any new electric car technology has an uphill battle to create a competing network, even if its vehicles offered equivalent performance.

These technological challenges can be overcome with enough investment. A far greater obstacle to meaningful change is financial lock-in: the financial infrastructure underlying the fossil fuel-based economy. Fossil fuel corporations are valued primarily on the basis of their proven coal, oil and gas reserves. However, for the world to keep global warming to 2 degrees, the oil companies could only use about one fifth of their reserves. These corporations would experience drastic declines in market value if the world were to make a serious commitment to rein in global warming. Given the overriding corporate objective of maximizing financial returns, their executives have a powerful incentive to steer the public debate away from this issue.

Beyond the narrow interests of the fossil fuel industry, the entire capitalist economy is founded on perpetual growth. In aggregate, world stock markets are valued on the same growth assumptions that predict a quadrupling of the global economy by mid-century. Business leaders fret that if a concerted attempt were made to reduce this growth trajectory, it might lead to a spiraling decline in valuations, possibly even to the collapse of the capitalist system. Additionally, in the arena of geopolitical rivalry, the power of a nation relative to others is substantially based on economic strength. Leaders fear that if their nation unilaterally chose to reduce its own growth to a more sustainable level, this would reduce its ability to protect its national interests.

This self-defeating collective dynamic, known in economics as the “tragedy of the commons,” highlights a crucial flaw in capitalist ideology: the notion that it is inevitably beneficial for society when each person seeks to maximize his own gain. Underlying this notion is an even more fundamental defect of classical economic theory: the assumption that nature is inexhaustible. When the framework of modern economics was developed in the 18^th century, it seemed reasonable to view natural resources as unlimited because, for all intents and purposes, they were. Economists therefore treated minerals, trees, and water as commodities to be sold at a price that was simply the cost of extracting and marketing them. As we’ve seen, the experience of the past fifty years has proven that assumption to be wrong. In the words of systems theorist Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

In spite of this obvious and fundamental flaw, classical economic theory continues to be used around the world as the driving force for decisions made by corporations, policy makers and governments. How can that be? Environmental historian J. R. McNeill offers an explanation: “When an idea becomes successful, it easily becomes even more successful: it gets entrenched in social and political systems, which assists in its further spread. It then prevails even beyond the times and places where it is advantageous to its followers.” This is another form of lock-in: ideological. “Big ideas,” McNeil observes, “all became orthodoxies, enmeshed in social and political systems, and difficult to dislodge even if they became costly.”

Humanity’s search for meaning

Our modern world is the result of the runaway success of one of the most powerful cognitive patterns in history. Capitalism triumphed over competing ideologies with its seductive precept that by selfishly pursuing their own financial gain, each person was contributing to the greater benefit of society. With the advent of consumerism, capitalism instilled an intoxicating new purpose into people’s lives, promising them that their feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness or alienation could be cured through the possession and conspicuous use of manufactured goods. No matter that the “cure” was only temporary: through hard work and dedication, one could earn more money to purchase even more goods, thus stepping on to the hedonic treadmill.

This pattern has become so embedded into the global construction of meaning that most people accept it without question. Those fortunate enough to possess more money than others gain more in the short-term on the treadmill of temporary satisfaction. However, the ultimate beneficiaries are not human at all, but rather the conceptual creations called corporations, which exist collectively to transform the human experience and the natural world into the monetized economy, regardless of the ultimate effect on humanity as a whole.

How did this cognitive pattern achieve such success? We’ve seen that, beginning with the “mind-cure” movement of the late nineteenth century, a consumption-based ideology served to redress a lack of meaning in people’s lives, replacing an inner void resulting from the uniquely Western mode of dualistic cognition with the consumerist frenzy of capitalism.

In more integrative patterns of cognition, such as traditional Chinese thought or indigenous cultures, a person’s relationship to their community and the natural world satisfied the drive of their patterning instinct to find meaning in life. In the prescientific Christian era, as in Islamic civilization, the belief in a transcendent God infused meaning into people’s lives, even though it led to the bifurcated experience that continues to cause so much suffering. However, in our mainstream modern value system, the separation from the desacralized natural world – created by the Greeks, systematized by Christianity and endorsed by science – is complete.

Where does this leave us? Is there a way our civilization can somehow be steered to achieve a sustainable path for humanity’s future – a path where progress might mean something other than re-engineering humanity and consuming the earth?

The Great Transformation

In order to navigate toward a future of sustainable flourishing, the economic system driving our current trajectory would need to be transformed, along with its underlying values: the pursuit of never-ending material growth and the glorification of humanity’s conquest of nature. Could such a drastic transformation of our global system really take place in the foreseeable future?

A Great Transformation would need to be founded on a worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth into the future. In place of root metaphors such as nature as a machine and conquering nature, the new worldview would be based on the emerging systems view of life, recognizing the intrinsic interconnectedness between all forms of life on earth, and seeing humanity as embedded integrally within the natural world.

Three core values emerge from this worldview. The first is an emphasis on quality of life rather than material possessions. In place of the global obsession with defining progress in terms of economic output and material wealth, we would begin to prioritize progress in the quality of our lives, both individually and in society at large. Secondly, we would base political, social and economic choices on a sense of our shared humanity, emphasizing fairness and dignity for all rather than maximizing for ourselves and our parochially defined social group. Finally, we would build our civilization’s future on the basis of environmental sustainability, where the flourishing of the natural world is a foundational principle for humanity’s major decisions.

The movement for a shared humanity

It may sound impossibly idealistic that the view of humanity as a sharing community could form the basis for a worldwide shift in ideology, but many historical examples show how powerful this vision can be. The abolitionist movement of the 19^th century succeeded in putting an end to slavery, which had previously been seen as integral to the global economy. In more recent decades, movements have fought for the preservation of the natural world. When Rachel Carson published her exposé of the indiscriminate use of pesticides in 1962, her solitary stand was denounced as hysterical and unscientific. Only eight years later, at the first Earth Day in 1970, twenty million Americans marched to protect the environment, and by 1990 two hundred million people in 141 countries across the world were demonstrating for the earth.

What’s more, the values of the Great Transformation are already held by large segments of the world’s population. Environmental activist Paul Hawken has estimated that there are more than a million organizations worldwide, both large and small, engaged in humanitarian causes. This dispersed and unstructured grouping of concerned citizens constitutes, in his mind, “the largest social movement in all of human history.”

The potential impact of this social movement is increased by the power of the internet to amplify each individual group’s effectiveness through its networked connectivity. Hawken points to Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the usefulness of a network grows exponentially when its connections grow arithmetically. In this way, the collective action of small groups of individuals can potentially become a global force to countervail the massive corporate networks that currently dominate global civilization. The global culture emerging from the internet offers humanity a view of itself as an interconnected whole, inviting people to see themselves as part of a web of life encompassing the entire world.

The ease with which the internet transmits ideas across the world means that, when the time comes, the transformation of global consciousness could occur at a speed which might surprise everyone. It is part of our evolved human nature to stick together with our group’s attitudes or opinions, even when a changing situation leaves those attitudes out of date, which can frequently cause social rigidity and political inertia. When thought leaders emerge offering new ways of thinking, they gradually attract increasing numbers of people until a tipping point is reached, when the “stickiness” that kept people attached to their old pattern of thinking is superseded by the pull of the new ideas. All of a sudden, the gradual shift in ideas becomes an avalanche when those who are most comfortable sticking together find themselves in a rush to join in the new way of thinking. In the age of the internet, this tipping point can conceivably be reached much more rapidly than in the past.

Choosing our future

What would the latter part of this century look like if our global civilization took the path of a Great Transformation? It’s likely we’d see a reorganized United Nations, with powers to enforce a more responsible approach to our global commons, such as the oceans, the atmosphere and the environment. When corporations and governments make investment decisions, they’d explicitly factor the externalities of the natural world into their cost/benefit analyses. While there would still be massive income inequality between rich and poor nations, that gap would be decreasing as a result of economic structures based on fairness rather than untrammeled exploitation. And the flourishing of the natural world would be given a high priority in global decision making. There might even be an enforceable UN Declaration of the Rights of Nature, putting the natural world on the same legal standing as humanity.

It’s a relay race against time in which every one of us is part of the team. What is ultimately required is a shift towards a new way of finding meaning from our existence. Many visionaries and deep thinkers today recognize the need for a new global consciousness, based on an underlying and all-infusing sense of connectedness. The meaning we derive must arise from our connectedness if we are to succeed in sustaining our civilization into the distant future: connectedness within ourselves, to other humans, and to the entire natural world.

3240. The Wild Way to Rapid Transition – How Rewilding can Slow Climate Breakdown, Protect from its Worst Effects and Improve Biodiversity

By The Staff, Rapid Transition, May 9, 2019

Even as they fall under increasing pressure from human activity, the restoration of natural habitats like forests, is a key component of rapid transition. Not only is it a vital defence against climate breakdown, but it also protects the web of life and is beneficial for human well-being too. This ‘rewilding’ has caught the public imagination, sometimes with trepidation where the reintroduction of certain species are concerned, but the speed of attitude change is illustrated by the television naturalist, David Attenborough, whose long-awaited embrace of climate activism has recently seen new documentaries on both the BBC and Netflix. As recently as 2016, Attenborough was hesitant about rewilding, but now he cites it as a cornerstone of combating climate change.

Almost a century after they were wiped out in Northern Europe and the USA, wolves, for example, are returning, causing awe and delight in some, and fear and controversy in others. Intense debate followed publication of the book ‘Feral’ by journalist George Monbiot, in which he argued for widespread rewilding. Wolves are just one of the 21 key species identified by the organisation Rewilding Britain for reintroduction as part rewilding, which they believe can help save landscapes, and restore biodiversity. According to a 2018 report by the Royal Society, rewilding could also be used to lower greenhouse gas emissions and store carbon; native herbivores both produce less methane than modern cattle and maintain forests by dispersing seeds in their dung. Wild creatures work quickly and for free, offering a rapid transition of our landscape that could help mitigate some of the effects of climate change.

In the UK, although there is a growing understanding of wildlife gardening and urban rewilding – leaving areas unmown, leaving dead wood and fallen leaves for wildlife to inhabit – large scale rewilding remains contentious. We are wary of truly wild wildlife, but we understand the value of trees and greenery to human well- being. In 2013, the Woodland Trust estimated that if every household in England were provided with good access to quality green space, it could save an estimated £2.1 billion in healthcare costs. The UK is currently home to two large scale rewilding projects – the 3,500 acre Knepp estate in Sussex and the 23,000 acre Alladale Highland estate near Inverness in Scotland, both privately owned and driven by each owner’s vision.

Beavers are thriving once more after being reintroduced in the UK. Credit: Rachel Knickmeyer (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Charismatic animals like the Lynx, the wildcat and the wild boar are all candidates for reintroduction in the UK, but the humble beaver is currently the key species leading the way: its incredible engineering skills create a diverse range of habitats for birds, insects, fish, small mammals and plants; slowing down water flow; preventing flooding downstream; and storing water for use locally. Beavers are native to the UK but were hunted to extinction for their highly prized fur. In 1789, the last bounty was paid in Britain for a Eurasian beaver skull; today they are thriving again – some as part of highly controlled, fenced and monitored trials and some from unregulated releases.

In 2001, the Kent Wildlife Trust with the Wildwood Trust and Natural England imported two beaver families from Norway to manage a wetland nature reserve, pioneering the use of beavers as a wildlife conservation tool in the UK. In Devon, beavers appeared (ironically) on the River Otter in 2008 and more were introduced by the Devon Wildlife Trust in 2016 to increase genetic diversity. Fenced beaver sites now exist from Knapdale in Scotland to Cornwall, and from Essex to Wales. Meanwhile, a substantial wild population of 450 beavers thrives along the Scottish Tay, probably from unregulated releases – and as a result, the beaver is now protected in Scotland.

The beaver is native to the UK and made itself quickly at home; positive effects have been reported on water catchments and biodiversity in very short periods of time. Beavers are so good at water engineering, they have been proposed as a tool for implementing the EU Water Framework Directive.

Wider relevance

Rewilding proves how good nature is at bouncing back to abundance, given the opportunity to thrive without human interference. This gives us hope for a future in which human populations could live in a more diverse environment, where the balance of nature helps mitigate our more destructive tendencies. Beavers had all but died out across Europe by the 18th century, but are returning successfully to manage waterways, ponds and whole water catchment areas. Most ponds used to be made by beavers, but are now man made. In the Devon Beaver Project site, one family of beavers made over 10 ponds in just three years, benefitting a huge array of dragonflies, birds and amphibians. The 10 clumps of frogspawn laid in 2011 increased to 370 clumps by 2018.

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park in the US in 1995 is interesting because it shows how rewilding can work on a large scale to increase biodiversity. By the end of the 1920s almost all of the United States’ wolves were killed off, predominantly by ranchers protecting their livestock. They clung on in small populations in the northern wildernesses along the border with Canada. Within a few years, however, the Yellowstone wolf packs had made favourable impacts on the whole ecosystem through their control of the herbivore elk population. They reduced overall numbers of elk, which had grown enormous without predators, taking pressure off the grazing areas and allowing more trees to grow. Along river banks, the tree growth slowed the flow of water and reduced flooding in times of heavy rainfall. It also shaded the banks, allowing fish to flourish. The wolves are also bringing in money: wolf watching is big business and brings in an estimated four times more than elk hunting.

The finances are important because rewilding is often predicted to be a costly effort, causing the loss of productive land for food and the death of livestock by large predators. However, for a fairly small amount of money and in the right place, big changes can happen that can offer enormous benefits downstream – literally. Research by the UK’s Environment Agency suggests returning England’s water bodies to a good ecological condition could generate benefits worth £21 billion over a 37-year period. Beavers could be part of this solution, restoring wetlands, boosting water reserves and slowing down flood water. Beaver dams also act as a filter capturing pollutants such as agricultural fertilisers.
Rewilding also holds great hope for carbon capture. Healthy peat soaks up carbon as it forms over centuries. Britain has 13% of the world’s peat – but 80% is damaged and needs restoration. For every hectare, peatland absorbs the equivalent of around 3.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Maintaining vital water levels in peatland is often part of the rewilding process. Reforestation is similarly beneficial; much of the land in the UK would naturally support trees that absorb carbon – but at just 13% it has some of the lowest tree cover in Europe. For every hectare, woodland can absorb an average equivalent of around 12.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

One of the important ways in which rewilding is relevant to building a sustainable future is that it enables us to forge new relationships with the wider natural world, including top predators with whom we must share the planet if we are to survive. There is no doubt that predators will take livestock, but we can mitigate losses with planning, design and compensation. For example, Germany sees much fewer losses from herds because they keep livestock enclosed, while French farmers with sheep in the mountains complain of high losses (for which they receive compensation). Using specialist dog breeds to warn off wolves has also proven highly successful. There are some surprising benefits too: the return of the wolf also brings the return of the shepherd staying with the sheep, an ancient role that had almost disappeared from our farming environment.

Rewilding demands a cultural shift and this will be closely related to the shift needed for rapid transition in other areas. Sharing space with messy, complex nature and predators with large teeth is something to which we can and must adapt. It is worth noting that there have always been thousands of wolves on the Iberian peninsular, and although they are persecuted by people, they survive alongside a human population that is accustomed to their presence. After all, most wild creatures prefer to avoid humans; wildcats survive in Scotland because they prefer woodland, watercourses and meadows, while keeping a critical distance from villages, houses and roads. Perhaps this cultural shift could include learning from people who live close to animals that threaten them or their livelihoods, such as the Masai in East Africa, who farm livestock without eradicating lions.

Context and Background

Conservation management has failed to stem the tide of biodiversity loss. We need biodiversity to enable our food to grow, to store carbon naturally, to manage water, and for our own well-being. In Britain, the 2016 State of Nature report highlighted that between 1970 and 2013, 56% of species declined, with 40% showing strong or moderate declines. Of the nearly 8,000 species assessed using modern Red List criteria, 15% are extinct or threatened with extinction from Great Britain. A new measure that assesses how intact a country’s biodiversity is, suggests that the UK has lost significantly more nature over the long term than the global average. The index suggests that we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world. The Living Planet Index shows a 58% global decline in populations of amphibians, fish, reptiles, mammals and birds between 1970 and 2012, varying from 36 to 38% in terrestrial and marine ecosystems to 81% in freshwater habitat.
The National Ecosystem Assessment highlighted that 30% of ecosystem services – the benefits and services nature provides society and the economy, such as clean water and flood alleviation – are in decline, and many others are impoverished compared to historical baselines. Soil degradation is estimated to be costing England and Wales £1.2 billion per year. The causes include: erosion, compaction, loss of organic matter, loss of soil biodiversity and contamination. Rewilding may be the fastest, most effective way of undoing some of this damage.

Rewilding can take a ‘passive’ form (letting land go fallow and not continuing human activity – even in the corner of a garden), ‘active’ (carrying out a range of measures including allowing species to self seed and grow, using hydration and fire but not introducing species), and ‘trophic’ (ecological restoration strategy that uses species introductions to restore top-down trophic interactions and associated trophic cascades to promote self-regulating biodiverse ecosystem). Beaver re-introduction falls into this last category, as they create a local ecosystem that is self regulating and with knock on benefits for ecosystems adjacent to it and downstream. Rewilding has been highlighted as a possible management approach in the follow-up to the first National Ecosystem Assessment. It has also been discussed as a potential solution to help mitigate flooding.

Rewilding is still contentious, but attitudes can quickly change. As recently as 2016, the globally feted naturalist David Attenborough was hesitant about Rewilding; but in 2019 he released a film called Climate Change: The Facts, listing rewilding as one of the cornerstones of combating climate change. This will undoubtedly raise the profile of the concept and help to make it more mainstream. David Attenborough’s film on the impact of plastic on wildlife is widely credited with changing public perceptions and generating unprecedented action.

Enabling factors

Most of the transitions that have occurred as a result of rewilding in the UK have been brought about because individuals with the vision and land have stepped forward at a time when government resources are tight and no immediate alternatives to the biodiversity crisis are in sight. Rewilding has happened mostly in protected parks, on large private estates, on reserves owned by conservation bodies and on private farmland. This has enabled trials to happen away from the public gaze. Many of the successful beaver releases have been unplanned and unregulated – beavers are native and therefore suited to our landscape; they flourish without our help.

The 3,500 acres of the Knepp Estate in Sussex are a good example of how private wealth coupled with enlightening risk taking can facilitate change. This estate is completely devoted to a process-led rewilding project involving free-roaming herds of cattle, horses, pigs and deer as the drivers of habitat creation. The results have been spectacular. Since its inception in 2001, numerous Red Data species like lesser spotted woodpeckers, long-eared owls and ravens have returned to Knepp and populations of common species are rocketing. Knepp Wildland is now a breeding hotspot for turtle doves and purple emperor butterflies, and boasts 2% of the UK’s entire breeding population of nightingales.

In other European countries, the government has taken a more proactive role, and several large schemes are in play across the continent, including 580,000 hectares of the Danube delta, Romania’s Southern Carpathian mountains, the Velebit mountainous region in Croatia, the Central Apennines rewilding area, and the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria. Much of this work led by Rewilding Europe – which is a Netherlands-based independent foundation working across Europe – has been funded with EU money. Their main tactics are undoing what is there, which is largely a one-off cost with reduced ongoing management, and attractive to funders:

• Removing dams and dykes to restore river dynamics and reflooding;
• Restore prey base by restocking animals for carnivores and scavengers;
• Bring in large wild herbivores to restore natural grazing;
• Remove fences to ‘unchain’ the beauty and the free movement of wildlife; and
• Remove tree plantations to restore natural forest.

Scope and evidence

• Rewilding can build resilience to the extreme weather exacerbated by climate breakdown. The UK government, Defra-funded Source to Sea project at The National Trust’s Holnicote Estate in Exmoor trialled various measures to slow flows and store water that mimic beaver activity. During the unprecedented rainfall in Somerset in winter 2013, there was no flooding in villages that regularly suffered in the past.
• In a US study, water took three-to-four hours to travel 2.6km where there were no beaver dams. When a single, leaky beaver dam, 1.5m high, was established, it took 11 days to cover the same distance.
• According to the Carbon Brief website, the loss of living herbivores, such as American tapirs and African and Asian forest elephants, could cause the world’s tropical forests to lose between 2% and 12% of their stored carbon.
• Research released in 2017 estimated that, over the past 1,000 years, the replacement of wildlife with cattle in Africa has caused methane emissions to more than double from 3.4m tonnes a year to 8.9m tonnes a year.
• George Monbiot in his book “Feral” rates the following species as suitable for rewilding projects in the UK: Beaver, Bison, Blue stag beetle, Lynx, Wild boar, Wild cat, Wolf, Capercaillie, Common crane, Dalmatian pelican, Eagle owl, Goshawk, Great bustard, Night heron, Osprey, Spoonbill, White stork, White-tailed eagle, Grey whale, European sturgeon.
• Studies of the Pontbren Project in mid-Wales showed that shelter belts of trees kept up to 60 times the amount of water in the soil compared to pasture. The tree roots appear to create channels for water flow, allowing the soil to act as a sponge.
• Beavers can alter the structure of the flow of water systems, create a rich resource of deadwood, create ponds that are beneficial to amphibians, alleviate downstream flooding, improve water quality and attract tourists.Plans to re-introduce the Lynx to Britain are being suggested by the Lynx UK Trust.
• Wild boar have re-established themselves in Britain after an approximate 400-year absence. Wild boar can create tens of square metres of bare ground per week. By grubbing in the woodland floor, they increase the diversity of the plants that can grow there. They dig up bracken rhizomes, allowing tree seedlings to rise through what would otherwise be an impenetrable mat. Their wallows are a useful habitat for water-loving plants, insects and amphibians.
• Wolf reintroduction to Scotland would save Highland estates the cost of culling the deer herd.

Lessons for rapid transition

1. Rewilding can be a fast and cheap way to slow climate breakdown, restore the diversity of plant and animal life and build resilience to the impacts of climate change.
2. Sometimes we need to act without ‘knowing everything’ – letting a complex system work unhindered can be the best thing we can do.
3. Attitudes can change fast when issues are communicated well and with good messengers such as David Attenborough who is a recent convert to rewilding.

References

• Bakker, E., Svenning, J-C. 22 Oct 2018. Trophic rewilding: impact on ecosystems under global change. The Royal Society. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2017.0432
• Barkham, P. 26 Jan 2018. Harmless or vicious hunter? The uneasy return of Europe’s wolves. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/26/harmless-or-vicious-hunter-the-uneasy-return-of-europes-wolves
• Cromsigt, J., Te Beest, M., Kerley, G., Landman, M., Le Roux, E., Smith, F. 22 October 2018. Trophic rewilding as a climate change mitigation strategy. The Royal Society. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2017.0440
• DEFRA. 2015. From Source to Sea, The Defra Flood Management Demonstration Project.https://www.therrc.co.uk/sites/default/files/files/Site_visits/holnicote_n_hester_presentation.pdf
• Dunne, D. 22 Oct 2018. Could Rewilding Help Tackle Climate Change. Carbon Brief. https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-could-rewilding-help-tackle-climate-change
• Economist. Feb 19 2019. The rewilding movement is going from strength to strength https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/02/07/the-rewilding-movement-is-going-from-strength-to-strength
• Graves, A., Morris, J., Deeks, L.K., Rickson, R.J.,    Kibblewhite, R., Harris, J., FarewellI, T.. 22 Oct 2015. The total costs of soil degradation in England and Wales.   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915003171#!
• Hayhow DB, Burns F, Eaton MA, Al Fulaij N, August TA, Babey L, Bacon L, Bingham C, Boswell J, Boughey KL, Brereton T, Brookman E, Brooks DR, Bullock DJ, Burke O, Collis M, Corbet L, Cornish N, De Massimi S, Densham J, Dunn E, Elliott S, Gent T, Godber J, Hamilton S, Havery S, Hawkins S, Henney J, Holmes K, Hutchinson N, Isaac NJB, Johns D, Macadam CR, Mathews F, Nicolet P, Noble DG, Outhwaite CL, Powney GD, Richardson P, Roy DB, Sims D, Smart S, Stevenson K, Stroud RA, Walker KJ, Webb JR, Webb TJ, Wynde R and Gregory RD. 2016. State of Nature 2016. The State of Nature partnership.
• https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/conservation-projects/state-of-nature/state-of-nature-uk-report-2016.pdf
• King, A. Dec 20, 2018. The return of the large predator to mainland Europe. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/the-return-of-the-large-predator-to-mainland-europe-1.3727602
• Lynn, W. 2018. Deep Rewilding, Wildlands Network blog. https://wildlandsnetwork.org/blog/rewilding-feature-deep-rewilding/
• Monbiot, G. 2013. Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, Allen Lane, Penguin Press.
• Reinhart, B. 2013. Born to Rewild. https://wildlandsnetwork.org/wildways/born-to-rewild/
• Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Blog. https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/our-positions-and-casework/our-positions/species/beaver-reintroduction-in-the-uk/
• Soulè, M. E., Terborgh, J. 1998. The Policy and Science of Regional Conservation, Chapter 1 in Continental Conservation. http://michaelsoule.com/resource_files/179/179_resource_file1.pdf
• Soulè, M. E., Noss, R. 1998 Rewilding and Biodiversity as Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation, Wild Earth. https://rewilding.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/RewildingBiod.pdf
• Eds. Grooten, N., Almond, R.E.A. The Living Planet Report 2018: aiming higher. World Wide Fund for Nature. 2018. http://www.livingplanetindex.org/projects?main_page_project=LivingPlanetReport&home_flag=1

3239. A Green New Deal Beyond Growth

By Ricardo Mastini, Degrowth, May 7, 2019

Art by Mike Chaput for Degrowth journal

Since 2018, a coalition of grassroots environmental groups and progressive politicians in the United States have brought into the public debate the idea of a Green New Deal. The plan is inspired not only by Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also by the subsequent wartime mobilization in response to a large-scale threat. The difference is that this time around the threat is not represented by the Axis powers, but rather by runaway climate change.

The Green New Deal moves beyond the market-based instruments that have so far dominated climate policy-making. It envisions massive public investment to overhaul energy and transport infrastructure, extensive state support for green industries, and large-scale efforts to help workers through a federal job guarantee.

The Green New Deal narrative put forward by Ocasio-Cortez considers the climate crisis a result of unbridled capitalism. And, as The Economist points out, it combines environmental and social programs to simultaneously tackle the twin problems of inequality and climate change. 

New skin for an old deal
The main issue with the current Green New Deal narrative is that it banks on the feasibility of decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions and material throughput. However, absolute decoupling is an illusion. In fact, economic growth and environmental impacts have been tightly coupled to date, with at best some relative decoupling, notably for carbon emissions, which have grown more slowly than GDP. This has been observed in a few advanced economies, but the role played by the outsourcing of emissions through international trade is likely considerable. Even under the best-case scenario, absolute decoupling of GDP growth from resource use and pollution is not possible on a global scale.

Furthermore, abundant and cheap energy has been historically a major driver of economic growth. Consequently, to sustain long-term economic growth it is necessary to increase the energy supply. However, the ‘energy return on energy investment’ (EROI) for renewables is low. Hence, an energy system entirely powered by renewables is unlikely to be compatible with a global economy at its current size—and much less with a global economy growing 2 or 3% per year.

Lastly, we should not be concerned only about climate change, as the scale of the ongoing ecological breakdown is much wider and it includes biodiversity loss, pollution, and unsustainable levels of material extraction. For instance, a scaling challenge for solar and wind comes from the need for raw materials, including rare earth minerals for electromagnets in wind turbines and lithium for batteries, that are limited in supply. In turn, this leads to other issues, such as environmental conflicts arising from struggles for the control of resources and local pollution where the mines are located.

Something new under the sun

It therefore seems clear that a socio-ecological transformation capable of moving us beyond a growth-based economy would require an even more ambitious political vision. Massive investments in green infrastructure would have to be the first step in a bolder programme, gradually leading to a just and sustainable social system which is not predicated on infinite economic growth. Is there any aspect of the Green New Deal discourse that raises such hope? Maybe.

In the text of the Green New Deal Resolution presented in the United States House of Representatives there is a mention of the need for “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care; affordable, safe, and adequate housing; economic security; and access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.” This amounts to a considerable expansion of the welfare state. As explained by Ian Gough in his book Heat, Greed and Human Need, the welfare state transfers the allocation of some goods and services from the market to political determination, often in the form of ‘social rights of citizenship’. The welfare state ensures the provisioning of decommodified services by the government for all households, e.g. education, housing, and healthcare.

Hence, if the provision of basic services is decommodified, then the rationale for pursuing growth on behalf of working people loses its validity. This may represent a breach in the political consensus around the need of pursuing economic growth at all costs. It will also make all the difference in our struggle to ensure a dignified life for all citizens while steering away from ‘hothouse Earth.’

But how do we get there? Roosevelt’s New Deal would not have happened without massive pressure from social movements. Thus, the mass mobilization led by Extinction Rebellion and the youth climate strikes is essential to pressure politicians into declaring a climate emergency (as it has already happened in the UK) and rolling out a Green New Deal. But it’s equally essential that we dethrone GDP growth as the utmost political priority and start building a post-growth alternative for human prosperity and ecological sustainability.

3238. Landmark Analysis Documents the Alarming Gobal Decline of Biodiversity

By Erik Stodstad, Science Magazine, May 6, 2019

Black rhinos, poached for their horns, are just one of some 1 million species that a new report warns are at risk of extinction. Mint Images/Aurora Photos

The state of biodiversity and ecosystems is at its most perilous point in human history and the decline is accelerating, warns a landmark assessment released today. But the hope is that the bleak assessment—crafted by hundreds of scientists and historic in its depth and breadth—will finally persuade governments and others of the need to change course and prevent further harm to the ecological systems that provide for human well-being. “What’s at stake here is a livable world,” says Robert Watson of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K., who chaired the organization that produced the report.

Only transformative changes to economic, political, and social systems will allow nations to meet agreed targets for nature conservation, the authors conclude. The core message is “quite radical,” says Georgina Mace, an ecologist at University College London who reviewed the assessment. “You have to prioritize nature and nature’s benefits to people in everything you do.”

The report confirms “that we can’t just preserve, we must reverse the trend by increasing biodiversity locally, regionally, and globally,” said Alexandre Antonelli, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in the United Kingdom, in a statement.

The report comes from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), based in Bonn, Germany, which includes representatives from more than 100 countries. More than 450 experts from around the world were involved in drafting the 1800-page report over 3 years. They reviewed some 15,000 scientific papers and other sources of data on trends in biodiversity and its ability to provide what are known as ecosystem services or nature’s contributions to people: everything from food and fiber to clean water and air.

Many species are declining, the report notes. Out of 8 million known species of animals and plants, about 1 million are under threat of extinction, including more than 40% of amphibian species and a third of marine mammals. Even more are declining in numbers: Since 1900, native species have become, on average, about 20% less abundant. Measures of the extent and condition of natural ecosystems have declined 47% since the earliest estimates and many are deteriorating by 4% every decade.

The report highlights other metrics of the decline of nature and its human domination. They include:

• Seventy-five percent of land has been “severely altered” by human activities.
• More than a third of land and almost 75% of freshwater is used for crops or livestock.
• The extent of living coral reef has dropped by perhaps half since the 1870s.
• One hundred million hectares of tropical forest have been destroyed between 1980 and 2000.
• Wetlands, which provide clean water and fish, are being destroyed three times faster than forests.
• Plastic pollution has increased 10-fold since 1980 and 300 million to 400 million tons of industrial waste are dumped each year.
• Coasts are marred by some 400 low-oxygen dead zones, equivalent to the area of the United Kingdom.

“The message is unfortunately very alarming,” says Hesiquio Benitez of the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity in Mexico City, a national delegate who voted to approve the report. “We’re reaching the limits of the planet.”

For the first time at a global scale, the report has ranked the causes of damage. Topping the list, changes in land use—principally agriculture—that have destroyed habitat. Second, hunting and other kinds of exploitation. These are followed by climate change, pollution, and invasive species, which are being spread by trade and other activities. Climate change will likely overtake the other threats in the next decades, the authors note. Driving these threats are the growing human population, which has doubled since 1970 to 7.6 billion, and consumption. (Per capita of use of materials is up 15% over the past 5 decades.) The report also includes perspectives from indigenous and local communities to a greater extent than before. Lands managed by indigenous peoples are declining less quickly than elsewhere, but 72% of indicators developed by such communities show deterioration of nature.

There are a few bright spots, mostly the increasing creation of nature reserves and marine protected areas. But the progress is not nearly enough to meet most of the international conservation targets that nations set in the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010. The declining state of nature also jeopardizes efforts to meet many of the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals, such as ending hunger. “If we continue with business as usual, we’ll miss [the goals],” Mace says. “We’re quite good at making plans, and quite good at setting aside protected areas, but the response of the natural world is nothing like good enough to meet the targets.”

The new report is the first global analysis of the state of nature since 2005, when researchers assembled what is known as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. But the hope is that the IPBES report will have a greater impact than that study. The new report “is significant, because it’s the first global assessment that has been asked for by governments—they’ve been involved in it, they’ve shaped it,” says Peter Bridgewater, a biodiversity policy expert and adjunct at the University of Canberra, who was not involved in the report. Delegates from member nations approved the report on Saturday, after a week negotiating the text of the 40-page summary for policymakers.

According to scenarios included in the report that examine the consequences of various possible policy decisions to 2050, the news will keep getting worse unless transformative change occurs. That change would involve undertaking a wide array of activities, the authors write, including land restoration, more widespread adoption of agroecological practices such as preventing soil erosion, and more widely enforced limits on fishing. Fundamentally, reversing the trends will require a shift to a more sustainable global economy, the authors state, and “steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth.”

In its call for transformation, the report anticipates push back: “By its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good.” IPBES will examine how to achieve such transformative change as part of its next round of work, notes Esther Turnhout, a science policy expert at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The goal, she says, would be to better understand “how we can tackle those challenges and why we haven’t done so.”

Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of IPBES, is optimistic the global report released today will make a difference. “The moment for biodiversity has arrived,” she says, pointing to growing initiatives and interest in protecting nature. “There is so much evidence, and the scientific community is speaking with one voice,” Larigauderie says. “Now it’s not something that can be ignored.”

3237. Breakthrough Discovery Recycles Plastic from the Inside Out

 By Science Daily, May 9, 2019

Light yet sturdy, plastic is great -- until you no longer need it. Because plastics contain various additives, like dyes, fillers, or flame retardants, very few plastics can be recycled without loss in performance or aesthetics. Even the most recyclable plastic, PET -- or poly(ethylene terephthalate) -- is only recycled at a rate of 20-30%, with the rest typically going to incinerators or landfills, where the carbon-rich material takes centuries to decompose.

Now a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed a recyclable plastic that, like a Lego playset, can be disassembled into its constituent parts at the molecular level, and then reassembled into a different shape, texture, and color again and again without loss of performance or quality. The new material, called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, was reported in the journal Nature Chemistry.

"Most plastics were never made to be recycled," said lead author Peter Christensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. "But we have discovered a new way to assemble plastics that takes recycling into consideration from a molecular perspective."

Christensen was part of a multidisciplinary team led by Brett Helms, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. The other co-authors are undergraduate researchers Angelique Scheuermann (then of UC Berkeley) and Kathryn Loeffler (then of the University of Texas at Austin) who were funded by DOE's Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program at the time of the study. The overall project was funded through Berkeley Lab's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

All plastics, from water bottles to automobile parts, are made up of large molecules called polymers, which are composed of repeating units of shorter carbon-containing compounds called monomers.

According to the researchers, the problem with many plastics is that the chemicals added to make them useful -- such as fillers that make a plastic tough, or plasticizers that make a plastic flexible -- are tightly bound to the monomers and stay in the plastic even after it's been processed at a recycling plant.

During processing at such plants, plastics with different chemical compositions -- hard plastics, stretchy plastics, clear plastics, candy-colored plastics -- are mixed together and ground into bits. When that hodgepodge of chopped-up plastics is melted to make a new material, it's hard to predict which properties it will inherit from the original plastics.

This inheritance of unknown and therefore unpredictable properties has prevented plastic from becoming what many consider the Holy Grail of recycling: a "circular" material whose original monomers can be recovered for reuse for as long as possible, or "upcycled" to make a new, higher quality product.

So, when a reusable shopping bag made with recycled plastic gets threadbare with wear and tear, it can't be upcycled or even recycled to make a new product. And once the bag has reached its end of life, it's either incinerated to make heat, electricity, or fuel, or ends up in a landfill, Helms said.

"Circular plastics and plastics upcycling are grand challenges," he said. "We've already seen the impact of plastic waste leaking into our aquatic ecosystems, and this trend is likely to be exacerbated by the increasing amounts of plastics being manufactured and the downstream pressure it places on our municipal recycling infrastructure."

Recycling plastic one monomer at a time
The researchers want to divert plastics from landfills and the oceans by incentivizing the recovery and reuse of plastics, which could be possible with polymers formed from PDKs. "With PDKs, the immutable bonds of conventional plastics are replaced with reversible bonds that allow the plastic to be recycled more effectively," Helms said.

Unlike conventional plastics, the monomers of PDK plastic could be recovered and freed from any compounded additives simply by dunking the material in a highly acidic solution. The acid helps to break the bonds between the monomers and separate them from the chemical additives that give plastic its look and feel.

"We're interested in the chemistry that redirects plastic lifecycles from linear to circular," said Helms. "We see an opportunity to make a difference for where there are no recycling options." That includes adhesives, phone cases, watch bands, shoes, computer cables, and hard thermosets that are created by molding hot plastic material.

The researchers first discovered the exciting circular property of PDK-based plastics when Christensen was applying various acids to glassware used to make PDK adhesives, and noticed that the adhesive's composition had changed. Curious as to how the adhesive might have been transformed, Christensen analyzed the sample's molecular structure with an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy instrument. "To our surprise, they were the original monomers," Helms said.

After testing various formulations at the Molecular Foundry, they demonstrated that not only does acid break down PDK polymers into monomers, but the process also allows the monomers to be separated from entwined additives.

Next, they proved that the recovered PDK monomers can be remade into polymers, and those recycled polymers can form new plastic materials without inheriting the color or other features of the original material -- so that broken black watchband you tossed in the trash could find new life as a computer keyboard if it's made with PDK plastic. They could also upcycle the plastic by adding additional features, such as flexibility.

Moving toward a circular plastic future
The researchers believe that their new recyclable plastic could be a good alternative to many nonrecyclable plastics in use today.

"We're at a critical point where we need to think about the infrastructure needed to modernize recycling facilities for future waste sorting and processing," said Helms. "If these facilities were designed to recycle or upcycle PDK and related plastics, then we would be able to more effectively divert plastic from landfills and the oceans. This is an exciting time to start thinking about how to design both materials and recycling facilities to enable circular plastics," said Helms.

The researchers next plan to develop PDK plastics with a wide range of thermal and mechanical properties for applications as diverse as textiles, 3D printing, and foams. In addition, they are looking to expand the formulations by incorporating plant-based materials and other sustainable sources.

Journal Reference:

1. Peter R. Christensen, Angelique M. Scheuermann, Kathryn E. Loeffler, Brett A. Helms. Closed-loop recycling of plastics enabled by dynamic covalent diketoenamine bonds. Nature Chemistry, 2019; 11 (5): 442 DOI: 10.1038/s41557-019-0249-2