Beyond Recycling
Communities around the world are
doing more than we know to halt the process of climate change. Many of the
initiatives have been collected in the book Drawdown (reduction or decline in
greenhouse gases) edited by Paul Hawken; here are some of them. What can you
and your community do?
There’s
a great battle going on. The rise of consumerism as the great index of human
progress is pitted against the planet’s natural ability to maintain balance in
the face of depleting resources, not just oil and gas and minerals but loss of
wildlife and biodiversity. We are in the midst of what is being called the
sixth mass extinction. The previous five
mass extinctions took place over millions of years:
443 million years ago: a severe ice age led to sea level falling
by 100m, wiping out 60-70% of all species which were prominently ocean dwellers
at the time. Then soon after the ice melted leaving the oceans starved of
oxygen.
360 million years ago: a prolonged climate
change event, again hitting life in shallow seas very hard, killing 70% of
species including almost all corals.
250
million years ago: more than 95% of species perished, including
trilobites and giant insects – strongly linked to massive volcanic eruptions in
Siberia that caused a savage episode of global warming.
200
million years ago: three-quarters
of species were lost, again most likely due to another huge outburst of
volcanism. It left the Earth clear for dinosaurs to flourish.
65 million years ago: A giant asteroid impact
on Mexico, just after large volcanic eruptions in what is now India, saw the
end of the dinosaurs and ammonites. Mammals, and eventually humans, took
advantage.
There
have been many theories around the decimation of species at this time, now
called the Anthropocene Epoch (the rise of humans) and the conditions that have
caused global warming and climate change which are now
manifested in extreme and catastrophic weather, floods and drought; as well as
global conditions such as coral reef bleaching, the rise and spread of
vector-borne diseases among other phenomena.
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| We need to maintain old forests and plant new trees, collect plastic, consume less, but more and more, we all need to be doing everything all the time... to reduce greenhouse gases (Photo of Main Ridge Forest by Pat Ganase) |
According
to Paul R Ehrlich, professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, “One
should not need to be a scientist to know that human population growth and the
accompanying increase in human consumption are the root cause of the sixth mass
extinction we’re currently seeing. … The
human population has grown so large that roughly 40% of the Earth’s land surface
is now farmed to feed people – and none too well at that.”
The
challenge therefore seems to be to place limits on human growth: population,
production and consumption. For more than a decade, the popular approach has
been to embed personal responsibility for the future of the planet by
“recycling.”
Recycling,
banning plastic straws, using LED lights to power homes are all low hanging
fruit - easy to do, feel-good exercises that don't really do much if everything
else remains the same. They do not tackle the bigger problems of plastic
pollution, excessive consumption, population growth and climate change. We ignore
the fact that hard changes in lifestyle have to be made in order to secure the
future of our natural ecosystems.
Faced
with the prospect of the sixth mass extinction, researchers, communities and
countries are already at work and there may indeed be hundreds of climate
change solutions being innovated around the world. Ten of these are reprinted
here from the Green America webpage. These are extracted from the publication Drawdown:
the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin
Books, 2017), edited by Paul Hawken. (Drawdown refers to the need to draw down the production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases around the world.) What some communities are doing give us reason to hope; and also inspires us to create our own initiatives.
Here
are the snapshots from Green America’s top
10 solutions to reverse climate change:
Refrigerant management:
The start of the healing of the ozone layer through discontinuation and
disposal of CFCs and HCFCs from refrigeration systems is reason for hope.
Further emissions reductions can be achieved through the management and elimination
of refrigerants already in circulation.
Onshore wind turbines:
In the USA, the wind-energy potential of just three states—Kansas, North
Dakota, and Texas—would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to
coast. The increase in wind energy from 4% to 20% of world supply would
result in substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Reduced food waste:
About one third of food produced is wasted. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of
resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial
capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when
organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin.
Adoption of a plant-rich diet:
Business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through
adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet (which includes
cheese, milk, and eggs). The model also calculates a reduction in global
mortality of six to ten percent.
Tropical Forest Restoration:
Given the interconnectedness
of people and forests, a particular framework for restoration has emerged:
forest landscape restoration. The approach, proposed by the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization, means “regarding the landscape as an integrated
whole ... looking at different land uses together, their connections,
interactions, and a mosaic of [restoration] interventions.”
It means there is no
single formula for forest restoration. Making restoration a collaborative
process can ensure it is done with and for local communities, and that root
causes of forest damage are addressed.
Educating girls: Education is the most powerful lever available
for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, while mitigating emissions
by curbing population growth.
Education also shores up
resilience to climate change impacts. For example, a 2013 study found that
educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor
associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.” This
decreased vulnerability also extends to their children, families, and the
elderly.
Family planning: 225 million women in lower-income countries
say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but
lack the necessary access to contraception—resulting in some 74 million
unwanted pregnancies each year. The need persists in some high-income countries
as well, including the USA, where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended.
Solar Farms: Solar farms are large-scale arrays of
hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, in some cases, millions of
panels that achieve generating capacity in the tens or hundreds of megawatts.
These solar farms operate at utility scale, more like conventional power plants
in the amount of electricity they produce.
Silvopasture: From the Latin for “forest” and “grazing,”
silvopasture means the integration of trees and pasture or forage into a single
system for raising livestock, from cattle and sheep to deer and ducks. Rather
than seeing trees as a weed to be removed, silvopasture integrates them into a
sustainable and symbiotic system. Silvopasture is currently practiced on 351
million acres of land globally.
Soil is the other
essential component—and key to the potential silvopasture has for mitigating
climate change. Silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass
above ground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with
trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that
are treeless.
Rooftop solar panels: Roof modules are
spreading around the world because of their affordability. Solar PV has
benefited from a virtuous cycle of falling costs, driven by incentives to
accelerate its development and implementation, economies of scale in
manufacturing, advances in panel technology, and innovative approaches for
end-user financing.
For more information,
see https://www.drawdown.org/drawdown-ecochallenge
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| Half an hour's collection on any beach. These will be used by an artist in his sculptures. |
REFERENCES
https://www.greenamerica.org/climate-change-100-reasons-hope/top-10-solutions-reverse-climate-change
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