Category Archives: Anthropocene

Opinions about the Anthropocene geological era

Disappearing Lions

Anthropocene, Decline of the west, Extinction, Natural History, New Attitude to Nature

 

This was the only Lion we saw in Africa

I have never seen wildlife as I did on our trip to Africa in 2013. It was spectacular.  But the fact is, numbers were already in serious decline when we were there. While others have been more lucky, we saw only one lion in the wild when we visited and that was in Kruger National Park in South Africa. That of course, is not important, but there are some important issues about lions and other African Wildlife.

Already in 2013, when we were in Africa, the problem with lions was severe. Between 1974 and 2013 when we were in Africa, it had lost 80-90% of its lions! And their number were continuing to decline.

One report published at the end of 2012 estimated that the number of lions in Africa was as low as 32,000. Another estimated the number at 15,000! That was profoundly disturbing since 40 years before that there were an estimated 200,000 lions in Africa.

The UK-based conservation  group LionAid said as few as 645 lions remained in the wild in western and central Africa  It said lions were extinct in 25 African nations and virtually extinct in 10, and it estimated that 15,000 wild lions remained on the continent as a whole, compared with about 200,000 30 years before.

No matter whose figures you believe the numbers are amazingly bad! According to Afua Hirsch writing in The Guardian in 2013,

“The report comes after a series of studies have raised concern about the fate of the African lion. Researchers at Duke University in the US used satellite imagery to conclude that about three-quarters of Africa’s wide open savannah had  disappeared over the last half century , and extrapolated lion populations on to data about their available habitats to estimate that 32,000 lions remained.”

This was one of the fastest declines of mammals in history.  Although their situation was not as dire as that of the tiger, it was clearly headed in the same direction and at breakneck speed.

The overall picture is clear—lions were disappearing fast. Many believed that at current rates unless something was done seriously and fast, the lions would  disappear from the wild in 40 years! As David Lamb pointed out in his book The Africans, in 1982,  “lions are so few in number that most Africans have never seen one.”

One of the problems was that the Chinese were paying big sums for lion bones. It was and is part of their superstitious beliefs that animal parts can give them health benefits.

That of course drives up the price of lions. Then when lions are scarce, the price is driven up so poaching continues with even greater vigor. It is vicious circle, just as it is for rhinos.  Added to that, as tiger bones become nearly impossible to obtain, partly because the Asians have driven them to extinction with their superstitious beliefs, they are now helping drive lions to extinction as well.  The problem is compounded, as it is for rhinos, by the fact that as lion numbers decline sharply, the price rises proportionately just as sharply, thus increasing the profits from poaching.

As a result of these declining numbers serious efforts must be made to protect lions, for the benefit of the tourism industry, but even more importantly so save the lions.

Can we considered ourselves to be civilized if we allow lions to be exterminated? Can we deny that a civilization that acquiesces in such destruction is in sersou decline?

 

Africa a place of unbounding Abundance: Elephants

Africa, Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

David Attenborough made his first trip to Africa in 1960.  Back then it really did seem inconceivable that a single species could threaten life on the planet. We were ignorant. There was such a species—Homo sapiens.

We went to Chobe National Park in Botswana where there are more elephants than anywhere else in the world. You have to work hard not to see any.

 

53 years later, when I went to Africa in 2013, I was blown away by the astonishing amount of wildlife. It seemed like every few minutes in our safari vehicles we would see an amazing array of wildlife. And compared to wildlife back home it was amazing. But compared to what it had been when Attenborough had gone 53 years earlier it was already cheap beer.

As far as wildlife is concerned, my experience in Africa was unparalleled. I had never seen animals in such abundance anywhere else in the world. It was not even close. All kinds of animals. But today I want to concentrate on one of them—elephants.

Yet we learned there that elephants were facing tough times—they were under siege. A survey in 1979 estimated that there were about 1.3 million elephants left in the wild. It is thought that in 2013 when we were there some 34 years later those numbers had been reduced to about 500,000. Less than half were left!

The worst part of it is that elephants were facing increasing challenges to their existence. Things were not getting better in many places, they were getting worse. Even though Chobe National Park was one of the few places where elephants were thriving this is what Damian Carrington of The Guardian said about them and their prospects:

 

 

The forest elephants of Africa have lost almost two-thirds of their number in the past decade due to poaching for ivory…There are about 100,000 forest elephants remaining in the forests of central Africa, compared with 400,00 of the slightly larger savannah elephants. The total population was over 1 million 30 years ago, but has been devastated by poaching driven by the rising demand for ivory ornaments in Asia.   

What has made things worse for elephants is that they range over central Africa and that region had suffered greatly on account of wars and competition. Poachers in such regions had easy access to weapons, and enforcement officers that were distracted by wars raging around them. Loss of habitat was not the primary problem as it was for many other species that were endangered. Many of the forests were already empty of elephants. That demonstrated that was a poaching problem not a habitat degradation issue.

China in particular was a large part of the problem. Their craving for elephant tusks had driven the price up to more than $1,000 per kg. Just 3 years before I was in Africa, the price was $150 per kg. 90% of Kenyan ivory ended up in China. As Africans told the Chinese, ‘China does not need ivory, but Africa needs elephants.’

The poachers were usually part of criminal gangs. They can be violent and ruthless. The guards on whom the elephants depended for their survival were often harassed and feared for their lives.  One guard said that he had become part of the national psychosis.

What was really weird then was that elephants by then depended on their mortal enemy for their survival.  That was us by the way. We were their enemy.  We had driven them to the brink of extinction by our wanton, foolish desires, and yet without us they would likely not survive because some of our species were working hard to save them.  The world is not just crazy. It is much more whacky than that. It is weirder than we could conceive it to be.

These two were from Kruger National Park in South Africa.

 

 

This group of elephants were actually part of a much  larger group. They actually surrounded our safari vehicle. It was a bit disconcerting to be surrounded by such large animals.  It was an experience I will never forget.  the elephants were actually difficult to photograph because they were too close!

I don’t know about you, but I think a world without elephants would be a paltry thing. Yes we need a new attitude to elephants. We also need a new attitude to nature.

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Ecocide, New Attitude to Nature

 

When we were in Africa,  in 2013 we were stunned by the amount of wild life we saw. One of the best places was Chobe National Park in Botswana.  It seemed like around every corner every couple of minutes, there was more to see. When we travel from Manitoba to Arizona each winter we rarely see any. Yet when Europeans arrived on the North American continent there were more wild animals than in Africa! Where did they all go? You  know where they went.

Although the Holocene era was fantastic it was not all perfect. As Dickens said, about another era, they were the best of times, they were the worst of times. Really our times were better than the times of the French revolution the time he was referring to in his great novel A Tale of Two Cities. But life created by humans was far from unmixed forward progress. We created the atomic bomb.  Our actions led to the Great Depression. We conquered some diseases; we ushered in others. We created the holocaust where we killed 6 millions of our own species.

By 1954, when I was 6 years old the population of the world had increased to 2.7 billion, carbon in the atmosphere increased to 310 parts per million in the atmosphere, and the remaining wilderness around the world had shrunk to 64%. But few of us noticed things had already changed. Even less were concerned. After all, we were the lucky ones living in the Holocene. So we thought. Actually, we were wrong. Another epoch had begun, though the exact starting date is still not certain.

Our technologies were making life easier. And the pace of change was speeding up dramatically. Our ideas were bearing fruit. And it all seemed good. Though there were a few shadows on the horizon. One was shaped like a mushroom in the sky. The Holocaust was behind us. We were convinced it was an aberration. We had learned from it and progress would proceed unhindered. Lucky us. These were illusions. There were problems out there. Big ones. And they were real.

By 1960 the world population increased to 3 billion people.  Carbon in the atmosphere increased to 315 parts per million and the remaining wilderness shrunk to 62%.

A lot of those problems have been created by the immense pressure on the planet by so many people and so many of those people getting richer so they could afford to affect the planet more drastically.

As a result, people were not realizing that the traditional attitude to nature—that it was a resource for us to do with as we pleased was exactly the wrong attitude.  We need a new attitude to nature, and we need it fast.

The Gentle perfection of the Holocene

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Climate change, Natural History, New Attitude to Nature

 

Until now extinction events were all created by natural forces. Over immense periods of time, we have reached our current time which scientists have call the Holocene. As David Attenborough said,

 

“the Holocene has been one of the most stable periods in our planet’s history. For 10,000 years the average temperature has not wavered by more than 1ºC. And for this time the great diversity of life on this planet has been attuned to this stability. Phytoplankton in the ocean and forests at the surface have helped achieve this stability by locking away carbon. Great herds have kept the plains fertile by fertilizing the soils. Mangroves and coral reefs along thousands of miles of coasts have supported species that when they mature will range into open waters. A thick belt of jungles around the earth’s equator helps to capture as much of the sun’s energy as possible adding oxygen to the earth’s air currents. And the extent of the ice at the poles has been critical, reflecting sunlight from its white surface cooling the whole earth. The biodiversity of the Holocene helped to bring stability. The entire world settled into a gentle reliable rhythm—the seasons. On the tropical plains the dry and rainy seasons would switch every year like clockwork. In Asia winds ensured the monsoons would be created on cue. In the north the temperatures would lift in March and remain high until they would sink bringing autumn. The Holocene was our Garden of Eden. It was so reliable that it gave our own species a unique opportunity. We invented farming. We learned to exploit the seasons to produce food crops. The history of all human civilization followed, each generation able to develop and progress only because the living world could be relied upon  to deliver us the conditions we needed. The pace of evolution was unlike anything to be found in the fossil record.”

At least until now.  This worked astonishingly well for millennia and humans were the prime beneficiaries of this stability.  Like all other creatures we evolved along with the system. Sadly, this did not last.

As Attenborough said,

“Our intelligence changed the way in which we evolved. In the past animals had to develop some physical ability to evolve. With us, an idea could do that. And the idea could be passed from one generation to the next. We were transforming what a species could achieve.”

 

Attenborough thinks that he grew up at exactly the right time.  I grew up more or less the same time. I started a little later than he did.  They were halcyon times. Thanks to air travel which emerged during his life time he was one of the first to travel around the world to see exactly how life could evolve thanks to the gentle conditions brought about by the Holocene epoch. I too have been lucky to travel around the world on a short but glorious sabbatical. He and I have been lucky.

It is now beginning to become clear that these halcyon times are in danger.  And the cause is, again, us. Our activities are threatening this gentle time. There is still time for us to change course, though a lot of damage is already baked in. The worst could be avoided, but it will require a brand-new attitude to nature. Or perhaps an old attitude to nature which more of us need to adopt. I intend to blog about that.  But the key is changing our current attitude to nature which is leading us towards serious dangers.

What do water lilies have to do with this? Everything.

 

Avoiding our greatest Mistake ever

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Decline of the west, desert, New Attitude to Nature

This is one of my favorite orchids of Manitoba

 

The fact is, as Attenborough said, “the natural world is failing. The evidence is all around us. I have seen it with my own eyes.” I agree. I have also seen it personally. I have seen places where once wild orchids lived in abundance that are now completely bare of orchids. They are gone.

 

 

I have detected it in Arizona this winter. I frequently went to a nearby park called San Tan Regional Mountain Park to hike and admire the local flora and fauna. The wonderful Saguaros—the cactuses are the mark of the Sonoran Desert because they grow nowhere else, but are disappearing before my eyes. They have been declining for years as their habitat declines.

 

 

This year, after a 2-year absence I saw a newly created residential housing subdivision son the edge of the park with all saguaros gone. They are amazing plants that can live up to 250 years in a desert. They can live for a year without water. They are incredibly resilient, but they can’t withstand human predation.  The proof of that is clearly visible in the bare desert now adjacent to the park where saguaros and other Sonoran Desert plants used to grow in abundance. Seeing this on my first visit here after a nearly 3 year absence was soul crushing.

Back home on the prairies I have seen the lovely yellow evening grossbeaks largely disappear along with many other avian species of the grasslands. Since 70% of our native prairies have vanished, the bird life is vanishing along with that. When I first became interested in birds as a young man these birds were in abundance. No more. Now they are nearly gone.

My 6-year-old grandson who loves to see birds and often asks me to help him identify birds may never see one. That is possible. I hope he does see them. His life would be poorer as a result of their absence. He is an amazing kid who should have an opportunity to see such birds.

This is one of my favorite spots in Arizona–Picketpost Mountain.  I would hate to see the saguaros disappears from its base.

David Attenborough said that he started this film, A Life on Our Planet, as his witness statement to what he has seen in his 93 years on the planet. I was inspired by that. I cannot make a film. That is beyond me. But I can prepare a testament. I made thousands of them over my nearly 50-year legal career, but none of them quite like this. I want to make a testament for myself. It won’t deal with property but it will be a witness statement, and a thinking statement. I have been involved a long and protracted “Long Think” as Huckleberry Finn said.  I want to talk about some of those things in this testament. A will is really a witness statement.

I want to urge people to reconsider what we are doing to our planet on which we depend for life and how we might change things for the better to make life better—for all. For all life on the planet. That is goal. I have concluded we need—we urgently need—a new attitude to nature. Economics is important but it does not trump nature.

I will comment on some of the things I think we are doing wrong, and things we are doing, and how we could make things better. This would benefit us all, but particularly I am worried about my grandson and granddaughters.  And your grandchildren too. Their future on this planet is clouded.

As David Attenborough said, “If we continue as we are doing, it might be the greatest mistake, but yet we have time to put it right.”

It’s time to start doing the right thing, before it’s too late. We must start by changing our attitude to nature.

 

A David Attenborough Witness statement

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Decline of the west, Environmental Apocalypse, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

David Attenborough prepared a documentary film which I watched with great interest on PBS while I was in Arizona this year, that he called, A Life on this Planet. In that film he departed from his usual approach of demonstrating wonderful aspects of diverse life on our planet without editorial comments. This time he explored some of the same issues I had been exploring recently as part of what he called a witness statement—a personal statement about some of the issues that had been concerning him for quite some time and what he has learned over 93 years of an extraordinary life on this planet.  I wondered how his philosophy would diverge from mine.

The film started off showing a scene of him walking through a large abandoned building. I recognized it immediately. It was the town near the Russian nuclear facility at Chernobyl. The town was called Pripyat and it is now located in Ukraine.  This town was once a modern city of 50,000 people that was filled with all the modern conveniences when on April 26, 1986 the city was evacuated in 48 hours after a accident occurred at the nuclear facility that exploded nearby rendering the city of Pripyat a radioactive wasteland. According to Attenborough, the accident “happened as a result of bad planning and human error.”

No humans have lived there since that day now nearly 40 years ago, though animals never left or returned. Some called the accident the most expensive catastrophe in human history. But that is not true. As Attenborough said,

“Chernobyl was a single event, and the true catastrophe of our time was the global event barely noticeable from day to day and is still unfolding. I am talking about the loss of our biodiversity, the loss of wild life and wild places.”

David Attenborough knew as perhaps few on our planet knew, that the diversity of life on our planet is truly, magnificently, diverse. First, look at the life on the planet in numbers. There are billions of creatures and millions of planet species on our planet providing spectacular diversity, abundance, and variety of life on it. Then, according to Attenborough, we came to realize how those creatures “interlock.” I prefer the word “interconnect.” They work with each other to maintain great ecosystems. Sometimes organisms and creatures in those ecosystems compete, even to the death, with each other. But at other times, as we have now learned, thanks in part to a Canadian scientist and former forestry officer in British Columbia, Suzanne Simard, that contrary to Darwin’s theory of evolution, those creatures and organisms also cooperate with one another, even at times across species lines. This is a remarkable discovery that many are just beginning to understand how significant it is. I will comment on her discoveries in coming days.

As Attenborough said, this system of life on our planet provides a “finely tuned life support machine” for the creatures, organisms, and systems on it. That system of life in turn “relies on its biodiversity.” It relies on nature filled with biodiversity. We rely entirely on that support. Without it we cannot survive on this planet no matter how clever our technology is. It all depends on the support of nature and its vast diverse life. But unfortunately, humans who dominate the planet do not really appreciate this dependency. If they did, they would act differently than they do. As Attenborough said,

“Yet the way our humans live now, we are sending its biodiversity into decline. This too is happening as a result of bad planning and human error and it too will lead to what we see here.”

The film showed images of the abandoned city of Pripyat. No people are left living there now or even within a radius of 30 km. Older structures are decaying or falling into ruin. The structures are falling apart and the town has been largely abandoned.  Although Chernobyl is primarily a ghost town today, a small number of people still live there, in houses marked with signs that read, “Owner of this house lives here”, and a small number of animals live there as well. Animals have been returning. They do not understand the risks, but nature is coming back. Nature always come back, but it comes back different after catastrophes, particularly a catastrophe as drastic as this one. The town is overgrown with trees. Some apartments now have trees growing out of them. I saw a number of photographs taken by a Winnipeg photographer and fine arts professor from the site and they are amazing to behold.

One cannot help but wonder when looking at the images of the city whether or not this is in our future. After all, the doomsday clock has recently been moved to less than 2 minutes before midnight. Clearly, none of us want to live there. There is still too much radioactivity. Is this what the future holds for us—i.e. a world without humans? Now I recognize that some people would cheer this one, but they are still in the minority. Most of us do not want to get rid of humans just yet. But perhaps we are wrong.

Dying Planet Report

Anthropocene, Bio-Diversity, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

The London Zoological Society produced a sensational report called the Living Planet Report. As one pundit said, “It really should have been called the Dying Planet Report.” It’s claims are actually a bit tricky, but anyway you look at it, deeply disturbing.

 

Ed Yong of The Atlantic clarified the findings of this new Living Planet Report that have been widely mischaracterized but they are still very important and unsettling and grim. Yong put it this way: “they found that from 1970 to 2014, the size of vertebrate populations has declined by 60 percent on average. That is absolutely not the same as saying that humans have culled 60 percent of animals” as some commentators have alleged. The word populations here really means “pockets of individuals from a given species that live in distinct geographical areas.”  I won’t go into the distinction further but suffice it to say humans have caused a lot of death. It would be kind to call it death on a massive scale. To call us “the aids virus of the earth” as Professor John Moriarty did is not really an exaggeration.

Professor Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany put it this way:

“We are rapidly running out of time… Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”

 

Damian Carrington of The Guardian reported as follows:

 

 

Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species – Homo sapiens. Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover.

 I believe he should have said “populations” which is not as drastic, but it is certainly drastic.

The Living Planet Report  produced by the London Zoological Society  for the World Wildlife Fund using data from 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians and found that

“Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%. The “shocking truth”, said Barrett [of the WWF] is that the wildlife crash is continuing unabated.”

 

In other words, previous reports of huge deaths has not turned around human attitudes to nature enough to have a profound effect for the better. The deaths are “continuing unabated.”

Professor Bob Watson one of the world’s most respected environmental scientists and at the time the chair of an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity  said this, “Wildlife and the ecosystems are vital to human life …the destruction of nature is as dangerous as climate change.”

We all know that nature contributes to human well being, physically, culturally, and spiritually. The food it contributes to us and facilitates  as well as the clean water, fertile soil, and energy it provides is of vital significance to everyone on the planet. As Watson said, “The Living Planet report clearly demonstrates that human activities are destroying nature at an unacceptable rate, threatening the wellbeing of current and future generations.”

Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF said this as a result of the continued assault on life on the planet by humans:

“We need a new global deal for nature and people and we have this narrow window of less than two years to get it…This really is the last chance. We have to get it right this time.”

Tanya Steele, the CEO of the WWF summed it up very well: “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”

It is abundantly clear: We need a new attitude to nature. No tricky statistics alter that.

Rushing Toward Mass Extinction

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Anthropocene, Decline of the west, Extinction, New Attitude to Nature

 

Scientists currently recognize that our planet has experienced 5 mass extinctions over its approximate 3.7-billion-year history.

 

Some people think extinction is a not a big deal. After all, 99% of all beings that have ever existed have gone extinct. We will like go extinct too. So what?

Well, what are mass extinction events? As the National Geographic has reported,

“More than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 75 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of an eye in catastrophes we call mass extinctions.”

 

Mass extinctions are events where from 75 to 95% of species on the planet have died. In those nearly 4 billion years of its history that has “only” happened 5 times. So far.  Many scientists believe that we are moving towards a 6th mass extinction.

The big difference of course is that the current possible extinction event has been caused by one species—Us—Homo sapiens. To think that we are perhaps causing so much loss of life is stunning. It should stop us dead in our tracks!  But it isn’t. We are stopping the species dead in their tracks.

The reason it is not happening is that our attitude to nature is one of not caring. We just don’t care. We think we have the right to do whatever we want on this planet because no one can stop us. We can do with it as we please.

And that is the problem! Worldwide 60% of vertebrate species have been wiped out since 1970! That does not mean 60% of animals but populations. Nonetheless, that is still carnage on a hellish scale. It is a sure sign of the decline of western civilization, since all of civilization depends directly on nature.

And our species is largely responsible for it. Professor Moriarty was right. Humans are like a virus on the earth.