A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics.

You don’t really have to worry about “giving away the ending” in Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species; the author’s done that himself in the title. What he’s seeking to do here is not so much cover the science of climate change, but rather to try to understand why the human race has been so oblivious to the danger, even when it is staring it in the face.

Here’s how he sets out the problem: “If the scientists are right, global emissions must reach a peak within five to ten years then decline rapidly until the world’s energy systems are all but decarbonised. Are the institutions of government in the major nations of the world capable of recognising and responding to the urgency of the problem in time? Are the international institutions that must agree on a global plan sufficiently responsive to agree to, implement and enforce the necessary measures?”

It’s obvious what Hamilton thinks the answer is, in part he says because we are all trapped in the “growth machine”, “which we thought we had built to enhance our own ends, which has taken on a life of its own, and resists fiercely the slow awakening to its perils of the humans it is supposed to serve. The growth machine has, over time, created the types of people who are perfectly suited to its own perpetuation, – docile, seduced by its promises and unable to think beyond the boundaries it sets…. Our political leaders tend to be those who have internalised the goals of the system most faithfully and are therefore most immune to arguments and evidence that might challenge it.” (p. 49) Certainly that sums up Britain’s current Tory-Lib Dem government!

The machine’s “religion”, or romantic belief, is that economics can be studied, and the world understood as a mathematical equation, value-free and entirely detached from the perspective of the thinker. Hamilton says: “The only preferences that [Richard] Tol regards as legitimate are those expressed by consumers in a supermarket and never those expressed by citizens at the ballot box. This is perhaps the ultimate conceit of mainstream economics, the equation of market behaviour with democracy itself.” (p59-60)

Yet the curious thing is that Hamilton finds evidence that huge majorities, even in America, when asked the right questions understand that we’ve gone horribly wrong. He quotes of 2004 poll that found 93% thought fellow citizens were too focused on work and making money, 88% that society is too materialistic, with too much focus on shopping, and 90% thought people were spending beyond their means and getting into debt. It’s worth highlighting the fact that until the 1980s, the era when a lot of things went wrong, working hours were on a steady historic longterm decline, and regarded as the “surest sign of social progress”. (p. 86)
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A shorter version of this post first appeared on Blogcritics.

I might never have “practiced” as an agricultural scientist, but an Australian degree in the subject has left me acutely aware of the global shortage of fresh water and quality soils – and how fast these are being degraded.

Australia might be an esspecially bad case – its ancient soils particularly ill-suited to imported European farming methods and its mostly desert interior having a desperate dryness most Europeans struggle to imagine – but erosion and degradation of soils is a huge global problem, as is shortage of water, and we have no alternative ways of producing food….

When I was studying some 20 years ago, climate change was hardly mentioned, but since then its threat to all of our futures has become glaringly obvious.

So which is going to get us first: water, soil or climate change? That sounds flippant, but it is an important question – we need to tackle all of these problems, urgently, and with every input we can muster, but there are some choices that have to be made, and some priorities selected.

Reading Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, it’s clear that his calculations have produced one answer: water, not that there is any cause for comfort on the other two issues.

On soils, the tale of woe is long. In Lesotho, in the past 10 years its grain harvest has dropped by half in large part due to the soil fertility problems; Haiti, self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago, is now importing more than half; in Mongolia over the past 20 years nearly 3/4 of the wheat land has been abandoned and yields have fallen, cutting the harvest by 4/5.

But it is not just the developing world problem. Roughly one third of global crop land is losing soil at an excessive rate, and each inch means a lost 6% in grain production. We all know about America’s Dust Bowl, but since then it was the Soviet’s turn in the late 1950s. At its heart was Kazakhstan, which at its peak had more than 25 million hectares of land under grain; that has fallen to 7 million, but the average wheat yield is scarcely one tonne a hectare, compared to seven in France.

The new problems? China, which has roughly the same number of cattle as the US, but about 281 million sheep and goats, compared to America’s 9 million, and a huge problem with dust storms; India, with 24% of its land area turning into desert; and the expanding Sahara in Africa. It is estimated that land degradation across Africa costs it 8,000,000 tonnes of grain a year, about 8% of its annual harvest. This loss is expected to double by 2020.
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