2014: Prosperidad ambiental // Environmental prosperity

[English below] Se acabó el 2013 en Japón. De nuevo ha sido un año nefasto para la vida en la Tierra, el único planeta del que la ciencia tiene conocimiento en el que existe vida en todo el universo. De nuevo este año se perdieron 52.000 Km2 de bosques, 70.000 Km2 de tierra fértil por erosión y otros 120.000 Km2 por desertificación. Lo peor de la crisis ambiental que vivimos es que esa pérdida de biocapacidad reduce sensiblemente la habilidad de los ecosistemas de regenerarse y absorber las emisiones de dióxido de carbono, que este año aumentaron en mil millones de toneladas métricas con respecto al año anterior. O sea, que a pesar de todo lo que sabemos, de todo lo que ya se está haciendo para transformar la situación, y de toda la conciencia que se ha venido creando, el problema, lejos de detenerse y revertirse, aún continúa agravándose. Dice el gran maestro de la eficacia, Stephen Covey, que “saber y no hacer es como no saber.” ¿Nos damos cuenta de que este problema no es sólo de quienes están dando la vida por resolverlo, sino que ya nos afecta a todos por igual, incluso a las generaciones que aún no han nacido? Este año que comienza, lo único que deseo es menos emisiones de CO2 que el año anterior, mayor cobertura boscosa y menor deforestación, pero ante todo, mayor coherencia en la especie humana entre la inteligencia que tenemos y nuestro comportamiento. La prosperidad es fundamentalmente un asunto de actitud. ¡Que así sea el 2014 para todos!

2013 is gone in Japan. It has been another devastating year for life on Earth, the only planet in the universe about which science has knowledge of the existence of life. Again this year 52,000 Km2 of forests were lost to deforestation, 70,000 Km2 of fertile soil has been lost to erosion, and an additional 120,000 Km2 were lost to desertification. The worst thing about the environmental crisis we live in is that this biocapacity loss significantly reduces the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate and absorb carbon emissions, which this year increased by one billion metric tons with respect to the previous year. In other words, despite everything we know, everything that has been done already to transform the situation, and all the awareness that has been created, the problem, far from stopping and reverting, is aggravating further. The great master of effectiveness, Stephen Covey, said “to know and not do is not to know”. Do we realize that this problem belongs not only to the people giving their lives to solve it, but that it affects each and every one of us, even our unborn generations? This year that starts my only wish is less carbon emissions than last year, greater forest coverage and less deforestation, but above all, greater coherence between humanity’s intelligence and our behavior. Prosperity is fundamentally a matter of attitude. May 2014 be so for all of us!

Reminder of Urgency

As 2012 moves along, we tend to get caught up in domestic and international politics, trade and unemployment figures. Meanwhile, the most pressing issue civilization has ever faced continues to increase in gravity. Human-made climate change has provoked the unpredictability of climactic patterns, augmented the intensity and frequency of climate-related disasters, and has worsened the constraints for human development.

In 2011 alone, 5.2 million hectares of forest coverage were lost, along with 7 million hectares of fertile land lost to erosion and 12 million hectares of land that turned into desert. This adds up to almost 250,000 square kilometers, a surface area larger than many countries.

These figures make us wonder: how much forest coverage and fertile land are required to support a human population that tends to reach 9 billion by 2050? What is the economic value of environmental services that humanity enjoys for free from nature? Can we afford to continue behaving in this way?

At the pace we are degrading the natural environment, humanity risks reaching critical ecosystemic tipping points beyond which extinction of biodiversity will accelerate, changing the condition of life on the planet like it has not been altered in millions of years.

Our top priority must be to revert the causes of this systemic failure threatening with civilizational collapse and adapt to rapidly occurring changes in our environment. Without healthy ecosystems there are no peacefully coexisting societies, and without these, no thriving market economies or financial expansion.

Peace, wealth, growth, development and comfort are intricately linked to the quality of biodiversity and ecosystems.

Preliminary Considerations on Intercultural Ethics

It is mandatory that we identify more opportunities to create change in the way we interact with one another and with other living beings. Symbiosis is the intricate co-dependency between species in any and all ecosystems. Unfortunately, humans have grown to believe that we reign over the rest of plants and animals on the planet and that we dispose of them with a sense of ownership that empowers us to even destroy what we believe belongs to us. Right or wrong, the truth is that we cannot survive without clean air and drinkable water, and the process of cleaning air and water in the planet relies, almost entirely, on trees in our dense forests in Latin America and Africa and Southeast Asia, where most rainforests still remain. As Jared Diamond wonders about the defunct inhabitants of Easter Island, what did the person that cut down the last tree on the island think as she was chopping it down?

Of course, the most expected response to this question is denial: there are still plenty a tree around to think about this question. True. But this denial has led humanity to reduce forest coverage as much as five million hectares, cause a loss of land to soil erosion of seven million hectares, and lead to the desertification of fertile land to almost 12 million hectares. The scariest thing is that these statistics are for 2011 alone. At this pace, the question is not whether or when will we run out of trees. The critical question is how much are we reducing nature’s capability to renew itself to continue cleaning our air and water, especially when, also in 2011, human industry managed to generate 33.5 billion metric tons of CO2.

When I say it is mandatory to seek change, I am not suggesting that it is mandatory by force of law or market incentive or sanction –say, like a carbon tax. Instead, it is an ethical mandate that crosses borders and cultures, gender and socioeconomic status. Survival on the planet lies on the symbiosis that must exist between animals and plants, oceans and skies, as a single and perfectly integrated system that has worked flawlessly for millions of years and has only been disrupted by the footprint of just a few generations of humans roaming the Earth.

This is not too hard to understand. Anyone who studied the water cycle in third grade science knows what I am talking about here. It is far more difficult, I presume, to change course of what we are doing on a daily basis that is causing so much irreparable damage. It is partly due to the fact that it is more complex to comprehend the connection between a beef patty on your burger and the corresponding carbon emissions attached to the transportation of that meat from Uruguay to Singapore, as well as the emissions generated where forest has been transformed into grassland to produce beef meat. In this particular example, when a tree has been chopped down to clear land for agricultural production, the calculation of CO2 emissions is inestimable, since a tree acts as a vacuum of carbon dioxide, and cutting it down reduces the planet’s ability to absorb those emissions permanently.

This is a hard fact and a solid truth in any language, for every religion, in every small village in the world. This is why the ethical mandate is of intercultural characteristics. Whoever cut or burned down those five million hectares of forests in 2011 affects you and me and them alike. We may consider the reasons as to why people do that, whether lack of information or the presence of very strong, monetary incentives. One thing is that a person knows that cutting a tree damages the environment and his own ability to actually grow food to put on his table, and another very different one is understanding that, in order to buy the bottled drink or mobile phone he will need money to do so. This is a microcosm of the trade-off that takes place billions of times every day around the world: doing what is right for the environment by planting a tree or choosing a different product with a lower ecological impact, or going for the immediate hedonistic satisfaction that only money can buy.

The reason why I consider the mandate that is calling is of an ethical nature is precisely because we are reducing the quality of our own lives and increasing exponentially the risk of health and safety for future generations. There is another reason why it is critical that we revise our priorities as human civilization based on ethics and values: because there has never been so much monetary wealth to go around in our history, it is despicable to know that as many as one hundred thousand people die every day from preventable causes, whether lack of proper hygiene, drinking water, malnourishment, diseases that should have been already eradicated, or violent armed conflict.

As it seems, prosperity is not correlated to monetary wealth. Even people that live well off are mistaken if they believe that they are prosperous because they are rich, because, as long as our natural capital is decreasing, we are all worse off. This trend of loss of wealth has been occurring for over two decades now, and as long as we continue to measure our wealth in coins, we will be oblivious to the reality that each and every coin, as well as every single gold bar is backed by a portion of the planet’s limited –and decreasing- natural environment.

CancunCocoon#13: Where Have All The Forests Gone?

When we got married, my wife and I decided to have an alternative celebration. We gathered our closest friends and relatives for a tree-plantation ceremony. We requested people to dress on a white top (not everyone did, much to our dismay) so that pictures would have a nice contrast between faces, white outfit and green, natural scenery around. The pictures look beautiful!

Anyway, we decided to plant trees because we thought our relationship had to be like caring for a garden or a forest. It needed nurturing, attention, sensitivity. So far it has worked beautifully. And the trees are growing strong too!

When a tree is planted, it absorbs carbon from the air as long as it lives. Growth of trees is the accumulation of carbon for its trunk and branches. Not only does a tree absorb carbon from the atmosphere. It also releases oxygen as part of its respiration process, and releases water vapor, pure and pristine, that later becomes clouds and rain. Trees clean our air and our water.

It would sound like a good business, then, to grow many trees so that we ensure there is always abundant -at least sufficient- clean water and air for our consumption. Well, it's perhaps the two elements we can't live without, right? And still what is happening is completely the opposite: we are tearing down trees at a rate of 20 football fields per minute, all day, every day. At that rate, all the rainforest of my paradisiac Costa Rica would be chopped down in 15 weeks. A horrible thought. Somewhere in the world in the next 15 weeks a forest of 25,000 square kilometers will be converted into, well, whatever a forest becomes when it lacks trees: grassland, and eventually desert.

The big problem is in the long term. How many more trees can we cut without losing the planet's ability to recover itself and to clean our air and water? If we had to pay for the price of cleaning our air and water I am sure it would cost us dearly. In fact, The 11th Hour, a documentary produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, proposes that the value of the function that our natural environment serves us cleaning air and water could cost some $40 trillion dollars, a value far greater than the estimated $18 trillion worth of global economic output per year.

It's not about money. Without trees there would be very little life that could be supported around here. So the need to preserve it is existential as well. Ethical or moral. Principled or rooted on a very humanly inherent will to survive and to procreate into the future.

Perhaps that's what we have lost: a sense of ownership with a future that we won't live to see. The world of our grandchildren and their grandchildren's grandchildren. As a Native American leader said, we need to think about the seventh generation after this one to learn how to preserve nature so that they -whoever that is- will also enjoy it.

We have also lost sensitivity for everything that is not immediate and discardable. The instant fix of satisfaction that goes with the next breath of air and that is costing so much on our nonrenewable resources. Our forests are in a way nonrenewable. We could replant a forest that has been cut down, but it will take as long as it had been standing, if at all, to recover. That's the greatest wealth of primary forests. They have been standing since time immemorial. They carry our history, our genes, our wisdom. Chopping it down is an unintelligent thing to do as a species.

The way to change our culture is to start planting trees, as many as you want. Make an appointment with friends to go plant trees. Watch them grow. Learn about them. Teach our children to care for them. Plant trees on behalf of your faraway relatives. Of the ones that have passed. On the ones that will come. Plant a tree for each child that is born. A tree to celebrate a promotion and a tree when each tooth of our child falls. Make up lame excuses to plant trees and plant as many as you possibly can. We will need to make a coordinated effort, those of us who care, to make a significant impact on our destructive tendency as a species.

Change culture and make it cool so we can have fun in the process. Change has never been boring anyway!