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TechnoratiLife Is Hanging By A Thread
Recently the International Panel on Climate Change issued a report predicting an alarming array of impacts of climate change around the globe, including drought, floods, lower crop yields, threatened food security, wildfire and ocean acidification. It seems that no living thing in this web of life we are a part of will be unaffected by climate change.As a primatologist, I am particularly concerned by the prediction that 20 percent to 30 percent of species will face increased risk of extinction.
We know that a majority of the world's species live in rainforests, from many flagship species like elephants, tigers and chimpanzees to smaller species like insects and algae. Some play a role in curing human diseases, or may in the future.
These forests are threatened both by large-scale commercial exploitation and by rapidly increasing numbers of poor people who are destroying the forests to make charcoal or to open the land for subsistence agriculture. Some of the other effects of climate change predicted by the IPCC, such as drought and food insecurity, will only exacerbate the plight of these people.
A relatively new danger to these forests is the growing enthusiasm for biofuels. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, forest blocks that were previously reserved for conservation or sustainable forestry are being converted to sugar cane and palm oil plantations, whose output will be used as fuel for ethanol or biodiesel plants.
The irony of cutting down forests for biofuels is that forests store a significant fraction of the world's stocks of carbon. If these carbon-capturing trees are felled and burned -- whether as firewood or to clear land -- the oxidation of their carbon will release billions more tons of carbon dioxide.
The tropical rainforests of Africa, Latin America and South Asia are particularly important in this regard.
Tropical deforestation contributes 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere annually, compared to approximately 6 billion tons from burning fossil fuels. Saving these forests would not only prevent the release of carbon currently stored in them, but it also would allow them to continue absorbing carbon in the future.
While population pressures cannot be quickly reversed, nor the businesses of logging and mining phased out, there is much we can do to save these forests. The core of a successful strategy involves working not only with national leaders, but also, and most important, with local people to raise living standards, especially in the areas near the forest preserves. By providing technical assistance to farmers to raise their incomes, education to young people, healthcare to families and economic investments in ecotourism, these rural communities can become the custodians of the forests, not their destroyers.
These strategies have other benefits as well: They promote local stability and security. Rural prosperity, education and effective public-health systems serve as natural defenses against outbreaks of pandemic disease, war, terrorism and political instability. By working with local people to save forests, we help to create stable communities that will surely improve global security.
The governments of the United States and other developed nations bear a special responsibility to promote these programs. Not only are Western nations the greatest consumers of oil, timber and other carbon-generating industries, they have the wealth to bring about change in poor developing countries. Relatively small increases in aid directed toward rural community development, especially through microcredit programs, can have an extraordinary impact on saving wilderness areas, including forests, and the array of life forms they sustain.
Only a few centuries ago, each of the developed nations on the continents of Europe, Asia and North America destroyed their own forests and many of the species inhabiting them in an unsustainable scramble toward wealth. Now only remnant forests remain on those continents.
The developed nations have an opportunity to enable developing nations to avoid making the same mistakes. By investing more in environmentally sustainable development, we can save valuable species, help prevent the escalation of global warming, and increase global security. Helping to preserve the forests of developing nations is in our interests, as well as theirs.
Jane Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a U.N. ``Messenger of Peace.''
©2007 Jane Goodall
20 Comments so far
Show AllRESPONSE TO ALAMAC
Idealistic but Goodall offers no practical means of carrying out change, alamac charges. From a progressive point of view, this post seizes on the key issue re the article.
I want to defend the value of her post on several grounds.
First, her article is not merely idealistic: she makes an effort to link her warning and plea to practical means of change - whether there is enough support for the global organizations she envisions carrying out the task is, of course, debatable.
Second, the example of a venerable scientist and researcher stepping outstide her field of authority and taking a position may have its own agency. Goodall was trained and has devoted her life to work as a naturalist. The point is not that we should understand that she is not a political fighter; the point is that her article demonstrates a worker in the natural sciences seeking to put her shoulder - probably at this point a rather frail shoulder - to the wheel on behalf of a practical imperative. This may inspire other professionals to step outside their areas of immediate competence.
Goodall's article may have an agency for another, connected reason - the mere fact that she has stepped out of her field is notable, and has its own authority as an action. In other words, Goodall is not a political partisan in the usual sense: her words have more the quality of someone coming down from a mountain to issue a warning. Certain pasages in her article - the reference to 'flagship species' - give the article not just a pathos, but a magisterial quality that has its own authority.
Finally, as the poster acknowledges, no one - not the idealists and not political realists - has presented an immediately practical or practicable approach to fighting climate change before it's too late. In this case, what is at stake may be more a matter of 'styles of protest' than what it accomplishes. I too felt that Goodall's article was more a plea than a practical approach. But if no one has a solution, the strain of pathos in her article - a great mind and spirit warning against destruction of aeons old patterns of life on earth - may have its own value and be one appropriate response to a grievous problem. Perhaps I prefer the militancy and moral accusation of a Chomsky, but - at this historical moment - such an approach may accomplish no more. I hope there's room for both types of scientists turned activists to do their work in a progressive movement.
Perfect quote, hoosierhick. And to yours, I shall add another Vonnegut gem:
"Life is no way to treat an animal."
Well said, hoosierhick. And to your quote, I will add another Vonnegut gem:
"Life is no way to treat an animal."
There is alot of people ready to give up and just say it's over. Remember that nay saying has been in our society forever. It is the people that drive forward, even though the people around say it cannot be done, that have molded our societies and our earth. Steps albeit small at first can become huge with the right attitude and support. I have heard the excuse that our economies cannot afford this change in thinking. Imagine our economies if we don't. The people of industrialized nations must be the first to set an example for others to follow. One possible solution to ease downtown core gas emissions would be to make all major downtown cores accessible only to public transit. This increases the health of people through walking, biking etc... It also increases a person's awareness of their surroundings. It's amazing how much cleaner a downtown core becomes when people have to walk through it instead of just driving by. This only one way to change our lifestyles/communities without causing any harm to anyone or anything. It may seem at times much harder than it has to be but remember Rome was not built in a day. You can choose to say it's too late or you can do what you know is right. You see the right answer every day, you know it in your heart to be true when you see it. Just follow your gut feeling and do what you feel is right for your children and the planet.
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
Kurt Vonnegut
I get annoyed when celebrities tell people how to cut back and such.
They enjoy a luxurious lifestyle and have the means to afford solar conversion and such.
Instead they feel entitled to live in multiple homes and drive multiple vehicles.
Why don't they cut back and teach by example. I do not need anyone's advice.
Imagine if all humans lived a vegan lifestyle... It's easy if you try. It won't solve everything but MANY lives will be saved and our world will be cleaner and a better place.
Humanity is bumping up against the sides of the petri dish, the normal pattern will prevail, the experiment in opposable thumbs is over, IT FAILED!!
and the suspected cause of colony collapse disorder is the cell phone.
causes individual pollen gatherers to get lost and die alone in the world away from the hive leaving a queen adn some droens and a few immature males - not enough to sustain the hive -
and who really believes that any in large enough numbers will stop using cell phones - many places already report 60-70% losses -
it is a time of hubris chastised - every body knew that this time had to come - plato, john the revelator, wovoka, rachel carson, each of us in our hearts
http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/56901.html
Einstein is quoted as saying humans only have 4 years if the bees die. Colony Collapse Disorder is spreading quickly. Our society can't focus on the truly big problems, morbidly focused on the the small, horrible crimes of individuals, it is blind to the social disasters that seem to never be challenged because they threaten corporations, entities that must be disempowered, dethroned if we are to survive.
I just want to express my profound sadness at what I see as the inevitable destruction of so many species that is coming so much faster than we expected. I can't even watch nature shows on TV anymore because they inevitably end with a warning that shrinking habitat is leading to extinction.
Like so many, I can articulate the problems: human overpopulation, uncontrolled global corporate greed, poverty and desperation, and arrogance that we can continue doing what we want because eventually we can find some kind of quick fix through "scienceandtechonology." I just don't see a way out.
I don't hate humanity, but I think that until our numbers are reduced, and until we learn to live with nature instead of against or "above" it, we are a cancer on this planet. My only hope is that enough other species survive to repopulate and flourish again some day.
Sometimes Comanche, I think you're right. If the human race isn't a virus, we sure act like one.
You'd think that we'd be able to run a car on water or something simple like that by now. It must be greed and nihilism that keeps innovation for the betterment of the planet at bay.
Right now in my area, we're getting tornado warnings. We never had tornado warnings this close twenty years ago.
I guess the elites will live in titanic, indestructible, weather-proof domes with exotic animals as pets while the rest of us burn, drown, freeze, parch, and starve to death. The world will be like New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina.
I have come to the realization that there is very little hope for the environment and the diverse life forms now in existence without a mass die off of human beings. They do not all need to die--- leave enough to represent that human beings once were inhabitants of the planet, and wasted it through careless thoughtless domination instead of living as my own ancestors did in harmony with the earth. But if there were truly a creator/god in control of it all they would never have been allowed to gain this kind of control in the first place.
It is hard to save the environment, but it is possible. The worst thing that I hear is people giving up on it. Does anyone really think that option makes sense? No matter how bad a situation is, doesn't giving up on it make it worse?
I am personally involved in this work because I care about the future and how it will be.
As far as citizens of developing countries are concerned, they are often just as concerned about the environment as people in developed countries. The difference is that they don't have the luxury to think about it as much as we do. On the other hand, they increasingly know that it affects their economic wellbeing so even that difference is changing.
Hey, Smurfy,I really enjoy your "voice."
Like so many of you have said, over-population and greed are the poisons of our age.Unfortunately, it seems to be in the nature of humans to want "their place in the sun," even if it means destroying/depleting their natural resources. How can we expect citizens of "underdeveloped" countries to be more enlightened than citizens of "first world" nations?
Well said ezeflyer,
As the human population grows their demand for food, shelter and clothing also grows, so corporations have growing opportunities to sell more and more products, even though our planet cannot support multi-billions of hungry, ambitious people, corporations follow their need for growing profits, their "bottom line", regardless of consequences.
The only effective way to stop this disease from killing the Earth is to treat it at its source - the growing population. If all women are given the right to decide if and when to birth how many or few children, the population will decrease because most women want only 2 or 3 children and some none at all. It is only ambitious husbands that want many children to create family empires. Thus, education in schools and family planning clinics is the way to reduce our all too human population and save the Earth. Any other "cause" that fails to do this is a lost cause.
For example, the chimpanzees cannot be saved unless the Africans agree to stop growing their population that encroaches on the rainforest where the chimps live. Likewise, the Amazon rainforest cannot be saved unless South Americans agree to stop growing their population that encroaches on it. Also, a smaller population will create a labor shortage and the power to bargain for higher wages.
Which is why we need to hope for and work toward an economy based upon trade in ideas rather than resource-heavy goods. It is the only way out of the Malthusian trap. This seems to be coming anyway, but we must do what we can to make it happen as soon as possible.
The carrying capacity that determines the health of an ecosystem is a function of its population density and available resources. Rich societies can afford to preserve natural places at the cost of the ecological devastation of societies they exploit elsewhere. Dependence on growth and the demand for cheaper labor are the cause of increasing global population densities with accompanying resource scarcity, environmental pollution and species extinction.
Well one thing that would help is if we quit telling people they're not supposed to improve their living standards with that darn capitalism thingy?
On the island of Borneo you can see it clearly - the Malaysian part is well-cared for overall, with plenty of national parks etc. The Indonesian side tends to get stripped heavily, often burnt. Same race, same religion, same island. The difference? Malaysia is wealthier.
Yeah the horror, wealth!
Great idea!
Now: What are we going to do about the oil and war pigs, who seem to have a different view?
I have read much like this which points out the problem with precision and then makes generalized statements which amount to "we need to change what we're doing". Yeah, but that begs the question.
What I HAVE NOT seen is anyone who can figure out how to wrest the bus's controls from the pig driver before the damn thing goes over the cliff. Maybe there's not a way before it's on its way to the valley floor below.