The No-Nonsense Guide to Degrowth and Sustainability. Wayne Ellwood

there is almost no knowledge of how chemicals interact with each other. When the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) was passed in the US in 1976, more than 62,000 chemicals were ‘grandfathered’ into the market – in other words, no testing, no questions asked. According to investigative journalist Mark Schapiro, these included highly toxic substances such as ethyl benzene, a widely used industrial solvent suspected of being a potent neuro-toxin; whole families of synthetic plastics that are potential carcinogens and endocrine disrupters; and thousands of other substances for which there was little or no information. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits that 95 per cent of all chemicals have not undergone even minimal testing for toxicity. In the European Union it’s estimated that two-thirds of the 30,000 most commonly used chemicals have not been vetted. According to Schapiro, the EPA had banned just five chemicals in the quarter-century prior to 2007.⁹ All of us live with this toxic burden. But the poor, the marginalized, and the people of color, those who are cheek-by-jowl with industrial plants, suffer the most.

      Rachel Carson would have been outraged but not surprised. ‘The chemical war is never won,’ she wrote in Silent Spring, ‘and all life is caught in its violent crossfire.’ It was Carson who first promoted the notion of ecology, the complex web that binds human life to the natural world. ‘The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments… harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind [sic]… We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or ecosystem.’¹⁰

      As humankind pushes every deeper into the most remote areas of the globe, expanding our industrial production and consumer habits, we threaten natural systems and sully the last remnants of wilderness left on our ‘full’ planet. ATVs (all terrain vehicles) thunder across alpine meadows deep in the Rocky Mountains. Seismic lines crisscross the high Arctic. Cattle ranches and industrial-scale soy farms replace dense, tropical forests in the Brazilian Amazon, displacing native peoples and destroying a unique pharmacological treasure trove. Nearly a fifth of Brazil’s tropical forests have been logged over the past four decades – more than in the previous 450 years since European contact. It is estimated than another 20 per cent may be lost in the next decade.

      As a result of habitat destruction, hunting, invasion by alien species, disease and climate change, the speed of global extinction is accelerating. There are now more than 17,000 plants and animals at risk, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This Swiss NGO’s Red List of endangered species records that 25 per cent of all invertebrates, 20 per cent of mammals, half of all primates, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and half of all turtles face extinction. When the IUCN first released figures in 2004, it noted that we are losing species 100-1,000 times faster than the normal ‘background’ rate suggested by fossil records before humans were around. Between a third and a half of all terrestrial species are expected to die out over the next 200 years if nothing is done to stop habitat destruction. Scientists generally put the normal extinction rate at about one species every four years. Harvard’s EO Wilson, one of the world’s most eminent biologists, has predicted the rate of species extinction could reach 10,000 times the ‘background’ rate in the next 20 years.

      The Anthropocene and nature’s services

      The destructive impact of human activity on the Earth has become so pervasive that ecologists now suggest that the previous geological era has ended and we have entered a new age: the Anthropocene. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning Dutch chemist, coined the word in 2000. Crutzen was attending a scientific conference where the chair kept referring to the Holocene, the period that started at the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago. ‘Let’s stop it. We are no longer in the Holocene. We are in the Anthropocene,’ Crutzen recalls blurting out. ‘Well, it was quiet in the room for a while.’ When the group took a coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation.¹¹ No wonder. No other species has had the dubious distinction of defining a geological era by its activities. According to the Royal Society, the Anthropocene is a ‘vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth’. We have laid down a trail, left our mark, indelibly, on ice cores in the Antarctic and in new layers of sedimentary rock being laid on the ocean floor.

      Two recent events highlight the threat that economic growth poses to ‘ecosystem services’, the natural cycles and systems that make our planet green, clean and habitable. We mentioned Fritz Schumacher’s inclusion of these ‘services’ in the phrase ‘natural capital’. But let me say a little more about these gifts that nature bestows on us and which we mostly take for granted. They include those fundamental processes that lurk in the background of our daily lives – the water cycle, photosynthesis, pollination, flood control, the decomposition of wastes and, ultimately, the regulation of the global climate. Unfortunately, both the terms ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’ adopt the dry language of economics to interpret the richness and mystery of nature. Nonetheless, they are useful, if mechanistic, shorthand to counter the prejudices of mainstream economics, in which the environment has never been treated as more than an ‘externality’. This of course is nonsense. Nature is not external; it is fundamental. The human economy is not a self-contained system. It is a product of human culture and human culture is uniquely, delicately, nested in the natural systems of the biosphere.

      So let’s look now at those three examples of the erosion of ecosystem services by exponential growth.

      When NASA released satellite photos of the Greenland ice sheet, taken four days apart, in July 2012, the contrast between the two images could not have been starker. An unusu al Arctic heat wave had melted a vast expanse of surface ice; approximately 97 per cent of it had thawed in less than a week. We’re talking about the surface here. The ice did not disappear. It’s almost two miles thick in places so it will take decades to melt to bare earth. But Greenland’s ice sheet is dwindling, undeniably, a little more with each passing year. About four times more ice melted in the summer of 2012 than in the 10 previous years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-mandated grouping of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, warns that if Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt completely it would raise sea levels by 7.5 meters.

      Back in 2007 the IPCC said that we would not see ice-free summers in the Arctic for another century. That now looks wildly optimistic. Things are changing even more quickly than forecast. A month after the NASA Greenland photo, researchers using data from the European Space Agency’s satellite corroborated the NASA findings for the Arctic as a whole. The Polar ice cap, too, had melted at an unprecedented rate – in total more than 11.7 million square kilometers, 22 per cent more than average. Scientists now predict an ice-free Arctic summer within 20 years. ‘This is staggering,’ Cambridge University sea-ice researcher Nick Toberg told The Guardian. ‘It’s disturbing, scary that we have physically changed the face of the planet.’¹² Studies show that 60-95 per cent of the melting of Arctic ice between 1953 and 2011 was due to human activity. There is little doubt that human-induced global warming has been more extreme in the far north. The area has been heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the world.