The Great Pause Week 67: The Social Lives of Forests

"The places of greatest biodiversity are a result of, rather than in spite of, long human disturbance of the environment."

Over the past few weeks we have been taking a deeper dive into biophysics, looking at energy and climate returns on investments in renewables and drawdown tech, landscape restoration, and lifestyle change. Trillionization is well underway, as predicted at the time of the Paris Agreement, but I am not the only one to say most of that money will be scandalously wasted. 

During the pandemic, novelist MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezo’s ex, gave away $10.7 billion of her settlement to a suite of charities that reduce the wealth and power gaps of the type that companies like Amazon widen, only to discover she made more that twice that much in that same period, thereby widening her personal wealth and power gap. Her ex-husband is much more sensible about getting rid of his wealth — he throws it into outer space where there is no possibility of it ever coming back to make him richer.

We can try to draw lessons from history, but projecting those into an uncertain future never before experienced by hominids is risky, and as MacKenzie Scott learned, this is not your daddy’s money system anymore, either. That said, some things really are eternal, and biophysical economics is one.

When early Europeans first arrived to North America they thought they were in a wilderness. Seeing no roads, cities, or sports arenas (all of which existed farther inland or in other times), they considered the human inhabitants “savage,” uncivilized, and little more than animals that they could perhaps train to perform menial labor.

As we know now, the habitation pattern of the Americas in 1492 was as advanced as anything in Europe then, and although of different design than European municipalities, was perhaps more realistically futuristic than science fiction concepts of glass skyscrapers with flying cars or domed colonies on Mars. But, like the speech of a whale to a whaler, the patterns revealed were incomprehensible to the conquerors, and so dismissed.

Had these people and their ideas not been bludgeoned to bloody mist like so many whales, passenger pigeons and buffalo, we could have learned much from their arts, sciences, languages, and phenological observations.

Archaeobiological data are used to explore the agricultural basis of the Jama-Coaque II archaeological culture that inhabited the western coastal lowlands of Ecuador between approximately AD 400 and AD 1430. Analyses of archaeobotanical and archaeofaunal assemblages recovered from 14 archaeological sites throughout the valley implicate an extensive native agroforestry system. The quantitative and qualitative composition of assemblage diversity suggest the accumulation and deposition of restricted categories of plants and animals whose ecologies reveal the possibility of a landscape managed through a form of pre-Columbian agroforestry that combined domesticated annuals, perennial tree crops, and useful forest taxa.

— Stahl and Pearsall 2012

What Magellan, Raleigh, Drake, Cabeza de Vaca, Cartier, Coronado, DeSoto, Cabot, Hudson, Gilbert, Smith, Cook and Zheng He discovered in the Age of Discovery were not wildernesses (as they reported to their respective monarchs) but subtle, extremely productive, and advanced human ecologies. Through the cultivation of landscape, First Nations shaped their environments to be continuously abundant, enduring, and interconnected. They observed the natural productivity of a landscape, tweaked it slightly to make it more friendly, and lived within, rather than against it. 

Of course, there were cases where thoughtless or ill-conceived human activities reduced biodiversity. We have fossil and historical records of the extinctions of megafauna. Yet many native landscapes preserved today in remote areas or national parks, and appreciated for their high biodiversity, provide scientific evidence of human use and respectful management over millennia. To quote one archaeological study of the Amazon basin, the places of greatest biodiversity “are a result of, rather than in spite of, long human disturbance of the environment.” What the original inhabitants began with was often less productive and biologically diverse than what resulted but the final products of generations were exquisitely elegant.

The Lost Colony, design by William Ludwell Sheppard, engraving by William James Linton.

 

In Amazonia: the historical ecology of a domesticated landscape, Clark Erickson explained how the land use practice Europeans called “slash and burn” actually worked: 

Slash-and-burn agriculture is characterized by low labor inputs, limited productivity per land unit, and short period of cultivation followed by longer periods of fallow or rest. … In addition to basic food crops, useful fruit and palms are often transplanted to the clearing. As fields fall out of cultivation because of weeds and forest regrowth, the plots continue to produce useful products, long after “abandonment”. 

* Amazonia
Traditional models assume that Amazonian societies did not develop into "civilizations" solely because of deterministic…www.universitypressscholarship.com

In 2007, while in Manaus to attend a conference on the terra preta soils, I paid a call at the university to meet Charles Clement. The professor was a man about my age, thin, with greying hair, who, just before our interview, had been busy taking pollen samples and radiocarbon dating them to better understand the ancient human influence on successional tropical forests.

I came to better appreciate his work when, after teaching a permaculture design course to a Kuna group in the Darien Peninsula of Colombia, I bouldered a steep river bed through dense forest for several miles before arriving at a mountain valley lush with fruit trees and many understory food and medicinal plants. It had not been humans that had planted this, or “nature” in a limited sense, but the monkeys who now tended and renewed their garden as they swung from tree to tree, harvesting calories and defecating seeds. 

Similarly, in many indigenous cultures, local farmers’ perception of cultivated and wild is not separated by a bright line. Erickson explains:

 

Anthropogenic forests are filled with fruit trees, an important component of agroforestry. Eighty native fruit trees were domesticated or semi-domesticated in Amazonia (Clement 2006). Fruit trees, originally requiring seed dispersing frugivores attracted to the juicy and starchy fruits, became increasingly dependent on humans through genetic domestication and landscape domestication for survival and reproduction. In addition, humans improved fruit tree availability, productivity, protein content, sweetness, and storability through genetic selection. Oligarchic forests, characterized by a single tree species, often a palm, provide mass quantities of protein and building materials, and food for the game animals. In the Bolivian Amazon, thousands of kilometers of the burití palm, the Amazonian tree of life, contributes protein and materials for buildings, basketry, weapons, and roofing. Forest islands of chocolate trees are agroforestry resource legacies of the past inhabitants of the region. 

Agroforestry and rotational milpa — patch clearance and regeneration — draws in and nourishes game animals that become another source of protein, fiber, and hides. Their decaying dung and processed bone and blood become fertilizer, transporting minerals from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity. For this reason, it is common for indigenous peoples to “plant for the deer;” to grow more food than necessary in order to attract and nourish game. They cultivate more than corn. They cultivate an ecology.

As a result, “garden hunting” is particularly efficient. Many game animals of Amazonia would have a difficult time surviving without a cultural and historical landscape of human gardens, fields, orchards, and agroforestry. The biodiversity of animals can also be enhanced by domestication of landscape. In coastal Ecuador, Stahl (2000, 2006) reconstructs biodiversity and the character of the anthropogenic environment through the remains of diverse animals in garbage middens of 4,000-year old settlements. The majority of identified animals thrive in a disturbed mosaic environment with light gaps, edges, old gardens and field clearings. 

A 2013 dig at the Classic Maya archaeological site Joya de Cerén in El Salvador focused on the analysis of plant remains near a sacbe (causeway) that were preserved under volcanic ash around AD 650. Finding agroforestry guilds, biochar fertilizers, and traditional maize, squash, agave and bean varieties was not surprising, but the researchers scratched their heads at the abundant “weeds.” It had been previously thought that the Cerén residents had well-maintained agricultural fields with few weeds or intrusive plants present among their annual crops. 

Various theories were advanced and discarded: the weeds were post-Conquest (ruled out by dating); they were were persistent perennials (they were not); they indicated change in soil fertility (not supported); lack of labor available to remove weeds with wooden and stone tools (no indication). Of the 16 different weedy species recovered (image), the majority are actually annual plants that would have been relatively easy to manage, if so desired. The study concluded:

Perhaps the paleoethnobotanical results from Cerén suggest a difference in the way weedy plants were conceptualized by the ancient Maya compared to modern views on the plants. According to Steggerda (1941), the main goal of agriculture in the Yucatan was to “use the land constantly and keep it covered, as far as possible, with useful plants instead of with useless weeds.” Alternatively, the species referred to as ‘weeds’ in this study may have been viewed quite differently by the ancient Maya than they are by people today. The plants were not necessarily seen as useless materials to the Cerén residents. The gathering of tolerated weedy species considered edible, or quelites, is a common supplement to Milpa agricultural systems.

***

The act of weeding an agricultural field is not an emphasized portion of the agricultural cycle in Kekchi villages in Belize (Wilk 1997). There, weeding is a casual side job when doing something else and is generally only a focus on when a particularly dangerous variety of weed is present, such as those with thorns or spines. The Kekchi Maya do not view weeds as a threat to crops once they have already begun growing and therefore their removal would be futile. 

***

Stepp and Moerman (2001) have shown that the Tzeltal Maya in Chiapas actually utilize a high frequency of weedy species for medicinal purposes. … All of the weedy species recovered from Cerén have known uses nutritionally, medicinally, or for other purposes. Farmers have a tendency to design a system of farming that yields the highest return per hour of work (Sanders 1973: 332) and collecting materials from the useful shrubs growing in the milpa may have been a way to increase the rate of return. Unfortunately, the contexts in which the Cerén samples were collected cannot verify that the Maya were aware of these uses for the weedy plants, but their strong presence suggests they held positive relationships with the villagers where they were certainly tolerated.

One creature’s weed is another’s manna. To lawn care addicts, milkweed is a noxious invasive. To migrating monarch butterflies, it may spell the difference between survival and extinction. Humans were an equal partner in the ecology of Cerén and the burití palm forests of Bolivia. Perhaps our role is to plant and harvest, or perhaps it is merely to observe and record. Either way, once humans are removed, the system is diminished. 

That is really the open secret of climate solutioneering. Despite desperate searches by X-Prize, Gates, the Bellona Foundation, and many others, the way out of this has been hiding in plain sight.

If we plant monoculture forests of pine or eucalyptus to pelletize and feed gigawatt-scale power stations, we will lose soils, microbes, all the forest creatures, and part of our own humanity. We can manufacture forests of aluminum trees in Iceland but the amount of CO2 they’d withdraw in a century might be less than is produced by a single volcanic eruption. Then, too, we’d want to ask how much CO2 went into producing metals, rare earths, and chemical catalysts for those devices. We can pave the plains with solar PV, elevated on poles to allow for shaded alley crops and grazing animals, but the tempests to come make that scheme vulnerable and once more, there would be questions of EROI and depleted non-renewables. 

“Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars?” 

 — Mark Andreessen in April 2020, refuting the idea of a damaged post-pandemic global economy.

But once we begin to speak of mixed-age, mixed-species forest ecosystems with humans included, all that changes. Take away the herbicides and pesticides. Add chinampas, marine permaculture, rooftop and vertical gardens, and eradicate food waste — we can still feed the world.

Estimates of the decline of the native human population of the Americas over the first century and a half following the Columbian Encounter range from 80 to 99.2 percent — from 50 to 1000 million in 1492 (estimates vary) to approximately 8 million in 1650 (and still fewer in later centuries) — caused by outbreaks of Old World diseases, slavery, and violent ethnic cleansing. As unspeakable as was the infliction of atrocities of such magnitude on the human population, far greater was the all-out assault on biodiversity imposed by the switch to “modern, civilized, progressive” land use practices and agrochemistry. 

The self-inflicted biodiversity loss carries a punishment proportional to the crime.

Bill Gates’ nuclear yacht, Earth 300

As we look ahead and try to collectively fashion appropriate responses to a century of catastrophic consequence, we won’t find those aboard Bill Gates’ nuclear-powered yachts or Richard Branson’s Virgin Galaxy shuttles to lunar orbit resort vacations. But, with a little luck and the roadmap provided by our ancient ancestors, we might just create Howard Odum’s “prosperous way down.”

 

References

Ambrósio Moreira, P., Mariac, C., Zekraoui, L., Couderc, M., Rodrigues, D.P., Clement, C.R. and Vigouroux, Y., 2017. Human management and hybridization shape treegourd fruits in the Brazilian Amazon Basin. Evolutionary Applications 10(6), pp.577–589.

Bardi, Ugo, Sara Falsini, and Ilaria Perissi. “Toward a general theory of societal collapse: a biophysical examination of Tainter’s model of the diminishing returns of complexity.” BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality 4, no. 1 (2019): 3. 

Barton H., Denham T., Neumann K., Arroyo-Kalin M. 2012. Long-term perspectives on human occupation of tropical rainforests: An introductory overview, Quaternary International, Volume 249.

Belsky, J.M., 2017. The Social Lives of Forests: Past, Present, and Future of Woodland Resurgence, by Susanna B. Hecht, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Christine Padoch, eds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Crutzen, P. J. and W. Steffen. 2003. How long have we been in the Anthropocene era? Clim. Change 61, 251–257.

Erickson, Clark L. 2008 “Amazonia: the historical ecology of a domesticated landscape” in The Handbook of South American Archaeology, pp. 157–183. Springer, New York.

Iriarte J., Elliott S., Maezumi S.Y., Alves D., Gonda R., Robinson M., Gregorio de Souza J., Watling J., Handley J., 2020 The origins of Amazonian landscapes: Plant cultivation, domestication and the spread of food production in tropical South America, Quaternary Science Reviews, Volume 248.

Odum, Howard T., and Elisabeth C. Odum. “The prosperous way down.” Energy 31, no. 1 (2006): 21–32.

Sanders, W. 1973 The Cultural Ecology of the Lowland Maya: A Re-evaluation, in The Classic Maya Collapse, ed. T. P. Culbert, pp. 325–336. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 

Slotten, V.M., 2015. Paleoethnobotanical remains and land use associated with the sacbe at the ancient Maya village of Joya de Cerén (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati).

Stahl, P.W. and Pearsall, D.M., 2012. Late pre-Columbian agroforestry in the tropical lowlands of western Ecuador. Quaternary International, 249, pp.43–52.

Steggerda, M. 1941 Maya Indians of Yucatan. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 531. 

Stepp, J. R. and D. E. Moerman 2001 The importance of weeds in ethnopharmacology. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 75: 19–23. 

Tainter, Joseph, The Collapse of Complex Societies. London: Cambridge University Press (1988).

Wilk, R. R. 1997 Household Ecology: Economic Change and Domestic Life Among the Kekchi Maya in Belize. Northern Illinois University Press, Dekalb, Illinois.

 ___________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#GenerationRestoration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

 

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 
1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Change Week 66: Sandy deserts mottled with mosses

"The trees have beards hanging from their limbs and fur on their bark. Even the rocks are covered in moss or mottled with lichens."

When John Liu was a teenager growing up in Indiana he was a year younger and much smaller than the others in his grade, many of whom found his intelligence annoying. In 1970, he was kicked off the debate team because he refused to cut his hair. His high school teachers kept wanting him to shut up. One of them told him very frankly that he had to stop telling her she was wrong when she was trying to teach class. “You don’t need to worry,” the teacher said. “You will pass the class. Now get out of here.”

Before travel stopped last year, John and I had been consistently bumping into each other at planet-care kinds of events for 20 or more years. Last week we spoke by phone from our respective pandemic safe houses. I asked if he could share his story with my readers. “My parents met in a small college in Nashville,” he told me, launching right in. “My dad looked sort of like a Casablanca Humphrey Bogart, only Chinese. He had been all over the world already and was wearing Saville Row suits.”

It was the habit in rural China in those times, and indeed the present times in many parts of the world, that one son remains to manage the family holdings while the other goes away to become educated and obtain worldly success. John’s father, the subject of a later biography, The Red Thread, was born in 1920, the oldest of two sons from a small village in Hunan Province. 

Sent from home, John’s father had spent nearly a decade in uniform, fighting the Japanese invasion and then commanding joint Chinese, British and American forces in Burma under Stillwell, where he was severely wounded. Expecting imminent death, he relinquished his command to a marine sergeant from Tennessee, who fought off the attackers and carried Liu’s father to the rear. The injured man moved through hospitals in Burma, then India, and on to London. Recovered, he was appointed Chinese Army liaison to the Allied Command on D-Day, serving as a senior staff officer to Eisenhower until the end of the War.

At age 25 he was a decorated veteran, had been all over the world, and was acquainted with the next President of the United States. He decided that traveling across Russia to get home to China was probably a bad idea, so instead he chose to go west. 

So he goes down to Nashville to see this guy who saved his life. And he meets my mother and they get married. Then the communists take over China and he is stateless, suddenly.

To marry a white woman in Tennessee at that time was crazy but he was basically given honorary white status.

Despite misogyny laws at the time, or perhaps because of them, their wedding made the front page of The Tennessean. John was born in 1953 and the family moved to Bloomington so his father could study civil engineering at Purdue. His father, rather than pursue an aerospace career in California like many of his classmates, decided he had had enough of the military industrial complex and instead opened a restaurant, and then another, until he was THE owner of Chinese restaurants in Bloomington, Indiana. Not wanting his children to become too provincial, he sent John’s older sister to school in Taiwan for two years. Then the whole family went there on sabbatical and John’s mother took a job teaching at the International School in Taipei. Returning by sea in 1967, the family called at Hong Kong, The Philippines, Bangkok, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Cape Town and Marseilles, where they switched to a Mercedes sedan and went sightseeing all over Europe. Then it was back to their Chinese restaurants in Bloomington.

“I think I am badly socialized but I’m pretty well educated,” he deadpanned.

In 1973, in the midst of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his father drove to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa and asked for a travel visa. Returning after three months in Hunan, he told his son China was very safe, you should go. “Really?” John said. No matter how little he enjoyed working in his father’s restaurants, had no desire to go to China. But in 1979 word reached the family that his grandmother in Hunan was passing, and his father said John had to go.

And I said, ‘Okay.’ I just packed everything and sold everything I owned and went to China with a racing bicycle and fencing equipment.

At the Language Institute in Beijing where he was learning Chinese he was given charge of a video studio full of government ministry equipment that no one knew how to use. He put together 80 video lessons in how to speak Chinese, populating the dialogs with top actors. He found a fencing partner in a baroness from Germany that rounded out his days. Then one day he learned that US news networks were being allowed to set up bureaus in Beijing, so he went to the hotel where CBS had just arrived and introduced himself. That day, and for the next five years, he became CBS News cameraman John Dennis Liu.

“Despite his Jedi status, 68-year-old Liu is easygoing and conversational, more midwestern ex-hippy than cryptic Zen master.”

— The Guardian

In 1995, he was asked by the World Bank to document the “Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project.” Throughout the Han, the Qin and the Tang dynasties, the Loess had been known for its giant forests, rushing rivers, and fertile soils that were the cradle of settled agriculture and Chinese civilization. “By 1000 years ago,” Liu wrote, “the Loess Plateau had been abandoned by the wealthy and powerful and by the mid-1990s was famous mainly for a continuous cycle of flooding, drought and famine known as ‘China’s Sorrow’ (中国的悲哀).”

At one time the Loess could have been the backdrop for a film like Avatar, Liu told me. In 2011 he word painted the scene for a Dutch magazine: 

“Great forests rich with oxygen, moisture, the scent of orchids and other flowers… epiphytes cling to every surface, making it seem that the trees have beards hanging from their limbs and fur on their bark. Even the rocks are covered in moss or mottled with lichens. The forest floor is covered with decaying organic matter, the remains of former generations of plants, from which spring giant ferns and colorful fungi. Animal droppings on the pathways, paw-prints, birdsong and animal cries….

Within these forests are ancient trees that live for thousands of years — giant trees anchoring vast diverse ecosystems, coexisting with their descendants and symbiotically with myriad forms of life. When it rains, the raindrops hit the towering ancient canopy and then drizzle down, nurturing each level of the multi-story environment. Water drops bead on the tips of the leaves, slowly forming, and when fat and heavy they drop to the next lower level, the process beginning again. The air is dense with humidity that bathes everything in the forest. Water springs spontaneously from rock formations and flows joyously in clear streams growing stronger and stronger until eventually forming great rivers.

The rivers flowing from the highland forests inundate the wetlands in the lower lands below on their paths to the sea. During the rainy seasons these wetland systems absorb huge amounts of water and during the dry seasons they slowly release it so that the land is never dry. At various times in the year the sky is darkened by enormous migratory flocks of birds. Various species compete in seeking nesting grounds in a riot of birdsong and the beating of wings. In the coastal zones where the land and the sea meet are vast mangrove forests, the interface between the land and the sea and the breeding grounds for much of the sea’s life. Where there is little rainfall one finds seemingly endless grasslands interspersed with trees and plants specially adapted to the exact rainfall patterns of each specific ecological habitat. In the grasslands and savannah regions vast herds of migratory animals abound. 

***

As human power has grown we have cut down vast forests, converted natural systems to agriculture, relentlessly grazed our livestock, and built great cities and industrial zones. Throughout the last 10,000 years various civilizations have risen, but they have also fallen. Human history shows numerous examples of civilizations that failed to conserve and protect the natural diversity of life, the fertility of the soil and the hydrological cycle and collapsed. Currently, as we experience biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, desertification, food insecurity, human-induced climate changes, financial crisis, poverty, disparity, war and all our other problems, we are facing the same fate as those civilizations that went before us. But our dilemma is somewhat more dangerous because while in the past the centers of power and affluence just shifted, we are now altering planetary ecosystems. We urgently need to understand what is happening and what to do to ensure that history does not repeat itself.

Liu filmed the restoration of Loess Plateau from its inception to completion of the intervention (natural succession continues). He attended the public support meetings the government used to inform residents as to what was going to happen and why. He watched engineers as they penciled on maps from satellite images that showed the contours of every watershed on the plateau. From these assessments, the government reached a critical decision that might have seemed counter-intuitive, but was transformative. For whatever reason, China decided that biodiversity was of greater economic value than sustainable resource extraction and sectioned the land accordingly, to optimize for diversity.

People still needed to eat and make a living, and since they were forbidden to plow on slopes, the government hired them to terrace slopes in the economic zone and plant those. The supplementary income from terraforming work, using only simple hand tools, saw them through until the new terraces began to produce.

…[T]he Chinese essentially helped transition poor, often illiterate subsistence agriculturalists to a new paradigm within one generation. Seeing and documenting the restoration of the Loess Plateau has been a source of inspiration and purpose but also a huge responsibility. When I began to realize how important the developments I was witnessing were, I began to speak publicly about it.

“Witnessing the incredible potential of restoration has helped me to understand that degradation is not inevitable,” he told the World Bank. “There is a path forward for humanity that leads to a sustainable future.”

At the annual meeting of the Society for Ecological Restoration in Merida, Yucatan in 2011, I was seated with Ronald Nigh, one of the worlds leading ethnobotanical anthropologists, when Liu, in his standard squashed hat and photographer’s vest came up. He wanted us all to come to the screening of his documentary on the Loess Plateau that evening.

We did, were suitably impressed, and John and I went on to have a beautiful, globetrotting friendship. He and I rode a boat up the Seine with a drum circle of Indigenous delegates to COP20-Paris, built rock dams in Morocco at the edge of the Sahara with the Hopi Rainkeepers, and worked at white boards together at Marlborough House in London to fashion a regenerative development plan to reverse climate change for the 52 Commonwealth countries. We have spent these past 65 weeks of pandemic in our respective borrowed lodging lockdowns, but we are still convening meetings on Zoom to discuss ecovillages, regenerative ag, carbon cascades, and the Ecosystem Restoration Camps he has been developing.

Sea Surface Temperature

Last week we were both in a Zoom to discuss progress at Camp Altiplano, Spain. The barren highlands of Galacia are rapidly desertifying as the climate of Northern Africa migrates into the Iberian Peninsula en route to Sweden and Norway. In 2016 a farmer there had offered ERC his land for a demonstration and John recruited a cadre of permaculture volunteers to build the first camp (there are more than 40 around the world now — slogan: “Let’s go camping!”). 

In the very beginning this was a physical intervention, but it quickly became a biophysical succession.

In the Altiplano, just as 20 years before in the Loess, permanent vegetation returned. Biodiversity blossomed. The desert greened. Neighboring farmers, struggling with their own desperate poverty, came to gawk and marvel. 

ERC established camps

Ten years ago, writing from Amsterdam, where he is now Visiting Fellow at Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Ambassador for the Commonland Foundation, Liu said: 

Money is now derived from the production and consumption of goods and services. This is the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. This thinking says that the total of the economy is what we produce and consume. But there is the rub. All the products and services we produce and consume come from functional ecosystems. If the ecosystems collapse then we actually have no productivity. This suggests the same finding that the Chinese had, that “Ecosystem function is vastly more valuable than the production and consumption of goods and services.” Recently there have been many attempts to envision ‘Green Economics’ but the problem with many of these efforts is that they leave the fundamentals the same. They continue to assume that the basis of money is production and consumption.

This line of thinking made me ask: What would happen if money were not derived from production and consumption but the basis of money was functional ecosystems? The answer seems to be that everything would change. Society would be completely changed by this understanding; instead of working to produce and consume more and more, humanity would work to ensure that ecosystems functioned well. If ecosystem function was the basis of money, the development trajectory would be accumulative and ecosystem function would be protected and improved. This replaces scarcity with abundance. This shows where and how the economy can grow larger than it is now, and it doesn’t require endless and mindless growth in order to have wealth.

 

“As long as our global economy continues to value production and consumption higher than the functioning ecosystem, the results will remain the same and the outcome for humanity and the planet is bleak,” he said. But when he first saw what the humble Chinese farmers with their hoes and wood wheelbarrows were doing in the Loess Plateau, he had an epiphany. 

This is more valuable than anything anyone understands. … I realized I had transcended dimensions and I am in another dimension of thought that doesn’t exist in the same way as mercantilism and commodification.

***

I started presenting at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, many universities, institutions and governments. The governments of Rwanda and Ethiopia were quite an experience because then they rewrote their land use policy laws.

***

So what I am working on now is to create a vehicle that allows me to have an ongoing societal conversation that raises the tenor of the collective dialogue. I have come to understand the role of the media more. It is the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. 

***

There are a lot of people around the world for whom the light bulb is going on. There is consciousness rising. … If you have any awareness of what’s gone on, just in my lifetime alone, not to mention going back through human history, going back through evolutionary time, back through earth time, to the edge of the cosmos, and thinking, ‘All right, what is my position in this … story?’ That is where I am at. This vehicle is not for me alone. This is a gigantic gift to the world. There can be botanic sanctuaries and human care sanctuaries all over the world. If nobody is listening to me what does it matter? But if nobody is listening to what is going on we’re in trouble.

But thanks to John and those around him, people are listening. Thousands now. Millions soon. John said he felt like this was the largest wave of awareness he had ever seen. “It’s huge,” I agreed. “I can barely surf. I need a tow-in.”

References: 

The Weathermakers
Ecosystem Restoration Camps
Commonland Foundation

_______________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#GenerationRestoration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 65: New Hope Creek Journal, Part Two - Shorting the Future

"If a fox spends more energy to catch rabbits than those rabbits return in calories, it will not live very long."

 

Last week I left off my story of a young graduate student setting fish traps in a North Carolina stream, weighing the fish he captured, and estimating the oxygen use by the fish and also the ecosystems in which they lived, and concluding that sunlight would not be enough to pay for the consumer culture of the fish in New Hope Creek. … and maybe not for the greater consumer culture that humans have become accustomed to.
 
Charles Hall said from that moment he first inventoried New Hope Creek he knew what his life was going to be. From his dissertation onward, through his years as a professor, researcher, visiting lecturer, and award-winning scholar, editing, authoring and co-authoring innumerable original papers and books, his name is associated with EROI — Energy Return On Investment.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends.

In a talk with friends as he hiked through Duke Forest, where his research stream is located, he said:

You’re probably pretty used to doing things in terms of money and so forth. But money by itself doesn’t have value. You can burn paper money and heat your lunch, but that’s not very valuable. I mean, it used to be silver would have some genuine value, and you can use gold in a computer or to fill your teeth, etc. But what was really important is that energy has value because money is a lien on energy. In other words society will give you, makes a promise to you, that it will use about five megajoules of energy — which is half a coffee cup of oil — to generate the good or service you want to trade one dollar for.

Let me give you an example: if you buy a bagel in Chapel Hill it doesn’t appear just by magic. What probably happened is something like this: the basic materials of a bagel are mostly carbon and roughly 7 to 14% nitrogen. While any green plant can use CO2 from the air, they cannot get nitrogen. This is a problem for plants and hence us, as plant (and animal) proteins are made largely of nitrogen. In principle, nitrogen should be easy to get, since the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. But in practice it’s not, because the two atoms of nitrogen are held together very tightly by triple chemical bonds, (N2), that is, it is unavailable to plants because the two atoms are held together very tightly. Before 1908, nitrogen fertilizer was pretty hard to get. It took a lightning bolt or a very special bacterium, or birds would concentrate it in their excrement or guano. This worked, but there was not too much guano relative to the needs of the world’s increasing population. 

Then in 1908 a German chemist names Fritz Haber found that if he took a metal tube, filled it with air and hydrogen, then heated it while compressing it with the right catalyst, he could split the N2 and then combine it with hydrogen to make ammonia (NH3). For the first time humans had unlocked the ability to access the abundant Nitrogen in the air by using lots of energy. Carl Bosch took Haber’s ideas and ramped it up to a large scale and used the Haber process to make ammonia and from that gunpowder. Unfortunately this allowed the Germans to prolong WWI for another 4 miserable years, but it also allowed a huge increase in humanity’s ability to make food. 

Back to our bagel: So the Haber-Bosch process is used in, say, Louisiana, to make nitrogen fertilizer, which is then barged up to Nebraska using diesel, distributed to sellers and then onto the fields using diesel-powered trucks and tractors. The fields are cultivated and then harvested using more diesel, ground into flour and then shipped to North Carolina on diesel-powered trains. So then a truck takes the flour from the train to wherever you’re making a bagel in Chapel Hill. And then if you’ve got a good baker, she mixes it up with an electric blender, then bakes and boils the water to cook the bagel using natural gas or electricity. By the time you have a bagel you might have spent some large part of your dollar just for all the energy required. This is an example of how money is a lien on energy. All of these things will happen, or have happened, in anticipation of you buying a bagel! No energy, no bagel. It took roughly five megajoules of energy to do that… 

… and the big question now is whether we can do all that from renewable energy.

Of course, even the bagel explanation is a simplification of the energy subsidies we take for granted. Although amortized by millions of uses and purposes, each of those wheat, flour and bagel trucks were made from Chinese steel, Icelandic aluminum, and Brazilian rubber — hundreds of thousands of components — and traveled over roads and bridges made of more mined and manufactured materials laid in place by heavy equipment created and powered similarly, ad infinitum. The designers, builders and operators were licensed after being expensively educated in grand institutions built and supported by the energy of millions of people, protected by a high-energy consuming global military, all overseen by layers of bureaucracy to ensure standards of performance in keeping with the demands of a growing populace. Searching “life cycle analysis” and “pencil” returns 11 million Google results. 

In 1975, Hall authored a metabolic analysis of the wiggles in the Keeling Mauna Loa curve of atmospheric carbon dioxide using procedures similar to those he used in stream ecology. The annual CO2 wiggles are similar to the daily fluctuations in stream oxygen, for the same reason — sunlight falling upon plants in daily and seasonal cycles. The entire biosphere is an ecosystem, breathing in and out with the seasons just as happens in New Hope Creek. In 1981, Hall and his then student Cutler Cleveland applied the EROI formula to an examination of the oil industry. This was well before Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère’s landmark “The End of Cheap Oil” article appeared in Scientific American in March 1998. In 1984, he joined with Cleveland, Robert Costanza and Robert Kaufmann in performing the first biophysical analysis of the US economy using a whole systems approach. That paper went through neck-rotating notice as it leapt from the back pages of Science to the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Still, notoriety is not a lien on energy the way money is. 

In the 1980s and 1990s I could not get any money for doing energy studies from the National Science Foundation or even the Department of Energy, and as the price of gasoline came down nobody was paying much attention to energy. But I had graduate students to support and could get money to do other things so I worked on tropical land use change and deforestation.

***

I believe that my team’s estimates of carbon release from tropical land use change (destruction of tropical forests) are still the first good numbers on release of carbon from tropical land use change. … I found it curious that so much attention and money was being spent on carbon when I thought the real issue was peak oil, and I still believe that, but that’s where the money (i.e.: research support) was.

Hall has now devoted the last several decades to applying the concept of EROI to a general examination of economics, in the process founding the International Society of BioPhysical Economics. BPE treats economics not as a social science, as is usually the case, but as a natural science — like fish migration in a North Carolina stream, dependent on energy inputs and material exchanges. BPE is the antithesis of conventional, i.e. neoclassical, economics, a field that cordons off and excludes from consideration pretty much all biophysical reality, i.e. everything that really matters, in favor of circular, rationalized greed — demand creates supply creates employment creates demand.

From this chart starting in 2005, showing a Covid dip in the middle, and projecting to 2030, note that few buildings or industries use coal. Coal power is already declining rapidly. Methane gas for transport or cooking has been constant and will likely increase for heating, industry, and power generation. It is still considered a “transition fuel.” Electric cars will have very little impact on oil products in transportation, which is already a very small sector compared to residential and commercial heating or industrial uses. Oil for mining and manufacturing will remain enormous — fossil’s largest use — and will still produce some 2 billion tons of CO2 in 2030. No replacement by renewable energy is presently considered even possible, despite considerable discussion of “green hydrogen.”

 

 

In a 2020 article on “Systems Ecology and Limits to Growth,” Hall writes:

The population issue still underlies all problems (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2016), oil remains precarious (Hall 2017), species are being assaulted from all angles and we are besieged with studies that suggest that civilization is in a very precarious position (e.g., Rockström et al. 2009, Ahmed 2016; Bardi 2019). It seems that while the wolf has been delayed, it remains at our doorstep, exacerbated by the relatively new arrival of potential climate change. 

***

My own perspective is that the issues and basic approach raised in the original Limits to Growth study remain extremely important, and that original study, although subject to intense criticism, remains a fairly good predictor of actual conditions some 50 years later. Perhaps the most important issue that mankind faces is whether or not, to protect our climate and the ocean’s pH, we can move away from a carbon-based global economy to one based on something else. We have chosen to build our civilization on fossil fuels but the EROI is much higher than the alternatives, and higher than we knew.

 A simple analogy to explain EROI is that if a fox spends more energy to catch rabbits than those rabbits return in calories, it will not live very long. Hall and associates showed repeatedly that once the energy return on a petroleum well, field, or province drops below some generous energy return, typically 5 to 10 barrels out for each barrel in, it will no longer be economical to get energy from that source and you can’t run a complex society on that — at least not for very long. The same goes for colonies on Mars, robot factories, unlimited prisons, Space Force, and artificial trees that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to pump deep underground or into the ocean depths. The arithmetic doesn’t work. As we sift through the array of solutions being developed for the climate emergency, it is great to have EROI in our toolkit and Charles Hall still around to “talk a lot.”

Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need
From typhoons to wildfires, as the visible impacts of climate change mount, calls for mitigation through carbon…link.springer.com

Nearly every day the mainstream media has been carrying cheery slices of technophilic futures depicting Direct Air Capture devices for CO2; algal fertilization factories that would mine crystals on Greenland to clean dead zones near Cairo; denuding hardwood forests in the Southeastern US to carry pellets to fire Drax power plants in England and Wales. The massive fossil calorie savings account we have relied upon for centuries is being replaced with a checking account refilled daily from the sun. The income and expenditures are a monumental mismatch, but the tools of classical economists obscure feedback. Moreover, demand does not create supply. Lithium, cobalt, silver, gallium, and neodymium —all needed for a brave new future of renewables — have finite and rapidly approaching resource limits if scaled up to what will be required to replace fossil energy. Why, if we know how to recover them from seawater now, the same way we pull CO2 out of air, why can’t we just…, you ask? EROI. It is a zero-sum game. Hall said:

Many people who are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere with mechanical fans and chemicals think we’re going to do that. We’re not going to do that, thank you. We’ve looked at 200 studies on removal of CO2 from the air [Sekere 2020] and found that when you include the energy you need to run the machinery, there was no net removal of CO2 and, you know, this was all Howard Odom’s idea about the importance of net energy.

***

Substitutes may cost more and more energy and usually do, because you extract the cheapest stuff first. Copper is a good example. We used to mine 40% copper ore in Butte, Montana, then we mined down to 4% purity in the 1920s and 0.4% today….with a corresponding increase in energy costs to refine it. If we’re going to go to a world of electric cars that use about three to four times more copper for each car than an internal combustion car where are we going to get the energy to mine the copper?

There is approximately 180 pounds of copper in every electric car, 45,000 tons this year just for Tesla. By 2025 there will be 5 million electric vehicles produced globally annually.

What Hall and Odum offer us is a better future lived within — not in ignorance of — limits. We are in the ecological pulse stage Odum termed descession. It is what all animals do when they sense winter coming. Scale back, not out. Gather and conserve, rather than waste and spend. Life can be better, but it must be thrifty. It is time to swim upstream now, and to make the best energy investments for our age and season. 

It was a historic week for the oil industry, potentially marking a turning point, at least for the corporate strategies of the oil majors. More curbs on the supply side added some bullish sentiment to the market, although the impacts on the fundamentals are not necessarily going to unfold in the near term. But in the wake of the enormous legal and corporate governance blows to the oil majors, more than a few analysts spoke about growing odds of a supply crunch in the years ahead. Royal Dutch Shell lost a landmark legal case in a Dutch court, which, if it stands, will require 45% cuts in GHG emissions by 2030. The case is seen as a warning sign for the rest of the oil industry, signaling legal exposure to emissions.

— The Energy Bulletin, June 1 2021

References

Ahmed, N.M., 2016. Failing states, collapsing systems: biophysical triggers of political violence. Springer.

Bardi, U., Falsini, S. and Perissi, I., 2019. Toward a general theory of societal collapse: a biophysical examination of Tainter’s model of the diminishing returns of complexity. BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, 4(1), p.3.

Cleveland CJ, Costanza R, Hall CAS, Kaufmann R (1984) Energy and the United States economy: a biophysical perspective. Science 225:890–897 

Hall CAS (1972) Migration and metabolism in a temperate stream ecosystem. Ecology 53(4):585–604

Hall CAS, Cleveland CJ (1981) Petroleum drilling and production in the United States: yield per effort and net energy analysis. Science 211:576–579 

Hall, CAS (2021) Taped conversation while walking New Hope Creek with Tom Heffner and our wives and dog, April, 2021

Purwaningsih, R. (2020) Eco-Efficiency of Pencil Preduction Using Life Cycle Assessment to Increase the Manufacture Sustainability Jurnal Teknik Industri 22(1):47–54 DOI:10.9744/jti.22.1.47–52

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F.S., Lambin, E.F., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J. and Nykvist, B., 2009. A safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461(7263), pp.472–475

Sekera, J. and Lichtenberger, A., 2020. Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need. Biophysical Economics and Sustainability, 5(3), pp.1–28.

Watts, J., “Johan Rockström: ‘We need bankers as well as activists… we have 10 years to cut emissions by half’,” The Guardian 29 May 2021

_________________________

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

 — Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 64: New Hope Creek Journal, Part One - Wading Back in Time

"Renewable energy is unlikely to support civilization at its present scale. We know this by looking at fish in a mountain stream."

 

In a frantic search for some way out of the climate crisis, governments, scientists and creators are throwing time, money, and people at carbon dioxide removal by natural and artificial means. Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Johan Rockström says quite frankly, “there is no plausible chance of an absolute zero landing by 2050.” The best we can hope for is a rapid decarbonization of the economy — by half every decade — followed by Rosie the Riveter-style mass-production of carbon dioxide removal devices. “That is the pace and that is non-negotiable.” 

As we race into this brave new world, we need to be mindful that every misstep, every wasted effort, every wrong turn, takes us away from the task, cuts into its unrelenting schedule, steals non-replaceable time, and should be avoided. There is a neologism (actually an acronym) that grounds our decision tree. The decisive expression is “EROI.”

In 1968 Charles Hall was trying to come up with a topic for his doctoral dissertation.

Most of us were focused on ecology with a small ‘e,’ that is, on trying to understand how nature operated. This was before the first Earth Day, and usually when you were talking up some young lady at a party you had to explain what the word ‘ecology’ meant.

Hall, who already had earned his masters in ecology at Penn State, chose to work under the mentorship of Howard T. Odum at the University of North Carolina. He describes his first day with Odum when the two went on an errand to a hardware store:

While we were waiting for a sales person, H.T. was looking at some domestic items. His eyes came to rest on a wide goldfish bowl, a small fan and a record player turntable. He said to me (I am not kidding!): “Look at this, we can make a model of the Gulf Stream. He put the goldfish bowl on the record player turntable, turned on the fan to blow across it making a current in the goldfish bowl, and then he said “now we have to add the coriollis force” and gave the record player a little spin to the right. Sure enough, something like the jet stream began flowing in the goldfish bowl, and the goldfish had to start swimming to keep his place.” Fascinated, I said to myself: ‘Well this is not going to be the same as my education so far! I think I am going to like this.’

In a textbook published in 2020, Hall put this period of his higher education into the 1967–71 social context:

While we were in graduate school, there was an explosion of information and predictions about the environmental problems and the degrading state of the Earth, including Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb and the original renditions of The Limits to Growth as well as general environmental concerns expressed by George Woodwell, Kenneth Watt, Garrett Hardin, and others which could not help but get the attention of graduate students in ecology. 

***

Concepts such as “limits” and “carrying capacity” were transferred from ecology to predicting the human condition. One had the sense that ecology was going to take its rightful place among the very most important disciplines, and that systems ecology was going to be leading the effort. Along with the hippies of the time, ecology students aspired to “change the world.”

Odum had begun shifting from, as Hall put it, “studies of natural ecosystems (streams, estuaries, coral reefs, tropical forests) to human-dominated systems (cities, sewage lagoons, and industrial society generally), probably catalyzed by watching the great petroleum towers near Houston increasingly towering over the estuaries in which he was measuring biological energy flow with “diurnal” (technically diel) analyses of oxygen.”

I think for him the new petroleum–dominated systems were just another ecosystem, although one with more intensive infrastructure and energy flow. Oyster reefs and cities were similar for him, both just centers of consumption of energy, each requiring large areas of production elsewhere whose products had to be carried in by external “energy subsidies,” tides in the case of one and oil in the case of the other. 

Energy and the Wealth of Nations - An Introduction to Biophysical Economics | Charles A.S. Hall |…
Authors: Hall, Charles A.S., Klitgaard, Kent Includes several new chapters and comprehensive updates addressing the…www.springer.com

Hall knew that he wanted a stream to study, and he imagined that with time, care, and the appropriate tools, he might be able to completely inventory its energy flows, or as he later described it. “looking at nature… in its actuality and complexity and in its biotic and abiotic entirety.” He just needed a suitable test site to show it could be done. Hiking with friends back to New Hope Creek, where he undertook his dissertation research, he recorded his memories from 50 years ago:

I traveled all around this region with Bob Kelly, but to my horror all the streams were obviously polluted. I wasn’t interested in pollution, I wanted to study nature. And so, Bob said the place you want is New Hope Creek. It was in the middle of protected Duke Forest and not readily accessible. He told me how to get in there and I remember very clearly coming up to a bluff like that we are walking on, and looking down and seeing beautiful New Hope Creek and saying “This is the place” — like what Brigham Young said when he saw the valley that became Salt Lake City.

You know? It was just reminiscent of what a river ought to look like, maybe with a southern tinge to it. But then I talked a lot — I talk a lot still — and I think Odum may have thought I was more show than go. So I went out and I collected six weeks of data, in the stream, of oxygen readings and fish data without saying a thing to him.
 
And, just to tell you about the fish: I built the weir — I’m familiar with weirs being from New England — just put hardware cloth across there. I was the best pop-riveter there ever was. I made all these cages that would fit into the weir. The first day that I went out there, I can remember pulling out the cage and looking in there, and there was about 15 or 20 fish, big ones, in the upstream weir, and maybe a similar number, but smaller size, in the downstream weir. And I weighed every one of them individually. And I said, that day, ‘I’ve got a dissertation!’ When I showed my first 6 weeks data to Odum he said little, but within a week I was funded for that summer and then my entire dissertation. He liked results.

My results after two and a half years were the same that I got on that first day. In other words, the pattern was repeated day after day. Big fish were going upstream, little fish were coming downstream. In time I put tags on most of the fish but caught surprisingly few at the wooden bridge although the pattern was the same. I had some weirs upstream too I found the same pattern, but with different fish, a little bit mysterious still. Then I stayed up all night taking oxygen samples.

Hall’s taped conversation on a friend’s iPhone lost fidelity here, but he was kind enough to send me the gist of what he had said.

And what you find is that during the daytime the oxygen increases due to photosynthesis. And at night, the oxygen goes down due to no photosynthesis. In the daytime the oxygen increase is a net increase, because oxygen is being simultaneously pulled down by the respiration of the ecosystem. Respiration means using oxygen to burn organic fuels. We’re respiring right now — we’re using oxygen to burn fuels from our last meal or last several meals within our bloodstream or the sugars stored in our liver or whatever. And so the whole stream too has a metabolism — we call it ecosystem metabolism. And, in New Hope Creek you have about about twice as much respiration as there is energy supplied from photosynthesis, indicating that there’s twice as much energy that is being used as produced from sunlight. 

I talked a lot — I talk a lot still — and I think Odum may have thought I was more show than go.

Where is that additional energy coming from? From the forest, as leaves and insects falling into the stream. As you go upstream, the proportional amount added from the forest increases…. Downstream the stream widens where sunlight can get in and you get more photosynthesis proportionally, although the forest input remains high. So you find as you went upstream the whole ecosystem is changing. What you’re having is the same amount of energy comes in per square meter, but it gets used in less ecosystem depth. So you have a concentration of energy resources, which I hypothesized was a greater energy base for the fish.

***

So I went into Odum and I showed him my data. The oxygen went up in the day because plants catch sunlight, and it went down at night. The system uses energy. Nature is a balance of taking energy from the sun and using it, and it is in rough balance.

Except New Hope Creek was not. About half the energy that was running this stream was coming from the forest, from the leaves and bugs falling in. Someone at Duke had measured them independently and this gave the same number in calories that I had figured out, from the oxygen, used above the amount produced. So we can say that the stream energy budget is subsidized by the forest. 

Energy Return on Investment - A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics, and Sustainability |…
This authoritative but highly accessible book presents the reader with a powerful framework for understanding the…www.springer.com

I was originally interested in all of this and in fish migration in terms of fish moving phosphorus. In the world’s geochemical cycles phosphorus is rare and therefore limiting. With phosphorus rare, it is very valuable. You (and the fish) have phosphorus in your bones, and in something called ATP — adenosine triphosphate — which is the little cellular energy storage batteries in yourself, and your DNA has phosphorus as part of its structural foundation. Life is far more dependent on phosphorus than it should be, given its rareness in nature. That’s why phosphorus is an important agricultural fertilizer.

***

It turned out that phosphorus was not the big deal of my dissertation — it was energy. From this I derived the concept of Energy Return On Investment (EROI) — how much energy does a fish use in migration and how much does it gain from being in areas of higher productivity? And why would they use upstream areas and downstream areas for different things in their life cycle? The concept works beautifully in New Hope Creek and it works even better for salmon in the Pacific Ocean.

What Hall discovered was that the sunlight received and flora of the stream could not support the population of fish without some external subsidy. That subsidy came in the form of leaves and insects that fell from the forest. Big fish swam upstream to lay their eggs into shallow environments with concentrated energy resources and collect that subsidy, even though they had to expend energy to swim against the current. Little fish swam downstream to be in deeper, less stressful environments with easier escape from predators until they, too, made the migration.

Next week I will continue this story and show how it relates to the work we must all undertake in the years to come. For now it is enough when you are shopping for whatever it is you feel the need to shop for, you think of fish moving in a stream from pool to pool. Sunlight probably won’t be enough to pay for your shopping. You will need some insects and leaves, too (for humans it comes in the form of fossil sunlight) or you will have to cut back your shopping.

If you try to tell people that renewable energy in all its many forms is unlikely to support global civilization at its present scale, never mind colonization of other worlds, many — probably the majority — will take the opposite side of that argument. I need a few thousand more words to explain why contraction is inevitable, so please read Part 2 — Shorting the Future.

References

Cleveland CJ, Costanza R, Hall CAS, Kaufmann R (1984) Energy and the United States economy: a biophysical perspective. Science 225:890–897
 
Ehrlich P (1960) The Population Bomb. Balantine Books

Ehrlich P, Ehrlich A (2016) Population, resources, and the faith-based economy: the situation in 2016. Biophys Econ Res Qual 1:1–9

Forrester J (1971) The counterintuitive nature of social systems. Technology Today, Cambridge, MA 

Hagen J (1992) An Entangled Bank: The Origins of Ecosystem Ecology. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

Hall, CAS (1972) Migration and metabolism in a temperate stream ecosystem. Ecology 53(4):585–604

Hall, CAS (2017) Energy Return on Investment: A unifying principle for biology, Economics and sustainability (Springer)

Hall, CAS (2018) Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An introduction to BioPhysical Economics (2nd Edition) with Kent A. Klitgaard (Springer)

Hall, CAS (2021) Taped conversation while walking New Hope Creek with Tom Heffner and our wives and dog, April, 2021

LeClerc, G. and CAS Hall. (eds) (2007) Making World Development Work: Scientific alternatives to neoclassical economic theory. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 2007

Swaney, Dennis P., and Charles AS Hall. “Odum in Texas: a brief review of HT Odum’s Texas Bays studies.” Ecological modelling 178, no. 1–2 (2004): 59–63

Watts, J., “Johan Rockström: ‘We need bankers as well as activists… we have 10 years to cut emissions by half’,” The Guardian 29 May 2021

____________________

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are up-sizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works: 

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app