Nick Lyth, November 2024
But this is quite new. For most of the history of the human race, the Earth we inhabited seemed to us to be infinite. With an eternal horizon, it seemed to offer a plentiful abundance for all. It seemed to be inexhaustible.
We are mostly familiar with the progress from uncharted, unexplored regions of the Earth through succeeding centuries in which more and more was discovered. Eventually, we reached a point where every pole, every peak, every desert waste was traversed, climbed and charted; where our attention moved beyond our own planet, and we started to explore space.
By the time I was born in 1954, this was roughly the case. Everest had been conquered (their word) a mere two years before, but the South Pole had been reached more than forty years earlier. The previous century had probably been the single greatest century of discovery, which is to take nothing away from the earlier explorers, Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and all their number.
But I don’t quite mean the geographical sense of our world’s limits. I am referring to its resources. Its resources are finite, and we are able to see their limits quite clearly.
The Cost of Urban Expansion and Pollution
Look at London, or Los Angeles, or Tokyo. These are among the most sophisticated and wealthy cities in the world. But they have run out of the simplest resource of all, space, while destroying the most necessary resource of all, air.
These cities reduce living space for all but the richest into something restrictive, small box-like spaces which are filled to overflowing. They turn any kind of travel into an ordeal in which the capabilities of modern transport are entirely neutralised. Vehicles capable of speeds well above 100 miles per hour rarely exceed the speed of a trotting horse for the duration of entire journeys. Worst of all are the health statistics caused by the air pollution in all of these places.
According to UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), more than half the residents of Los Angeles live in a neighbourhood that has a high exposure to at least one of five severe climate threats – extreme heat, wildfire, drought, extreme precipitation and sea-level rise. Exposure over time to the compromised air quality caused by some of these threats can lead to asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), strokes and death. The area tops all the US charts for its air pollution scores, and also, unsurprisingly, air-related health issues and mortality.
These cities seem to be emblems of the most advanced societies our modern civilisation has created with access to all the technological miracles of the modern world. Yet they are symptomatic of something quite opposite, the break-down of every standard of living a child would consider desirable for his or her future life. These are no longer available because we have used up the resources required to provide those standards.
At this point in history, however, it would be true to say of all these cities that, in the main, they are still able to feed themselves, keep themselves warm (or cool) in winter or summer, to access the health care and medical assistance they need for support. Yes, issues such as homelessness, child poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime, are real issues. But they always have been in large cities.
At this point in history, in other words, these cities seem to be stable and in balance. But they are not. They are on a knife-edge. Each of the situations described above only needs to become fractionally worse before complete break-down is reached.
In other words, we are engaged in the deepest form of habitat destruction of which we are capable. We are destroying our own habitat. It is only a matter of time before these huge cities become uninhabitable.
Habitat Destruction: Threats Beyond Biodiversity
Habitat destruction has been talked of a lot in recent years, in the context of the natural world. (We are foolish to disconnect our world from the Natural World, and talk of Natural History as if it is distinct from human history, even celebrating it with its own Museum. But we are part of nature, we are animals ourselves.) We have lamented the habitat destruction of recent decades, and its effects on other species of animal and plant life. Biodiversity. A word that was far from the lips of most people in the 20th century has entered common usage in recent years. It is always mentioned when deploring its loss, and its loss is always partially attributed to habitat destruction, either from the effects of human urbanisation, or from the effects of climate change, or both.
The habitats of a wide variety of animal, plant, insect, marine life have been poisoned, desertified, recalibrated, built over, to combine in destroying the potential for them to maintain life. The statistics showing the scale of this destruction are endless and frightening. WWF (World Wildlife Fund) restricted its 2022 study to animal life, but was comprehensive in that respect. Its summary gives an average decline of 69% since 1970 of wildlife populations. More than two thirds. And getting worse all the time.
All the studies show how no species can live in a habitat that cannot provide the resources it requires for life. But this is what Biodiversity discussions never mention: neither can we.
However, this is not a shock, nor even a new thought. We do already know this. We have seen illustrations of the human species destroying its own habitat, and we can see the consequences. Human life is starved out of existence in these places, when migration has not been possible. It is being starved out of existence now in the places of origin of the migrants who have become such a contentious political issue in the UK and US. Jared Diamond demonstrates how this happens in his book, Collapse (pub. 2011, Penguin Books). It includes well known examples of self-destruction like Easter Island, but also much less familiar examples of some Native American tribes, popularly held up as exemplary custodians of their natural habitats, which were in fact the very opposite and condemned themselves to oblivion as a result.
The Problems of COP29
Now we need to see that the same applies to all of us. It is simple, whether Donald Trump likes it or not. Jared Diamond’s examples revolve around the staples: food, water, energy supplies. It is much simpler than that. We cannot live if we cannot survive in the escalating temperatures now familiar in southern European summers, some of the southern states of the US, India and parts of Africa. We cannot survive if we cannot breathe the air.
These are simple points which need to be stated simply. We are now in the midst of COP29, from which many different and positive agreements and policy decisions are emerging. But it is very complex. There are so many different priorities, and ideas as to how to deal with them, that it takes a long time simply to read through and study the outcomes. The translation of these outcomes subsequently into practical action is a worse problem that has long dogged the COPs. So many of the declarative statements made at these conferences never become more than good intentions, and we know which road is paved with those.
I fear that our tendency towards this kind of complexity has its own dangers, which are all too easy for Donald Trump to exploit. He can assert the fallacy of climate change science when so many of the crucial points are hidden behind arguments and ideas that can be made to appear specious.
The consequence, then, of the exploitation of disarray by Donald Trump and his many supporters is that we will find we have not prepared ourselves for what is actually happening.
Everyone who sees and understands how deep these problems are, and how irresponsible Donald Trump and his supporters are, needs to redouble efforts to find solutions that will correct the problems. Despair is not an option, whatever the vogue for dystopian film and literature may imply. Solutions are there for us to find, so let’s use the energy we once used to find the limits of our Earth to find the solutions we now need to maintain human and other life upon it.