Many will think me mad for writing about green issues at a time like this. The eurozone is currently in the toilet with the market's hands on the flush handle, the British economy is flatlining and the climate talks in Durban have produced little other than hot air and empty promises.
However, I think the green agenda is slipping because we're all so focused on global warming. Don't get me wrong, I believe the evidence for global warming is strong, but green issues matter for other reasons. Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol because of it's inability to bring CO2 emissions under control. America didn't even sign up. Ecology and environmentalism cannot be advanced as a cause if everyone is focusing only on one problem, one subject to a great deal of skepticism.
So below I'm going to point out three reasons why green issues matter, right now, to the whole world, that are simply matters of fact.
Oil, Energy and fossil fuel dependency
Everyone knows we're going to run out of oil, eventually. I think only a fool would say he can predict exactly when, as technology changes. However, one thing can be said for certain, it will run out. Dependency on fossil fuels isn't just bad for the climate in the form of emissions, we're setting ourselves up for a fall unless we develop new strategies to generate energy.
The problem doesn't end at energy, though. After all, in theory at least, nuclear power could be used as a stop gap source of energy until better alternatives are found. However, many of the products we use every day contain products derived from fossil fuels. PVC, for example, which we depend on for everything from wire coating to drain pipes is made from fossil fuels.
It makes no sense for highly technologically capable countries to be stifling research funding into possible alternatives and renewables. It also makes no sense to be dependent on something that you don't have enough of. (Ask any heroin addict what withdrawal is like and then imagine how we're going to cope when the oil does eventually run out.) Not just because these solutions are carbon neutral (after all, this article isn't about global warming,) but because they are a possible solution to one of the other big problems we face: water scarcity.
Water scarcity
Let's be clear: fresh water supplies are falling massively. Only about 1% of the world's water is drinkable, and a great deal of that is used to deal with our third problem, food production. Millions (possibly billions) worldwide live without sufficient drinking water.
This is just one example of how dependent we are on a healthy ecological environment. The water system is broken because fresh water is being polluted massively and supplies are rapidly dwindling. Once water is impure and unsuitable for consumption, it is surprisingly difficult to make it elsewise. Especially if the culprit is one of man's favourite substances: salt. Desalination of salt water consumes huge volumes of energy. Unless we can solve the problems in energy, we have to find ways to preserve what fresh water is left. Which brings me onto my third and final point.
Food, biodiversity and extinction
Oftentimes in the urbanised west, we forget just how dependent we are on our ecosystem. Despite all of our modern trappings, we still depend massively on our environment to supply us with food and fresh water. As mentioned above, we use massive amounts of the world's fresh water supplies to irrigate crops, oftentimes resulting in contaimination with biocides.
This is because the environment au naturel could never support such a massive population as 7 billion, and we need to divert massive amount of water to help keep us supplied with food. The problem is, we're also diverting less obvious natural resources away from systems that help maintain the ecosystems we so very much depend upon.
The global ecosystem is a remarkably complex chaotic system. I use chaotic in the mathematical sense here: the system is dynamic and dependent on initial conditions. Predicting it's outcomes more than a short while in advance is remarkably difficult. Localised phenomena may not be so: but predicting what the loss of rainforests in Brazil might do to change the ecology of say, China, is basically impossible. This said there are certain principles which we still understand very clearly.
Biodiversity helps keep ecosystems in check and functional. The extinction of one species is a sad loss, but not an ecological threat in and of itself. The loss of multiple species, however, threatens to unbalance ecosystems.
Herbivorous animals run riot in crops if their predators are hunted too ruthlessly. Parasitic plants run riot if too many of it's competitors are eliminated. This sort of behaviour happens at every level, from single celled organisms up to the global level. It is one massive, interdependent network. I say all this so I cannot be misunderstood to have failed to stress the point: biodiversity is absolutely essential to human survival. If the wrong organism, bacterial, viral or multicellular, gets out of control it could decimate our own food supply. Mass starvation would be a looming prospect, as well as food protectionism and isolationist policies.
This could happen if, for example, pollinating insects died out and imported species run amok amongst the remaining wind pollinated crops. Science and genetic modification offer some hopes, but also risks. Nature is chaotic and we have no idea if the cure will be worse than the disease. Scare stories about Frankensteinian plants are grossly over-exaggerated, but unsettling the ecological balance is a definite risk in dealing with disease resistant crops, for example.
This problem is enormous because ecosystems worldwide are being devastated by various smaller demons that all add up to the same problem. Plastic contamination, deforestation, urbanisation, changes to planetary atmospheric make-up (even excluding the rise in greenhouse gases,) contamination, overfishing, radioactive waste... the list is a long one. All of these things threaten wider biodiversity. Taken individually, these problems would probably eventually balance out over time, but all at once and the system is dealing with a scale of shock that it cannot adapt to. Evolution requires mythic lengths of time in ways that human beings barely understand other than as figures written on a page. Nature is surprisingly adaptable but it must be given a chance to catch up.
These things are not theories, these are all going on, right now, worldwide. Taken on their own, each may not be a threat to our survival, but together they represent the spectre of self-annihilation. That may sound like hyperbole, but if our food supply dies out then we will go the way of every other extinct species unless we find a technological solution. We're still subject to the same rules as every other living organism, we have to find a way to extract energy from our environment to power our biological systems. We fail to do that, and we have the first and probably last self-engineered mass extinction event.
It's not all doom and gloom
So, what do we do? Well perhaps unsurprisingly many of the solutions mooted to deal with climate change help contribute to solutions for the above problems. A 100% renewable energy source would allow us to desalinate water, and would massively alleviate the pressures on fossil sources required for other uses buying us plenty of breathing room to produce other solutions to our needs. However that isn't enough, solving our energy crisis will not stem the wave of extinctions coming our way if we continue the way we are going. We must find solutions to pollutants, plastic, radioactive and biocide pollution are the most urgent but there are plenty of others, if we are to ensure our future survival.
I am not going to hypothesise as to why this hasn't happened so far: it doesn't matter. What matters is that action is required from the global village, and it is required yesterday. If this article can help show why, even in "the toughest economy in a generation," we must put the Green agenda at the heart of our politics as a matter of survival, then I am a grateful man.
PS Do not be fooled by thinking that small places like Britain cannot contribute to this sort of "de-toxification." We are massive polluters in many of the respects listed above. Land fill sites are one of the worst offenders. We need to find solutions to all these problems if we are going to ensure a future for our children. Let's be clear, that's not a healthy future, or a positive future, it's any sort of future at all.
