It seems that this could go one of two ways. Either we keep global warming to 1.5º or less and survive in mostly adequate conditions, or we allow the warming to increase 2º or more, and the global climate spirals rapidly out of control, rendering the planet uninhabitable to humans and most of life as we know it within a handful of generations.
Based on observations better informed than my own, we are on a trajectory leading towards the latter and terminal disaster. Despite repeated summits on the looming environmental collapse, including renewed optimism following the Paris Agreement in 2015 where 196 of the world’s countries pledged to follow a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, arriving at a fully carbon neutral scenario (carbon released = carbon absorbed) by 2050, emissions are still increasing, and the clock is ticking.
Having spent most of my life in the relative luxury of the so-called ‘developed world’, it’s been easy to ignore the signs, or rather, not even notice them. Money, comfortable housing, technology, myriad digital distractions, the daily toil of making ends meet. I have been insulated in every sense of the word from the effects of global warming. There’s little incentive to sit back and analyse the changes that may or may not have occurred during my own lifetime, or even since my parents were children. However, we must only go back as far as our grandparents’ youth to see just how much things have really changed.
My grandparents were born in the UK just after the first World War. They survived the second World War and emerged into a new industrial era that would dwarf the previous century’s industrial revolution in scale, acceleration, and reckless abandon. Fuelled by a post-war need for regeneration and the euphoria of a new-found peace, technology and money were thrown into improving the old and developing the new. Necessary solutions were sought, and more luxuries, both necessary and unnecessary were invented.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, agriculture was organic, all of it. Synthetic pesticides and fertilisers were a post-world-war extension of the explosives and chemical warfare industries. All these expertise and methods of destruction developed for the taking of human lives needed a new market, and with some relatively small molecular changes, an explosive became a fertiliser, and poison gas was converted into insecticides. Combined with improvements in machinery and vehicles, war was declared on nature in the name of progress (and profit), and previously healthy and diverse wild land was stripped and poisoned in favour of huge single-crop fields in need of constant attention, and artificial intervention, and to make space for grazing cattle.
The landscape has been altered immeasurably; visually, chemically, and in its ability to store carbon. Annual crops, constant ploughing and breaking up of the topsoil, and regular spraying of unnatural chemical compounds has rendered the land infertile at best, toxic and dangerous at worst. And if this wasn’t bad enough, a huge percentage of the food produced is wasted at various points along the chain between cultivation, harvest, transport, supermarket, and your dinner table.
I know a lot of people who wax lyrical about the beauty of the countryside. And of course, as compared to the average cityscape, the wide-open spaces and greenery are a very literal breath of fresh air. However, I recently came across a concept I’d not thought of before, in a book by George Monbiot about ‘Rewilding’. Shifting baseline syndrome. This is the recognition that everyone’s image of the countryside comes from their own memory and personal experience. Their own reference point, from which they judge the state of the land. Any changes within their own lifetime are compared to this baseline and judged as improvements or degradations to the ‘quintessential’ landscapes that they know as the rural landscape.
My baseline is of course very different to my parents’ baseline, and theirs in turn, to that of my grandparents. During the last century or so, the changes have come swiftly. Successive generations have very different memories of our natural landscapes. Now we see an overwhelming prevalence of farmed fields, crops and grazing animals, which to some is a wonderful scene. It is however, a significant degradation of that which preceded it. And for all the perceived benefits of modern agriculture, it has up to now, followed the business model of any ‘for profit’ enterprise…. Short-term gains with little or no consideration of long-term consequences. The likely consequences of current ‘industrial era’ practices, may well give the next generations successively shifting baselines tending towards desertification in what were once green and pleasant lands.
The danger of is that we forget the previous baseline, and all the others that were progressively wilder and healthier the further back we ‘remember’. That the current image we have is that everything is OK, rather than the admission that we need to go well beyond living memory to remember things as they were meant to be.
That being said, there is nothing to gain in lamenting what we’ve lost. We must instead come to terms with it, accepting that things will never be as they once were. We must also accept that it’s not the end of the matter. We may be responsible for many irreversible changes, and the situation will continue to get worse before it gets better, no matter what we do, but do something we must.
It is not a question of ‘can we?’, but rather, ‘how do we?’
If we do nothing, then our children and grandchildren will have to survive in incredibly difficult conditions. If we work together, now, then we can still slow down the juggernaut that’s heading our way and reduce the struggles and suffering that humans face (and that some are already facing) in the not-so-distant future. The clock is ticking. We must care, we must inform ourselves, and we must act constructively in every way we can. Now.
Stuart Westwood 