The Natural Patriot

[In celebration of the recently passed Solstice and the dawning season of rebirth, number nine in a series, this the second from Mary Oliver. Food for thought in the holiday season, and always]

The Sun
Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from the world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Where does your food come from? This is a question central to the Gordian knot of issues tangling together public health, environmental health, energy markets, and geopolitics. It is increasingly on the lips of “localvores” seeking to enhance both their own health and that of the land around them by eating locally grown food that is wholesome and does not require massive expenditure of fossil fuels to transport it to the plate. It is obviously a question at the heart of vegetarianism.

For many Americans, the food comes, most immediately, from the local fast food joint, arriving wrapped in a mountain of paper and plastic packaging (the recently popular phrase “lipstick on a pig” comes to mind) at the take-out window while the car sits idly, spewing carbon and other stuff into the air.

But where does it come from before that? Answering that question is surprisingly difficult. And that, it emerges, is no coincidence. The fast food industry, which runs more than half the restaurants in the USA and sells more than a hundred billion dollars of food each year, have consistently opposed regulation of ingredient reporting. Enter Hope Kahren and Rebecca Kraft, who set out on a scientific detective mission to answer that question and recently reported their results in an open access article in PNAS. The results, perhaps predictably, are not pretty.

The authors dusted for fingerprints, as it were, using stable isotope analysis. Isotopes of carbon are used commonly in scientific sleuthing of where food comes from and who eats it, both in natural food webs and in what might be called the human food web. The background is this: Carbon has two naturally occurring stable (i.e., non-radioactive) isotopes, that is, two forms of the element that differ in the number of protons in the nucleus, having either 12 or 13. The two types of carbon basically function in the same way chemically and biologically; however ¹³C is a slightly heavier than ¹²C, with the result that it tends to gets left behind when plants are sucking CO2 out of the air to photosynthesize and make new plant biomass. The result is that the ratio of the two forms or isotopes of carbon in their tissue, their so-called carbon isotopic signature, differs from the ratio in the atmosphere out of which they sucked it. Plants that are less selective, and thus suck more ¹³C, are said to have a “heavier” ratio than pickier plants that suck less ¹³C. The technical term for this difference in isotopic ratio between the plant (or animal, as the case may be) tissue and the atmosphere is the δ¹³C ratio (pronounced “del C-13″, del being short for the lower case delta, which is used by science geeks to signify a difference, in this case between plant tissue and the standard against which it’s being compared). Animals (like cows and us) that eat the plants (like corn) retain the carbon isotopic signature of their food, so it can be used to figure out what they’ve been eating.

Right. So why do we need to know this stuff? Well it just so happens that corn has a rather unique “light” carbon isotopic signature that is readily distinguishable from those of many of the other crops at the base of the human food chain. The authors of this paper took advantage of corn’s unique carbon isotopic signature to explore the rather unsavory (pardon the pun) question of where fast food comes from.

Jahren and Kraft used C and N stable isotopes to suss out the source of feed to the animals used in fast food, the source of fat within Freedom French fries, and, ingeniously, were able to interpret these data to infer the role of artificial fertilizer use and confinement of the animals in the industrial fast food production chain. They sampled >480 hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries from McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s outlets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, Boston, and Baltimore. Personally I prefer diving in the Caribbean for my field work, but — hey — they got a PNAS paper out of it. Here’s what they found:

” Based on a comparison with [isotopic vaues of different livestock feeds], 100% of the chicken and 93% of the beef sampled in this study had δ¹³C values consistent with an exclusively corn-based diet.” Indeed, isotopic signatures indicated that only 12 of the 162 hamburgers they sampled could possibly have come from cattle fed anything other than corn. So forget the bucolic vistas of cattle peacefully grazing in green pastures with tinkling cowbells. We’re talking about industrial meat factories.

But wait — there’s more:

Jahren and Kraft also measured the isotopic signature of nitrogen, the δ¹⁵N. This signature tells a different part of the story. The signature of nitrogen in livestock ultimately reflects the source of fertilizer used, but also correlates with animal stocking rate. It turns out that the burgers and chick-o-patties sampled from America’s fast food outlets (over 90 billion sold! OK, I made that up but it’s probably within a few orders of magnitude) have unusually high and consistent δ¹⁵N signatures: “We observed remarkably invariant values of δ15N in both beef and chicken, reflecting uniform confinement and exposure to heavily fertilized feed for all animals.” The results are shown in the graph above, which I included mostly because of its pleasing, mandala-like arrangement of colored dots. The different symbol shapes are different fast-food chains, with three samples (rows) from three restaurants (columns) of each chain in each of seven cities.

The bottom line: Throughout the whole country (and presumably elsewhere in the world, where the Golden Arches and their ilk are increasingly blocking out views of the Arc de Triomphe, the Great Wall, etc.), a principal source of calories and fat to the populace is provided by a food industry that is not only grossly unhealthy, a blot on the landscape, and numbingly inhumane, but also destructive to the environment. In what way? Corn agriculture has gotten black eyes lately because of its tremendous appetite for water and fertilizer, with much of the latter running off into the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay, where it nurtures hypoxic dead zones. Now we can see that, perversely, much of that pollution is being driven by the American appetite for junk food (not to mention the growing, and wildly misguided, move toward bioethanol fuel production).

Why are we learning this only now? Well, one reason is the way the fast-food industry is structured: “Fastfood corporations do not raise livestock, but instead buy it from other companies. Birth, growth, and slaughter are distinct events occurring at different facilities, often under different companies. Each fast food chain employs distributor companies: These suppliers organize and broker the production and transport of meat to the site of food fabrication and sale. In this way, distributors act as a barrier to consumer information; suppliers relevant to this study provide little information beyond their use of ‘local farms’ that feed ‘mixed grains.’” Clearly, The latter claim at least is fiction, as these results demonstrate.

One more piece of evidence that what you don’t know can hurt you. So [warning: self-righteous pontification follows!] slow down and eat local foods. And, if there is a single no-brainer message that comes out of all of this, it is clearly this: stop eating meat. You’ll be healthier, you’ll greatly reduce your environmental footprint, and you won’t have those frightful chicken and beef factories on your conscience. As a personal disclaimer, I haven’t succeeded entirely in doing that — yet — but I’m working on it . . .

[Original source: Jahren, A.H. and and Kraft, R.A. 2008. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in fast food: Signatures of corn and confinement. Proceedings of the National cademy of Science of the USA 105 (46): 17855-17860.]

[Natural Patriot’s semi-trivia contest: My 11-year-old son wants to know if any alert reader out there can identify the source of that quote.]

In the meantime, a note to the Ex-President-to-be: Dude, stick with the flag pin on the lapel. At this stage in your administration’s tailspin, I would recommend accessories that divert, rather than draw, attention. Yes, I know, you were only being polite — and perhaps trying to salvage a few Hispanic votes for the GOP in advance of the 2012 campaign. But it’s really not you.

And on a related note: I realize that this is tantamount to kicking someone when they’re down, but I cannot resist passing on the link to this astonishing video of the Governor of Alaska, allegedly being interviewed after the ceremonial pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey — while its pals are getting the bass-o-matic treatment in the background!:

Check out this videoVerily, truth is stranger than fiction. I know that, strictly speaking, this has little to do with Natural Patriotism, but give a guy a break. After eight years, there’s a lot of stuff pent up here that needs to be cleared out of the system to restore a healthy outlook on life . . .

The degrading global environment has raised concern, even alarm, for many reasons, but one of the most important involves the issue of how loss of species may influence nature’s ability to continue providing life support to us — “ecosystem services” in the common parlance. Ecosystem services include the various processes necessary to life and well-being that we get free of charge, and usually unnoticed, from the natural world: purification of water by percolation through soil and plant communities, moderation of climate by forest cover, production of fish for human consumption, protection of coastal communities from storms by mangrove thickets, and so on.

It’s well appreciated of course that nature, in a very general sense, is essential to our well-being (although this seemingly obvious fact appears to have escaped the understanding of many mainstream economists — see here for an antidote). But what about “biodiversity” — that somewhat nebulous term we hear so frequently these days? What real difference does it make to us whether we have one or ten or a hundred species in our backyards? Can we just pick the several types of plants and animals we think that we will need in perpetuity and plant them under a glass dome on the moon, as some people in surprisingly high positions appear to believe?

The general question is how biodiversity affects the way ecosystems work, and more particularly how they work for us. This question has been a hotbed of scientific research in the last 15 years (and a strong personal interest of mine). Ecologists have conducted hundreds of experiments to determine how the number of species in a habitat affects the total production of plant biomass, the use of soil nutrients, the production of small animals that serve as food for fish, the ecosystem’s ability to rebound from disturbances, and so on.

There are are now enough such experiments that it’s been possible to synthesize the results in search of generalizations, some of which I have participated in myself (e.g., here). These show pretty clearly that, in a nutshell, more species means higher production and more efficient use of resources.

But what about the real world? I have argued that these experiments, despite being small-scale, of short duration, and under artificially simple conditions, are probably conservative — that is, the influence of biodiversity on functioning of ecosystems in the real world is likely more, not less, important than we see in small-scale experiments. But the real test of this idea will come from studies in the real world, studies of how loss of species influences processes that are directly important to us where we live.

A new study published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology does just that. John Swaddle and Stavros Calos tackled a specific question about how biodiversity influences risk of disease, namely the hypothesis of the “dilution effect”. The idea applies to diseases that humans contract from animals in the environment, such as lyme disease, west nile virus, and bird flu. The hypothesis goes like this: when diversity of animal hosts is high, the disease organisms that live in them cannot be transmitted or grow as effectively, because the animal species differ in their susceptibility to infection, the population sizes of individual species tend to be lower (and hence support lower disease populations) in diverse communities, etc. But what is the evidence for this?

Swaddle and Calos used a clever approach to test the dilution hypothesis for West Nile Virus (WNV), which is carried by birds. They compared counties in the eastern USA that reported WNV with adjacent counties that reported no cases of WNV (shown as red and blue respectively — no relation to their political leanings, as far as I know), a pair-wise comparative test that controlled for differences in climate and other regional environmental factors. They also used human census data to account for human demographic and socioeconomic variation between the counties.

Supporting the dilution effect of biodiversity, their analysis showed that incidence of West Nile Virus in humans was lower in counties where bird diversity is high, and that, quite surprisingly, bird diversity explained more variation in disease incidence (roughly 50% of total) than urbanization or socioeconomics. The mechanisms appear complex but support a component of the “dilution effect” by which higher host diversity reduced abundance of those bird species that are the most susceptible hosts.The results of this study generalize previous evidence of the dilution effect, notably the similar finding that lyme disease in humans is more prevalent in areas where diversity of small mammals (the usual hosts of the organism that produces lyme disease) is reduced. In both cases, lower-diversity communities tend to favor the host species most likely to carry and transmit infections. In other words, loss of biodiversity is sickening — not just esthetically and ethically, but literally.

This study is one of a growing number of examples supporting the suggestion that biodiversity enhances ecosystem services not only in small-scale experiments, but also in real-world landscapes.

[Original source: Swaddle JP, Calos SE. 2008. Increased Avian Diversity Is Associated with Lower Incidence of Human West Nile Infection: Observation of the Dilution Effect. PLoS One 3(6): e2488. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002488]

[Below is a letter making the rounds on the internet from Professor Steve Carpenter, an eminent ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, offering advice to President-elect Obama on the importance of serious and prompt environmental action as he begins his presidency. The text of the letter and a petition you can sign (for whatever that is worth) in support of its goals can be found here.]

November 2008

“Dear President-Elect Obama,

Congratulations on your election, which has created a sense of optimism in America that has never occurred before in my lifetime.

Yet earth’s life support systems have deteriorated more in our lifetimes than in any other era of human history. With earth’s population increasing, and consumption per person growing much faster than population, humans are heating the climate, polluting air and water, degrading landscapes and turning coastal oceans to dead zones. America’s food supply depends on a few fragile crops, grown using practices that degrade soil, air and water to yield foods of low nutritional value that harm our health. The U.S. is not investing in the education and innovation needed to create agriculture and energy technologies that can get us through the 21st century. Details are found in a consensus report of more than 1300 leading scientists from more than 90 nations including the U.S. (http://www.MAweb.org). These findings support the following priorities for your presidency.

Decrease America’s dependency on coal and oil and increase the supply of energy from non-polluting technologies: We must decrease emission of greenhouse gases, and the era of cheap oil is over. We must accelerate development of clean energy technologies using wind, sun and tides. These investments must be based on scientific information to avoid bogus remedies, such as grain biofuels, that sound good but do not in fact solve the problem. We must increase conservation through better buildings, efficient transportation, and renewal of industry. We must improve agriculture and forestry practices to reduce energy consumption and increase carbon storage in soil.

Stop subsidizing agriculture that destroys land, water and health. Create incentives for agriculture that maintains land and water resources and yields healthy food: Agriculture must shift to practices that use less energy for tillage and transport of food, produce healthy food for local consumption, train more people in diverse farming practices, build soil instead of degrading and eroding it, and maintain clean water and air. These reforms can be accomplished by reforming federal subsidies.

Have a population policy: In global impact, the U.S. is the world’s most overpopulated nation, mainly because of our high per-capita consumption. Our population is growing rapidly. Global population growth is a key driver of degraded land, water, air and climate. Education of women is a powerful lever to restrain population growth. If all the world’s women are educated to high-school level, human impact on our life-support system will be more than 30% lower by 2050. As a father of daughters, it is especially appropriate for you to support education for all of the world’s women.

Invest in the education and innovation needed to create a society that could thrive in the 21st century and beyond: Even though our universities and research centers are the envy of the world, science education of the general population of the U.S. is weak and must be made stronger. Education must be reformed to encourage creativity. There are enormous opportunities for innovations in agriculture, energy, and infrastructure that will lead to a moderate climate, rich landscapes, and clean air and water into the future. These technological opportunities are being seized by other nations while the U.S. lags behind. We must restore American leadership in creating technology that maintains our life support system while providing the energy, food and shelter that people need.

Sincerely yours,

Steve Carpenter

Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology
Center for Limnology
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin 53706 USA”

[I beg your pardon if this seems a bit over the top. They don’t let me out of my cage very much . . . and how often do we get a chance like this?]

What a time to be an American!

After so long in a dark age, we can finally see the light. It has been said thousands of times in the last weeks and months that this is an historic election — that is not just media hyperbole. Who would have dreamed even two or three years ago that a black man — and one with a so clearly foreign name — would be the next President of the United States? Who could have guessed that we would arrive so soon at a time when “the race card” — one of the central boogeyman of politics and of America’s ambivalent soul for centuries — essentially evaporated? Who would have imagined that in 2008 we could have a national political discussion (to use a charitable word for the usual public discourse on politics) about two candidates for the highest office in the nation — many would say in the world — that had so little mention of the issue that has so often in the past been the elephant in the room? I personally doubt that it is possible to truly reach the oft-mentioned ideal of a “color-blind society” — some degree of prejudice is probably hard-wired into our genes, in the sense of inherent distrust of the unfamiliar or different. But it can be overcome. This election proves as nothing else could that this country has made a quantum leap in that direction.

I have felt repeatedly in the last two days like a sudden flood of sunshine has come into a dank cave that we’ve been in for so long, a hole that the idealogues of the current administration, through a combination of criminal ineptitude, arrogance, and paranoia, have dug us into and from which we’d begun to despair we would ever get out. I am not so naive to think that it will all be sweetness and light from here on out. President-elect Obama inherits a catastrophe on nearly every front — military, economic, geopolitical, environmental — and it will surely get worse before it gets better, at least financially. We are all in for a rough ride. But even with all that, the mere fact that this nation, which had devolved in the eyes of the rest of the planet to a bunch of myopic, superstitious bullies, could come together and elect a black man as President — by a two to one margin — that alone can only cause a sea change of almost unprecedented proportions in our image in the world. And the news and reactions I see here in Portugal amply bears that out.

Yet, despite its far-ranging significance, even the historic election of an African-American is in some sense almost a side issue. The most important thing is that we have elected not another cookie-cutter political product buoyed along by slogans and spin machine but an actual thoughtful statesman who successfully avoided the toxic culture of personal destruction that has increasingly consumed American politics in recent decades. Living in Virginia, where for the first time in decades we actually saw campaign ads for President, I can attest to this: Obama focused on his opponent’s voting record. Not on ties to ancient scandals (though McCain has some), nor on his choice of running mate (shockingly irresponsible as it was), not on convoluted claims of financial connections to alleged terrorists. Not even on McCain’s apparent uncertainty about the USA’s alliance with Spain. Obama refused to stoop to the level of is opponents. He rose above it all. Against all odds, and no doubt against the judgment of many seasoned advisors, he kept the focus on real issues. And it worked. In addition to everything else that’s been said about him, Obama made some small but important progress back in the direction of a civil society. Democracy is working again.

Hail to the Chief.

[And: You go, Judith Warner!]

The big day has arrived at last (son: “Dad, will we still have to watch politics every night after the election?). I am on my way out the door to two meetings in Europe, plane leaving Philadelphia at 4:35 this afternoon. I am already experiencing withdrawal symptoms about not being able to watch the blow-by-blow tonight while in the air (perhaps they’ll have the cheesy airport version of CNN on the plane for all the other junkies like myself). On the other hand I’m very intrigued at being able to see the immediate aftermath of the election from the other side of the pond. If time — and jet lag — permit, your ace correspondent will report on the election results from Portugal tomorrow. Stay tuned . . .

Question: What is more fundamental to sustainability than fixing climate change, even more certain to lead to catastrophe if unfixed, far more politically sensitive, but even more essential to passing on a habitable planet to our grandchildren and their children?

Answer: Controlling human population growth.

There. I’ve said it. And so have a host of others, who have pledged to speak out on this critical issue–which remains largely taboo in most polite conversations–in an organized event scheduled for February 2009.

The Global Population Speak-Out (GPSO) is being organized by John Feeney, who some of you know from his very thoughtful blog Growth is Madness. Why the focus on population growth — isn’t that old-fashioned? Don’t we know that the real culprit is the out-of-control resource use by those of us in the developed world? Well, yes, that is a major source of our unsustainable impacts on our life-support system. But those patterns of per-capita resource are rapidly being exported to the developing world. It must be stressed that the current and projected increases in resource use in the developing world carry some very important benefits to historically impoverished people. But it is also well documented that our modern lifestyles, and the resources they require, are not remotely sustainable over the long term.

Total human impact on the earth is the product of population size and per-capita resource use. All else being equal, then, a decline in population allows a corresponding rise in average individual resource use. And it should go without saying that a planet of finite size cannot sustain growth of the population, or of per-capita resource use, indefinitely. At some point it has to stop. And it is increasingly, glaringly, clear that that point must be soon. Ecological footprint data indicate that no realistic reduction in per capita consumption on the part of industrialized countries would be enough, in the absence of increased attention to population, to bring us back to within Earth’s capacity to sustain us.

John has succeeded in generating enough interest in the GPSO that the journal Science has taken notice. Here is their summary from the issue published today:

“RETURN OF THE POPULATION BOMB
At a time when some developed nations are paying citizens to bolster flagging birth-rates (Science, 30 June 2006, p. 1894), a grass-roots group of scientists and environmentalists is calling for a new push to limit human numbers.

Overpopulation is threatening life as we know it on the planet, say members of a movement called Global Population Speak Out (http://gpso.wordpress.com/), which aims to persuade at least 50 “respected voices” to “speak out in some way” about the problem for a month next year.

“The hope is to concentrate these informed researchers’ messages about population during the month of February so we can make a bit of a dent in this taboo” surrounding the subject, says the movement’s organizer John Feeney, an environmental writer in Boulder, Colorado. Global population, now at about 6.7 billion, is expected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050, says Feeney, and that’s the United Nations’ “medium” projection.

So far, Feeney says 46 people have pledged to speak out or endorse the movement, including botanist Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis; Cornell University entomologist David Pimentel; and entomologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb. Although some of Ehrlich’s most dire predictions haven’t come to pass, others–namely, mass extinctions, as well as horrors he didn’t mention, such as destruction of rainforests and coral reefs from climate change–appear to be well under way.”

The letter inviting everyone to participate is here. Basically, the organizers ask you simply to speak out publicly during the month of February 2009 about how unfettered population growth threatens global society’s sustainable future. Like 2007’s Step it up campaign about climate change (which we participated in locally), the GPSO aims to draw attention to the issue of global population growth by raising a chorus of voices throughout the world simultaneously. The GPSO site has suggestions for letters to the editor, talking points, and other resources here.

As E.O. Wilson has said, “The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology or land-use management is sophistic.”

This weekend we drove back north to the ancestral homeland in Arlington, Virginia, for my high school reunion — I can’t bring myself to reveal which one it was except that it’s been quite some time. The return trip brought us down the old familiar trail of US Route 17, a mostly two-lane highway winding through the picturesque, rural hinterland of eastern Virginia from the Piedmont down into Tidewater. Autumn colors are beginning to come up, it was a beautiful cool crisp day, and traffic was light. Here and there families were bent down in the fields picking pumpkins, cars were parked for harvest festivals. A great fall day.

But I mention all this not for the idyllic natural scenery but because of the striking evidence of a possible sea change in the political landscape. Virginia has been a reliably red state for four decades. And “the Nation’s first district”, as the long strip of land bisected by Route 17 is known, has had a Republican congressional representative for longer than most people can remember. When I arrived here in 1994, the Democrats didn’t even bother putting up a candidate for Congress because it was pointless. It almost certainly still is, though a brave soul has decided to take the plunge this time.

But here’s the thing. When we drove up to Arlington yesterday, I was astonished to see what appeared to me to be equal numbers of signs along the road for McCain and Obama. This is utterly unheard of in my experience here. For example, in 2004, my estimate, admittedly non-quantitative but based on many weeks of observing the bumper stickers of hundreds of pick-up trucks and mini-vans, is that Bush-Cheney bumper stickers outnumbered Kerry stickers by at least ten to one. Probably more.

So, on the way back to Gloucester, we decided to quantify the patterns. Along the whole stretch of Route 17 from Fredericksburg to Gloucester, we counted the number of political sign for McCain and Obama (counting each group of signs that clearly was posted together as a single “installation”). And the tally was:

Obama: 28

McCain: 23

Interesting. But what does it mean? That is harder to say. It’s been well publicized that Obama has raised substantially more money than McCain — also a rather striking change of fortunes, so to speak, since the Republicans have typically raised more money in past presidential elections. This means there is more money available to pay staff, print posters, and get them out on the roadside. So it’s conceivable that the larger number of Obama signs means only that the campaign was able to pay a bunch of warm bodies from DC or New Jersey to come down and plaster the roadsides.

Maybe.

On the other hand, lots of the signs seem to be in people’s yards, which suggests that they reflect the views of real people that live here. I suppose we’ll find out — in 23 days.

So why I am I talking about this on the Natural Patriot? What does all this mundane politics have to do with Natural Patriotism? I mean apart from the solemn responsibility of all citizens to exercise their democratic responsibilities.

The reason is that your vote makes a difference (leaving aside for the moment that annoying little detail that we still use the curious, antiquated institution of the electoral college, which has historically meant that, given my minority status in this state, my vote meant jack squat).

How does it make a difference? You be the judge. Here are the League of Conservation Voters‘ report cards for Barack Obama and John McCain.

And you thought the mortgage crisis was bad . . .

Even as people the world over perch on the edge of their chairs, chewing their fingernails in barely contained panic at the global financial meltdown, the BBC reports that the crisis in our natural capital is even worse.

According to a study commissioned by the European Union, called “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity“, the global economy is losing more money from loss of forests than through the current banking crisis. The annual cost of forest loss is estimated at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion. This estimate comes from adding the value of the various ecosystem services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide. The team calculated that forest loss alone was equivalent to about 7% of total global gross domestic product.

Says the study’s lead author Pavan Sukhdev:

“It’s not only greater but it’s also continuous, it’s been happening every year, year after year . . . So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today’s rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year.”

The assumption underlying this type of accounting is that as forests (or other natural infrastructure) decline, nature stops providing the services that it has historically provided free of charge. In which case the human economy either has to provide them instead — for example through building reservoirs, facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, new farming methods — or we have to do without. Either way, there is a financial cost.

And that’s just forests alone. The TEEB team hasn’t got around yet to valuing ocean ecosystem services, fisheries, and so on. The figures mentioned here were already known since they were published in the Phase I report back in May. But the global financial meltdown puts some flesh on the bones, so to speak. That is, it’s hard to comprehend (at least for me) what 2 trillion dollars are (how many zeros is that anyway?) until you begin to glimpse it in terms of the major financial institutions of planet earth simultaneously tanking. Puts things in perspective. The forest crisis is more of a slow burn — no pun intended. But no less worrisome in the long term.

Bail-out anyone?

Is there any hope? Perhaps. Study leader Sukhdev says that governments and businesses are beginning to get the point:

“Times have changed. Almost three years ago, even two years ago, their eyes would glaze over . . . Today, when I say this, they listen. In fact I get questions asked - so how do you calculate this, how can we monetize it, what can we do about it, why don’t you speak with so and so politician or such and such business.”

Thank goodness it’s Friday. I think I’m ready for a drink . . .