Why bother. Well, some of us would like to pass on a planet which is better than the way we found it. If we are Christians, we know that dad (The Father) passed on his business to us his children. It says so in the first book in the bible. Just judging from human dads who have passed on their businesses, that they created, they would be much happier if their children improved the business and kept it going for their children. I think that God would like this too.
To those of us who are not religious, the world is a pretty amazing, fantastic, beautiful place. Such a shame not to preserve all this wonder for our children. I've never understood why the religious amongst us want to drill, mine, clear fell and fish out all the fishes in the sea while us atheists are desperately trying to preserve the earth.
Much later
I may have thought of a reason. You notice how so many religions, at least the many Christian varieties, emphasize the end of worlds and seem to lust after it happening in their time. I think the thought of the world carrying on for generation after generation after generation makes them feel somehow insignificant. Somehow they gain status or importance by being the last generation. Well, the way we are treating the earth, this may 'come to pass'.
Whatever!! It is all academic anyway as long as we have our present systems of government. Have you ever wondered why politicians, are not trying to help. In fact they are actively blocking us from taking the measures needed. We are continually fighting an uphill battle against them. No-where is the old adage "Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune", more true than in politics. As long as the rich and companies with vested interest are allowed to support the election campaigns of politicians, to somehow make them rich while in office and to take care of them with sweet jobs when they leave politics, this uphill battle will continue.
So the following is just a check list of what we could be doing if we could stop vested interests financing politicians. We, the people, will eventually succeed but how much more damage will be done in the mean time. We might actually be able to save us from our sorry selves if we could get the politicians on side.
In no particular order
Basic Conservation
Generation after generation has shown that we, as a species, are not capable of conserving our planet, either on land or at sea. Every generation thinks they know what to do and each generation fails. The level of Hubris is unbelievable. There is one and only one way that works and that is to set aside large areas both on land and at sea that we don't interfere with. Leave it alone. Nature has done a far better job for far longer so get off the Hubris wagon and let nature do her thing. We made a valiant stab at it with national parks but let's admit it. They are inadequate. They aren't big enough and not wild enough. Fortunately, some of them have preserved remnant populations that could spread out if given space.
Likewise at sea, our small marine reserves are great but think how much more effective large areas would be. In fact there are a few being established but the problem is the policing. If successful not only will they seed adjacent fished areas with larval marine organisms but with adults as well who are looking for more leibenstraum. And fishing in the permitted areas will be so good that we could abandon destructive fishing methods such as drift nets and bottom trawls.
The only way to save our oceans is to set aside large parts of it and ensure that no human activity except for tourism happens there.
Forestry
In the protected areas, of course we leave well enough alone and let nature take her course. If we insist on running sheep in these areas, as they do in the UK, we must also put in wolves or mountain lions. But how about where we plant trees for lumber. Timber plantations can make a great contribution to getting Carbon dioxide out of the air.
We must grow our lumber trees in fairly crowded conditions so that they self prune and shoot for the sky, making fine grained, straight lumber with large inter-node spaces (the distance between side branches) and few knots. If we plant them with greater spacing, we must put lifts* on the trees. We must then build this timber into engineered wood. Engineered wood is essentially ply wood but in the form of beams and posts. This sort of lumber is dimensionally very stable and tends to be built into quality, long lasting single and multi-story buildings. Thus we sequester lots of carbon. Dry wood is about 50% carbon so for every kg of wood used for construction, we sequester 12+16+16** = 4.4 X 1.2 = 2.2kg of Carbon dioxide. Better still, engineered wood, while more expensive than sawn lumber, is easier and quicker to work with. It saves on labor costs. It can also be delivered, already cut to the needed lengths. It might be that the use of engineered wood for simple one story houses would be less expensive, despite it's greater cost, than sawn lumber.
* The process of cutting off the branches flush with the trunk over the bottom half, or so of the tree. This is typically done 3 times for fast growing lumber trees such as Pinus radiata. It results in an increased proportion of knot free wood.
** The atomic weights of C and O.
We don't stop there. We pyrolyze (gassify) all the off-cuts and sawdust unless there is some more profitable use for these materials. This produces a range of fuels such as 'natural gas', gasoline, diesel, airline fuel and right on up to tar. This is completely green fuel and displaces crude oil we have to extract from the ground but (in the words of Dr Seuss) 'that is not all, no that is not all'. The by product of the pyrolysis of wood is charcoal. This we incorporate into agricultural soils. It serves almost the same function as humus and sequesters more carbon - long term. Charcoal is very refractory (hard to break down) in soil but fills many of the functions of humus.
Last but not least, single and multistory buildings built from engineered wood are very very earth quake resistant and displace concrete, itself a major source of Carbon dioxide.
Recycling
The ongoing effort to recycle must continue. Note that any organic material for which there is not a more profitable second life can be pyrolyzed (see above). Thus we should never have a mountain of used tires or plastic, pools of used engine oil, discarded electronic equipment (mostly plastic) and so forth.
As for batteries, once there are enough of them to make it worthwhile we can recycle the minerals they contain. I can't believe it is more difficult to separate out the metals contained in solar panels, batteries and wind turbine motors than to separate the metals from ore which in addition to various other metals, contains gangue (waste rock).
I've recently read that the problem with recycling solar panels is that they are lasting longer than was expected when they were installed so the volume of used solar panels is still relatively low.
Nodule Mining
Of course we must mine mineral nodules from the ocean's abyss. They are needed for our transition to a fossil fuel free society. But whether we create another mess or do it responsibly depends on the details of how we do it. Nodule mining is not like bottom trawling for marine life. First of all, it can only be done once. It will be many thousands of years before Nodules have grown there again and by that time, we may have knocked ourselves back into the dark ages or even a new stone age.
We must not mine the whole area. Untouched areas must be left to seed the mined areas
The crawlers that move along the bottom must be designed so that all the organic 'snow' that they raise is sucked to the surface and not allowed to smother un-mined areas.
Bottom water with it's dissolved nutrients and bottom 'snow' must be sprayed over the surface of the ocean and not released in a solid plug that will plunge back down to the bottom.
Note that there may be some rather surprising benefits from nodule mining besides the obvious access to minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. In places in the world where bottom water is pulled up naturally into the photic zone, such as off the coast of Peru, we see incredible productivity resulting from the minerals dissolved in the bottom water. The same will likely be the case when we spray the water, which is brought up with mineral nodules, over the surface of the ocean. In addition, the organic particulate material entrained in the bottom water will likely feed surface filter feeders.
The ocean surface, above areas where there are mineral nodules are usually marine nutrient-deserts and a mining operation will likely become a nutrient-oasis in the ocean desert. One other aspect is worth mentioning.
Climax ecologies are often less varied in terms of the species composition than disturbed ecologies*. Mined areas could well provide a nitch for pioneer species, enriching the ocean bottom biodiversity.
*A tree falls in the jungle
Fishing the Oceans
Of course we are going to continue to fish the oceans and once we have set aside huge areas where no fishing is allowed, the fishing in the rest of the ocean will be fantastic. We may not reach the populations that occurred before the advent of commercial fishing but we will be well on the way in that direction. Best of all, with fishing so good, we can abandon destructive fishing methods such as drift nets and bottom trawling. Fishing will be so good with purse seines and long lines that those destructive methods will not be necessary.
However, we need a 'wee tweak' in our attitude to fishing. Just imagine when the first people of South America were eating Teosinte, the precursor of our magnificent corn plants and they started to grow it. Imagine if they always ate the biggest and best cobs and planted the seeds from the scrubby little cobs. Fortunately they instinctively recognized that like begets like and saved the best cobs for seeds. Now, unless you are a trained biologist, you would have a hard time recognizing the original Teosinte plant that gave rise to corn.
We need to adopt such an attitude to our commercial fishing. It won't be easy. After all, it is easier to sift out the biggest fish, scallops, clams or prawns with a net, allowing the small ones to escape through the mesh. But we have seen how an attitude based on the simple premise that like begets like has resulted in pretty well all our agricultural animals and plants today. We could actually be improving the oceans fauna instead of degrading it. Considerable human ingenuity in each branch of fisheries will be necessary.
Fish Farming
Fish farms are not farms at all. They are feed lots. The feed for the fish is not grown on the farm but is harvested from other places such as the up-welling areas of the ocean and the soy fields on land. And one of the main areas growing soya are cleared areas of the Amazon jungle!!!
Salmon farming, in particular, has to be the the most egregious example of our stupidity. If we were to take care of our rivers, we would only have to wait until the salmon returned each year, harvest most of them and allow the best to continue upstream to spawn. What a waste of effort to compensate for our lack of ability to care for our rivers.
Soil Restoration
Since the invention of the plow a few thousand years ago, many soils have lost most of their carbon content*. It all ends up in the air where some of it is sucked back into plants. This process has accelerated up to the present. Soils have been lost at one two and even three orders of magnitude greater than they are produced in nature from the bottom up (10,100 or 1000 times faster). America has been one of the most egregious examples with the whole eastern seaboard degraded, followed by the central great plains but it didn't start there. The Greeks and Romans now farm barely weathered rock instead of the rich soils that existed thousands of years ago. Fortunately, soils can be build up from the top down with appropriate farming methods and the carbon put back into them. And it greatly improves farming while lowering input costs.
*Read Growing a Revolution by David R Montgomery and The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Educate Women
Never mind that it is totally unfair for one half of the population to dominate the other half. Never mind the fact that we aren't unlocking the potential of half of our people. The overarching most important reason to educate women is that they stop having so many babies and, on average, have them later. In most of the countries where woman are educated, the birth rate has fallen below the magic 2.1 births per woman which is just enough for replacement.
In these countries the population will stabilize and begin to decline in the very near future. In fact, if you ignore immigration, it is already happening. We run our countries as a ponzi scheme in which we always have to be increasing our GDP. Well guys, we are just going to have to learn how to run our economies with less people and economic contraction. A good start would be fair taxation.
With our global companies they are able to pull all sorts of nonsense so that they pay very little tax. With the increase in automation, for the manufacture of many goods we need fewer and fewer people. The decreasing population will help with this since there will be fewer and fewer people needed in factories but at the same time there will be fewer people to buy the goods from these factories. We need a far more even distribution of the wealth of the world and at some point a universal pension will probably be needed. This isn't possible unless all people and businesses pay their fair taxes.
To be continued:
