How to Save the World

[mtvessel]

Aug 2021
A Life on our Planet - David Attenborough – Witness Books, 2020
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If anyone has earned the right to be listened to, it is David Attenborough. We have been incredibly fortunate that nature has spared him for so long, and he has made the most of it. For in his programme-making, and now in this equally terrifying and hopeful book, he has been trying to save the world.

It is divided into three parts. The first is a witness statement, with chapters dotting through significant years in his life from his boyhood to the present day. Much of this will be familiar to those who have read his autobiography Life on Air, but there is one significant addition. Each chapter starts with three statistics relevant to the year in question - the total human population, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the percentage of the earth's surface that can be regarded as pristine wilderness. The cumulative effect is terrifying. For 1937, when Attenborough was 11, the figures are 2.3 billion, 280 parts per million (ppm) and 66 per cent. In 2020, they are 7.8 billion, 415 parts per million and 35 per cent. These figures are linked. Rising population increases demand for fossil fuel-derived energy and drives wilderness destruction, which pushes up carbon dioxide further by destroying trees. Farmland created from the destroyed wilderness allows sufficient food cultivation for the population to rise. It's a virtuous circle for humans, but a vicious one for everything else. Thirty percent of fish stocks are now critically endangered thanks to uncontrolled fishing. Since the 1950s, wild animal populations have, on average, halved. What's worse, humans have become used to this impoverishment. We no longer think that herds of bison that take hours to pass, temperate forests that take days to traverse, or flocks of birds so large that they darken the skies, are normal. But they were a century ago.

Part two describes the likely outcomes if we carry on as now. Climate change isn't the only threat. Attenborough describes the Planetary Boundaries Model of Johan Rockström and others, which is essentially a set of nine metrics with boundary values that describe a safe space within which humans can operate without causing dangerous instabilities in the planetary ecosystem. Four of the boundaries - for climate change, biodiversity loss, land conversion, and phosphorus/nitrogen cycle disruption - have already been breached by quite a considerable margin (and two others - for chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosols - are worryingly "not yet quantified"). The effects are likely to be: forest dieback in the 2030s, converting large swathes of the Amazon into savannah; the Arctic becoming ice-free in a similar period (bye bye polar bears and fish stocks in the Atlantic); in the 2040s, landslides and floods in the northern tundras as the permafrost melts; extinction of coral reefs, oyster and mussel beds in the 2050s due to ocean acidification; soil exhaustion, topsoil loss, storms and droughts leading to widespread harvest failures by the 2080s; and loss of coastal cities as sea level rises by 0.9 metres by 2100, leading to mass migrations. Many of these effects also trigger positive feedback loops that feed yet more carbon into the atmosphere or increase heat absorption by decreasing the planetary albedo. Average temperatures could rise by as much as four degrees Celsius, making swathes of the planet uninhabitable by humans, even with our technical ingenuity. Famine, war and disease would be inevitable consequences.

So can the world be saved from this appalling fate? Attenborough thinks it can, and through a means that is conceptually quite simple. He points out that the biodiversity of the living world is a quite remarkable life-support system with many negative feedback loops; it is no coincidence that humanity's assault on it correlates with the appearance of dangerous instabilities in our weather, food and water supplies. There is only one solution - as he puts it, "we must re-wild the world!"

Part three describes some of the actions that humanity needs to take to achieve this. Although not expressed as such, it reads like a political manifesto, so I am going to summarise it in bullet points:
- Adopt new economic models that give value to sustainable processes rather than endless growth. This means addressing problems of wealth inequality between nations; the Oxford economist Kate Raworth has approached this by modifying the Planetary Boundaries model with an inner ring of metrics describing minimum standards for human well-being, creating the "doughnut model" (her book is in my to-read pile so I will review it shortly). It also means replacing the hopelessly simplistic Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic worth with a framework based on benefits to the "three Ps" - Profit, People and Planet. Under its enlightened leader Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand has already done this.
- Move rapidly to clean energy. This is of course already happening, but needs to be incentivised to encourage vested interests such as pension funds and oil companies to stop being a drag on progress, for example by a tax on carbon emissions and removal of government subsidies for fossil fuels. To minimise the pain, temporary "regrets" such as nuclear power, bioenergy sources (which use agricultural land), large hydropower, and extended use of natural gas, will be necessary.
- Re-stock the seas by declaring one third of waters to be Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) where fishing is banned. Studies in depleted regions have shown that MPAs can regenerate fish stocks in fifteen years or so, and if left in place, the spillover effect allows fisherfolk to catch more fish in adjoining areas as well as providing an income from tourism. Obviously, the transition to this sustainable model would have to be handled - governments may need to pay a generation of fisherfolk not to fish, and sustainable aquaculture may be required to satisfy gastronomic demand - but it can be done.
- Reduce the proportion of land used for agriculture by maximising the yield from existing farmland, either by high tech approaches such as those used in the Netherlands, or the relatively low-tech methods of regenerative farming. Urban farming and vertical farming will also have a part to play, as will a wholesale move towards a plant-based rather than meat-based diet.
- Stop all deforestation by re-valuing wilderness land to include the biological services that it provides. This, as Attenborough acknowledges, is easier said than done. Measures such as the UN's REDD+ programme, which attempts to give value to rainforests for the carbon they store, fail to address the value of biodiversity and have led to accusations of colonialism as foreign "carbon cowboys" swoop in to buy up land as it rises in value. But finding a way to put a value on biodiversity would be a huge win - it could encourage new (actually very old) methods of farming such as agroforestry, silvopasture and wildland farming that mix species rather than keeping them in separate sterile fields.
- Plan for peak human and make it arrive earlier by improving educational standards, particularly for girls. Studies suggest that this could make the difference between the world population peaking at 11 billion people in the early 2100s or 8.9 billion in the 2060s. Of course, the flip side - elderly populations being supported by a progressively smaller group of working-age people - would have to be addressed.
- Cut down on waste, particularly of food, by introducing circular processes that ensures that ingredients are recycled. Globally, one third of produced food is lost and wasted, either through damage and poor storage (in countries with poor infrastructures), or through over-ordering, perceived imperfections and a throw-away culture. Technical chain wastage could be reduced by better design of processes to encourage standardisation and re-use.

This is a book that is intended to inspire and motivate, so it is not surprising that the challenges of moving to this vision of a sustainable future are touched on but not really addressed. The first problem is individual. Adopting sustainable practices will need a change of mindset on the part of us all, and will most likely involve some quite painful alterations in personal lifestyle. For example, no more summer holidays by plane, less personal travel in general, fewer goods in the shops, smaller and less customisable living spaces, a blander diet, and a greater proportion of income going on day-to-day services rather than luxuries.

And then there's the politics. Attenborough has never been a political animal and says little about how these changes can be achieved at the nation state level, other than to point out the (relatively rare) occasions when international cooperation has led to positive outcomes, for example in the conservation of mountain gorillas. But as this sobering Kurzgesagt video makes clear, the climate crisis cannot be solved by individual efforts alone but requires government-level action. So our task must be to focus the minds of our leaders. In the UK with its winner-takes-all electoral system, that means changing the policies of the three parties - Conservatives, Labour and Scottish Nationalists - who currently have a realistic chance of power.

Nonetheless, the vision of a future free of plastic waste, of cities with buildings covered in plants, of ingenious designs that make houses and neighbourhoods energetically self-sustaining, of rich, messy natural environments full of colour, life and (possibly) danger, is very much a world in which I would want to live. And, as Attenborough says, it's not as if we have very much choice. Using the example of Pripyat, the city near Chernobyl that has returned to forested wilderness in less than half a human lifetime, he points out that the natural world has recovered from ecological disasters far worse even than the one that human activity is currently inflicting. Unless humans succeed in completely sterilising the planet, it will re-wild eventually. The only question is whether we will be there to see it.