On Dec. 15, President-elect Barack Obama announced his energy and environment team at a news conference in Chicago. Obama chose Carol Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as head of a new policy council for climate, environment and energy issues. The rest of the team consists of Steven Chu, a Noble-prize winning physicist, as his energy secretary; Lisa Jackson, former head of New Jersey’s environmental protection department, as national EPA head; and Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

With the team in place, Obama is ready to start creating a new energy economy. He admitted that he didn’t know when the economy would start getting better, but he did say, “We know that we’re going to create jobs that wouldn’t otherwise be created.” According to Obama, those jobs should eventually add up to 2.5 million.

While Obama plans to make the United States a leader in climate change, he admits, “The solution to global climate change must be global.” The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland just finished on Dec. 13, claiming that there is “a clear commitment from governments to shift into full negotiating mode.” Hopefully, they’re right.

To learn more about Barack Obama’s energy and environmental policy watch the video below, or check out these articles:

Environmentalists Help Obama Create New Green Economy

Obama Addresses Fight Against Climate Change

Obama's Changing Climate Change

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

We haven’t traditionally assigned much value to natural productivity except when it was producing something we could eat, wear or burn for fuel. Predictably, David Tilman’s research is inspired by the hunt for new biofuels — renewable resources that might replace petroleum products. He suggests that someday our cars might run on so-called “cellulosic” ethanol created from grass. Ethanol created from cellulose could be derived from nearly any plant, so why not the plants that naturally grow more profusely, the native plants of the prairie?

Cool idea, unless your children are among the millions currently starving for lack of corn, wheat, rice or some other staple foodstuff that might be grown on that property. We’ve clearly demonstrated that we can spike grain prices with burgeoning new demand from ethanol manufacturers. Poor people around the world are straining to pay for food made expensive this year by the demand for ethanol.

On top of everything else, there’s good evidence that while our population is expanding we’re also wrecking some of the natural machinery we use to create our food. Setting aside the excesses of industrial agriculture and the short-term damage they do to farmland, we’re still tearing down important environmental assets the old-fashioned way, by burning forests and overgrazing grasslands.

The X Prize Foundation chose three videos out of 133 for their $25,000 “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” Contest. The competition encouraged people to create a two-minute YouTube video that explained their idea for the next X Prize in Energy and Environment.

Submissions ended on Oct. 31 — and now it’s up to you to decide which idea is best. The three ideas involve creating a more efficient battery, reducing home energy usage, and making it easier for homes to have complete energy independence. Which one is most important to you?

The public can vote here through November 30.

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

This is no chicken-little scenario. Agribusiness is not destroying the human habitat (although it probably could, given time). We need to give due credit to the architects of the first “green revolution.” The benefits of agricultural productivity are real. We have fed a lot more people than would have been possible without technology. But a lot of people believe that the world would be a better place if we re-focused agricultural priorities on local food, environmental preservation and healthy farmers.

Agriculture’s green revolution underlines in a powerful way this basic biological fact: We live at the expense of other creatures. Every living thing does. We can, through symbiotic relationships or good husbandry, cooperate with other creatures to increase biological productivity overall, but at the end of the day if we disappeared, other living things would take advantage of the resources we no longer consumed.

And because I am alive — because you are alive — a lot of other creatures never get the chance to live. 

BRYAN WELCH

I would describe myself as a committed environmentalist. It’s my passion and my work. I’ve covered our deepening environmental crisis as a journalist for 30 years and now I run magazines and Web sites dedicated to raising human awareness of environmental issues. My wife and I raise much of our own food on our little organic farm and we supply organic food to lots of other local families. Environmentalism is my passion, my career, my chief avocation.

I’ve watched the environmental “movement,” if you will, grow from a radical, tie-dyed clique into a mainstream global consensus. I don’t think we, as environmentalists, can take much credit for that however.

We have, for the last 30 years, been among society’s least effective leaders and least pleasurable companions. In his 2006 essay, “Beyond Hope,” Derrick Jensen claims that the most common words he hears spoken by environmentalists,everywhere,are “We’re fucked.”[1] He exaggerates, but he has a point.

Our attitudes reek of Puritanism. We are, often, dour, strict and humorless. We’re judgmental. Behind most of life’s simple pleasures we see unnecessary consumption, which we ridicule. Because humanity is responsible for environmental problems we are, ipso facto, all sinners and we find little joy in being human. We portray the giant global corporations as occult covens, and we burn their representatives in effigy in our own reenactments of the Salem witch trials. When our neighbors seem too moderate or abstract for our tastes — as the Quakers did to New England’s 17^th-century Puritans — we whip them out of the colony, at least figuratively, and we’re not above discussing executions. (The Puritan authorities hanged four Quakers for their religious beliefs in Boston between 1659 and 1661.)

To say the least, we’re no fun a lot of the time.

Maybe that explains why we’ve accomplished so little in the past 30 years. After all, we were right all along. Why has it taken popular opinion so long to catch up?

Well, for one thing, no one follows a pessimist. We’ve spent far too much time confessing our sins and assigning our scarlet letters. We’ve invested far too little time visualizing successful outcomes.

BRYAN WELCH

We in the developed world consume far more than we need. We are fat, we drive big cars, we throw away whole households of valuable goods because we’re spoiled and we can afford to buy something new rather than preserving or repairing what we have. Our bad habits damage our environment.

But conservation is not going to save our habitat. Global warming, deforestation, desertification and pollution are all products of overpopulation. The poorest people don’t have the option of leaving the nearby forest standing, or keeping their goats off of an overgrazed pasture. For the world’s poorest people, every scrap of land is part of a thin barrier between life and death. They must use every resource available to keep themselves and their families alive. That’s the grim reality at the heart of human population growth. At some point we all end up there, struggling to sustain our lives regardless of the consequences for our community or our habitat.

Forests consume greenhouse gases and emit oxygen. Deforestation is one component of climate change. And it’s the product, by-and-large, of overpopulation.

The other obvious result of overpopulation around the globe is desertification. I grew up on land that was covered in grass in the 19^th century. We have photos to prove it. By the time I walked there, however, only a few tufts of grass remained between the mesquite, sagebrush and creosote bushes. I’m an eye-witness to desertification. My predecessors moved on to the land with domesticated cattle, sheep, horses and goats. They subdivided it, homesteaded it, fenced it and then tried to make a living on it. There aren’t many animals there today but the grass isn’t coming back very fast. The United States Geological Survey cites the Rio Puerco basin in my own home state of New Mexico as a prime example of desertification. The process is not mysterious. Semi-arid grasslands sustain themselves through droughts by maintaining a dense mat of roots mixed with dormant seeds at the surface of the soil. In natural conditions, a grassland can lie dormant for years. When it is overgrazed, though, the mouths and hooves of the hungry foragers destroy the grass roots. Dormant seeds provide a little sustenance for desperate animals. When the rains come back, there are no roots to hold the soil in place or to regenerate the grassland. There are no dormant seeds to bring forth new life. The rain washes soil away. The land around the Rio Puerco is grotesquely eroded. The river itself is full of silt.

Desertification became well known in the 1930s, when parts of the Great Plains in the United States turned into the "Dust Bowl" as a result of drought, overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. We’ve learned to manage the land better and we reversed the desertification of the plains, but elsewhere the desert marches on, especially where people have no other option than to push their herds to the next patch of grass. The famine that periodically afflicts sub-Saharan Africa is, primarily, the result of desertification, which is a result of overpopulation, which in turn aggravates the severity of the famine. By 1973, the drought that began five years earlier in the Sahel of West Africa and the land-use practices there had caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people and 12 million cattle[1].

Droughts do not cause desertification. Droughts are common in arid and semiarid lands. Well-managed lands with intact root systems and dormant seed cover will revive when the rains return. Continued land abuse during droughts, however, prevents that recovery.

Forests are being destroyed at a pace even with the rate of human population growth. Unless something changes soon, by 2030 we will only have 10 percent of the natural forests that stood on the planet when we started paying attention[1]. Locations rapidly losing their forests are diverse:

Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana and the Cote d'lvoire have lost most of their rainforests, according to the biologists of Chicago’s Field Museum. Ninety percent of the forests of the Philippine archipelago have been cut[2]. In the last 30 years, the Rotary Foundation’s Fellowship for Population and Development estimates that two-thirds of the forests of Central America have been cut down. That’s two-thirds of the forests in Central America in just 30 years cut down by local people who need farmland and household firewood[3]. The same basic pattern holds all over the tropical world. If we look at the earth as an island — an island surrounded by outer space — then the experience of tropical islanders is unnerving. When we started keeping track, 60 percent of Haiti was forested. When the International Conference on the Reforestation of Haiti convened in 2007, less than 1 percent remained. The conference’s report is eloquent: “Haiti has become an environmental catastrophe and a human catastrophe ... With the forest cover gone, floods ravage the country at each rainfall. Topsoil washes into the sea. And since the only hope of Haitians for feeding their families is the soil and small scale farming, it is a terrible humanitarian disaster.”[4] 

In Haiti deforestation is both a symptom of overpopulation and a root cause of human suffering. Haiti is an example of what can happen when too many people have too few natural resources in a limited environment. Food for thought.

And in Haiti, as around the world, deforestation is mostly a local phenomenon driven by local needs. There are a few places where big timber companies are driving the process, but not many. In most places, local folks need the space and need the fuel. The wood is going into the fireplace or, tragically, being piled up and burned simply to make room for more poor farmers.

[1] Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. 2003, Vintage ISBN 0-679-76811-4
[2] Field Museum. The Lost Forest. 
[3] Rotarian Fellowship for Population & Development. Population & Deforestation. 
[4] International Conference on Reforestation and Environmental Regeneration of Haiti. Reforest Haiti. 

I read this really interesting article for my Environmental Studies class. Unlike me, you won’t be quizzed over it, but I do think the article is worth reading. It’s about eight pages long, but I promise it’s worth the time.

The article presents the argument that the demise of empires and governments is conspicuously correlated with the depletion of the environment. Jared Diamond, the author of the article, used the Maya civilization in South America as a case study of this argument.

Essentially, the Maya civilization fell because it exceeded the carrying capacity — or the number of individuals able to be supported by the environment without depleting resources — of its ecosystem.

The Maya relied heavily upon corn for their food, and in order to produce healthy crops, the Maya used what we now call the slash and burn technique. However, as the civilization expanded and population grew, more corn was needed. To meet the growing demand for food, they stopped burning the fields and allowing time for regeneration — either as frequently or altogether. Eventually, the fields could no longer produce as much food as the population demanded, and the civilization died out.

The scary thing about the article is the number of parallels between the warning signs of the Maya civilization — follies we all profess to recognize from this side of history — and the current status of the United States. We are at the peak of our power. We have exponential population growth. We have environmental problems ranging from limited water supplies in some regions to vanishing topsoil. So when do we reach our carrying capacity? When do we become too many in number for our environment to sustain us anymore? Are we already there and waiting for the effects to catch up to us?

Diamond also lists three misconceptions that lead people to dismiss these warning signs today.

One is that the environment exists solely to satisfy human needs. Rather than seeing the environment and humans depending upon each other for mutual benefit, people tend to see the environment as a commodity in surplus. Using some of that logic against them, Diamond says, “our strongest arguments for a healthy environment are selfish: we want it for ourselves, not for threatened species.”

The second is that technology will solve all our problems. He points out that all of our current environmental problems are byproducts of earlier technologies and that each new technology comes with its own set of problems that may not be realized until five to 30 years later.

The third is that people tend to view environmentalists as “fear-mongerers” who have overreacted in the past and are doing so now. Diamond makes the point that if you ask an ecologist which countries have the most environmental problems and a politician which countries are the most politically unstable, they will both give you the same list of countries, among which are Afghanistan, Rwanda and Somalia. 

Definitely something to think about …

If all the residents of North America and Western Europe cut their per-capita energy consumption in half over the next 20 years (not likely) and the rest of the world held per-capita consumption steady at their current, frugal levels (also not likely), total energy consumption will remain the same. A 50-percent reduction in the developed world will not be sufficient to outweigh population increases in the developing world, even if the increasingly affluent residents of developing countries don’t increase their energy consumption.

Someone’s going to object to my evidence. Maybe it will take 75 years to reach 10 billion population. Maybe the planet can accommodate 12 billion frugal human beings. The rate of population growth is not the issue. Any growth at all creates the same ultimate dilemma. Sure, we might figure out ways of accommodating 10 or 15 or 20 billion people in a crowded world. But why would we want to?

If ultimately we must control our population, why not plan for a rich, healthy planet?

What if we decided, by mutual consensus, that a stable worldwide population of 4 billion people is our goal? Could we then live on a planet with clean air and water, plenty of food for everyone and the environmental resilience necessary for us to prosper through the inevitable environmental fluctuations – the next ice age, for instance? Could we restore habitats now teetering on the brink of destruction?

Couldn’t we create a sustainable healthy planet just because we decided to?

In one sense it’s a terrific time to be human. We’re here to meet our biggest challenge so far – bigger than bipedal locomotion; bigger than the domestication of plants and animals; bigger than the invention of the wheel. We’re here to confront our own biology, the essential nature that tells us to keep reproducing and expanding. If you could view the entirety of human experience from the dawn of our evolution to the present, if you could pick the human century you’d like to witness first-hand, you might choose this one. I think I would. I would want to watch us tackle this problem.

The suffering, if we don’t get it right, will not be humanity’s alone. Already we’ve destroyed thousands of species. In just the last few years Africa’s Western Black Rhinoceros, Europe’s Pyrenean Ibex, Costa Rica’s Golden Toad and North America’s Pearly Mussel have, so far as we can tell, passed into oblivion as humanity has destroyed their habitats. The scientists of the World Conservation Union estimate that 99 percent of recent extinctions and currently threatened species have been or will be destroyed by human activities. Conservation International reports that, as of the middle of 2008, a plant or animal species was becoming extinct every 20 minutes.

Extinction is normal, of course. The vast majority of species that ever lived seem to have disappeared somewhere along the line. What’s not normal is the rate of extinction. The rate of extinctions has been accelerating since the beginning of the 20^th century and we’re responsible.

It’s no great tragedy that any particular species becomes extinct, unless of course it’s us. Generally, it has been part of nature’s way and each extinction opens opportunities for other species.

The greater tragedy is the fact that we’re taking a healthy, resilient and rich natural habitat – the only planet we know where life thrives – and degrading its ability to support life. New species can’t evolve fast enough to replace the diversity we’re destroying, even if we hadn’t made the habitat inhospitable. We’ve inherited the best planet in the known universe, only to squander it. And if we don’t change course soon, the planet could very well end up unfit for human habitation or at the very least damned uncomfortable.

Now is the moment when our uniquely objective perspective and our enterprising intellect are engaged in what may be the most important challenge faced by our species so far.

Other species have damaged their habitats or lost them to environmental disaster. The dinosaurs, the Saber-toothed Tiger and the Woolly Mammoth died out. Many species routinely go through periods of catastrophic population collapse and reestablished themselves in some new biological equilibrium. Lemmings spring to mind. But none of them, so far as we know, are consciously aware of the natural forces at work. They couldn’t conceptualize the fact that their own reproduction, their natural consumption and expansion, played a part in causing the pain of their population’s collapse.

Nature has lots of tools at her disposal for controlling species that cause habitat damage. Famine and disease are her most potent weapons, effective and unpleasant.

We, on the other hand, can conceptualize our effect on the environment and we might, if we wish to, avoid the suffering Nature will inflict.

And we could restore the astonishing garden into which we were born – the Earth.

I can’t think of a more inspirational goal.