Who is the Sam Bankman-Fried of the Biodiversity Loss Space?
On December 1st, whale watchers near Maui spotted a female humpback they had not been hoping to see. The name given to her by British Columbia conservationists 3000 miles away was Moon. They knew it was her when they saw how she dragged the second half of her body through the water, using only her pectoral fins in a breaststroke-like motion. She was emaciated and covered in lice, necrotic tissue falling away and floating in her wake.
After being struck by a boat and having a broken back, Moon continued one final migration back to the place of her birth, arriving, in great pain, weeks behind most of her pod. She was more than 4,800 km from where Canadian researchers first took note of her injury. She had used up her fat stores to make the herculean journey and, with no food source in the tropical spawning grounds, she is expected to die soon. Hold that thought for a few minutes.
The Post-Trust World
Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchanges FTX & FTX-US and cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research. The thirty-year-old’s personal net worth peaked at $26 billion before November 8, 2022, when it dropped 94 percent in a single day, exposing a major fault line in crypto as a presumedly inviolable store of secure wealth. SBF had created, it now appears, an even more grandiose fiction than the paper pictures of dead presidents and living monarchs that one carries around in wallets made from the skin of dead animals.
He was ensconced at the galactic center of the Cryptoverse, a thief and looter hiding in plain sight. His only mask was effective altruism, pretending that he was pursuing an altruistic career by earning to give. In truth, he was skimming off billions of real dollars and euros in the style of Bernie Madoff or Michael Milken, using his money to buy friends in high places. His sunset arrest and extradition from the Bahamas will now complete that comparison. Innumerable small islands in the Bahamas, inhabited only by migratory seabirds, have been spared from crypto-palace tiki bars and swimming pools.
There is another, much larger Ponzi scheme that has been running for the last ten thousand years, also hiding in plain sight. According to an estimate by Vaclav Smil, after the last ice age, humans and their livestock were a mere 0.1 percent of the entire live weight of mammalian biomass. The other 99.9 percent was in elephants, deer, gorillas, and so on. Today, 90 percent of animal biomass is in the eight billion people on the Earth and their cows, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats and goldfish. The turn planetary evolution has taken at the behest of the Ponzi cabals shows no signs of changing direction, or even slowing.
Global production of meat and milk is projected to more than double by 2050. When considering this in terms of land area, consider too that for a natural elephant herd to be sustained requires a minimum of 1000 square miles (2600 sq. km) of habitable reserve, although a sensitivity analysis shows extinction probability to be elevated by slight variations in things like droughts and floods, which we know will increase dramatically this century. Of the parks and game reserves in Central and Southern Africa, 35 percent are now being infringed by human expansion, particularly by cattle ranches.
Raising and slaughtering our 55 billion domestic land animals consumes 30 percent of the Earth’s entire land surface and 80 percent of the total land occupied by humans. Subtracting feed crop production, the area currently taken by grazing cattle is 26 percent of the ice-free land surface of Earth.
That’s the Ponzi. When you run out of land surface and desertify the ocean there is no new sucker to buy in and keep the game alive. The question I began with is whether there is the equivalent of a Sam Bankman-Fried who will do for the destruction of the planet what SBF did for crypto, which is to bring it to a crashing pause. Maybe that person is Huang Runqiu.
Plenty of hope has been poured into the UN’s COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal this week, but at this writing, it is shaping up as another COP15—Copenhagen in 2009. I recall standing in long lines in the blowing snow waiting to get into the UN meeting hall on December 17, 2009. With ambitious plans drawn up in advance, the delegates were expecting to ink a deal on climate that would save humanity, only to have those hopes dashed by last-minute finagling from the rich countries, principally the USA, that torpedoed the deal and nearly ended 50 years of UN multilateralism. It was from that embittering experience that the Paris Agreement emerged six years later, at COP21, with the underdeveloping world refusing to go under the thumb again. Could that replay in Montreal?
North America has lost about one-third of its birds in the last 50 years. That's three billion birds not filling the skies.
Right now, entrenched positions from the EU, the Africa group and Latin American countries raise the likelihood of a standoff. Because this COP was to have been in Kunming before the re-emergence of Covid, China plays an outsized leadership role but has been anything but leading. Huang Runqiu, China’s environment minister and the president of the COP, has been hesitant to speak to international media. In meetings with NGOs, he has openly worried that there are too many unresolved issues to be able to make sensible decisions. Trust China to take the long view. Oddly, issues of money and digital biopiracy are among the unresolved sticking points. Sam Bankman-Fried’s specter hangs over the talks.
Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, the former Costa Rican environment minister and the head of the hundred-billion-dollar Global Environment Facility, said, “I have never seen such a tense, aggressive environment. It used to be very different.”
Delegates have thrashed out 22 different targets for the Montreal meetings. They include reducing invasive species and pesticide use, cutting food waste, ensuring fair access to and sharing of genetic resources, and ending government subsidies that harm biodiversity. There are even proposals to place endangered species on the blockchain. Good luck with that. Carbon emission reductions and removals can be—in theory and increasingly in practice —reliably blockchained for credits, but then a CO2 molecule in Beijing is the same as a CO2 molecule in Lima. Calculating biodiversity gains and losses is far more complex. How many mountain gorillas is a Javan rhino worth?
If people don’t recognize their own bias there is no way they can clean or scale their response to it.
— Alexandra Damsker, crypto advisor to A-list celebrities
Canada’s Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault said resolving just four of the remaining sticking points would be enough for something Parisian. Last time he checked, there were 1,200 "bracketed" items — spots in the text where the wording isn't settled.
As indicated in last week’s post, one contentious proposal is 30x30 (putting a third of the planet into nature preserves by 2030) which has majority approval (it was first proposed by the late E.O. Wilson) but there is a bedeviling surfeit of small details. If achieved in isolation, 30x30 would likely just result in more rapid destruction of the remaining, unprotected 70 percent. And what constitutes protection? The Guardian reveals:
In England, for example, the government says it is protecting around 28% of land for nature, but in reality it is closer to 3%, one report found. The EU – which is championing 30x30 – was accused of trying to water down the target by arguing that extractive industries, such as mining and drilling, should be allowed in protected areas, provided they do not negatively affect biodiversity.
Remembering Moon
One proposal that has been kicking around for many years is to have whale zones in the open seas in much the same way we have school zones for cars. Janie Wray, who tracked Moon’s migrations for BC Whales said, “Even if you’re really a focused boat driver, you could accidentally hit a humpback whale because they will just come up in front of your boat. The most important thing to do is everybody needs to slow down, especially in areas where we know there are whales.” Remembering Moon, Wray continued:
Something deep within her drove her to just swim across the ocean, using just her pectoral fins. This migration is part of their culture, their tradition. Moon was probably born in Hawaii. And she just goes back every single year, because that’s what her mother taught her to do. It’s been passed down from mother to calf. That’s likely what drove her to travel all that way with her injury.
In Montreal, underdeveloping countries are asking overdeveloped nations how they can be expected not to chop down their forests and dig up their peatlands just as rich countries did in the past. If you want them to do that, say the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), it will require significant financial incentives (a.k.a. “bribes”).
At this point, if a repeat of Copenhagen is to be avoided, we need Tarzan to lead an elephant charge on the Montreal Underground City Place Québec conference center. Just jailing SBF won’t cut it.
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are still 70 sites in Ukraine and 300 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”
The Green Road is helping these places grow their own food, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
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The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.6 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. We set back our children’s education and mental health. We virtualized the work week until few wanted to return to their open-plan cubicle offices. We invented and produced tests and vaccines faster than anyone thought possible but then we hoarded them for the wealthy and denied them to two-thirds of the world, who became the Petri-plates for new variants. SARS jumped from people to dogs and cats to field mice. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talent as a species.
Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will change all that for planetary-ecosystem-destroying climate change?
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“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.
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