[R-G] Monbiot / The Road Well Travelled / Dec 06

[Anthony Fenton]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-11/19monbiot.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
The Road Well Travelled December 06, 2007
By George  Monbiot

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important  
environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is  
Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts,  
figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a  
single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most  
environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago,  
and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the  
world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans,  
hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the  
action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over,  
"their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth  
as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl."(1) McCarthy  
makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates  
about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with  
organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are  
the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is  
hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth,  
even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his  
thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our  
technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological  
production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the  
skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the  
sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I  
remain haunted by it.

So when I read the UN's new report on the state of the planet over  
the weekend, my mind kept snagging on a handful of figures(2). There  
were some bright spots - lead has been removed from petrol almost  
everywhere, sulphur emissions have been reduced in most rich nations  
- and plenty of gloom. But the issue that stopped me was production.

Crop production has improved over the past 20 years (from 1.8 tonnes  
per hectare in the 1980s to 2.5 tonnes today), but it has not kept up  
with population. "World cereal production per person peaked in the  
1980s, and has since slowly decreased "(3). There will be roughly 9  
billion people by 2050: feeding them and meeting the millennium  
development goal on hunger (halving the proportion of hungry people)  
would require a doubling of world food production(4). Unless we cut  
waste, overeating, biofuels and the consumption of meat, total demand  
for cereal crops could rise to three times the current level(5).

There are two limiting factors. One, mentioned only in passing in the  
report, is phosphate: it is not clear where future reserves might  
lie. The more immediate problem is water. "Meeting the Millennium  
Development Goal on hunger will require doubling of water use by  
crops by 2050."(6) Where will it come from? "Water scarcity is  
already acute in many regions, and farming already takes the lion's  
share of water withdrawn from streams and groundwater."(7) One-tenth  
of the world's major rivers no longer reach the sea all round the year 
(8).

Buried on page 148, I found this statement. "If present trends  
continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions  
with absolute water scarcity by 2025, and two thirds of the world  
population could be subject to water stress." Wastage and  
deforestation are partly to blame, but the biggest cause of the  
coming droughts is climate change. Rainfall will decline most in the  
places in greatest need of water. So how, unless we engineer a sudden  
decline in carbon emissions, is the world to be fed? How, in many  
countries, will we prevent the social collapse that failure will cause?

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again.  
You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we  
learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world's species 
(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction 
(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release  
it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and  
waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is  
this: "if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?"

On Saturday, for some light relief from the UN report (who says that  
environmentalists don't know how to make whoopee?), I went to a  
meeting of roads protesters in Birmingham. They had come from all  
over the country, and between them they were contesting 18 new  
schemes: a fraction of the road projects the British government is  
now planning(12). The improvements to the climate change bill that  
Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, anounced yesterday were  
welcome. But in every major energy sector - aviation, transport,  
power generation, house building, coal mining, oil exploration - the  
government is promoting policies that will increase emissions. How  
will it make the 60% cut the bill enforces?

No one knows, but the probable answer is contained in the bill's  
great get-out clause: carbon trading(13). If the government can't  
achieve a 60% cut in the UK, it will pay other countries to do it on  
our behalf. But trading works only if the total global reduction we  
are trying to achieve is a small one. To prevent runaway climate  
change, we must cut the greater part - possibly almost all - of the  
world's current emissions. Most of the nations with which the UK will  
trade will have to make major cuts of their own, on top of those they  
sell to us. Before long we will have to buy our credits from Mars and  
Jupiter. The only certain means of preventing runaway climate change  
is to cut emissions here and now.

Who will persuade us to act? However strong the opposition parties'  
policies appear to be, they cannot be sustained unless the voters  
move behind them. We won't be prompted by the media. The BBC drops  
Planet Relief for fear of breaching its impartiality guidelines:  
heaven forbid that it should come out against mass death. But it  
broadcasts a programme - Top Gear - that puts a match to its  
guidelines every week, and now looks about as pertinent as the Black  
and White Minstrel Show. The schedules are crammed with shows urging  
us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none  
of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they  
don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities  
of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, is  
hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the  
biosphere.

It seems to me that we are already pushing other people ahead of us  
down The Road. As the biosphere shrinks, McCarthy describes the  
collapse of the protagonist's core beliefs(14). I sense that this  
might be happening already: that a hardening of interests, a shutting  
down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world.  
If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or  
food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in  
trouble.

Published in the Guardian 30th October 2007

References:

1. Cormac McCarthy, 2007. The Road, p55. Picador, London.

2. United Nations Environment Programme, 2007. Global Environment  
Outlook: GEO4. http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/report/ 
GEO-4_Report_Full_en.pdf

3. ibid, p86.

4. ibid, p110.

5. ibid, p110.

6. ibid, p83.

7. ibid, p110.

8. ibid, p99.

9. Alok Jha, 24th October 2007. Warming could wipe out half of all  
species. The Guardian.

10. James Randerson, 26th October  2007. The edge of oblivion:  
conservationists name 25 primates about to disappear. The Guardian.

11. David Adam, 23rd October 2007. Carbon output rising faster than  
forecast, says study. The Guardian.

12.  The organisation RoadBlock, which convened the conference, has  
lists of the government's new trunk road schemes. http:// 
www.roadblock.org.uk/

13. HM Government, March 2007. Draft Climate Change Bill. http:// 
www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm70/7040/7040.pdf

14. p93.