Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp

There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for each of the countries of the world.

The Rapid Growth of Human Population 1750-2000 by William Stanton predicts a likely collapse and massive die-off by the title’s latter date on account of human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet resulting in resource wars, famines and environmental systems failure.

Most of the graphs tell a similar, devastating story: starting around 1850- when the world reached its first Billion inhabitants- populations that in many cases had been relatively stable for thousands of years began to explode and the nearly flat lines all morph spontaneously into hockey-sticks. With another 84-million added to the planet every year at the books publication, the stats and the authors’ analysis lend powerful support to the petri-dish theory of humanity: like bacteria in a sugar solution, homo sapiens will simply keep on consuming all the available resources, leading to massive population increase, followed by die-off.

This is a compelling idea that originated of course 200 years ago in Surrey with Malthus, author of Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798, but as Fed Pearce shows in his recent rebuttal to Malthus PeopleQuakethe inevitability of die-off has strongly informed much of the environmental movement- and still does.

Including myself here on Z5. I have written at several blog posts over the last few years arguing that population is one of the “last taboos” which needs to be addressed much more strongly in debates on sustainability. The reasoning goes like this: all our powering down and reducing emissions can be canceled out- and are being canceled out- by increases in population.

Lets say the world manages to reduce its carbon emissions by 2%- something we dont yet seem to have managed anyway- but the population increases also by 2%- then the one might cancel out the other.

Of course it is more complicated than that, because it turns out that there is a huge disparity in footprints in the world, with someone in the richest 1 billion people consuming some 32 x what the average person in the rest of the world does;

however, I have countered that argument on the grounds that a)poor people want to get richer- consume more- and indeed that is surely their right; and b)we are in overshoot already, probably long past it: species extinction, peak oil, peak water, loss of topsoil and forest cover, all converging with the looming catastrophe of climate change- all of these would be easier to address with less people it seems, and in the event of catastrophes and famines, there would simply be less vulnerable people to suffer.

Of course we in the rich world should reduce consumption and be less greedy in every way possible- but just how far are we to go? Few in the West would give up basic amenities like washing machines, yet billions of people around the world dont even have electricity. So the question of “What is the carrying capacity of the Earth?” cannot be addressed without also asking “at what level of consumption are we willing to live?”

And therein lies the dilemma, because improving one’s lot may very likely involve increasing consumption.

Pearce’s book has made me question some of these assumptions, look at others in a new light, and realize that about some of the fundamental issues on population, I have been dead wrong.

Malthus was wrong

So far food production has in fact kept pace with population growth,and famines have been declining since the 1980s. Two-hundred years may be a long time to be wrong about something he was predicting in his own lifetime, but collapse theorists (like me) simply say: it’s coming. Peak Oil and all that- we have finally reached the point where the Malthusian nightmare of famines on a global scale are inevitable. The stresses we have placed on the environment that sustains us seem inevitably to overwhelm our technological improvements, with climate change the wild card with effects that may be impossible to prepare for adequately.

This view has been most forcefully expressed by Professor Al Bartlett in his discussions of the Exponential Function; and before him, William Catton in Overshoot (1980).

Pearce also looks at the landmark report “The Limits to Growth” by Dennis and Donella Meadows which came out in 1972. In an age of computer naivety, argues Pearce, the graphs were compelling enough to be taken at face value, without looking at the underlying assumptions.

It certainly grabbed attention. Science, the voice of American science, ran five pages. It noted that ‘the book reveals none of the assumptions and equations that are the meat of the model’. When these were finally published, critics said the apocalyptic conclusions had been fixed from the start. The formulae put into the model were Malthusian to the core. All the bad things- population, pollution, our deand on resources- were set to rise exponentially, while all the good things, like technological breakthroughs, increased only arithmetically. Surprise surprise, the world sank into a mire of pollution, soaring commodity prices and famine.

The counter to the Malthusian assumptions of meadows is that food production could keep pace with population proportionately- ie, the more people, the more labor, also the more minds and hands that might be able to make innovations to increase efficiency etc..

Pearce takes a historical view and explores Malthus from his upbringing, the world events he saw around him, and the political influence his ideas had.

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Pearce explains how influential Malthus became, and why he was decried so much by for example Marx: After his death, British politicians, believing Malthus to be correct about population growth amongst the poor, did not act to intervene with the Irish Potato famine, in which millions starved while the island was operating the largest livestock exporting market in the world.

Was the famine a case study in the operation of Malthus’s law- or an illustration of its political misuse? In reality, the famine may be a terrible example of how, in the hands of mean-spirited politicians, Malthusianism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pearce also analyzes the Rwandan genocide, contesting Jared Diamond’s view of the crisis as “Malthus in Africa” in his famous book Collapse and arguing that it was the wealthy northern Hutus who perpetrated the genocide, not the over-crowded landless poor; the collapse of coffee prices 1989, plunging many smallholders in Rwanda into poverty, he cites as another contributory factor.

Pearce also suggests that the more densely populated Tutsi farmers were also planting trees and improving their land, even that there may have been more afforestation taking place amongst them than in the less densely populated areas; population growth and environmental destruction need not always coincide.

Still the doomsters will say: we are already in overshoot. Population needs to be reduced everywhere, not just in the poor world. This would be an argument from The Optimum Population Trust which puts a sustainable population for the UK at between 17 and 24million.

In addition, a country like Britain- one of the most densely populated of the world- also has one of the highest per capita footprints, and obviously depends on continued imports for essentials including food.

While this is undoubtedly true, with population, there can be no quick fix (unless one provided by Nature); clearly, we cannot let people starve and will continue to endeavor to feed them.

In Ehrlich’s famous equation I=PAT or Impact = population x Affluence x Technology, the last one is the least considered, but as Pearce points out, technology has been only one reason Malthus has been wrong

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Blood and Soil and the Rise of the Greens

I have been aware for a while of course that the roots of some aspects of environmentalism are to be found in the Blood and Soil cults of early-20thCentury Right-wing movements including Nazism. Part of the Nazi ideology included the concept of lebensraum – the need to “space” for a people, a tribe- and an occult attachment of that people to a particular “soil” as in “The fatherland”.

A romantic and mystical view of the natural world as somehow “purer” than much of humanity also played a role in the rise of the Soil Association for example, which to this day has connections with Anthroposophy, an occult religion based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner’s views on karma and race should be more widely known; perhaps Anthroposophy is the clearest example of how this philosophy is still influential in parts today.

What also should be more widely known is that several of the most prominent contemporary Malthusians- including Bartlett, Herman Daly,William Rees and William Catton- are all on the National Board of Advisors to the Carrying Capacity Network, a Christian Right homophobic anti-immigration organization, which campaigns for stricter immigration policies in the US.

When I first looked at the CNN I thought it curious that a group concerned with population control should be homophobic- surely that would be opposing a potential solution? With so many of the heavy-weights of the Collapse movement associated with such ideologies, maybe it is worth questioning some of their other assumptions?

(It has been suggested to me that maybe some of those named as on the advisory board are not aware that their names are being used; this seems unlikely to me, but agreed it is also unlikely that some of them are involved with such an organisation.)

These associations do make me pause and wonder: just how much doomerism around, not just population but peak oil and general resource depletion, is actually influenced by this kind of right-wing agenda? To what extent has the environmental movement’s concern about the human footprint been colored by racist or anti-humanist ideologies?

Pearce makes a compelling case that immigration is good for both immigrants and host countries; it represents the fastest way for the poor to improve their lot, and money sent home makes a real difference to the economies of poor countries. There is much we should do to improve the circumstances and conditions of immigrants, but immigration is not itself necessarily the problem.

Demographic Patterns

Pearce’s book takes you deep into the world of the demographer, where one encounters fascinating concepts of baby booms and demographic windows; the politics of contraception and the history of attempts at population control such as the one-child policy in China ; graphs like mushrooms and inverted mushrooms (and the in the case of AIDS stricken South Africa, an hour-glass); and some surprising insights.

It was Stewart Brand who first made me question some of the conclusions from the Exponential Growth camp: worldwide, fertility rates have already peaked and are declining faster than expected. Population is expected to peak by 2050-some say by 2040- and will start to decline in total numbers.

One of the reasons for this is the large-scale movement of people from the countryside to the city, where surprisingly, footprints can be smaller per capita while opportunities for improvement increase. Like Brand, Pearce puts a positive spin on the burgeoning mega-slums of the world, many of which he has stayed in, finding them crowded, yes, but full of life and vitality, and far from hopeless.

As people move to the city and adopt more modern lives, consumption increases- but often from a very low vase to start with- while fertility tends to decrease as women gain more access to education, contraception and generally increase their independence and control over their lives.

Already across much of Europe, and this process is well underway, and the native population could halve by mid-century; but result will be an ageing population, the mushroom-shaped graph, as the baby-boomers of the 1960s- pass mid-life- I am myself now 45- and begin to age but with a much fewer children to follow on into the work force. An ageing population will have its own challenges of course, dramatically changing the dynamic of the world’s economies, and could even, as Pearce hopes, bring a more peaceful and thrifty world, in contrast to the testosterone-charged youthfulness of the last 50 years of rapid growth.

Pearce is of course aware of the enormous impact humans are having, but finds room for hope there too:

[In Costa Rica] tree cover is back to 50%, even though the population has grown more in the two decades since 1987 than in the two decades before… ‘We discovered it was government policies that were destroying the forests, not too many farmers. This is true across the world,’ says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez. This is an important lesson, and one which environmental pessimists miss. There is another way.

It seems that despite environmental angst and the darker motivations of groups like the CNN, and various government attempts to stave off Malthusian collapses with state-run large-scale family planning schemes , the world’s population is in any case inexorably heading towards decline.

The hockey-stick graphs of Stanton’s book were not wrong, they just didnt show the next couple of decades: if they had, the graphs would start to look more S-shaped.

In a resource depleted world, this still means that we in the rich world should power down and generally prepare for a leaner future. Pearce is no cornucopian: he knows that we are straining the limits of the planet nonetheless.

The issue of whether we can continue to feed the current population as it peaks and begins to decline over the next human generation is unknown. I have long believed that industrial food production is inherently unsustainable, but improvements in technology, combined with agro-ecological approaches are still feasible. This is really a topic for another post, but the key thing is that we have to try. We cannot just stop feeding people on the grounds that they might survive and breed and thereby increase the population and cause more problems.

Lamentably, I have recently heard more than one person argue quite emphatically that the only moral thing to do, in view of the impact humans continue to have on other species, is to cull our own.

Nor in my view is it ethical to deny people the opportunity to use technology to improve their food systems. In the rich world, even those of us back-to-the-landers are heavily subsidized simply by the wealth of our societies.

Most people would like to improve their lot and they have every right to do so. The life of a peasant is not an attractive one, and I for one, though I love my gardening life, do not wish to be at the mercy of the weather to be able to eat.

The Green Revolution was designed to maximize global food output.The next revolution needs to get local. It needs to help these poor farming communities, the ones largely left out of the last green revolution, to find ways to manage their own soils better, using livestock to fertilize soils, conserving rainwater on their land in case of drought, breeding and exchanging local crop varieties and finding natural predators for troublesome pests.

Humanity still faces huge challenges , but the leveling off of human population growth, and even its decline in the near future, is a fact that needs to be acknowledged.

Rather than worrying about population overshoot, we need to address the issues that will arise over the next 30-40 years with a much older population, and the very different society that will ensue: possibly, as Pearce hopes, one not just older, but wiser also.

We need to leave behind the idea that sustainability is only for a minority of the human family, and work to making a sustainable future for all.

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/

Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

Atlantic Books 2009 316pp

“Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”.

Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole Earth Discipline he takes that same movement to task for rejecting science and getting sidetracked by ideology at the very time when the practical application of science through engineering and technology may be the only way to save ourselves.

I came across an early copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by Brand in 1968, on an early visit to a small “back to the land” commune about 25 years ago. It was a thrilling introduction to the possibilities of the burgeoning “alternative” lifestyle of organic gardening and renewable energy I was joining at the time.

Over the coming years, I read about his early involvement in LSD in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and currently have a copy of his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now on my bookshelf.

In a recent interview, I heard Brand take on the environmental movement’s anti-science stance on various issues. I have been grappling with this issue myself for some time now, particularly in the credulous acceptance by most green organisations of “alternative medicine” for which there is no evidence, and the anti-science diatribes that are inevitably summoned up in defense.

More recently I have discovered for myself how little science there is behind the health claims of organic food, and how organisations such as the Soil Association are often pseudo-scientific in their claims and their treatment of evidence.

Whole Earth Discipline challenges the greens on four more holy cows: population, urbanisation, nuclear power and Genetically Engineered crops, and in reading this compelling and fascinating book I have had to do some serious re-thinking around these issues myself.

Of those four issues the one I have been most concerned about myself has been population: what use our hard-won per capita reductions in carbon emissions if this is to be always canceled out by more people? What chance of eco-system restoration if a growing population is constantly increasing the pressure?

In contrast to Brand- who had Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich as one of his early tutors- I do not see population really as a big environmentalist cause, rather it seems to be the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, perhaps because of connections with oppressive regimes, racism and the sheer intractability of the problem.

Brand claims however that world population will most likely peak within another generation at around 9 billion, far less than was being predicted in the 70s and 80s, and that there is one major reason for this: urbanization. Most of humanity now live in cities and as the rural poor move there they reduce their numbers of offspring, so much so that far from a population crash, we are facing a crisis of an aging population.

Brand paints a very different picture of this process of the move to town than that of the conventional environmentalist. The move to the city Brand claims is liberating on the whole, and especially for women. Rural village life tends to be parochial and oppressive, offering little by way of opportunity. Peasant subsistence agriculture is far from the romantic view of the back-to-the-land movement for most, but back breaking toil subject to the vagaries of the weather with no back-up in case of crop failure.

The mega-slums of the developing world may appear to be hellish and grossly over-crowded polluted and destitute to the affluent western greenie, but Brand argues that in fact they are preferable to squalid farming because they offer opportunities to escape poverty. One way this is happening is by the ubiquitous spread of the cell phone: even the poorest of the poor have one, with incoming calls often free.

Not only that, but growing cities mean an emptying countryside which is good for forest regeneration. The point is made clearly: if you want to be green, than the compact life in the city id for you, while those in wealthy countries who set up their small-holdings in remote rural locations are likely to have a larger footprint, subsidised as they are by car transport and long supply lines. (I would be a classic example of this last category.)

Surprising though Brand’s analysis is on cities, his more controversial chapters are likely to be the ones on nuclear and GE crops.

While I attended anti-nuclear demos in my youth- CND was at its height in the late 1970s when I was leaving school- more recently I have been swayed by James Lovelock’s position on nuclear, that which ever way you look at it, coal is the real dirty fuel and if your concern is over future generations, addressing climate change by decarbonising the economy is your first priority.

It does indeed seem that fears over the dangers of nuclear waste have been exaggerated. The total per capita waste from a lifetime of using nuclear fuel for one family would fit into a soda can. France runs 80% of its electricity from nuclear, but while many die every day in car crashes, nuclear seems to be very safe these days. Not only that, but there are new generations of nuclear power stations which are relatively small and which can be deployed anywhere. One scheme is to produce small power stations which contain their entire lifetimes worth of fuel, are buried for the duration of the fuel and simply switched off when that is spent, with no waste extracted.

Brand also points out that all the existing nuclear powers developed weapons technology first, which then gave rise to civil energy uses, rather than the other way round; since Iran actually does need nuclear power, the international community would be in a very strong place to insist how this is developed safely. In the west meanwhile, large numbers of nukes are being used as a source of fuel for power generation.

What Brand skips over in his book with barely a mention is peak oil. He clearly thinks new technologies and fuel sources can fill the gap somehow; uranium can be extracted from sea water, and if that runs out, we can use thorium instead.

Peak oil doomers like myself have long argued against nuclear on the grounds that it will take too long to construct, that the carbon footprint is still high once you have counted the embodied energy in construction and decommissioning;that uranium will peak also before too long should we try to run everything from nuclear. While Brand makes a convincing case for the safety of modern reactors and the promise of new technologies, he is clearly under no illusion about the challenge facing us were we to try to replace existing coal and oil with a range of alternatives, including nuclear, before the climate tipping point. Brand is no techno-fantasist, but a pragmatic and practical engineer.

Perhaps even more of a Holy Cow for environmentalists than nuclear is Genetically Engineered crops. (Brand prefers “GE” to the more common “GM”.) This seems to go right to the heart of what sees as the problem with the ideological position of “romantic” greens who are motivated by a spurious ideological notions of what is “natural”. Tampering with genes, especially crossing the species divide, seems unnatural to many and unholy to some.

But scientists are no more concerned about GE technology than they are about plant breeding and loss of diversity from farming in general, because they know as Brand says that genes are extremely fungible in nature: transgenic mutations, especially on the microbial level, are apparently quite normal, indeed we could hardly have evolved without this process. Although the “strawberry with fish genes” is apparently an urban myth, in fact any given gene may be nearly identical in two very different species so splicing genes from one organism into another may not be nearly as “abnormal” as it may appear.

The problem is not this or that particular kind of farming, but farming in general. Unless you advocate a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles (there are those who do) there is no reason to feel GE crops are uniquely evil or dangerous.

To an ecologist, or to a Gaian for that matter, agriculture is one vast catastrophe. The less of it the better.

Another urban myth which may be partly responsible for the extreme opposition to GE- in common with anti-abortion and anti-vivisection activism, anti-GE sentiment is deemed to justify violence on occasion- is the “terminator gene”, designed to produce sterile genes. This does appear to be unjustifiable, interfering as it does with ancient farming practices of seed-saving, until you read the true story: no “terminator” crops were ever actually produced, in part because of protests, but the real reason for their proposed development was to limit the dangers of the new crops running amok in the wild: in other words, terminator technology was part of the checks and balances that Monsanto were proposing to address some of the environmentalists concerns. Without this, preventing contamination may now be harder.

The absurdity of the opposition to these crops is expressed in the quote given by Vandana Shiva, from her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000):

“The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that would eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”- a biological impossibility, since terminator plants would be unable to spread by seeds.

Brand gives a shocking account of how ideologically motivated environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaigned extensively against US food aid to Africa during famines in 2001 and 2002 because it contained GE crops, threatening to prevent any African imports to Europe if this badly needed food was accepted. Brand ruefully quotes Brecht: “Grub first, then ethics.”

Starvation was treated as a measure of commitment to the cause. In the service of what was thought to be a higher good, the environmental movement went sociopathic in Africa.

That well funded environmental groups in Europe campaigned so vociferously against food aid that was meant for starving people is surely a shocking indictment that there is something seriously wrong with the movement.

Many of the arguments Brand discusses in favour of GE crops are given here;

-after a decade of real life trials, no evidence suggests any human health implications from eating GE food;

-checks and balances are employed far more diligently in GE than in many other areas;

-GE is already becoming decentralised with many smaller companies and NGOs becoming involved in using the technology appropriately to help the poor and the hungry, with many beneficial effects for the environment including less use of pesticides:

“Developing countries are building their own non -corporate GE programs suited to their unique agricultural needs.” The democratization of the technology may even have been hampered by anti-GE activism: “Only a few big corporate players have survived a period of consolidation, caused partly by excessive anti-GE regulation that drove out small companies”.

And the potential of the technology is impressive: unlike conventional plant breeding, GE can be highly specific and precise in the traits it develops, and has had many successes despite the hampering of environmental protests.

Brand discusses at length how the bogus concept of the “precautionary” principle has been used to scupper development of the technology. In the absence of any clear evidence of danger, the precautionary principle is merely a recipe for social apoplexy. No doubt there were protesters using the same argument when people first discovered fire. In fact there are lots of checks and balances and the scientists who know what they are doing are far more aware of possible dangers than protesters.

Quasi-scientific propaganda against climate change is no different from quasi-scientific propaganda against genetic engineering. Both try to harness science to a political agenda.

In the coming years, GE seems certain to spread and eventually to be accepted: “The fact is that the fastest-moving countries now with GE crops are the developing nations that have the scientific competence and confidence to stand up to excessively cautious environmentalists- China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Argentina, the Philippines. as they go, so goes the world.”

As I write this I am getting forwarded emails asking me to sign the Avaaz petition against the recent decision by the European Council to allow GE potatoes to be grown here. I wont be signing, but I know most of my colleagues- many of whom have pulled up GM crops themselves- will.

In the future however, the strategy is likely to be to aim the benefits of the produce at the consumer: if the technology is good enough, people will simply prefer the better product. The proof will be in the pudding.

Brand returns to the issue of the dysfunction of Greens in his next chapter, Romantics, Scientist and Engineers

Here he suggests that one of the driving forces of green movements has been the romantic notion of decline. As a peak -oiler myself a lot of bells rang as I read through the book and I found myself stopping to question how much of my beliefs about the inevitability of collapse and “the long descent” are ideological rather than based on real evidence.

Clearly the potential for collapse is very real, and perhaps an over-optimistic world view based on “positive thinking” has contributed to the recent financial collapse, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in her book Smile or Die.

Without discussing the ins and outs of the collapse theory- he has already outlined some of the worst scenarios of climate change in the opening chapter- Brand explores the idea that romantic greens are ideologically opposed to finding solutions, whereas engineers believe there must be a solution to everything.

A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see environmental problems neither as a romantic tragedy nor as a a scientific puzzle but simply as something to fix.

I myself used to buy into the still prevalent myth of the Fall from an idyllic past: for thousands of years,so this particular myth goes- humans lived in harmony with Nature, responsive to Her (usually feminine) deepest energies and understandings.

At a certain unspecified point in our history, we lost our way, separating from Nature and playing God by manipulating natural laws. It is because this myth is still so powerful that anti-GE and anti-nuclear sentiment remains so strong and vitriolic- Thou Shalt Not meddle with the Deeper Law.

In reality, there never was such an idyllic harmonious past; Rousseau’s Noble Savage never was.

Nature does not care about us, nor does it have plans or desires; rather, any species that were to evolve the adaptive advantages of opposable thumbs and the neo-cortex would have come to dominate our predators and competitors in the same way we have.

Being close to nature has always meant short life-span, high infant mortality and constant resource wars. It has only ever been our technology- starting with fire- that has allowed us to escape such an existence.

As Brand outlines so succinctly in his opening pages, the fundamental problem of humanity is not separation from nature, but existential: everything we do has a footprint; yet we want our children to survive and prosper.

Brand takes a brief look at how these retro-romantic views have been associated with, and are not incompatible with, Nazism: yearning for a purity in nature not found in culture; and an elitism only possible in the well fed to moralize to the hungry.

But the engineer’s approach is very different from any kind of deluded new age pseudo-therapy, rooted as it is in science and practical experience. There is surely no guarantee that we will be able to pull off the kind of techno-fixes Brand describes in his last chapters- which includes such things as giant sunshades in space and the sequestration of carbon through biochar on a massive scale- but the worst aspects of the romantic’s world view should not hinder these attempts which may be our last chance.

Every environmentalist should read this life-changing – and maybe even planet-changing book.

The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated- too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role,environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system- climate dynamics.

The Living Landscape: How to Read and Understand it

Patrick Whitefield

Permanent Publications 2009

334pp

48 color photos

When I first saw in the recent Permaculture Magazine that Patrick Whitefield had written a book on reading the landscape I became very excited and thought, “That’s probably a book David Holmgren would have liked to have written!”

Holmgren called it “reading the great Book of Life”- looking at the living landscape of the countryside  through the lens of ecology,botany, geology, archaeology, history and even politics and economics.

Observation of the natural world is the starting point of permaculture design and with this book Whitefield helps us gain an insight into the myriad of the many natural and human processes that make up our landscape, and how to interpret their  hidden indications.

Patrick Whitefield covers all of these impacts on the British Countryside, taking his examples from all over the country, and shows us how to be a kind of landscape detective, painstakingly uncovering the meaning of signs and indications of past land-use, some obvious – the absence of trees indicating ongoing grazing- some much less so- the horeshoe bat indicating an intact mosaic of different habitats.

The book begins with some  chapters on general patterns in the landscape and underlying features of   geology, soil and then climate and natural succession before moving onto more specific cases including animal signs; niches; succession;  Different Kinds of Woodlands; Grassland; Heaths and Moors; Water in the Landscape; and finally, Hedges and other field boundaries and Roads and Paths.

Throughout Patrick gives us pages from his extensive notebooks that he has kept over the years which show actual examples of reading the landscape in a wide range of landscape types he has encountered on travels up and down the country, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Somerset “Levels” – or Moors as they are more usually known locally; the remnants of diverse wildflower meadows still found on the chalk downs, and the semi-ancient wood of Lady Park Wood in the Wye valley.

Patrick is always an agreeable travel companion and makes fascinating observations throughout. The pleasure he takes at discovering new landscapes or unpicking the story of a woodland and how it got to have the species mix it has- the subtle interplay of geology, microclimate and grazing patterns- is always obvious, becoming most so when discovering a new hedgerow with large number of species ( a possible indicator of antiquity).

we have been using Patrick’s previous books, The Earth Care Manual and How to Make a Forest Garden on the Kinsale course for the past several years; The Living Landscape is another great addition which fills an important niche in permaculture literature. A fascinating and engaging read with great color photos,  it will have to find a place on every designers’ bookshelf.

a species of jumping plant lice, aphalara itadori, could bring down the mighty knotweed by guzzling its sap. If released to do its worst, it would be the first ever “biological control” deliberately introduced into Britain.

At present, knotweed can only be controlled with heavy-duty chemicals, and then only with great difficulty- it can remain dormant under the ground even after being cut for over a decade, and chews its way through concrete and tarmac for breakfast.

It is becoming a serious threat in Ireland however and there needs to be a concerted effort to educate how to stop its spreading. Take good note of the advice given in the above article:

And how to tackle it

• Don’t ignore it. A small Japanese knotweed plant quickly becomes a major infestation. • Do not strim, flail or chip it. It can reproduce from tiny fragments of rhizome, twig or even leaf. It is extremely unlikely you can eradicate it by digging it out, because the roots stretch down so deep into the soil. • Herbicides can check its growth but only the most powerful chemical treatments will eventually clear it. These are unsuitable for spraying near water. One approach is to allow the weed to grow to about 1m, in early summer, and spray then. You will need to re-spray regrowth in midsummer and again in September if necessary. Another approach is to cut it back and apply to the stumps a powerful weedkiller such as Roundup’s treatment for tree stumps and roots. • Be careful not to allow cuttings into any drains, streams or waterways. • Do not compost cuttings or put them in the rubbish bin. It is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to cause Japanese knotweed to grow in the wild so if you dispose of it carelessly you will be breaking the law. Do not dump it in the garden waste bin of your local recycling centre. Japanese knotweed (and contaminated soil) is classed as “controlled waste”, which means you must only dispose of it at certain, licensed landfill sites: check with your local council. If you are allowed to have a fire, burning the waste on site is another way to dispose of it. There are also commercial companies that specialise in the eradication of Japanese knotweed. • More advice at environment-agency.gov.uk

Lawson quotes research suggesting farmers may have lower cancer rates possibly because pesticide use may protect against cancer! Now that has just got to be corporate spin…

The findings in last weeks’ FSA report that there is little to choose between organic and “conventional” food in terms of the major nutrients is hardly a surprise.

For many including myself, less rigidly defined labels such as “local” and “chemical-free” have been more important especially if we can see for ourseleves how the food is grown.

What is more surprising perhaps is some of the responses from some parties in the organic movement, which are not helping us understand the issues raised, or move the discussion onto other aspects of sustainable food and farming.

Rob Hopkins wrote to me to ask:

Might it be possible that this is actually an example of bad science, which just might have set out to prove a point, been subject to some kind of political interference and the might of the multinational food industry? Clearly it is very useful for some quite unpleasant institutions if we all believe organic farming is a waste of time. Might one argue that to believe that such a study is completely impartial and rigorous is somewhat naive? Might this report be an example of where we need to take what is presented as ‘good science’ with a rather large pinch of ‘organic’ salt?

In order to assess whether or not the review meets the highest standards of science, it is necessary to understand something about how science works, and this is an issue which goes right to the  heart of what is wrong with environmentalism, because the movement in general is poorly informed about science, despite being dependent on it for assessing the general health of the environment.

As explained on Bad Science, the review followed the internationally accepted protocols established by the Cochrane collaboration, which does not accept corporate funding. These include deciding criteria for including studies before actually doing the review. The studies that were excluded were because they were either not relevant to this review, or of poor quality.

Contrary to the SA’s press release, the review found no statistically significant difference between organics and conventional foods, as explained here.

Goldacre says:

sadly, like many industries in a corner, the Soil Association seek to undermine the public’s understanding of what a “systematic review” is (which itself causes collateral damage to everybody’s ability to engage in debates on evidence).

(It came as a surprise to me, naive as I am, to discover that the SA advocates the use of homeopathy in treatment of some animal diseases, which might lead one to question whether it has any interest in evidence at all.)

The charge of vested interests seems rather paranoid, but unfortunately is all too common amongst the alternative community which  often holds the view that science and technology in general is just a conspiracy to poison us for profit. We forget just how hard it is to eek a living from Mother Nature, and our separation from the means of our sustenance has the price to pay of igorance of what is actually involved in feeding ourselves.

We all have agendas, even jobbing permaculture teachers like me, so the important thing is to be upfront about them.

It seems worth noting then that  Craig Sams, the vice-chair of the SA, and founder of Green and Black’s chocolate, retained a post for with Cadbury’s after the posh chocolate brand was sold to the multi-national in 2005. This kind of association between the SA and large corporations which sell sweets and use the organic/fairtrade labels to expand the market does rather seem to undermine the arguments being made about the supposed nutritional benefits of organic food. It seems reasonable to ask the question: is the Organic label nothing more than a marketing strategy?

It’s not all Black and Green: Anecdotal evidence suggests that 9 out of 10 under-12s and many adults as well find organic chocolate more yummy than non-organic carrots

Many people have said, as does the SA, that higher nutritional content is not the main reason why they might buy organic. This is certainly true; however, the SA has certainly used the perceived nutritional benefits of organic food as a major reason to favour it, as in this piece:

There is a growing body of research that shows organic food can be more nutritious for you and your family. Put simply, organic food contains more of the good stuff we need – like vitamins and minerals – and less of the bad stuff that we don’t – pesticides, additives and drugs.

The first sentence here is false as the FSA review demonstrates- although one of the conclusions of the report is that the number of good quality studies is small, and research in the area generally poor, the fact is there is no good evidence of higher nutritional content in organic food, so we should not claim that there is. We might guess that there might be, and there seems plenty of anecdotal evidence that the quality and taste may be better, but for the major nutrients that keep us generally nourished and healthy, there is no difference.

Of course, it may be that further research will show up this evidence, but the fact that it is not evident to date indicates it is unlikely to be a major difference. The SA should lobby the Big Organic growers to fund more research if it is not satisfied.

There are several other good reasons why we might nonetheless prefer organic food:

-avoidance of pesticide and fertiliser chemical residue;

-supporting sustainable farming;

-supporting small local growers;

-supporting animal welfare;

-better farming practices including better care of the soil;

• protection of biodiversity and wildlife habitat on farms;

-less dependency on fossil fuels.

-building self-reliance and local community resilience

Avoidance of pesticide and fertiliser chemical residue

The first question here is, how much residue of chemicals is actually found on non-organic food and how bad is it for us? Seems like a reasonable concern and I admit that this would have been a major reason that I have favoured organic since a teenager.

But is it really true?

Firstly, a serious criticism of organic standards is that they are inconsistent and still permit the use of fairly noxious substances such as copper sulphate, used in the control of potato blight.

On the other hand, given that most of our food is grown using pesticides etc, there doesnt seem to be any real evidence that our health is suffering as a result of consequent environmental contamination: we still have one of the longest life-expectancies in history of the race, and although there is an increase of such modern diseases, many of these may be a result of old age and of the kind of food we eat, not pesticide poisoning.

A key issue here is that as mammals we need high-energy foods like carbohydrates to keep going- in an oil-rich world, this basic need is easily satisfied, and obesity can set in if we have endless cheap supplies especially in the form of corn-syrup (fructose). That is why the emphases on “eating your greens” becomes so important for the affluent ape.

This issue goes back to Rachel Carson’s  “Silent Spring” and the rapid destruction of the environment that was apparent in the post-war rapid expansion of industrial agriculture, but deeper than that it touches on one of the most prevalent post-modern myths that “nature is better”.

In a world dominated by our one over-successful species, the concept of “natural” may not mean very much. Practically every last square inch of the planet- and certainly nearly all of the industrial and over-crowded Europe- has been modified by humans.

More than that, we have been modifying our food since we started cooking it. Farming started some 10,000 years ago and began the process of breeding plants and animals to be more amenable to meeting our needs. The “natural” world is full of complex chemicals many of which are toxins designed to keep predators at bay. The reason our tender young salad seedlings are so vulnerable to slugs is that they have not yet developed the resistance to pests their wild cousins have.

The question then is, are artificial chemicals more nasty than natural ones? The answer is certainly not, in general- but of course each one needs to be looked at case-by-case. In the development of chemicals, many trials are conducted to ensure they are only administered at doses well below what would be fatal- in many cases this may be far below the fatal dose of, say, a glass of lager.

That is not to say that we should not be vigilant with the introduction of new chemicals, and there may be justifiable concern about long-term effects, but this issues goes to the heart of what is wrong with post-modernism. The whole of human history has been a struggle for survival and whatever the negative effects of the modern world, few of us would survive long in the natural environment without the benefits of modern science, and fewer would voluntarily choose to dispense with the comforts of modern life completely.

We need to acknowledge that naturally occurring chemicals can be just as dangerous as synthetic ones, but the latter have the advantage of being tested, and have the potential to be applied as and when we need them, in carefully controlled quantities, which cannot be achieved for their naturally occurring counterparts.

In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability , David Holmgren also suggests that use of appropriate herbicides to aid tree establishment may be acceptable, but for many any kind of spray remains simply taboo.

Biodiversity and care of the soil

One of the great contributions of the organic movement has been an emphases on better care of wildlife habitats, and care of the soil. However, while organic farms in general may be better than conventional in this sense, this is also not a clear cut issue.

Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma discusses how many organic farms may have to harrow and cultivate more often for weed control, which can be more harmful to the soil than spraying, as well as using more fossil energy for this at least. He also saw evidence of the use of low-paid migrant labour on big organic farms to make up for the extra work involved.

A 2004 review of organic vs “conventional” farming practices by  Anthony Trewavas concludes:

The article concludes that in the UK, at least, when problems with agriculture emerge they usually hinge around poor management not mode of agriculture. In environmental terms no-till farming currently seems to be better than others.

So in terms of soil health, no-till practices- as prioritized in permaculture for example- may be more influential than not spraying; while organic farmers may in general be more aware of issues of soil health and environmental protection, improvements in farming on some conventional farms show that good practice is possible there as well. It depends on the farm, not the mode of agriculture.

Animal Welfare

This is a key ethical issue and one that has certainly motivated by buying habits; but is it an issue for specifically organic production? Again, the target should be large-scale factory farms, the worst excesses of profit-driven industrial farming, rather than converntianl farming per se. Personally, I am far more concerned about avoiding intensive factory farming than buying organic.

Fossil fuels dependency

Organic farming may be less fossil-fuel dependent, but on the other hand, yields may be lower and therefore more land may be required. Some crops may require more fossil fuels; clearly, the increased use of refridgeration and the habit in some cases of flying in fresh organic produce would not help reduce fossil-fuel dependency. There is a lot of studies referred to on Wikipaediabut again there are many other factors apart from the specific industry standards of “organic” that effect fossil fuel inputs.

Food plant diversity

The greatest threat to our food security, and the greatest tragedy of modern farming, is the loss of food crop diversity.

The vast range of food crops, adapted and bred for specific characteristics for specific locations and conditions, was a hallmark of traditional food resilience; but industrial methods have lead to an inexorable decline as the priority has been towards a “one size fits all” type for mechanical harvesting and ever-bigger fileds of monocrops.

For the smallholder or home gardener, seed saving to protect diversity and home plant breeding for varieties more suitable to the home gardener, has become increasingly important.

The organic movement is to be applauded for raising these issues and encouraging the protection of seed diversity. The work of Vandana Shiva highlights the loss of biodiversity in food plants and the corproate complicity in this process.

Most scientific research goes into breeding varieties geared for maximum yields, ability to intake nitrogen and and withstand pesticide use; and allow for mechanical harvesting, global transport and storage.

As much as anything, the perceived superior quality and tast of organic produce may be down to variety.

However, if the resources of science could be harnessed to produce varieties of greater diversity for the home gardener or small producer, this is an area where a real difference could be made. It is of course quite correct for the organic movement to lament the increasing influence of big business on the uses of science in this area, with the miuses of GM technology for profit and control of seed the most obvious example.

Self-reliance and building community resilience

These may be the most important contributions that the organic movement have made. It is obviously important for people to know how to grow food without the addition of chemicals they have no chance of producing themseleves on a small scale; on the other hand, organic farming may be reliant on many other inputs from plastic tunnels to mulch.

Home gardening is a fascinating and fulfilling activity which can contribute to local food security, and it is essential to retain and develop the skills needed for people to grow at least some of their own food.

Peak oil-ists have long been advocates of growing food,and far more people will need to be working on the land in an energy descent future- but this is not something most are yet willing to accept and would involve considerable change in lifestyle.  Goldacre for example says that most food “will always be industrial”. It would be interesting for him to consider more seriously the peak oil issue and whther this will indeed always be possible into the future.

Conclusion

The “Organic”  label is primarily a marketing device to sell an expensive product with “added value”; in times of recession  fewer will be willing to pay for it.

There is an obvious difference between an organic lettuce flown in fresh from israel and a regular lettuce from a sprayed field down the road where you know the farmer.

It should be said though that where “organic” does mean “local, small farmer using natural methods and trying to limit fossil input” many of us will be willing to pay more as a “sustainability subsidy” and to support local growers. Food has become unrealistically cheap during the last 50 years when we learned to increase yields with fossil energy, and there is every indication that we will have to pay more in the future, and that a lot more of us will have to be involved in actually doing the work to produce it. Food has been a declining proportion of our weekly grocery budget and this has lead to it becoming undervalued and treated as just another commodity; consumers have come to resent the farmer asking for a decent wage and demand cheap food. I don’t resent the extra cost becasue much of what I buy comes from the ocal grower; but I wouldnt favour “Big Organic” over “Big Conventional” otherwise.

There is lots of reasons however to feel that some organic produce, especially meat and salads, taste better and are produced more ethically, and are of superior quality.

In addition, the organic movement should be applauded for raising the issues of the environmental impact and pesticide use, and perhaps playing an important role in reigning in big AgriBusiness from the worst excesses of profit-fuelled conventional farming practices.

As environmentalists, we should reject the simplistic notion that “natural is better” and we should demand that groups like the Soil Association and other prominant environmental lobby groups such as Transition Towns stop trying to confuse us about the workings of science, and should make their own agendas more transparent. The anti-science stance of many prominent environmentalists is a shameful disgrace to the movement, discrediting it in the eyes of those who actually understand just how science works and how profoundly we depend on science to survive.

In an age of climate change, which will effect food and farming more profoundly than anything, our understanding of science is paramount, and it is a tragic irony that sectors of the environmental movement itself are undermining this understanding at a time when we need it most.

The question still remains as to whether organics or small-scale farming can really feed a population of 6.7 billion and still retain at least some of the benefits and creature comforts the modern world has brought us; all too often the “green” lobby conveniently forgets how tough life can be on the farm, and red in tooth and claw “nature” really is.

For these reasons alone we should salute the farmer, any farmer, who is able to at least temporarily cheat the natural competitve forces of nature and put food on our plates.

I was visiting my sister this week, who lives nearby in Bodmin, and got the opportunity to visit, with my father.

We were both hugely impressed and had a highly enjoyable trip. This week visitors got a chance to see the extraordinaryand extremely rare Titum Lilly

Amorphophallus titanum one of the largest flowers in the world which only flowers for 48 hours.

The rain forest dome also included many tropical plants that have provided important cash crops for the west throughout the colonial era and continue to do so and it was fascinating to see the plants of many common products like rubber, coffee,

pistachios, bananas and many spices like ginger and cardamon in the flesh.

The Mediterranean dome also had lots of interest to the permaculturalist, with many fruiting plants such as olives and grapes and kiwis on display.

There was also some examples of innovative ways of growing, for example the autopot system of growing in very dry conditions.

There is a big educational aspect to Eden , with outside gardens exhibiting the “crops that feed the world”- the 6 main ones being corn, potatoes, soybeans, rice, wheat and peanuts- although the potato patch looked positively sickly in contrast to most of the other crops.

Inside the Core building were many interactive and multi-media educational exhibits aimed at increasing the public’s awareness of their environmental footprint and global issues such as climate change, food, energy, waste. These showed great innovation and creativity and perhaps represent the state of the art as far as this kind of environmental  exhibit is concerned.

The really hard issues were however avoided, in common with most presentations of “mainstream environmentalism”: the main message being a need to transfer to “Green tech stability” with a lot of information on technological alternatives to oil such as wind and solar and even hydrogen fuel cells, without an analyses of the limits to growth and possible powerdown energy descent scenarios, or an emphases on the need to radically change our lifestyles and the issue of population reduction.

Inspired by the displays however, it would be a great project to create such exhibits for Peak oil and Permaculture. Indeed it seems that a permaculture garden was conspicuously absent from the project; maybe we will see this added in the future as the need for practical self-reliance becomes more widely accepted.

If Eden takes such a project on, I feel confident they could do a fantastic job.

All in all, a really great day and highly recommended.

We are now officially in the Anthropocene, according to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London. This is presumably the first time in the Earth’s 4-billion year history that a new geological epoch has begun while being marked and recorded by the species that is responsible.

Essential reading:

Living on the Ice Shelf- Humanity’s Meltdown By Mike Davis

To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

And supporting evidence can be found in this report suggesting that the rate of arctic ice-melting is once again confounding even the worse-case predictions and the Arctic could be ice-free for the first time in human history this summer.

-the economic crisis

-global food security

-horse power

-bringing back a canal and rail system to Ireland

-renovating an old cottage

-Irish transition Initiatives

and much more.

Available from your local newsagent/wholefood store or from the Sustainability Institute:

office@sustainabilty.ie

A few people have pointed me to George Monbiot’s recent article on population in the Guardian. While it is welcome that Monbiot addresses the issue I wanted to reply because I found it really disappointing, failing to join the dots and in some ways misleading.

The main thrust of the article is that some environmentalists complain the issue of population is ignored- perhaps for political reasons- even though it is the “number one environmental problem” and Monbiot sets out to discuss whether this is in fact true. The basic issue in this debate is, can we really give out as it were about the large populations of the developing world when over-consumption in the West is in fact having a bigger environmental impact?

However, this is really a straw dog issue because as Ehrlich (whom he refers to) pointed out in The Population Bomb population and consumption are two sides of the same coin. It is in my opinion quite meaningless to speak about which is the greater issue, like we are dealing with some kind of Top of the Apocalyptic Pops.

Ehrlich’s famous formula- which should be on every high-school curriculum- is:

I (Impact) = P (population) x A (Affluence) x T (Technology)

The issues of consumption and population are quite simply inseparable. If the population increases, there will be less resources to go around, so in theory we can increase the population so long as we reduce per capita consumption- and vice-a-versa.

Monbiot then presents some statistics to demonstrate that economic growth is projected to have a bigger impact than population growth:

“Many economists predict that, occasional recessions notwithstanding, the global economy will grow by about 3% a year this century. Governments will do all they can to prove them right. A steady growth rate of 3% means a doubling of economic activity every 23 years. By 2100, in other words, global consumption will increase by about 1,600%.”

Any one who knows about Peak oil can see that this is impossible. Peak oil will end the past 150-year period of growth and lead to a shrinking economy. But Monbiot has never really satisfactorily bitten the Peak oil bullet, although more recently he has been coming closer.

There are a number of issues apart from this that Monbiot has missed:

Firstly, there is hardly as government in the world which does not assume that population growth is an inherently good thing. in other words, in the world of politics, it is not a question of economic OR population growth- they are treated as essentially the same thing, one leading to another. More people means more economic activity, more consumers, a larger pool of workers that can help keep down wages. Population growth is not an alternative to economic growth so much as a requirement for economic growth.

Secondly, in a similar way, it is misleading to treat the low-birth-rate, high-consuming “rich” as separate from the high-birth rate low-consuming (per capita) poor as if they are separate species. This is the “politically correct” excuse that is always used for avoiding or downplaying the population issue, and Monbiot ends his article with this point:

“to suggest… that population growth is largely responsible for the ecological crisis is to blame the poor for the excesses of the rich.”

But it is not simply that there are rich people in the world and then there are poor people; it is more that there are rich people because there are poor people- the one group depends in effect on the other (the poor do low-paid work for the rich). In a sense, the “poor” are simply “that group of people that have failed as yet to become rich”. The rich and the poor of the world are not separate species; wealth is not genetic. It is a one-world system in which the activities of one group effect the activities of the other- and of both groups, the impact on the whole system.

This mistake is the same one that is found in the “diffusion of affluence” theory in mainstream economic theory: “A rising tide will rise all boats”. The argument goes: look at the rich world: they seem to have controlled their birth rates; this is because of education, particularly of women, which leads to economic growth, which leads to falling birth rates. The way to deal with global population is education and development.”

The problem is, as Monbiot is clearly aware, there are not enough resources for everyone to enjoy a western lifestyle, so this diffusion will never happen to any great degree; and poor people generally want to increase their standard of living.

For example, Cuba has been pointed to as representing the kind of standard of living that could be sustainable if it were equally distributed throughout the world- about a quarter of the per capita resource consumption of the average European The problem is, it is not at all clear that Cubans are content with this standard of living; while few in the more affluent world would accept a cut to that level. But even if this was acceptable and achievable, if the worlds’ population continues to grow, this standard will have to be continually lowered.

Thirdly, this kind of debate always tends to ignore processes and the demographic momentum:

Playing around with statistics to show that consumption is the real problem, not population, as Monbiot does, again fails to see that the two issues are inextricably linked. For example, it is often said, if we all become vegetarian, the world could support a bigger population. But what happens then if we achieve this and the population continues to grow?

Presumably, the response to those who try to raise the issue of population control will once again be:

“Ah, yes, but if we all just live on one bowl of rice a day and huddle round a single light bulb the world could support twice the current population! Let’s have 10 billion! Let’s have 20 billion!”

Population growth rates have been declining, but as Stanton has argued, it is the total number of people added each year- currently about 80million- not the rate. In a world already over-populated, any further numerical increase will make things worse.

Another issue that Stanton discusses that is really mentioned is the concept of “aggressive breeding” whereby one ethnic group encourages rapid population growth as a deliberate strategy in order to outnumber a rival group. One of the examples he gives is of Albanians with a high birth rate immigrating to Serbia which ultimately lead to war. The peace-keeping efforts of the west have failed to address the demographic causes of this war and if the peace-keeping forces are ever to leave, the underlying causes are still there.

Underpinning this whole debate is the reality that the world is already in an advanced state of overpopulation, by whatever measure you care to choose, and that this is a result of the cheap fossil fuel era. So whatever we do, whatever our take on the issue, we have to acknowledge that population will fall. Talking about how if food and resources were rearranged we could feed 6.5 billion or more is meaningless when the production of these resources is unsustainable and will surely decline- even as we are committed to another couple of billion people on the planet because of the demographic momentum.

So what we need is a more sophisticated, systemic understanding of these issues, not a kind of competition by different camps competing for “their” issue to take priority. I dont think that those who are writing about population are necessarily doing that; it seems that way because the issue is generally ignored and considered taboo.

Among the many things we need to do to create a sustainable culture is to have a mature approach to our total numbers, as well as and always in the same breath as limiting our personal consumption of resources. The discussion needs to be focussed around “what standard of living for what number of people relative to what degree of availability of sustainable resources”.

Any discussion of an Energy Descent Plan, for example, MUST in my opinion include an analysis of Population- not just the total number of inhabitants in an area today, but what the trend is, what the growth rate is, and include in such a report recommendations for limiting population. It is surely obvious that any measures to address the myriad of environmental issues we face will be easier to implement with fewer numbers.

The environmental crisis is a result of the Total Human Footprint. Any discussion of sustainability that ignores population is going nowhere.