Ecosystem Crises Interactions. Merrill Singer
and to the global youth fighting to rescue our fragile environment.
Preface
This book appears at a moment in which leading climate scientists from around the world are warning that, if nothing else changes, there are only about a dozen years for global temperature to be kept at a level beyond which, even if it rises by only half a degree, there will be a significant worsening of the health and social impacts of drought, floods, extreme heat, ecosystem destruction, and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. Earth will not end, but for people around the planet, life as we know it today will be history. This dire warning that urgent and unprecedented changes are needed to avoid catastrophe was issued in a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018. This report does not stand alone; rather, the pace of critical findings on the effect of human‐caused climatic and other environmental changes is accelerating. In my online news feed, I regularly find new articles affirming that we are at a critical juncture, a consequential threshold for humans and other earthlings.
Of special concern in this volume is the issue of ecocrises interaction: the fact that not only do we face a litany of negative environment changes, but these changes are made worse through interface. Put simply, 1 ecocrisis + 1 ecocrisis results in more adverse outcomes than the additive effects of 1 + 1 because of interaction. For example, the loss of coral reefs, the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world, upon which millions of people depend for their food and livelihoods, is being driven by the enhanced interacting effects of warming oceans, absorption of carbon dioxide into those oceans, overfishing, and water pollution. Interaction of these stressors severely compromises the ability of corals to grow, reproduce, and thrive. As a result, as much as one‐third of all reef‐building corals are currently at grave risk of extinction. Nor are corals alone in this; numerous ecosystems that are critical to human populations are confronted by similar risk from interacting stressors of human origin.
Thus, interacting ecocrises constitute one of the most serious threats to health around the globe. These pressures come in the form of flooding, heat stroke, loss of food sources and production, spread of infectious diseases, and enhanced armed conflict. Efforts to address environmental risk have been stymied by a business‐as‐usual stance among elite polluters that benefit financially from their claimed ‘right to pollute’ and the investment of some of their profits in the organized denial of climate change and environmental disruption. However, this corporate strategy, which has been supported through lobbying for government inaction, is meeting a growing popular resistance around the world, especially among youth. This book, which provides a detailed examination of all of these issues, is intended to arm readers with the knowledge required to make vital decisions about the kind of world Earth will be over the coming decades.
1 Introduction: public health, EcoHealth, planetary health, and you
For decades, many of us have turned a blind eye to what is happening to the planet. But now, given that Earth [as we know it] may well be dying, we may be ready to stand up to protect what we love. An extraordinary alchemy can take place when people follow their inner directives to stand up and face squarely the dire odds of biosphere survival. These actions involve extraordinary outer and inner courage, which can nurture a profound activism.
Dahr Jamail (2019)
1.1 Connections
This book is about connections, often unexpected links in a complex world. It brings together detailed information about seemingly disparate subjects. In the process, the growing air traffic of Miami International Airport is shown to be connected to the city’s low‐lying status in the ocean, to the use of sediment rock in the area’s hydraulic and drinking water filtration systems, and to king and red tides. Elsewhere, the connections are examined between the climate of Earth and human evolution, the peopling of the world, and the historic development of modern society. Also of concern are the multiple ways national and international development under capitalism are entwined with deforestation, coral die‐off, emergent infectious disease, and mounting food insecurity around the world. This list could go on, but the basic point is that a holistic perspective on diverse issues is needed in the investigation of the interaction of contemporary ecological dangers, human behavior, and health.
In visiting ecocrises around the globe, from U.S. nuclear waste buried below the melting glaciers of Iceland to the deteriorating asbestos cement used to construct homes in Australia, and many other catastrophes in many places in between, a considerable amount of detail is offered. Why such a thoroughgoing approach to cases and examples? Because, while there are redundancies reflective of the unfortunate fact that in countless ways adverse elements of environmental history repeat themselves, it is by knowing a multitude of events that the patterns and their determinants are brought into sight. In this way, we begin to see the forest through the trees. It is a critical moment for this task, as the logger’s saw, intensifying wildfires, climate change‐induced pest invasions, drought, global warming, and over‐extraction conspire to denude the planet of oxygen‐generating forests, depopulate the oceans, melt the cryosphere, and put human well‐being at risk.
1.2 Is this a dangerous book?
In an essay entitled “The Danger of Environmentalism,” Michael Berliner (2020), senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives, writes: “Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.” The perception, by some, of the danger inherent in being concerned about the industrial destruction of the environment is what has led covering the environment to be one of the most risky assignments in journalism. It is estimated that 40 reporters around the world died between 2005 and 2016 because of their environmental reporting. This is more than were killed covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Notes journalist Saul Elbein (quoted in Warren 2016): “In Cambodia and in remote forests elsewhere, a rising boom in the illegal sale of wood, land and minerals has turned the environmental beat into a new sort of conflict journalism. The dead have overwhelmingly been local reporters, covering illegal mining or logging. They are largely independent, poorly educated, untrained and despised by their nations’ establishment media. Reporting on a violent, corrupt frontier, they are never sure when they’ll cross a line and end up dead. Their lives in their hands, they head into the woods.” Newsworthy environmental controversies often involve powerful business and economic interests, explosive political clashes, criminal gangs, anti‐government rebels, or outright corruption. Often, they focus on struggles between elites and local people over indigenous rights to land and natural resources. In wealthy and developing countries alike, journalists covering environment issues find themselves the targets of attack by military, police, and paramilitary forces. In 2013, for example, independent journalist Miles Howe was assigned to cover protests by the Elsipotog First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada against hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. In his reporting, Howe sought to highlight unreported and underreported incidents. He recalls (quoted in Freedman 2018): “Many times I was the only accredited journalist witnessing rather violent arrests, third‐trimester pregnant women being locked up, guys tackled to the ground.” On one occasion, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police pointed at him and shouted, “He’s with them!” His equipment was taken and the police searched his home. In addition, they offered to pay him to spy on the protesters—an offer that he rejected. In 2014, the body of Taing Try, a journalist covering the illegal logging of the forests of Cambodia, was found by local farmers in Kratie Province. He was lying face down in the mud on a logging road, a bullet in the back of his head. Try’s fate was not his alone. In 2008, Mikhail Beketov, a Russian journalist who wrote about the destruction of the Khimki Forest, part of the green belt surrounding Moscow, to make way for the Moscow–Saint Petersburg motorway, died of injuries suffered several years earlier after unknown attackers crushed his skull, broke his legs, and left him for dead in his own front yard. Similarly, in 2012, Chandrika Rai, an Indian reporter for the Hindi‐language newspaper Navbharat