A wrap-up of 2023’s major climate events.
Image: AI-created on perchance.org
Global trends
We had multiple days in 2023 where global temperatures were more than 2˚C greater than pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement states that governments should aim to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5˚C, so this trend of increasing temperatures is alarming.
The estimation for this year’s average temperatures is around +1.40˚ – 1.46˚C above pre-industrial norms, +0.13˚C higher than the hottest year on record, 2016. This will make 2023 the hottest year since records began.
In terms of carbon dioxide, levels in the atmosphere are 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.
Scientists across the globe are alarmed at the rate of change in climatic conditions shown in 2023. They are concerned because 20 of the 35 different “vital signs” for the health of the planetary system are now at record extreme levels. Read the Plurality.eco article about this here.
Month by month
In February, Cyclone Gabrielle hit the upper North Island of New Zealand, causing severe damage to homes and agricultural land. It was declared the worst storm to hit New Zealand this century.
In March, Cyclone Freddy hit Madagascar, Mozambique and Malawi, causing severe damage, and affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Cyclone Freddy travelled 10,000km over 35 days, making it the longest, and also the most powerful storm ever recorded. Mozambique received the same amount of rain in one month that it would normally get in a year.
Long-term drought conditions continued to worsen in Central and South America, with rainfall 20-50% lower than normal in the first half of the year.
Record-breaking temperatures were recorded in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, with temperatures reaching 49-50˚C in July.
The deadliest wildfire in more than 100 years of US history occurred in Hawaii at the beginning of August. At least 99 people lost their lives, and whole towns were burned to the ground.
June-July-August 2023, the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, were the hottest experienced on Earth for at least the past 120,000 years. The average global temperature was 16.77˚C.
In September, Cyclone Daniel caused extreme rainfall and flooding in Greece, Turkey, Libya and Bulgaria, with a heavy loss of lives in Libya in September.
October was the most humid month since weather records began. This is due to higher-than-normal global temperatures and the El Nino weather event.
The COP28 conference finished mid-December in the United Arab Emirates, where the major discussion was about the phase-out of fossil fuels. 2,500 fossil-fuel lobbyists attended the conference. The President of the Conference, the Sultan Al Jaber, declared that there was no scientific proof behind the phase-out of fossil fuels. The Conference is, despite this, one of the only places where each country can have its voice heard, including developing countries who often speak about climate justice.
The World Meteorological Association provided an overview of climate events in 2023 here.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
It’s easy to forget the climate events that have happened this year, especially when news cycles are so short, and new information and events are appearing each day. Taking the time to look at events such as climate change over the space of a year can help us to understand just how this phenomenon is affecting us, across the world. Climate change is not coming, it is most certainly already here. As the IPCC’s Sixth Synthesis Report pointed out, it’s what we do now that will determine how bad the effects will be in the coming years.
More on climate science...
To understand more about the climate crisis, and the larger ecological crisis, read our article What is the Ecological Crisis here.
To read about the climate science that we currently have, from the IPCC report earlier this year, read our summary article here.
To read about what we know about biodiversity and ecosystem services, check out our article on the IPBES report here.
You can also donate to Plurality.eco, to support articles like this breaking down climate science and bringing a balanced perspective to the climate debate.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
On social media
Need some help to get to the next stage of your ecological journey?
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
Copyright © Plurality.eco 2024
2023 Surprises Scientists at Pace and Scale of Climate Change
Have we passed the point of no return with the climate and planetary systems? The warning signs are there.
Image: AI-created on perchance.org
Since 2019, a group of scientists have published a “State of the Climate” article which discusses some of the major climate events and climate-related research to date. The 2019 article declared a climate emergency, which has since been signed by 15,000 scientists worldwide. The 2023 article by Ripple et. al has just been published in BioScience here: The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory.
2023 has been particularly notable as a year of climate instability, major climate disasters, and records being broken by huge margins. Scientists are concerned because 20 of the 35 different “vital signs” for the health of the planetary system are now at record extreme levels.
The authors write, “The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected.”
The authors, climate scientists, are surprised by the magnitude of the changes we are seeing: “Even more striking are the enormous margins by which 2023 conditions are exceeding past extremes.” As we see in the image, following the red line for 2023 shows huge differences compared to past norms on these six different metrics for climate change.
Why are scientists surprised?
Climate science has always been approximative – we make the best guesses we can about the possibility of extreme weather events in the years to come, but this is only based on the information we know about the climate. The existence of so-called ‘tipping points’ is not necessarily something that exists in nature, but rather a way for human beings to mark out the point at which a system which was previously quite stable, becomes very unstable. Just when and where these tipping points are, and what causes them to be reached, is still the topic of much scientific research.
Because we still know so little about the climate system, and the Earth’s other regulating systems, it’s difficult to know whether the predictions that have been made will be accurate in the future. It would seem that the rise in unpredictable climate events has occurred sooner than we thought – many climate scientists have predicted reaching or passing tipping points around 2030. However, we may have already gone too far, and already passed the point at which the planet can cope with our activities.
350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the goal we have for a safe and stable climate system. In 2023, we reached 420 parts per million, and this number is increasing year-on-year. Global emissions are not decreasing, which they must do in order for humanity to confront the climate crisis.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
The challenge for scientists
The article reads a little bit like something from the film Don’t Look Up, which explored the emotions scientists feel towards societies which don’t act in the face of a disaster. In the film, the group of scientists who discovered that a meteorite was going to destroy life on Earth attempted to warn people, but in the end, those in charge and some parts of the population chose not to listen to these warnings – and not to act in the face of them. In the face of this, the scientists became emotional – angry, sad – and therefore lost the objectivity that we like to think science has.
The series of State of the Climate articles are hotly debated amongst scientists for their lack of real rigour, and the inclusion of moral sentiments and the promotion of certain solutions. The group of scientists responsible for these articles have started talking about what we should and should not do, rather than just presenting what we know about the situation. Is this the role of the scientist?
For example, the report states “We also call to stabilize and gradually decrease the human population with gender justice through voluntary family planning and by supporting women’s and girls’ education and rights, which reduces fertility rates and raises the standard of living (Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018).”
Is the reduction of the human population through fertility control an acceptable conclusion for a scientist to make about climate change? And is an article on the state of the climate the right place for this kind of opinion?
It is difficult for scientists to balance the care they feel towards their lives, their loved ones, their countries, and planet Earth, with the requirement that we place on them to be objective and only present what we know as fact.
The report also relies a lot on media reports, and includes photographs of climate-related damage. We could also ask, is this kind of strategy, to elicit an emotional response in a scientific article, the right way to present information to other scientists and the public? Or does it, once again, cost us the objectivity that we require of the sciences?
Being a climate scientist and reporting on the state of the climate is tough. Especially when the facts paint a very distressing picture of the future of life on planet Earth. That is why it’s particularly important to act now. Every tenth of a degree of warming sets up a more hospitable future. You can act to reduce your emissions, talk to your local council or Member of Parliament about their plans to respond to climate change, and try to discuss climate change with your friends and family.
More on climate science...
To understand more about the climate crisis, and the larger ecological crisis, read our article What is the Ecological Crisis here.
To read about the climate science that we currently have, from the IPCC report earlier this year, read our summary article here.
To read about what we know about biodiversity and ecosystem services, check out our article on the IPBES report here.
You can also donate to Plurality.eco, to support articles like this breaking down climate science and bringing a balanced perspective to the climate debate.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
What is deep ecology?
Perspectives in political ecology series
The aim of this series of articles is to delve into the different perspectives in political ecology. It is absolutely not the case that there is only one way to address climate change. There are, in fact, many! More technology, carbon removal, and business as usual is but one way of confronting the crisis, and this approach misses the mark in so many ways. Read on to discover what deep ecology is, who its founders were, and whether we see many deep ecology movements amongst climate activists today.
The basic definition
The term deep ecology was coined by Arne Naess in 1973, with his article, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A summary.” Naess sought to point out the difference between certain ecological movements which viewed problems in silos, and believed that each could be treated with technical fixes and economic policies; and those which sought deeper systemic or structural change in spiritual and social systems.
Shallow ecology, therefore, is a particular approach to the ecological crisis which identifies particular problems, and proposes technological or instrumental solutions to these problems. For example, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem, and we can solve this through carbon capture technologies which will be developed to take the carbon out. We don’t look at the production systems that cause this carbon dioxide to be in the atmosphere, or the other, related problems. Many of the environmental policies that we see today from governments across the world take a shallow ecology approach to the crisis: we can keep going, and keep growing, we just need small modifications to stop the worst parts of our production and consumption.
Deep ecology, on the other hand, does take all these problems as being interconnected in one large web. For Naess, deep ecology also comes with certain commitments relating to the order and structure of beings in the world, and a certain ethical view, too.
The two main traits of deep ecology are the following:
- A belief in the fundamental importance of self-realisation. This means that each human should be able to set and achieve their goals and develop themselves as they see fit in any society. Deep ecology extends this to include all living beings, too. Therefore, all bears, birds, fish, snakes, spiders, wasps and more, should be able to flourish on earth, all at the same time as humans are.
- The belief that human beings are not at the centre of the universe (a rejection of anthropocentrism). Ecocentrism is the position that all forms of life are important because they are alive on this planet, and this gives them the rights to live in ways that allow them to flourish. All life forms, and a diversity of life forms, are valuable in their own right. This means that human beings are no longer the masters of nature, the possessors of nature, nor do they have any divine or supreme right to the use of natural resources. The idea that human beings are at the top of the evolutionary pyramid is arbitrary, and this view poses that there is a web, a net, or a fabric of relations, in which the human being is just one part.
Deep ecology says that the reason that we are going wrong is because we have badly evaluated the place that we as human beings occupy in nature. If we are to confront the challenges we face, we have to re-evaluate this, and change our perspective on who we are as human beings in, and with, nature.
Furthermore, Naess posits that a view of cooperation, rather than competition, should be had towards species in nature. He writes, “live and let live is much better than Either you or me.” He also notes that nature, and ecological systems, are complex, but not complicated. This implies a division of labour, not a fragmentation of labour in the way beings work together. Finally, Naess advocates for decentralisation and localisation, so that structures can be developed that reflect the local landscape and ecology in which the human beings live.
The leading theoreticians of deep ecology
Already mentioned is Arne Naess (1912-2009), who was a Norwegian philosopher and writer on environmental issues. He was the youngest person to be appointed full professor at the University of Oslo in 1939, and was the only philosophy professor in the country at the time. He also was a prolific mountaineer, and engaged in several protest actions throughout his life to prevent the destruction of the environment.
Naess created an 8-point platform upon which a deep ecology movement could be founded, with fellow American environmentalist George Sessions, in 1984. These eight points are:
- The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves…. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
- Richness and diversity…contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
- Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
- Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
- The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
- Policies must therefore be changed…[to] affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures.…
- The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality…rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.…
- Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.
Warwick Fox (b. 1954), an Australian-British environmentalist and Professor at the University of Lancashire in the UK, is another key thinker in developing the deep ecology movement from the ethical point of view. For a decade beginning in 1984, he worked to primarily on deep ecology, before shifting away from this to consider environmental ethics more globally. “Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism” is his main work on deep ecology, where he writes that deep ecology has three main ideas:
- The development of a non-anthropocentric or ecocentric worldview,
- The idea that we should ask deep questions about our relationship with the natural world, and what this means, and
- The importance of cultivating a wider relationship with different forms of life around us.
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) was another key thinker, or source of inspiration for the deep ecology movement. He is often not cited as a deep ecologist, because of some key differences in his thinking, despite their belonging to deep ecology at first glance. He was one of the ‘fathers’ of the ecological consciousness in the United States, as well as the environmental ethics movements.
Leopold believed that instead of each individual being able to realise his or her own goals in life, the community or group was more important. The community was prioritised over the individual, and should be so in our thinking and policy decisions regarding our relationship to nature.
Leopold also fought for the idea that we do not only have rights to certain resources, but also responsibilities towards nature. He believed that we shouldn’t be giving people money to fulfill their responsibilities towards the natural world; rather, their mere existence on this planet meant that they have the duty to fulfill these obligations.
Central to the thinking of all these people is an idea of egalitarianism amongst all living beings. Human beings cease to be the master species on earth, and instead, all forms of life have equal value and importance on earth. Likewise, they all encourage us to reflect on our relationship with nature, and propose that we should relate more to nature, sometimes in a spiritual way, other times in a metaphorical way.
Earth First, founded by David Foreman (1946-2022) and some of his friends in the southwestern United States, is perhaps the most radical example of a deep ecology movement. Their widely referenced belief was that human beings are parasites on the planet, and should be placed last, rather than first, in the hierarchy of species. This anti-human thinking was too much for many humans who believe in the human race at least to some degree. These radical ecologists refuse to go to commissions or talk to politicians, instead preferring eco-terrorism, protests, blockages, and other radical means to stop environmental destruction. There are now chapters of Earth First in many countries across the globe.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
Critiques of the deep ecology movement
On a theoretical level, one of the main problems with deep ecology is that we always end up back in an anthropocentric worldview, no matter how hard we try.
Take for example, the belief that all life has value on earth, and all species are intrinsically important. This idea of value requires an evaluator – someone or thing who can decide what has value on Earth and what does not. This evaluator could only be a human being, because value is a human concept. Despite all life being equally important, there is still one species who is deciding this fact and enacting its consequences.
Furthermore, deep ecology is often charged with being anti-humanist, or worse, anti-human. Humanism is the view that the human being is at the centre of thought in the world, and values the development of human qualities, the love of humanity, the fight against oppression, and more. Humanism constructs a vision of the ideal human, and, by definition, this human is not-nature. Humanism implies anthropocentrism, one of the main things that deep ecology seeks to challenge. Therefore, many deep ecologists are do not mind being anti-humanist, because it is this very thinking, they believe, that has caused the problems in the first place.
Deep-ecology is also sometimes referred to as being fascist, which is a mistaken view, but does have some truth to it. Critiques often talk about the fact that the Nazis in Germany liked writing about nature, and fantasised about their relationship with nature, and therefore that the deep ecology movement is somehow related to National Socialism in Germany. This is incorrect. However, what deep ecology could lead to is a form of ecological totalitarianism, whereby the efficiency of the ecosystem, or the rights of all beings, are taken administratively to be the highest goal, with other things such as human needs, or culture, becoming unimportant to a particular politician. This is not inherent to the deep ecology view; rather a possible manifestation of deep ecology that should be avoided. Arne Naess is rather anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian: he asks that each human being search for the meaning of their own life, and that the possibilities be afforded to them to be able to do so.
Deep ecologists also sometimes discuss the problem of population and the overconsumption of resources. Each year, human beings consume more and more resources, at a faster rate, and therefore consume more than one planet’s worth of resources per year to meet their supposed needs. Deep ecologists like Naess as well as other ecologists such as James Lovelock (the Gaia theorist) have supported a reduction of the human population. The optimal human population, according to them, sits somewhere between 100 million and 500 million. The problem with this, however, is that there is no ethical or morally justifiable way of reducing the human population without imposing some kind of rule on who can, and who cannot, have children.
Finally, the deep ecology perspective is often situated in religious or ideological contexts. People such as American Joanna Macey mix Buddhism and deep ecology to advocate for a return to nature and the natural world. There is something spiritual about the deep ecology movement, and the changing relationship that this movement advocates between humans and nature often forces us to think in spiritual or somewhat imaginary ways. For some, this approach works and is necessary; for others more scientistic in nature, this is another criticism of deep ecology.
In summary
The deep ecology perspective, and the movement that accompanies it, seeks to challenge the position of the human being in nature. Instead of being on top of the hierarchy, or standing outside of nature, human beings are embedded in the natural fabric that makes up nature, and are but one species in this fabric. Rights to resources are to be accorded to all living beings, and not just to human beings.
Deep ecology has challenged how we relate with nature, and has promoted an awareness of all other life forms on the planet. It proposes radical political changes, like giving rights to all living beings, which in practice seem, at least at this stage, quite difficult to implement.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
A history of ecology
Ecology is a relatively new science, and an extremely complex one to pin down. It’s also stuck between competing world views which mean that sometimes ecological information can be used to justify something when in fact it can only support an argument, rather than justify it. Knowing the history of ecology means that we can better understand the role it plays in our societies and the considerations of our future planet.
Ecology is the discipline which studies phenomena such as climate change, the extinction of species, global temperature increases, sea level rises, and more. Some 200 years ago, ecology wasn’t really a thing, and even biology only really began to be developed as a separate science in the 19th century. The origins of exploring the relationship between humans and nature using the scientific method are much more recent than we might think. However, the discovery of climate change and the potentials for increased carbon dioxide to warm the atmosphere are not as recent as we often make out. In fact, in as early as 1863, British physician Joseph Tyndall suggested that carbon dioxide and water could potentially provoke a change in climatic conditions, based on his studies of the absorption of light by gases.
There are some challenges to writing a history of ecology, not least the fact that each country, culture, religion, and people have a different relationship to or with nature. This means that their ‘ecology’ or ‘economy of nature’ will be different. What we commonly call ecology in the English-speaking world has largely been influenced by North American research and priorities, mostly in military and security. Other countries, such as Russia, have contributed much to ecological science historically, however the Soviet Union regimes have meant that this did not continue. Māori have their own relationships to nature, and each iwi or tribe will relate to their environment in a different way. Is the study of this ecology? Or is this something else? In this article on the history of ecology, we’ll stick to understanding ecology in a scientific and mostly western sense, drawing on the history of the study of natural relationships from a scientific perspective. This does not mean that other, indigenous cultures do not have an ecology, or that their ecologies are not important. Rather, we should understand their relationships to nature using their language and in their context.
What is ecology?
Ecology, broadly speaking, is the study of living beings and the relationships between them, between these beings and their environment, and of the biological factors of the environment. Ecology studies things like ecosystems, which are specific containers of life on earth which work according to certain patterns and tendencies. Ecology also studies the biosphere, or the whole area in which living beings exist on the planet. In more recent times, ecology has been more focused on the relationship between humans and nature, than other relationships. This is because of the discovery that human beings are destroying the continued viability of life on earth through their production and consumption activity. This destruction has manifested in climate change, the acidification of oceans, rising sea levels, rising temperatures, the loss of animal and plant species, and much more.
There is a problem in defining what the boundaries of ecology are, however. Think about how we use the word ‘ecosystem’ or ‘climate’ to talk about start-ups or just groups or communities of things. These are terms which are proper to ecology, and not to other disciplines or areas of life. But if ecology is the study of ecosystems, then we must say which type of ecosystem we are studying: probably not the start-up ecosystem, that’s for sure! There are also an increasing number of small disciplines appearing, which branch off from ecology, such as the ecology of gender, ecology of words, ecology of music, and much more. These are more difficult to place, because ecology does look at the relationships between living beings, therefore, between human beings, too.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
A quick overview of the stages in ecology’s history
Yannick Mahrane writes that there are three main stages in the development of ecology (in “Ecology: Know and Govern Nature” (French)). Each stage relies on a different metaphor or way of seeing nature, which influences the nature of the science that is being performed. Other writers will discuss the development of ecology in terms of paradigms, or main assumptions that theorists make. Yet more will talk about ecology in terms of the debate between holistic theories, which view the earth or living beings as a united system, and reductionist theories, which look at the parts of these systems separately.
According to Mahrane, the first stage of ecology was from the word’s coining by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, until the end of the Second World War in 1945. This period was characterised by the study of plants, which developed in order to control territories, regulate and improve agricultural production, and learn about how plants functioned through institutions such as Botanic Gardens. These scientists had an organicist ontology, meaning they viewed the world as a unified whole, and organisms within this system are constantly changing and evolving.
The second stage of ecological development is from 1945 until the middle of the 1970’s. This stage is characterised by a formal, mathematical ecology, which functioned on a culture of engineering and geo-engineering. This is when we saw the large attempts to build domes and controlled environments by people such as Buckminster Fuller, which ultimately failed. These ecologists thought in mechanistic and cybernetic terms, meaning that they viewed the world as composed of mechanical parts which all needed to be understood in order to understand the whole. This viewpoint is also called reductionist.
The final stage in ecological development is from the late 1970’s until today. Here, ecology becomes influenced by neoliberal politics. We begin to view ecosystems as providing us with services, which need to be accounted for and managed. Managerial ecology views nature as something to be directed, and human beings are the designated managers of this nature, performing a very similar role to managers in companies. Economic rationality, in terms of resources, production, consumption, and more, are key to the viewpoint that this kind of ecology takes.
The beginnings of ecology
We could think that ecology first began as a systematic study of nature with Aristotle’s natural science, in Ancient Greece. This was not called ecology at the time, but Aristotle made detailed observations of many animal and plant species, noting their qualities and relationships, and drawing differences between the varieties and species that he found. Theophrastus, around the same time as Aristotle, also commented on the relationships between living beings.
The second possible beginning of ecology is with Carl von Linné’s economy of nature, entitled Systema Naturae, spanning 3 volumes and 2,300 pages. His method was to identify, name and describe as many different species as he could find, and determine the hierarchy or relationship between these different beings.
Biology as a science began to appear in the 19th century, and people such as revolutionary biologist and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin began positing their hypotheses concerning the natural world, and how this natural world had developed. At the same time, Ernst Haeckel in Germany begins referring to something he calls oekologie (ecology) – the economy of nature, which he defines as the study of the relations between organisms:
“By ecology, we mean the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the “conditions of existence.” These are partly organic, partly inorganic in nature; both, as we have shown, are of the greatest significance for the form of organisms, for they force them to become adapted.” E. Haeckel, 1866 Generelle Morphologie der Organismen.
This definition of ecology will be expanded upon, throughout the rest of the history of ecology, because ecology does not only study living beings, but also the environment, the ocean, the soils, and more. It also is concerned with other types of living and non-living things, not only that which we would normally call ‘organisms.’
The invention of some key concepts in ecology
In the late 19th century, there were some central developments that helped ecology to become a domain in its own right. These were the invention of the concept of the biosphere, and the creation of ecology’s research method, the quadrant.
In 1875, Austrian geologist Edward Suess invented the term biosphere. He did this in the context of a changing Europe: no longer was Europe composed of feudal communities; rather the industrial development and the creation of nation states was beginning to change the way people lived, and saw the world. This increase in industrial action and production meant that people began studying the impact and the relationship between humans and nature. They could see that something was happening, and that landscapes were changing, so scientists began investigating this.
It would only be in 1926 that the idea of the biosphere could really take hold, as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian philosopher and ecologist, Vladimir Vernadsky. In his book, The Biosphere, he posits that life is the geological force that shapes the earth, and that terrestrial life can be considered as a totality – in a global sense. Instead of thinking about small localised ecological events, there is a linking and intimate relationship between all life on earth. This concept of the biosphere is one view in the holistic perspective in ecology.
Across the Atlantic in the United States, Frederick Clements developed the concept of the quadrant: a square, usually 5 metres wide and 5 metres across, in which all life forms would be studied to build a picture of a particular area. Clements wrote a how-to guide for ecology, measuring out quadrats, counting species, and measuring conditions. It was later that more statistical and sophisticated measurements were added to these methods, to reach the forms that we have today.
The ecosystem
The idea of the ecosystem is another key concept in ecology that has only grown in popularity since its coining in 1935. It was not, however, until the 1950s that ecosystems became a central notion for ecologists worldwide.
Between the World Wars, most ecological thinking was dominated by Clements’ theories, which considered ecological communities as organisms and associations, buoyed by his methodology of the quadrant. British ecologist Arthur Tansley developed the idea of an ecosystem in his work “The use and abuse of vegetational terms and concepts” to once again shift the paradigm in ecology. His interest in ecology, as for most ecologists, was due to a larger scale industrial revolution, and an increasing globalisation, which were beginning to reveal negative flow-on effects on the environment, and on our ability to produce food for larger populations.
Tansley considers ecological communities as totalities, and not separate species with no relations between them. This again is a holistic perspective. The ecosystem is a way of referring to these ecological communities of related plants and species in a particular place. However, Tansley is very keen to point out that the ecosystem is not a given concept in nature: we cannot see ‘ecosystems’ nor can we find them somewhere. Rather, ecosystems are mental abstractions, ways of seeing communities of living beings, such that we can better study and understand the relationships between living beings in a particular area. We should not forget that ecology produces models of the world, and all models are wrong – they are simplistic representations of what reality is actually like, but we use them because they help us to understand what the world is like.
Linked to the idea of the ecosystem is the particular relation within this system between living beings, called the niche. Charles Elton, the pioneer of animal ecology, used this term to describe the place occupied by a particular being in relation to other beings. The niche is “the position of the animal in its environment and its relations to its food and to its enemies.” (Animal Ecology, p. 63-64).
Another paradigm shift, this time with energy
As industrial societies began to electrify large parts of the home and office, energy transformation and electricity transfer became important topics in the minds of many scientists. This change did not escape ecology, with Howard Odum, a North American ecologist, positing that energy is a universal perspective through which we can see the world, particularly in the way that human beings use nature. Photosynthesis – the way that plants capture energy from the sun – is one such way of considering energy transfers, and opens up a realm of considerations regarding the efficiency with which plants convert energy into mass or food that we can eat.
Along with Odum, Raymond Lindeman believed that ecosystems were actually thermodynamic systems, which exchanged energy with their environments. An ecosystem could be seen and determined through analysing energy transfers. Take a corn field, for example. The corn plants take up nutrients and water from the soil, and sunlight from the sun, which they convert into energy in order to grow the plants. Other organisms in the corn field, like the worms in the soil, the bugs on the plants, etc. all take energy from their surroundings, and convert it into energy that they can use to sustain their life. Human beings do the same thing – we eat food and drink water, which we extract molecules of glucose from, in order to have the energy to perform.
The third paradigm shift: mathematical ecology
Between the two World Wars – the late 1910’s and the late 1940’s – ecology was in its golden age, as Jean-Paul Delèage put it.
The first attempts at mathematical ecology were with Thomas Malthus’ writings on human population. In 1798, he published “An Essay on the Principle of the Human Population” where he compares human population growth to resource availability on Earth. He notes that human populations double: they follow the pattern, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32… Resources, and our subsistence, however, grows following an incremental increase: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Eventually you will have a population of 256, but resources will have only grown to 9 – therefore showing that at a certain point there are limits to population growth, because of a lack of resources available for these populations.
Along with this conclusion, resources were becoming scarce and ecological problems were beginning to emerge in the growth of food and the availability of wood for fuel. Mathematical and statistical formulations became a key way of understanding, and therefore predicting, what would happen in certain ecosystems that were crucial to human survival.
Alfred Lotka (in 1925) and Vito Volterra (in 1926) produced ecological models for competition and predation in nature. They wanted to find out how certain animals became the prey of other animals, and what this did to their populations, depending upon the population of the predator. Central to their ideas was the observation that animals in nature seemed to compete for resources and space, and the availability of these things determined the relative success of their populations.
The introduction of past events into these models by these two researchers meant that the models became more complex. It also gave a sense of history to the things that were happening in nature: what happens now depended upon what happened in the past, and we began to be able to make mathematical connections between past and present, and therefore understand what might happen in the future.
Edward Wilson then built upon these ideas, which were for him too simplistic, to develop the idea of dynamic equilibrium. These mathematical models were reductionist – they wanted to understand species, and could not include in their models all the conditions that affected the populations of a specific species – climate, food, predators, other species, catastrophes, viruses, bacteria, and more.
The idea of an equilibrium is similar to that which we find in economics, and Yannick Mahrane suggests that there is a link between the era in which the idea of market equilibrium took hold in Western societies, and when it became an ecological concept, too. Wilson’s idea is that species in a particular ecosystem will reach a stable point of equilibrium, where certain populations are able to be maintained according to the resources. When something in the ecosystem is disturbed, these relative populations will change – the point of equilibrium will move and re-establish itself at different levels to before.
The theory of Gaia
Building upon this idea of equilibrium and changing points of stability, British scientists James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis developed the hypothesis of Gaia, which unified the concepts of biosphere and equilibrium in the science of ecology.
The Gaia hypothesis sees the earth as a living being itself, which is capable of self-regulation and self-organisation of the climatic conditions and the life forms that exist on the planet. This system, called Gaia, is much larger and more inclusive than the biosphere; it includes places where there is no life as well, such as the atmosphere, the oceans, and the rocks.
The key part of the Gaia hypothesis is that the living beings on the planet participate themselves in the regulation of temperatures and the composition of the surface of the planet. By breathing in and out, we take out oxygen, and release carbon dioxide. Trees take up that carbon dioxide, and release oxygen. The earth is no longer just something that is there, created in a certain way; rather it is the product of the life forms that have inhabited it. The proof for this hypothesis is the fact that many millions of years ago, when life first formed, there was no oxygen on the planet. Through the activity of bacteria, however, oxygen was released into the atmosphere, and then reached a stable level of around 21% of the atmosphere, which was the most ideal composition for the regeneration of forests, the growth of other species, etc. This world, therefore, is the best possible world for those species that are living on it, because they have participated in creating the conditions that now exist to support life.
This theory is termed a hypothesis because it is still hotly debated. The main reason for this is that the theory posits a certain teleological finality to the planet: there is a goal to the evolution of life on earth. It is not just random happenings that occur in certain ways that just so happened to create life and sustain life. This goes against much of the fundamentals of the sciences. Furthermore, the theory is supported by certain life forms above ground, but in the oceans, marine life seems to be much more determined by nutrient availability than temperature or composition.
We can, as Stephen Schneider suggests, take a key conclusion from this theory as truth: that organisms interact and co-determine their destiny. What this destiny may be is not defined, nor is it possible to know, but what we can know is that different forms of life are interrelated and are involved in determining the success of other forms of life on Earth.
The human being in ecology
As we became more aware of the fact that human beings are affecting the composition of the atmosphere, the quality of the soils, and the viability of other life forms on the planet, the object that ecology studied began to change. Instead of looking at ecosystems, ecologists began to study the biosphere – the totality of life on earth – in more detail.
Looking through the history of human civilisations, we can see a very strong correlation between the climatic conditions at a particular period in time, and the economic success of these civilisations. Although the ancient civilisation of the Maya in South America did not decline solely because of ecological reasons, the destruction of forests and the disruption of the water cycle contributed to the collapse of this civilisation. The cultivation of corn was the main factor in this disruption, and as they tried to grow more corn, they disturbed larger parts of the ecosystem upon which they were reliant.
Pierre Gourou, a French geographer, noted that “there is no crisis in the usage of nature that is not also a crisis in the way of life of mankind.” Our relationships with nature became more and more important as objects of study and analysis, to find out how we were changing the ecosystems in which we lived, and the biosphere as a whole. In the United States, and other countries, large areas of land have been rendered unusable and infertile because of the industrial agricultural methods that were, and to some extent still are, used to grow food for both humans and cattle that we eventually eat.
Ecologists, and political or literary ecologists, began to think about where this problem might have come from. Why and how did we get into this mess? These more theoretical and philosophical forms of ecology began to flourish around the 1970’s, and are perhaps still in their main growth phase today. Lynn White in her 1967 essay, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” traces back the origins of this relationship to nature to the Bible: we were told that God had given us the Earth to have dominion over, and to fill this Earth with our own kind. Francis Bacon, an English philosopher and statesman in the 16th century, made clear that human beings were the centre of the universe, and had absolute authority over all things on Earth.
The 21st century ecologist is therefore confronted with the question of the place of the human being in the biosphere. What role do they have? What impact do they have? And how can they live with, or without, nature? These questions are just as much scientific as they are philosophical, which is why ecology is now a discipline at the crossroads between multiple different areas of study and research.
Ecology is also still very much in a phase determined by neoliberal economic theory, whereby accounting for and quantifying resources and outputs is crucial to the work of many ecologists. Carbon accounting is but one example of this kind of ecology, whereby we attempt to figure out the carbon emissions of each resource and good on the market, and each process or action undertaken in society, so that we can develop an overview of the carbon emitted per year, per country. Once we can measure and know about it, then we can solve it: so would say the technologically-minded politician or leader.
Ecology has many challenges in the 21st century, not least the need to research the ongoing impact of human beings on the planetary systems and climate conditions. The challenges that ecology faces are only increasing, however, with the rise of a distrust in international organisations such as the IPBES and the IPCC, both tasked with reporting on the human impact on nature, as well as climate-skepticism, climate reassurism (those who say we don’t need to worry about climate change), and scientism (those who believe that science will solve all the problems). Disseminating and communicating the research and results of ecology, as well as the nuances about the predictions made and methodologies used in ecology, is another incredibly difficult task.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
IPCC Synthesis Report: what we do now will determine the future impact of climate change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have finished their sixth cycle of reporting. They published the conclusions of this research in a report released in March 2023.
In late March 2023, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the final synthesis report of around a decade of research and investigation into climate change and its impacts and effects. This report is incredibly important, as it shows us an overview of what we currently know at a global level, as well as a regional level, about the impacts climate change might have on our environment. The report contains the best guesses about what could happen, and presents future scenarios with different levels of global warming to show us what these futures might be like. What’s clear is that each tenth of a degree makes a difference to the damage that will be caused by human-induced climate change.
Unfortunately, there was not much fanfare or media reporting in New Zealand when the report was released. A look on the Climate page of Stuff’s website 3 weeks after its release shows nothing regarding the report, and to find the articles they did publish requires searching through their archives. Looking at the articles, no news media site seemed to take the time to explain the whole report, its importance, and what NZ could do off the back of this evidence.
What is the IPCC and why is this report important?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC for short, is the organisation set up by the United Nations (UN) to coordinate and report on climate change science across the globe. It comprises scientists from member nations of the UN, each a specialist in their field of climate research in their country.
The IPCC is divided into three Working Groups, who focus on different areas of climate change research. The first group works on the physical science of climate change; the second on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and the third on mitigation of climate change. There are also Task Groups which focus on research in specific areas such as gender-related impacts as a result of climate change.
The IPCC have reporting cycles, meaning that approximately every seven years they release three large reports, one from each Working Group, and a synthesis report, which summarises the findings over this period. In 2022-23, they released their sixth cycle of reports (AR6), which discuss the changes in climate science since 2014, when the fifth cycle was published. The report published in March 2023 was the final report in the cycle, synthesising the findings and delivering important conclusions and possibilities for action for governments worldwide (link to the report).
It’s important to note that the IPCC do not recommend anything, nor are they in the business of making promises of what will happen. They discuss the information that they have gathered through the scientific method, which comes with varying levels of certainty, depending upon many other factors, such as the availability of data, the extent to which this data has been verified, and the likelihood of certain scenarios. The IPCC reports can tell us the overall impact of certain policies, but they will not tell us what to do or how to do it.
We must therefore be careful when reading articles which quote a conclusion from the IPCC report, attempting to defend the arguments of a particular person. The report does not justify actions, but provides evidence for the possible outcomes of global warming. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is of interest to the scientists; just how we go about that is of interest to politicians.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
The main conclusions of the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Cycle
There are several important conclusions drawn by the report that all citizens should be aware of, if they are to understand climate change and its current and potential future impacts. These are the following:
- Global warming has already resulted in a temperature increase of 1.1 degrees Celsius in the period 2011-2020, compared with 1850-1900.
- Time is running out. There is a rapidly closing window of action to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all, and if we do not see a rapid and severe decline in greenhouse gas emissions, we will not keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, and therefore the challenges will become more complex and the impacts and risks more severe. The next 10 years are crucial.
- Each tenth of a degree counts. Each tenth of a degree of warming results in greater losses and damages, and risks that become much harder to predict and to manage. Current measurements are showing the state of the planet is worse than was predicted in the previous report.
- Vulnerable populations are the first and hardest hit by climate change. These populations are less developed countries, indigenous peoples, low-income families, and those living in low-lying and coastal regions and small islands. 3.3-3.6 billion people live in highly vulnerable places to the effects of climate change.
- There is a gap between what we are currently doing, and what we should be doing to both meet our targets and keep global warming within the 1.5-degree threshold. Continuing our current trajectory will result in 3.2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.
- All models desiring to limit the impacts of climate change at least somewhat involve a necessary “rapid, deep, and in most cases immediate reduction in CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors.”
- Cross-sector, multidisciplinary and democratic approaches are the best ways to implement and adapt to climate change, as well as mitigate losses. Working with indigenous knowledge, working with diverse approaches, working with vulnerable populations, and involving all stakeholders in decision making leads to better outcomes.
- It is more likely than not that we will hit at least 1.5 degrees of warming in the early 2030’s, however we do have hope. We can still limit warming to 1.5 degrees. The only way to do this would be through large, severe cuts in emissions across all sectors and all developed nations on the planet.
The estimates: What will happen at different levels of warming?
The image below contains the IPCC’s estimates for all geographic regions at different levels of warming. The first scenario is for 1.5 degrees of warming, the last for 4 degrees of warming. As you can see, the impact gets more and more severe, as the average temperature increases.
The report notes that every region is projected to increasingly experience extreme weather events, which happen concurrently. This means that both hottest temperatures will increase, and lowest temperatures will decrease, as well as there being increased precipitation and risk of rain-caused flooding in most regions, increased fire risk, tropical cyclone risk, and drought risk.
For other terrestrial species like insects, mammals, birds, etc., of the tens of thousands of species surveyed, between 3-14% of them face a very high risk of extinction at 1.5 degrees of warming. Coral reefs are projected to decline a further 70-90% at 1.5 degrees – these may very well become something that exist only in our memories.
Alongside these ecosystem changes, we can expect changes to the availability of food, and therefore increases in nutritional deficiencies among those in highly vulnerable regions; increases in pathogens and diseases, heat-related deaths, and more. As the temperature increase rises, so does the complexity of managing the effects of this increase.
Current policy action vs necessary policy action: the enormous gap
If the policies and agreements in place in 2020 such as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, were continued along their current trajectory, we would in no case reach net-zero emissions, nor keep warming to 1.5 degrees. There is a large gap between the current policies in place, and what needs to be done in order to respond to the dangers that we just saw above.
In the case of finance, globally we need 3-6 times more investment in climate-related programmes, initiatives, innovations, strategies, and knowledge production, averaged between now and 2030, if we are to limit the effects of global warming. In the Australia, Japan and New Zealand region, this figure is 3 times more at the lower estimate, and 7 times more at the higher estimate. For places like the Middle East, a much, much larger investment is required, with 14-28 times the current investment required to mitigate the effects of climate change. The report notes that “There is sufficient global capital and liquidity to close global investment gaps, given the size of the global financial system.” Factors within and outside the global financial system act as barriers to stop this from happening.
The most important conclusion of the report is that what we do between now and the early 2030s, is what will make the most difference to the impacts of climate change for all future generations. Sea levels will keep rising for millennia, but just how much they rise is determined by how we choose to respond today. As you see in the above image, when we choose early action, we can set a trajectory towards a brighter, more stable, and more liveable future. If we make bad choices now, we put ourselves on the pathway towards greater destruction, pain and suffering in the future.
The good thing is that the report highlights the interrelatedness of the Sustainable Development Goals and the work being done to mitigate the effects of climate change and adapt to new realities. In places where we eradicate poverty, ensure clean air and water supplies, and educate all young people, we not only look after the ecosystems and allow communities to reduce their emissions, but also improve the wellbeing and living standards of these people. There may be some trade-offs between climate mitigation and sustainable development, but there are significant mutual benefits, too.
What can we do about climate change?
The Synthesis Report considers many different possibilities for climate action. These possibilities are both at the individual and collective level. Have a look at the image below, and you will see the various estimated impacts of particular solutions, as well as their relative costs to implement. The largest light blue bars represent low-cost high impact solutions, such as solar and wind energy, electricity efficiency, and public and goods transportation including cycling.
Things that we can choose to act on ourselves include our diet and lifestyle choices. As we can see, shifting to sustainable healthy diets with more plant-based foods and less animal products such as meat and dairy has a reasonably large potential impact. Likewise with reducing food loss and food waste – only buying what we need and making use of all of it can go a long way to reducing emissions.
Similarly, transportation choices make a big difference. Walking or cycling are the lowest-emission options, closely followed by public transportation. A fuel-efficient vehicle or electric vehicle if you do need to use a car also makes a big difference. Our shopping choices also make a difference, opting for efficient lighting, efficient household appliances, and other electronics which require lower energy supplies helps to reduce emissions.
This individual impact is summarised in the Demand-side impacts section at the bottom of the image. Sobriety, that is, making the choice to live a low-emissions, low-energy, low-consumption lifestyle, has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70%. Given that each tenth of a degree counts, these lifestyle and shopping choices makes a real difference.
Most of the impact does however come from the institutions which make up a society, including government, businesses, and energy production. We can’t make the choice to use solar or wind power unless we have a large investment ready to purchase an autonomous power supply for our own roof, but our energy companies can make the decisions to stop fossil fuel energy production. Solar and wind energy are low cost and high impact solutions. Stopping deforestation and the destruction of natural ecosystems is a reasonably low-cost solution which likewise has a large impact. These kinds of decisions are the policies we need to see our politicians enacting, if they are to demonstrate that they have understood the problems we will face due to climate change.
The report puts specific emphasis on the fact that justice and inclusion are particularly important in the response to climate change.
“4.4 Actions that prioritise equity, climate justice, social justice and inclusion lead to more sustainable outcomes, co-benefits, reduce trade-offs, support transformative change and advance climate resilient development. Adaptation responses are immediately needed to reduce rising climate risks, especially for the most vulnerable. Equity, inclusion and just transitions are key to progress on adaptation and deeper societal ambitions for accelerated mitigation. (high confidence)”
Likewise, solutions that involve multiple stakeholders, and which are arrived at through collaborative means, have far-reaching impacts beyond just the state of the planet:
“4.9 The feasibility, effectiveness and benefits of mitigation and adaptation actions are increased when multi-sectoral solutions are undertaken that cut across systems. When such options are combined with broader sustainable development objectives, they can yield greater benefits for human well- being, social equity and justice, and ecosystem and planetary health.”
Some policy ideas
We need to demand more from our politicians, because as the report clearly states, current trajectories are not sufficient to mitigate the effects of climate change. As a reminder, current efforts put us on track to reach 3.2 degrees of warming by 2100. That means, if you are now 30-40 years old, and we continue as we are, your children or grandchildren will be living in a highly uninhabitable world with large-scale economic and ecological damage.
Here are some things New Zealand and other developed countries could do on the back of the IPCC’s Synthesis Report. These are not part of the report, as the IPCC is not involved in making recommendations or telling us what to do; rather they are my own ideas based on the evidence we find in the report.
- Stop all fossil fuel subsidies, spend the money saved on vulnerable populations.
- Convert 100% of electricity grid to renewable (solar, wind as first choices)
- Small scale grant programme for community ecology and environment initiatives (max $20,000 per year, per initiative for example)
- Banning greenwashing with severe punishments, increasing requirements on green advertising, carbon reporting, and introduce mandatory emissions labelling
- 1 day per week environmental work scheme, paid for by the Government (instead of working at your workplace, you opt to work in local government, or other associations on environmental issues, and your daily salary paid for by Government).
- New Zealand international cooperation with low-lying Pacific nations on a much larger scale.
- Free ecological and environmental studies programmes, climate change information sessions for all NZ citizens.
- Investment priority in public transportation, cycling and pedestrians. Development of road and car projects scaled back significantly. Bike and electric bike rebates (50% off up to $500 per citizen for example).
Moving from science to action
The report is serious and sobering reading. It’s quite tough to think about what the world might look like in 20 years’ time. One of the best ways to confront this is through taking practical action steps in your own life to reduce your ecological impact and your emissions. Here are three ways you can transform your new knowledge into action immediately:
You can calculate your approximate carbon footprint using the NZ-based calculator FutureFit here.
You could think about diet and lifestyle changes that you could implement, focusing on food, transportation and energy use. How can you live better, with less?
You can have a conversation at your workplace about your company’s emissions and ecological impact. Push for more measurements of emissions, and more ambitious emissions reductions targets. Use the information in this article to help you talk about what the dangers of climate change might be, and why we should act now.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
A simple guide to the Global Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
One of the best ways to learn about the ecological crisis is through the reports issued by collaborations between many international scientists. These offer a global and diverse perspective on just what is happening at each corner of the globe, as well as a synthesis of the many different articles published each week on the climate and biodiversity loss.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) has 123 member countries, and in 2019 released their 1,000-page report on the state of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Part of the reason why these kinds of reports don’t appear in the news in most countries is simply because they are too large and too complex for any journalist without ecological training to understand. Even with the summary at the beginning, they tend to be filled with ecological terminology and scientific language which isn’t easily accessible for a wide audience.
What is the report about exactly? It’s a collaboration between different governments on the recent changes in the systems of planet Earth, caused by human activity. They look into what the causes of the changes to the Earth’s systems are, why and how the systems are changing, and what this might mean for us going forward. Instead of studying one particular ecosystem by a beach or in a field somewhere, this study brings together research and experience from across the planet to see what is going on, on a global scale. Much of the research has been done since the 1970’s, when world governments first became aware of just how bad things were getting.
The main idea is to see the trends over the past 50 years, and what these trends might mean for the next 30 years, between now and 2050, if we continue down the current path. The researchers also examine other possible scenarios based on popular approaches to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss at the global scale.
The good aspects of this report are its specific emphasis on indigenous and local knowledge systems, its inclusion of diverse perspectives and worldviews, and a gender-diverse team of scientists and researchers. Together they seek to explain the connections between humans and nature, and the impact that human beings are having on Papatūānuku Mother Earth.
The main conclusions
Over the past 50 years, the human population has doubled, the global economy has grown fourfold, and at the same time, ecosystems are increasingly struggling to keep up with this level of development, and are at risk of collapsing in every country on the planet, even with land managed by indigenous peoples. Biodiversity is projected to continue to decline, and human demand for natural resources is projected to increase.
The factors that have caused these changes in Earth’s systems have been changes in land and sea use (for forestry, agriculture, etc.), direct exploitation of organisms, such as hunting, fishing, etc., climate change caused by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, pollution both of the atmosphere and the soil and water systems, and what they call the ‘invasion of alien species,’ animals and plants that are not normally found in a particular landscape but have been brought in by humans and have taken over that landscape. All of these factors are directly related to human use of natural resources – both in order to meet our needs, and in some cases in attempts to sequester carbon into the ground, which also causes ecosystem disruption.
This disruption of ecosystems threatens their stability – if you start rocking a rowing boat side to side, you have a greater chance of capsizing – which is exactly what is happening here. Only, once we have capsized, or completely disrupted the systems that feed us and meet our needs, we have no idea how to restore them.
Another problem is that we are losing variety in our species of plants and animals, which is also threatening the ability of these systems to combat the other changes that are happening around them. This is called a loss of genetic diversity, and more generally, a loss of biodiversity. As a result, agricultural systems are less and less able to resist pests, pathogens, and the ravages caused by climate change.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
Progress made so far and trends for the future
The report has a frank and alarming conclusion regarding how we are currently faring with regard to biodiversity and ecosystem services: “Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors.”
What they mean here is that if we continue as we are, adding small modifications to systems in place and pulling economic levers to solve the problem, we will not meet the Sustainable Development Goals (for 2030) nor the Aichi Biodiversity Targets (from 2020). Current ecological decline is projected to undermine progress made in 80% of the Sustainable Development Goals. We cannot solve the current problems by doing more of what we are doing now: it simply won’t work; we will just go backwards.
These international and diverse scientists, using research published internationally, support transformational change. By transformational change, they mean “a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic, and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”
This is much more than just letting the emissions trading scheme do its thing. It’s also much more than increasing conservation efforts, and planting more trees. Systemic changes at the economic and social level means reorganising our systems of production and agriculture, it means consuming less and producing less waste, and ultimately, it means abandoning our “current limited economic paradigm of economic growth.” Growth cannot lead us forward and confront the ecological crisis, if we want to save our biodiversity and our ecosystems; the very systems that enable us to live on Earth.
What about the other projected scenarios? The authors state, “The negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios in response to indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption and associated technological development.”
One of the major problems of technological development is the enormous amounts of energy and resources it requires to put into place. Even development such as renewable energy like solar and wind power are incredibly resource-hungry, and the only solution to reverse this ecosystem decline is to decrease our energy and resource consumption, not provide more energy in supposedly sustainable ways.
The most effective ways to change
There are many ways in which we can address the ecological crisis. The report states that according to many other studies done internationally, the following are effective ways to create large-scale changes:
- Promoting alternative visions of a good life
- Lowering total consumption and waste
- Unleashing widely-held values of responsibility towards the Earth, to create new norms for sustainability and action
- Addressing inequalities on the social/economic levels
- Ensuring inclusion of diverse perspectives including indigenous people in justice claims and conservation efforts
- Accounting for the environmental degradation caused by economic efforts, both locally and abroad
- Ensuring environmentally friendly technology, innovation and investment
- Education, sharing and generating new knowledge, and maintenance of different indigenous knowledge systems.
Lack of knowledge and resources is still a very large problem and barrier to acting further to stop biodiversity loss. There are still a lot of knowledge gaps, and areas where we simply don’t know enough, or don’t have enough certainty about the effects of current human action, and potential solutions, to be able to evaluate and design new courses of action.
Recent additions the report
In November 2022, some of the authors of the main report published a follow-up article about which factors were causing the greatest damage to ecosystems and resulting in the greatest loss of biodiversity: “The direct drivers of recent global anthropogenic biodiversity loss.” The report looks at the research published after 2005, to provide an overview of the factors which are having the greatest impact.
Current discussions in New Zealand and on a global level focus almost exclusively on climate change, but as the report shows, climate change is the third most important factor causing ecosystem disruption.
Land and sea use change, mainly in the form of rapid expansion and intensifying management of land used for growing crops or keeping animals, was the number one contributor to ecosystem and biodiversity decline. The second greatest cause was direct exploitation of land, through fishing, logging, hunting, and the wildlife trade. These factors had a significantly greater impact on biodiversity loss than climate change.
The article concludes that “combatting climate change will not be enough to prevent or possibly even slow the loss of biodiversity.” They return to the need for transformative change, by tackling the root causes of biodiversity loss, which are not just economic, but demographic, socioeconomic, and technological, as well as governance structures that keep these systems in place.
What next?
The report is sober reading. It spells out the potential decline of the very systems that support life on Earth. If we lose the insects that pollenate our food crops, the water cycles that regulate and clean our water, and the plants that are resistant to pests and environmental changes, then we have very, very little chance of surviving as a population of 8-12 billion human beings. This is a serious and quite depressing conclusion.
All is not lost, however. It is still possible to conserve the biodiversity that we have – each and every plant and animal species is important, and the faster we can stop destroying ecosystems and begin to allow them to restore themselves, the more likely we will be able to continue as humans.
One of the things that you can do, if you’re really interested in gardening, is to ensure maximum diversity of plants in your garden, including heritage varieties of foods like tomatoes and beans, as well as planting flowers and cover crops to provide homes for insects and microorganisms to grow. This should be done in consultation with a local ecologist, who can tell you the best way to make your local area as biodiverse as possible.
For those who work in corporate environments, we should be asking ourselves, which of the levers for change above are we promoting and actively participating in, in our workplace and through our business? Are we lowering total consumption and waste? Are we looking after indigenous knowledge systems? Are we promoting alternative visions of the good life, that don’t mean more and more consumption, but something else? Are we accounting for the negative impacts of our business on the environment, and then trying to minimise this impact? There is a lot to be done, but if each community, each business, and each person begins to change, then the transformative structural changes that need to take place will be much easier to put into place.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
What is the Ecological Crisis?
Climate change, global warming, sustainability, environmental management… What is all this really about? And why should we be worried?
At this point, in early 2023, I think it’s safe to say that everyone in Western liberal democracies like New Zealand has heard of climate change and global warming. They might deny it, or think it’s not important, but we all know that there is a theory out there which says that the climate is changing.
Quite a few people will have also heard of environmental protection. Perhaps people who work in business-related contexts will have heard of environmental and social governance (ESG) which has become a buzz word in these circles. Sustainability is also something we read about everywhere, and a lot of the things we buy have labels or packaging which make reference to sustainability.
Why are sustainability and environmental protection important? What is actually going on? Climate change is referred to as a bad thing, and the environment must need some kind of help or management if we have a Ministry for the Environment, but what is the problem exactly?
As we’ll see, the problem is more complicated than just different weather patterns and hotter summers. It also extends much further than the icebergs in Antarctica.
The Meadows Report and the Great Acceleration
In 1972, a report was published by Club of Rome researchers Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III. This report, called The Limits to Growth, set off alarm bells in many organisations and governments throughout the world. For the first time, we had evidence that a serious crisis was, and would continue to be affecting not just human beings, but the whole planet. Despite the fact that we had known about the effects of industrial farming, capitalist production, and other human activities on local environments since at least the 18th century, this report was one of the first high profile papers to state, very dramatically, the potential future of the whole planet.
This report analysed global trends in many things, and saw that in nearly every category, growth was no longer linear, but instead was exponential. Today we might have three, and tomorrow nine, and in seven days’ time 2,187. Exponential growth means the rate at which this growth occurs is always increasing.
These trends are now known as ‘The Great Acceleration’. The image below represents this, and shows the increases in measures including the number of McDonald’s restaurants, as well as the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere.
The report had three main conclusions. These conclusions would influence Margaret Thatcher’s energy policy in the United Kingdom, and act as a motivator for Al Gore’s political ambitions in the United States. Here are the conclusions, straight from the report:
- If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
- It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
- If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success. [Meadows et. al, 1972 p. 23-24]
There are, therefore, two possibilities: human beings will be in trouble, their populations will decline, and their capacities to meet their basic needs will become less and less sure. Or, human beings will begin to change things, and have a greater chance of not being in this situation.
When Emmanuel Macron said in January 2023 to the French people, “who could have predicted the climate crisis?”, he must have been quite misinformed. Or perhaps he thought that people were sufficiently uninformed about climate change to be able to fool them with his words. In fact, world leaders have known about the real and disastrous possible outcomes of humanity’s impact on the environment for the past 50 years.
Global Warming and Climate Change
One thing that was measured in this report was the average temperatures at various locations around the world. Records in different countries began at different times, but we can use other measurement tools to determine what temperatures would have been like.
In New Zealand, temperatures have, on average, been increasing since the middle of the 20th century. Now, almost all regions in New Zealand are experiencing increased temperatures, and meteorologists (weather experts) have declared that there is a warming trend in these regions, meaning temperatures are likely to keep increasing.
The increase in temperature is what we call global warming: the earth is getting, on average, hotter.
Why do small temperature changes matter? NASA explain that “A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land masses by that much. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.”
We can even make estimates about the global temperatures as far back as 20,000 years ago – the last time Earth was in the Ice Age. One of the characteristics of the current period in the Earth’s history is the relatively stable temperatures and climatic conditions. Remember that Earth hasn’t always had a stable amount of oxygen in the air, and it hasn’t always had the temperatures that we now experience.
Can you see how dramatic the increase in global temperature has been, since around 1950, compared with all other temperature increases in the past 20,000 years? The red line is a prediction of what will happen if we do not act to stop global warming, up until 2100. An increase as steep as the one we are seeing now has never been experienced before on planet Earth.
Another measure was the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide that was in the air. The increases in these gases in the atmosphere is what is causing the increases in temperature. The increase in these gases, as the Meadows report demonstrates, and many scientists have shown in the past 50 years, is caused by human industrial activity on the planet.
Climate change, therefore, is the term that we use to refer to the effects of this temperature increase. When temperatures get warmer, icebergs in the Arctic and Antarctic begin to melt, which causes sea levels to rise. The rate of extreme weather events increases. Rain stops falling in some locations, including central United States. Some parts of the world will become unliveable, as is already becoming the case in parts of India and the Middle East, where temperatures in summer are consistently above 50 degrees Celsius.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
The wider ecological problem
Climate change and global warming are not the only things to be affected by human industrial activity. This activity is also damaging many other parts of the Earth’s systems, which is proving to have disastrous effects.
In 2009, Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre brought together a team of 28 international scientists to discuss how we could measure the different changes in the environment. Climate and temperature were only one piece of the puzzle.
Their solution was to develop a series of nine planetary boundaries. These boundaries represent the nine different factors which contribute to the flourishing of life – human, animal and plant life – on the planet. These are the most important ingredients, if you will, for life to continue the way it has done for thousands of years.
Just like in a baking recipe, if you add too much of something, the cake is ruined. The same goes for the nine planetary boundaries – once we have too much pollution in our air, our oceans become too acidic, or our water supplies damaged, then the possibilities for life to flourish become greatly reduced.
At the end of 2021, humanity had crossed the boundaries of four of the nine different categories. In January 2022, humanity passed the fifth of nine, which was the amount of chemical pollution in our biological systems. In May 2022, we passed the sixth of nine planetary boundaries: that of the fresh water cycle, and in particular for green water. This refers to the humidity of the soil, and the flow of water through the soil systems. When the earth is too dry, and water stops flowing, it is as if the blood flow of a human being has slowed or stopped: life becomes unsupportable.
In the image below, the green area is the area within which life can be properly sustained. This is called the ‘safe zone’. Beyond this, the risks of collapse increase, as does the viability of life on Earth.
The idea of planetary boundaries is not without critique, however (Biermann and Kim, 2020). In actual fact, there is no determinable ‘boundary’ which can be measured and set. According to researchers at the National Centre for Research in France (CNRS), we generally can only figure out the point at which this boundary lies after the whole system has been disrupted, at which point we have the information to see where the tipping point was (Callioce, 2020). We use these ideas and representations as metaphors and images, to help us understand what is going on in the environment, rather than hard and fast truths about the way the Earth works.
The other problem is that these boundaries are interrelated. Changing the status of one of them can lead to large changes in other areas of the Earth’s systems. One simple example is the fact that more acidic oceans lead to decreases in biodiversity, as fewer species are able to survive in more acidic environments. We see this in the bleaching and dying out of coral reefs across the planet.
The ecological crisis
Now that we have been through the various aspects of the ecological problem, let’s tie it all together. What is the ecological problem?
We know the following things:
- The relationship between the activities of human beings and the Earth’s biological systems is evident, and well-demonstrated. Currently, this relationship weighs heavily on these systems, disrupting, destroying, and even eradicating them.
- The causes of this disruption are varied, but most certainly human. These include the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the development of non-degradable materials such as plastics which stay in the system for thousands of years, the increases in industrial agriculture which has destroyed soil and water systems, producing other greenhouse gases, and more.
- The biological systems that we are disturbing are the very same systems that support life on this planet. It is because of these systems, and the stable conditions that they have created, that life has been able to flourish on Earth.
- The conclusion that ecologists have reached is that this disruption and destruction of the Earth is unsustainable, because Earth’s resources are limited, and its systems are fragile. We are putting the very possibility of life in danger, because these systems are changing in ways that are hostile to life as we know it.
We can see that this understanding of the ecological problem is much, much larger than politicians, companies, and many ecologists would have us believe.
Much of the current debate is centred around the question of emissions. Whilst this is important, the ecological problem is not simply a question of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and consequently too great a carbon footprint for each person in most Western countries. The problems are more varied and complex than this one indicator which has become popularised to the point that it has become vulgar, symbolic of a larger problem but taken, by those who do not know better, to be the only problem.
This is evident in the commitments that countries have made in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in each country. This approach ignores the larger conclusions which ecologists have clearly drawn: it is not just the fact that we extract fossil fuels and burn them that is the problem; it is our very relationship with nature itself, it is our way of life which the planet cannot support.
To conclude
The ecological crisis is that the Earth’s systems are being destroyed in ways that will make Earth a more hostile place for almost all forms of life. The conditions that supported the flourishing of life, and of human beings, are no longer present on Earth. This has happened because of the industrial actions of human beings.
Here on the Plurality site, we use the term ‘ecological crisis’ instead of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ or ‘environmental problem’ to refer to what’s going on. The problem is much bigger than just the fact that the climate is changing. In fact, this could be the biggest crisis humanity has ever had to face.
When you’re talking about the environment with your friends and family next, try to discuss the ecological crisis with them. Drawing people’s attention to the fact that climate change is just one part of the crisis is important, so that we are able to see just what we are up against when it comes to policy and lifestyle changes.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
Global Carbon Inequalities
Carbon emissions are far from equal. Rich people seem to emit more than poor people, and rich countries more than poor ones. Just how bad are global carbon inequalities?
We often hear organisations in New Zealand asking for climate justice. The Fridays for Future movement started by Greta Thunberg and continued in New Zealand by some of our young people is but one example of a climate justice movement. One of the things that we can do to measure climate justice is to by looking at the different emissions of different sectors of the population.
New Zealand’s Government-supported climate action website, GenLess.govt.nz, seems to have misunderstood the whole idea of carbon emissions. In a colourful and celebratory picture, they declare that New Zealand has the fourth highest carbon emissions per capita in the OECD! That actually means, the fourth worst country among all the other rich countries!
To help any wary readers of this Government site out, and for those of you interested in learning more about carbon emissions, here is an explanation of carbon emissions and how they can be compared to show the level of inequality in countries around the world.
How do we calculate carbon emissions per capita (per person)? This is done by measuring the total emissions of a particular country, including all greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide…), and determining the share of these emissions for each person in the country. Because some citizens are wealthier than others, they tend to emit a lot more than people who are less wealthy. This is for many reasons: sometimes these people believe they need to travel a lot and so have large transport emissions; other times they buy expensive and high-polluting items such as private jets; and most have high-consumption lifestyles which require large amounts of resources in order to sustain.
We make these measurements by figuring out the amount of all the greenhouse gases that we produce, and converting these into a carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e. We have this equivalent because each gas warms the planet differently – methane for example is much stronger than carbon dioxide, meaning it warms the planet faster with the same amount of gas. (See this article from MIT to read more about this). This number is then expressed in tonnes, which is the mass of gases that we are producing over a given time frame.
The inequality aspect of this measure of carbon emissions is a way of determining the difference between those who are more wealthy, and therefore emit a lot, and those who are less wealthy, and therefore emit much less. The greater the inequality, the greater the difference between wealthy and less-wealthy populations.
Carbon Emissions in New Zealand
In New Zealand, things are quite bad. We have a very unequal distribution of carbon emissions. On average each New Zealander emits 15.18 tonnes of CO2e per year. To put that into perspective, if we are to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming, we can each emit 1.1 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year. To stay within 2 degrees of warming, we can each emit 3.4 tonnes per year. Our annual emissions are therefore, on average, 5 times what they should be if we are to limit the impact of global warming on our planet. Why do we need to limit the warming of the planet? See the article here (coming soon).
In fact, the bottom 50% of income earners, so half of New Zealand’s population, only emit 8.2 tonnes of CO2e per year. However, the wealthiest 10% of New Zealanders emit 45.89 tonnes per year, and the top 1% emit a staggering 139.1 tonnes per year. This top 1% of the population use up the carbon budget of nearly 41 people, each year.
Is there something wrong with carbon inequality?
Imagine that we were on a ship. On this voyage we have enough food to sustain everyone on the ship for the whole trip, plus a little bit more. But, one of these people decides that he’s going to eat much more than his allocated share – enough for 41 people. He starts eating, and day by day the food supply decreases for the whole crew abord the ship.
Is there a problem here? There’s no contract saying that this person can only consume his portion of the food each day. He’s free to eat as much as he wants. But the more he eats, the more other people will starve.
Some people will respond to this by saying that on this ship, it’s a matter of survival of the fittest. This person is acting in his interests to eat as much as he can. After all, he’s allowed to, and if he loves food, then why should we stop him?
Others will respond that in fact this person’s actions are wrong. They are eating more than their fair share of food, and as a result, other people will go hungry in the future. By being on the boat, there is an implicit understanding between the people that they will each share the resources evenly, so that everyone will be nourished and healthy at the end of the voyage.
The problem comes when we ask, what shall we do with this person? Some will say – do nothing! There isn’t a problem, and we can sort out the other (malnourished) people later on. Others will say we should cut off the food supply of this person, because they have already consumed more than their own share for the whole trip. Others will argue for something in the middle.
Carbon emissions inequality is the same. For us to stay within 1.5 degrees of warming, each person is given a budget of 1.1 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year. To stay within 2 degrees of warming, we can each emit 3.4 tonnes per year. Most of us in developed countries like New Zealand will be over these limits. Certain people however have decided that they are going to emit an enormous amount more than their fair share. Much, much more.
Here we have one way of looking at climate justice. How do we make sure that each person has a similar degree of emissions, and how do we make sure that the ones who are emitting the most are the ones who bear the greatest consequences? Because, as we have seen, and will continue to see, it is always the least wealthy and most precarious people who bear the brunt of the effects of climate change.
What about the rest of the world?
In 2022, the World Inequality Database released the World Inequality Report 2022. This report contains a section on carbon inequality across the world.
On average, each person on planet Earth emits 6.6 tonnes of CO2e per year. That’s less than half the average New Zealander.
The graph from the report below shows us the carbon inequality across the planet. The least wealthy 50% of the world’s population – some 4 billion people – only emit 1.6 tonnes each per year. They’re within the limit for the Earth’s warming to be kept below 2 degrees. The middle 40% are emitting 6.6 tonnes per year. The top 1% however are emitting 110 tonnes of CO2e per year. That’s the same as 68 people in the bottom 50% of the population.
How does this compare throughout the world, when we look at different geographic regions?
The closer the difference between the three bars, blue, green, and red, the more equal a particular region is when we talk about carbon inequality. When there is a massive difference between the bars, these regions are very unequal.
What we see here is that Europe is the most equal among the regions shown here, with the top 10% emitting only 6 times more than the bottom 50%. In most other regions, however, the top 10% emit around 10 times more CO2e than the bottom 50%, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the top 10% emit 14 times more. Their top 10% only emit 7.3 tonnes each, however, compared with the top 10% of North Americans who emit 10 times that amount – 73 tonnes per year. Similarly, the poorest North Americans, on average, emit more than the richest people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and almost the same amount as the richest in South and South-East Asia.
Remember that in New Zealand, the top 10% emit 45.89 tonnes of CO2e per year, just over half that of a North American in the same wealth category.
As we can see, the world is quite an unequal place when it comes to carbon emissions. When we think about the individual carbon budgets described above, some people have a lot more effort to put in than others, if we are to meet these goals.
Critiques of emissions policy and carbon calculations
This brings up the question of scale and impact in climate change policy. For example, limiting the flights that are made by private jet, or banning these flights entirely, will impact the carbon emissions of the wealthiest 10% of the population, and have almost no impact on the rest of the population – who, for a large part, have never even been in an aeroplane.
Actions that limit the emissions of the wealthiest of our populations often have a large impact on total emissions. Policies that limit the emissions of the least wealthy people, however, often have very little impact on total emissions. We should keep this in mind when considering carbon emission-related policies.
It’s also important to keep in mind that calculating true carbon emissions and carbon dioxide equivalents is almost impossible. On large scales, we can estimate a lot of things, but many small pieces of the equation are often left out. In order to calculate the emissions relating to the four carrots you bought at the supermarket last week, the quantities emitted are so tiny they often become simply ‘0’ in the overall calculation. This means that the emissions of your consumption are dramatically lower than they would be, had we taken absolutely everything into account (which is very, very complicated and difficult to properly measure).
Another problem with carbon calculations is what we include. Often New Zealanders’ emissions are referred to as being around 6 tonnes per person, per year. This is just carbon dioxide, and doesn’t take into account other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. You can see the difference on the Our World in Data page. The website FutureFit.nz uses an average total value of 7.7 tonnes per year, which is based on a calculation done in a research paper in released in 2014, which used data from 2007.
The figure used here, 15.18 tonnes per New Zealander, per year, includes these other greenhouse gases. Therefore, the emissions related to producing dairy and meat for export is included in the average emissions total of each and every New Zealander, because this is a collective emission due to our country’s production choices. Future Fit, for example, don’t use this higher figure, because it would involve emissions that don’t directly relate to your own choices. These collective emissions are almost impossible to reduce or remove without large scale change.
We should also remember that the debate on carbon emissions is only one part of the much larger ecological problem. We’re also acidifying the seas, destroying natural resources, losing biodiversity through more animals becoming extinct, degrading the quality of our water and soil, and more. Air pollution is part of the changes in weather and temperature that we are seeing. However, managing only our carbon emissions is insufficient to deal with the ecological problems that we are facing.
From a more methodological perspective, carbon emissions and carbon accounting can be a good thing, as a statistic. This measurement can bring our attention to inequalities, give us a rough guide of the impact of our production and consumption relative to other countries, and help us to see if we are going in the right direction with the actions we take. The numbers are also a good tool to get people motivated to reduce their score – and if through small changes, people are able to see their carbon emissions decreasing, they’re more likely to continue with these behaviours in the long term.
However, at the core of the directive to measure carbon emissions is the idea that nature and the environment are manageable resources, which can only take a certain amount of greenhouse gases before the balance is lost and life becomes threatened. This isn’t the case – for one, the environment cannot be managed and is not a quantifiable resource. Second, there is no limit beyond which the planet will be out of equilibrium. Nature doesn’t have equilibriums; rather, these are tools that ecologists use to understand the way that nature works. For more on these topics see this article (coming soon).
Looking for more?
Are you interested in knowing where you sit in terms of global wealth and income? The World Inequality Database have a handy calculator which can tell you both where you sit in New Zealand, as well as how you compare to other countries, and the rest of the world.
If you’re looking to get a rough idea of how your choices impact your total carbon emissions, you can calculate your carbon footprint at FutureFit.nz, and see how this relates to others in New Zealand, as well as what areas of your consumption are the biggest contributors to your score.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
Political Ecology dictionary
Wondering what all these new words mean in political ecology? You’ve come to the right place! Words are ordered in alphabetical order.
New words are often added, so check back soon if the word you’re looking for isn’t here yet. Or, send us a message to let us know you’d like it to be defined here.
You're reading an article on Plurality.eco, a site dedicated to understanding the ecological crisis. All our articles are free, without advertising. To stay up to date with what we publish, enter your email address below.
A
Adaptation: The response to current or expected external stimuli, or to its effects, through adjustments made to a natural or human system, either to decrease the negative effects of the stimulus, or exploit the advantages. Natural systems often adapt in spontaneous and reactive ways. Humans, however, adapt both with intention, will, and prediction, as well as in accidental and unpredictable ways. Humans (and other living beings) can adapt in groups or individually, and can adapt by changing themselves, or using external elements to their advantage (like technology).
Anthropocene: term used to refer to a new geological era, after the holocene, which is marked by the impact of humans on the earth. Exactly when the anthropocene might start is under debate – some say it is with the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, others say it’s more recent, around the 1950’s, with the beginnings of the Great Acceleration.
Anthropocentrism: refers to both a perspective on knowledge, and a moral position. As a claim about knowledge, anthropocentrism asserts that humans are at the centre of the world they inhabit: everything is seen through human eyes, rather than from the point of view of animals, rivers, etc. As a moral position, anthropocentrism refers to the idea that only human beings are capable of moral thought and judgement.
Apocalypse: often part of ecological discourse, an apocalypse is the ‘end of the world’. Which world, and just how much is destroyed, changes according to the scenario being put forward. People believe we are heading towards apocalypse often because of the lack of real measures being taken at a global and systemic level to combat the ecological crisis.
B
Biocentrism: a moral position referring to the fact that all living beings are deserving of the same rights and relationships as human beings. The Whanganui river being given the same legal rights as a human person is an example of biocentrism.
Biodiversity: often thought of as another way of saying ‘biological diversity’. This means that there are a large number of different species on the planet, each with unique characteristics developed over many years. In conservation biology, biodiversity is a way of seeing the world – a political and moral position. This position asserts that greater diversity is better for an ecosystem, and for the world, and thus we should combat the extinction of many different species.
Biopower: a term by French philosopher Michel Foucault, used to refer to a type of power which is exercised when humans are thought of as populations, in statistical and controllable ways, rather than as individuals with specific and diverse attributes. The collection of population data, along with the control of bodily procedures, and public health campaigns are all forms of biopower.
Biosphere: refers to the fine geological, physical, chemical and biological envelope on planet Earth that supports all life. The biosphere is also the habitable zone – the place where things can live and thrive.
C
Capital: Ecological economics views capital as a way of discussing the different types of matter which are moving around the economic system. There’s environmental or natural capital, like trees and vegetables and soil; social or human capital, in the form of workers, relationships, etc.; and manufactured capital – the goods that are bought and sold on the market. The current economic system considers all these things as one type of thing, resources with the same qualities, and with the idea that the goal is to accumulate more of these things.
Capitalism: the practice of the indefinite exploitation of resources in order to generate more capital, and therefore have growth in the economy. In the liberal economy, capitalism is a way of organising the production and exchange of goods and services. This is possible because of private property and freedom of exchange in the market, which is supposed to lead to an optimal distribution of resources. The goal of this system is to accumulate more capital, or wealth, often in the form of money or property.
Carbon: carbon is an element with the number 6. It is the fourth most abundant element on the Earth. Often when we read about carbon in the ecological context, people are referring to carbon dioxide, which is a natural byproduct of respiration and a greenhouse gas responsible for the warming of the planet.
Carbon budget: a carbon budget refers to the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents that a particular person, enterprise, or government can emit within a certain time frame. If we are to halt global warming, we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This means allocating a certain amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted to different parties.
Carbon footprint: the carbon footprint is an idea created by the petrol industry to push the responsibility from the industry onto the individual consumer. A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents a person puts into the atmosphere through their activities in one year. This is measured in tonnes. For us to stay within 1.5 degrees of global warming, each person can only emit 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Currently the average New Zealander emits 15.8 tonnes.
Catastrophe (and catastrophism): When unpredictable environmental events cause already vulnerable societies to break down or collapse, this results in extreme events that we call catastrophes. Catastrophism, or disaster theory, is the idea that we must employ the principle of precaution – to prepare for the impending catastrophe that we may encounter, and therefore mobilise the resources of the society to do so.
Circular Economy: this is the idea of an economy without waste, where all inputs into the economy are used by those who need them, then they re-enter the economy to be transformed into another product, for another use. The circular economy is more than just recycling, but thinking about the ‘life cycle’ of a product, and what happens after the product is no longer used.
Climate: the weather conditions of a particular location, such as wind, rain, temperature, sun exposure, etc. In environmental theory, the climate is something to be concerned about because it is responsible for the conditions of the planet which made life possible, such as fairly stable temperatures, predictable weather patterns, etc.
Climate change: this term refers to the fact that the weather conditions on the planet are changing as a result of human activities. Weather is becoming more unpredictable, and more extreme weather events are occurring, as well as global temperatures increasing, and some places becoming more dry, and others more wet.
Climate skepticism: This is not a scientific theory or a doctrine, rather a position taken up by certain individuals and organisations in order to deny the reality of climate change currently occurring, or to deny that this climate change is a problem worth worrying about. This position was common in the oil industry, where companies would create theories to sow the seeds of doubt among people, to be able to continue extracting fossil fuels and warming the earth. Nowadays, this position is popularised through sites such as Facebook, with groups dedicated to denying the reality we are facing.
Community: a group of people who maintain certain relationships because of where they live, their interests, their identities, or a shared belief. The antonym of community is a city, whereby people have relations based on impersonal connections such as the law, the government, the workplace regulations, etc.
Conservation: the idea that particular parts or species are deserving of protection, and in cases where they are disappearing, deserving of extra help and resources by humans in order to reestablish themselves. The idea that landscapes hold a certain cultural, artistic, or patrimonial value dates back as far as the 1850’s. Today conservation is about protecting the different species of animals and plants in an area, and not doing anything to further destroy areas which are deemed important or fragile.
Cooperation: a political term used to refer to the fact that many countries in the global North, which are the rich countries, are giving financial aid to countries of the South, generally less wealthy countries, in the name of cooperation and development. In general terms cooperation means working together to achieve something, and on a global scale this is happening, but often to achieve things desired by those giving the money in the North, and not to achieve goals decided by the cultures of the South.
D
Degrowth: a term much more widespread in Europe than in the Anglophone world, degrowth refers to the fact that if we are to have an ecological economy, and respond to the ecological crisis, we need to become agnostic towards growth. That means that economic growth is neither good nor bad – it’s unimportant. For some time now, we have shown that increased growth is not a measure of the health, happiness, and wellbeing of a particular nation. Infinite growth also leads to the exploitation of resources, pollution and waste, and the destruction of the planet. The idea is that we should exit this society obsessed with growth for the sake of growth, and choose another objective.
Deep Ecology: a position proposed for the first time by Arne Naess in 1973, deep ecology refers to an intellectual current making use of spirituality, religion, myth and narrative to advocate for the protection of nature and a response to the ecological crisis. Deep ecology is opposed to shallow ecology, which is concerned only with problems of pollution and resources, and not with the relationship humans have towards nature. A position which has been criticised a lot, but is still maintained today.
Deforestation: refers to the change in use of particular areas of land, through the destruction and clearing of what was previously growing on this land, such as plants, trees, etc. and the subsequent loss of habitat for the creatures that previously lived in this area. Deforestation is happening across the world, and perhaps the worst example is in Brazil, where the deforestation of the Amazon will, if it continues, cause massive changes to the Earth’s water systems.
Democracy: a form of political society originating in ancient Greece, a democracy is a society in which the citizens, each equal in rights before the law, have an equal and regular say in public decisions made by the state. Democracy is often an important part of ecological politics, but it is often also criticised. Some say that a more authoritarian approach is needed to confront the crisis, by putting into place drastic measures in short time frames. Others argue that democracy, as the governance of the people by the people for the increasing wellbeing of the people, is not compatible with ecological politics, because we cannot keep increasing our living conditions with finite resources on the planet. Others still argue that democracy is at the foundation of any ecological politics, and we will only see change when people vote in and participate in an ecological politics.
E
Ecocentrism: An alternative to anthropocentric thought, this current was developed in the 1970’s. Initially this approach was the opposite of technocentrism, which viewed the ecological crisis as a technical problem requiring the use of technology to solve it. Ecocentrists saw the larger scale of the problem and refused the reductionist approach of technocentrists. It’s not just about adding technical solutions, but also about modifying our economic system, changing our relationship with nature, and more.
Ecofeminism: A sub-current of ecology and feminism, ecofeminism sees the causes of the ecological crisis and the feminist struggle as being one and the same. Women are often the first to feel the effects, and the most vulnerable in ecological disasters. Likewise, the patriarchal system of governance and the imposition of traditional masculine values such as domination, colonisation, desire for growth no matter what consequence, etc. are root causes of the ecological crisis. Ecofeminism denounces the social and gender categories which consider human beings as all of one nature, such as ‘rational agent’ or ‘white heterosexual male from the West’.
Ecology: the science of the study of the relationships maintained by living beings with their physical and biological environment (other animal and non-animal species). Today, ecology refers to the quantitative and qualitative study of populations of living beings, of their equilibriums, and their variations in the natural conditions of life.
Ecosystem: a collection of plants, animals and other living beings living in a defined area with certain climatic and geological conditions.
Environment: strictly speaking, the environment is what surrounds a particular object, that which is exterior to it, that which is not the object itself. More commonly, however, the environment refers to something similar to ‘nature’ – trees. rivers, animals… the things which are not civilisation, not society, non-human.
Emissions: each time a fossil fuel is burned, like coal, oil or gas, this liquid is converted into a gas which enters the atmosphere. These gases, the product of burning fossil fuels, are called emissions. Emissions could also refer to all by-products of a particular activity that enter the environment.
Eurocentrism: the point of view which puts a white, Western viewpoint as the main perspective through which something should be considered, ignorant or unwilling to recognise other perspective such as indigenous knowledge.
Evolution: the idea that natural history progresses because of two things: the possibility of genetic modifications between different generations, and because of natural selection. That means that life forms change and develop because of random changes to the makeup of creatures, which makes them either better or worse at living in their environment. Charles Darwin (1809-82) is the common reference for evolutionary theory.
Exaptation: the idea in evolutionary biology that a trait might change its function during the evolutionary process. For example, bird feathers helped to keep birds warm, then might have later developed the function of flight. An alternative way at looking at adaptation, because traits do not appear to serve particular functions, rather they appear and then later become useful for certain functions. The exception precedes the norm – exaptation precedes adaptation.
F
Finance (carbon): the approach of solving the ecological crisis through manipulations made to the economic market by incentives and schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This often takes the form of carbon credits, or quotas, which can be bought and sold. People can also compensate their cardon dioxide emissions by activities such as planting trees or purchasing other’s unused credits. This approach reduces the ecological crisis to a matter of accounting, and ignores the social and environmental aspects.
G
Gaia (hypothesis): Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970’s. This hypothesis postulates that the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere where we find life on earth, is a complete and self-regulated system. Conditions such as temperature, chemical composition, oxygen, acidity, etc. are controlled directly by the living beings of the planet. The planet is able to keep the conditions for life at an optimal and stable level through certain planetary mechanisms. This is just a hypothesis, and the idea that the whole Earth is capable of regulating itself in one big system is hotly debated.
Geo-engineering: the idea that new technologies will and should be developed in order to control the environmental and climatic conditions such that life on earth can continue despite the ecological crisis. This view originated in military circles, desiring the complete control and domination over a particular environment, and looking for ways that humans could live in the most uninhabitable places. Such technologies that intentionally modify the atmosphere, and carbon-capture technologies, are part of geo-engineering projects. This projects often lead to enormous unintended consequences, which are not considered by those launching the project.
Globalisation: there are two types of globalisation – the increase in the possibilities for movement and exchange across the planet, and secondly the exportation of certain cultural norms and economic and political doctrines from countries such as the United States. The first is a good globalisation, the second is often not so appreciated. Globalisation also refers to the fact that, since we began seeing ourselves as all on one planet, we have changed our regard towards the world from a local perspective to a global one. Now it’s possible to think of all creatures on Earth, all humans on Earth, rather than just those which are in our immediate environments.
Greenwashing: the act of making it seem like someone or something is acting in ways that support the resolution of the ecological crisis, when actually they are having the opposite effect. Companies and governments are the biggest greenwashers, and we need to be vigilant to question their claims of ‘doing good’.
Growth: Most commonly thought of in biological or economic terms, this idea is inscribed in all cultures influenced by the West’s modernity. To grow is to develop, to advance, to progress, to go further… all things which are seen as good and beneficial things in Western culture. Growth is inherently tied with ideas of ‘more’ and ‘better.’ Growth in biology simply means to increase in a particular measure, such as size. A plant grows, and this is neither good nor bad.
H
Habitat: the territory used for the reproduction of a species, its eventual acclimatisation, and its development. The place of dwelling. This includes all the conditions which are necessary for the development of this particular species, including food sources, temperature, other plants and animals, materials used for construction, etc.
Homo faber: the development and use of the atomic bomb indicated a change in the power and scale of humans and their technological capacities. Instead of referring to ourselves as homo-sapiens (rational humans) an alternative proposition is homo-faber – humans who make things. Our intelligence is manifest because we transform our world, we seek to master it, understand and control it.
I
Individual: modernity installed in our societies a unit with an almost sacred value: the individual. Individuality, and individual expression, was deemed to be the highest possible form of society, where each human had freedom and was equally considered in the eyes of the law. This atomistic way of viewing people is not necessarily how they are in reality: humans are also social creatures, forming their identities through interactions and relationships, living in communities, and participating in larger projects than just those that benefit themselves.
Inequality: the fact that there exists a difference between two things, often people, in terms of a particular measurement. Inequalities often refer to the fact that certain people are treated differently to others, have more resources than others, have greater chances in life than others, etc. Free-market economists will say that inequality is not a bad thing; others will argue that inequality is inherently bad.
Investment (socially responsible): Responsible investing is an alternative route to the practices which led to the financial crisis of 2008. Recognising that investments have real-world implications, responsible investing means realising the social, environmental and governmental impacts of making a certain investment. Petrol companies for example would be evaluated not only on their oil reserves, but also their damage to the environment, their emissions of carbon dioxide, and the way they treat their employees and the people in countries where they are extracting oil.
J
Justice (climate): the field of research into how the costs, damages, and benefits of action taken on climate change will be felt and managed by people in different countries, economic groups, and localities. One group of climate justice thinkers advocate that those who have polluted the most should ‘pay’ the most, for example, the United States and other wealthy nations, resulting in these countries paying for the damage caused by climate change in other countries. Other thinkers argue that countries should be left to deal with the consequences of climate change by themselves. Others promote the idea that the atmosphere is a common space, no one country can pretend that they are doing ‘enough’ unless all countries are also pulling their weight.
Justice (environmental): this term appeared in the United States in the 1980s to refer to the actions taken by activists to redress what they believed were climate injustices, such as blocking streets, occupying land, etc. The first to feel the impacts of environmental mismanagement are often less wealthy and marginalised groups, who live and work in conditions with high pollution, and are employed to use pesticides and other toxic chemicals. These are also the groups who have the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per person, and the often the least impact on the environment in terms of pollution. Environmental justice aims to point out that those who perpetuate the destruction of environments should be the ones to face the worst of the consequences; or, at least, those who are not responsible should not be bearing the greatest burden.
K
Kaitiakitanga: the relationship based on an ethic of care and kinship bonds between human beings and their environment according to Māori. Often wrongly translated as ‘guardianship’; more correctly referred to as ‘stewardship’, keeping in mind that reciprocity is at the heart of this idea.
L
Limits: the idea of limits first became popular in the 1970’s with the release of the Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome. At the time, common ideas of progress and growth were infinite – limitless. In fact, the planet has a finite number of natural resources; there is only so much fresh water, for example, or copper, or lithium for batteries. The idea of limits is central to ecological thinking, because we must recognise that nature and the Earth is not infinite, and all-giving, but a place with certain limits and restrictions. We cannot, for example, continue to pollute carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as we are now, unless we want to become extinct. We must therefore limit our emissions, just as we must limit our consumption.
M
Management (environmental): the belief that the natural systems of the earth require the governance and decision making powers of human beings in order to function in their optimal way. Environmental management presupposed that humans can determine an optimal state for a particular ecosystem or piece of land, and then that they can achieve and maintain this state without other negative effects being had either in this system or in neighbouring systems. In 1995 a study by Holling analysed attempts to manage environments on small scales and concluded that “environmental management leads to less resilient ecosystems […] and sets the conditions for collapse.”
Market: for economists, the market is an abstract idea of the circulation of goods, services, and money. In this system, decisions are decentralised amongst the actors in the system, and because these decisions are supposedly in opposition, price becomes the means by which the market functions. In a more socio-economic sense, the market is the collection of institutions which, through their functioning, come to provide a regulated ‘space’ in which transactions can take place. An example of this would be the fruit and vegetable market, where growers and distributors can sell their food.
Modes of life, ways of living: When we speak of natural destruction, we also often speak of the erosion of ways of life too. These modes are archetypical ways in which people have lived and related in the past. Due to globalised capitalism, industrialisation, technological advances, and more, these ‘ancient’ modes of living are no longer possible to live, even if one chose to. Likewise, modes of life also refers to the ‘consumption society’ – you can choose to live a certain archetypical life, by buying certain goods and choosing to behave in certain ways. Life, and its ways, have become commodified.
Money: simply, money is a means of exchange between two parties to ensure a transaction of equal value. Money gains its legitimacy through social and political institutions and conventions, which are adhered to by the citizens in the society. There need not only be one form of money in a successful society – in the Egypt of Pharaohs, multiple monies circulated and this scheme lasted a long time. Ecological monetary theory looks into the links between the current lending and debt-creation system, and environmental destruction. Loans promote and encourage the growth-addiction that our economy suffers from, and this addiction to growth in the long term leads to environmental destruction.
N
Nature: a hotly debated word in political ecology. Some say that nature does not exist, because nature is only defined in terms of what is not-human, what is outside society, outside the human boundary. Because human beings are a part of this ‘nature’, part of the natural systems on Earth, there is no such difference between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ or ‘culture’. It’s all one. On the other hand, Western societies (and others) have for many millennia reinforced a difference between humankind, and that which is not human, in the form of plants, animals, forests, clouds, wind, etc.
Neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is a political ideology that gained in popularity after the 1929 economic crisis in Europe. Neoliberalism rejects collectivism and the recourse to the dogma of the invisible hand, letting the market regulate itself. In the 1980’s, this became a political programme and economic model with the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the U.K. and the U.S. Now, neoliberalism takes many forms: the globalisation of exchanges, global financial systems, flexibility in the labour market, commodification of the environment and natural resources, structural development plans in less-developed countries, and more.
NIMBY: an acronym meaning ‘Not In My Back Yard.” Used to refer to an attitude towards development often held by ecologists and non-ecologists alike. These people oppose the development of environmental dangers such as large waste sites, nuclear power plants, incinerators, transport infrastructures like roads, but also social infrastructure like social housing, refugee centres, etc., which are proposed to take place in close proximity to them.
O
Overshoot: this concept first appeared in 1980 by William Catton. He advocated for an entirely new approach to sociology and thus a new ecological paradigm. He explains how occidental societies support their lifestyles through excessive consumption and environmental destruction. Instead of looking at the human effects on nature, Catton looked at the environment’s effects on society; namely, that there were only a certain number of resources that we could use before our ideas of development and growth, and the possibility for deluxe lifestyles, would fall to pieces. The term is now popularised by the Earth Overshoot Days, the point at which each country has used up its annual allocation of resources, sometimes only a few months into the year.
P
Permaculture: a contraction of the words permanent and agriculture, permaculture is a form of land use which diverse forms of agriculture are used in order to create lasting and resilient production systems, where the ecosystems and farmland are maintained in their quality, or even enhanced in the long term, by the diverse strategies used. This is in order to avoid the waste and environmental destruction caused by industrial agriculture, such as loss of soil quality. plants and pests developing resistance, etc.
Petrol: for at least a century, petrol has been the most precious material to all of industrialised humanity. Without petrol, it’s unlikely that our standards of life would have improved significantly since the 18th century. However, because petrol is a resource provided by the earth in limited quantities, we will soon run out, and the grandeur of modern lifestyles will begin to decline. The burning of petrol emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is the principal cause of global warming and climate change.
Political ecology: this term has a different meaning depending on the linguistic tradition. In English, political ecology refers to the empirical and interdisciplinary science which explains the different degradations of the environment by political and economic factors at different scales. In the French tradition, however, écologie politique refers to a movement: no-one will get together to support scientific information, so we must politicise ecology, and take back control of our destiny as human beings. Ecology becomes a political force.
Pollution: an unwanted product of a particular process, which enters an environment with negative consequences for the species living in that environment. Carbon dioxide pollution causes global warming; nitrous oxide pollution causes human health problems, pollution in the form of waste being dumped in rivers kills off fish and plants in the river ecosystems, etc.
Population: a group of individuals that we put together because we believe that they have certain attributes in common, and they function together as a whole from an ecological, genetic or evolutive perspective. The viewpoint of population allows greater understanding of a particular species, but also promotes the idea that such a grouping of individuals can be controlled and managed according to certain criteria.
Principle of precaution: In the face of a potential future major disaster, it is necessary to put in place certain preventative measures in order to limit or stop the damage caused by this disaster. According to this principle, groups, companies, governments, individuals, have the duty to prevent potential major damage if they know a disaster such as climate change is coming. This principle is used by philosophers and ethicists, but also by the justice system and in law, to argue for the protection of people or places.
Progress: a grand idea forming much of the motivation for development in modernity, progress is the idea that things develop and grow along a linear line in time, and that each successive development is inherently better than the previous ones. This concept has religious foundations, coming from the idea of a positive infinity, the linear progression of time, and the destruction of the cosmic world for the scientific world after Galileo Galilei. The victory of abundance has reached its end; abundance no longer exists and the very idea of progress is brought into question in ecological politics. Just where are we going, how, and why?
Property: a three-way relationship between a thing, a person, and a group of others who agree to a particular relationship between this thing and this person. The state accepts to protect the right to ownership over particular things by individuals, companies, and other legal entities. This is what underpins the growth of capital – if I own something, you cannot use it, and must pay me for it. Property also underpins the legal system – I can bring a justice claim before the courts because I have a right to something which is exclusive, and when you breach that exclusivity, the courts see fit to punish you. Te ao tawhito, the ancient Māori world, did not function in terms of individual property, but rather in terms of collective property. Items did not belong to people; rather people belonged to nature, and items were given to them by nature to look after and use.
Prosperity: another big idea from economics linking growth to better living standards, prosperity is the idea that more is better. Ecological economist Tim Jackson is one of the world’s leading thinkers on prosperity without growth, and how we can create a new vision of a thriving human community which doesn’t depend upon economic growth and the ensuing environmental destruction.
Q
Queer: A concept often used in gender studies, but which has implications in ecology too. Queer refers to the blurring of boundaries between what has previously been defined as dualistic oppositions. Male/female is but one example. When we look at what ecology tells us about our place in nature, we see that in fact we are all interrelated, that both ecology and queer theory demand intimacy with other beings, and that ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are not clear places but rather perspectives that require a certain violence to uphold. For more on this connection, see Timothy Morton’s “Queer Ecology,” and the journal “Undercurrents.”
R
Racism: the belief that humans can be divided into specific entities called ‘races’, accompanied with the belief that some of these races are superior in nature to others. Racism is also the practice of discrimination based on the division of people by race. Anti-racism is ecological because the same mechanisms that supported a racially divided world, like colonisation and economic globalisation, and values of domination and control, are the same causes of the ecological crisis. Malcolm Ferdinand is one contemporary thinker pointing out the links between racism and ecology.
Recycling: the act of reforming a particular material, giving it another form and therefore another usage. Recycling is part of the circular economy, but not all of it. Often only very small percentages of our waste are actually recycled, and in the case of plastics, many can only be recycled a limited number of times. Recycling also requires large amounts of energy and water, which is not the case for reuse or for not consuming a particular thing in the first place.
Refugee (environmental): someone who is displaced from their original home because their environment becomes dangerous or no longer able to safely be inhabited. The environment has always been a factor for human migration, but was for some time considered less important than social and political reasons for migration. However in recent times and in the future, environmental migration will become more and more commonplace. For the moment, environmental reasons are not considered by the Geneva Convention defining the notion of refugees. Many current environmental refugees are forced to move, but do not cross their national borders.
Resilience: a concept that is important in ecological science to describe the durability of particular ecosystems or species. Resilience refers to the capacity to return to a previous state, and absorb the shock of change, or modify and adapt as a result of a change. This can be of a particular object, but also of a system or collection of things, for example an ecosystem.
Responsibility: the ecological crisis brings up the idea of responsibility often, because many feel that as humans we have a duty to care for and not destroy the environment that supports us. Previously, responsibility was oriented towards the past, and the known consequences of our acts, however now we are also called to take into account and be responsible for the future consequences of our actions. This means that driving a car now produces polluting gases which will not immediately cause 2 degrees of global warming, but in the space of the next 20 years, will most certainly do so.
Responsibility (corporate social responsibility, CSR): most of the time, just another version of greenwashing, CSR promotes the fact that companies should take care of the social aspects and impacts of their business, as well as the financial ones. As companies began growing larger and larger, their influence on the environment and on human beings grew also. Because of this, companies were called on to take more responsibility for their business actions, because of these greater impacts. The growth of CSR means we have begun to question the role of private enterprises in our society: are they just businesses, or are they also social institutions governing parts of society? And to this end, can and should they be promoting moral viewpoints towards the world?
S
Sobriety: the opposite to a society of abundance, the society of sobriety is one where everyone choose to live in more frugal manners, reducing their consumption and their waste, and therefore stopping the destruction of the environment. Sobriety breaks the link between growth and prosperity, more and better, and instead suggests that less might be better. Often portrayed in a negative light by many on all parts of the political spectrum, sobriety might just become a necessity as we get closer and closer to a climate disaster, and slowly begin to run out of key resources needed to power our societies.
Sustainable development: a contradiction in terms – it is not possible to both develop, and be sustainable. Most commonly this term means a state of development which is able to be continued into the future, or a development which respects the environmental governance agreements of world governments. Sustainable development is often used today to justify continuing business as usual with some small modifications and a new report on environmental impact, without changing core components of a system or business. Development means growth, and because the Earth doesn’t have an infinite amount of natural resources, development is never going to be truly sustainable, because at one point or another, we are going to run out.
System: a system is a group of elements or components that work in interaction with each other, according to certain fixed or random rules, that form a moving structure, able to be isolated from a particular environment or exterior. The use of the idea of systems has grown exponentially, with the advent of computer science, and now almost all disciplines speak of systems. Strictly speaking, however, it’s not entirely clear if we can speak of natural systems in the way we speak of computer systems – it’s easy to see a circuit board as a system, but biological systems are all interdependent, and therefore to conclude that a particular point is the end of one system and the start of another is sometimes quite arbitrary, or is done according to certain criteria which were decided by humans, but may not necessarily be the case.
T
Technology: refers to a specific causal world view, as well as to the devices and tools that we use in everyday life. According to the first part, technology is an ideology, the development and implementation of these tools in social and economic life. Technology has at its heart the desire to master and dominate nature, because each form of technology is essentially the imposition of a human form onto a particular raw material. Technology means that we view the world not in cosmic terms, rather as a space in which everything can be transformed and changed, all problems can be solved, simply through the transformation of resources. Technological thinking sees a problem, applies a particular strategy, a “techno-fix”, and believes the problem resolved. The second meaning of technology is simply the devices that we use such as computers and smartphones, but also knives, bicycles, books… all human transformation of resources.
Tragedy of the commons: originally developed in a celebrated article by Garrett Hardin in 1968, the tragedy of the commons is a situation explaining the destruction of resources in the absence of rules. When we follow the logic of “each for themselves” and “first in first served,” each person would follow their own interests, try to accumulate as much of a resource as possible, to gain as much as possible from it, and therefore the resource would be exploited and would disappear. Thus, the whole community misses out, and there is nothing left for anyone. The morale we often learn from this is that we should put in place rules to govern the division and extraction of resources. These assumptions above however, are not how everyone functions, but how economics presumes that people function.
U
Universal basic income (UBI): An amount of money given from the government to each and every citizen of a society, regardless of their job status, economic or social situation, etc., but because of their participation in the society and their being a human. On the left this is seen as a tool for social transformation, equalising the resources all people possess, and removing poverty and financial hardship, and the stress associated with work. The right view it as a liberalisation of the economy: if everyone has more money, then they can choose to spend it how they like, and are therefore more ‘free’ – by giving a certain amount of money to everyone, then they can better participate in social life.
Utopia: a place which does not exist, literally, ‘no-where.’ A utopia is a place of dreams, a visionary place, one which we long for, and which contains the style of life and social systems which we desire. Thomas More first wrote about the island of Utopia in 1516, and since then, authors have continued to describe social, environmental and economic paradises. Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopia is an important addition – he didn’t just want fictive places, but wanted to imagine real, possible utopia on Earth, taking the present conditions as his starting point.
V
Value (intrinsic and instrumental): Certain ecologists believe that there is an intrinsic value to nature, and this constitutes the basis of their position on environmental ethics. Intrinsic value is a particular importance or worth which is possessed by something internally, of itself, without any other reasons or justifications. Something is valuable intrinsically if it is valuable in and of itself. Instrumental value, however, is something which has value as a means to achieving something else. This is the common critique of capitalist and industrial systems of production: they value nature instrumentally, as a means to achieve economic growth and prosperity.
It's important we know what we're talking about when we discuss the ecological crisis. This dictionary will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.
What is Kaitiakitanga?
We’ve seen kaitiakitanga used a lot recently, when we’re talking about the environment. But what does it really mean? And how can we use it in a way that is true to tikanga Māori?
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we seem to hear the word kaitiakitanga quite frequently in reference to sustainability and environmental management, especially since we have become more aware of the ecological problem (coming soon). But what is kaitiakitanga, and are we using it in the way it was intended by Māori, or has this concept been colonised by a certain view on the world, and lost its intended meaning?
The story of kaitiakitanga is traced back to the late 20th century, where the New Zealand Government and Māori began using the term in discussions over the lack of rangatiratanga, authority, that Māori had over the environment in the country. The development of the Resource Management Act (RMA) in 1991 cemented the use of this term in our judicial system.
The RMA defines kaitiakitanga as follows: “the exercise of guardianship by the tangata whenua of an area in accordance with tikanga Māori in relation to natural and physical resources; and includes the ethic of stewardship”.
Similarly, the Te Ara Encyclopaedia defines kaitiakitanga as “a way of managing the environment.” They continue, “Kaitiakitanga means guardianship, protection, preservation or sheltering.” Guardianship seems to be the main word that comes up when we have discussions about kaitiakitanga. We, as human beings, are (or should be) guardians of planet Earth. This means taking care of the planet, looking after it, deciding what is best for it, and steering it towards this state.
In a Stuff article about how kaitiakitanga could be relevant today, Jade Temepara echoes this idea, writing that kaitiakitanga is “a way of managing the environment, based on the Māori worldview.” We should, according to Temepara, be reducing our use of plastic, and making conscious shopping choices, to fulfil our role as guardians of the environment.
I recently picked up an issue of the Capital magazine, and whilst reading about Māori influences in contemporary architecture, the concept of kaitiakitanga rose its head. Whare Timu (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Arawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) criticises how we translate and use the word. He says, “A guardian is a protector that stomps its foot and places its own ego in protecting something,” but kaitiakitanga, he explains, is about reciprocity. “If you want to take, you should be able to give back.”
Timu is right. When we are acting as guardians, we are deciding what is best for the environment, and imposing our will upon it, so that it will be able to conform to our wishes and needs. This way of thinking about caring for the planet is problematic. It places human beings at the centre of the world, and requires a dominating attitude towards the natural world. It is this mindset that has led to the ecological problem. We won’t resolve our relationship with nature through thinking in the same way.
So, what does kaitiakitanga mean to Māori, and how did the term come to refer to another way of justifying the current, dominant “environmental management” worldview?
Reverend Maori Marsden writes in an article on kaitiakitanga that the original kaitiaki, or guardians, were not human beings at all; rather, they were the Gods. “The ancient ones (tawhito), the spiritual sons and daughters of Rangi(nui) and Papa(tuānuku) were the Kaitiaki or guardians. Tane was the Kaitiaki of the forest, Tangaroa of the sea, Rongo of herbs and root crops, Hinenui-i-te-pō of the portals of death and so on. Different tawhito had oversight of the various departments of nature. And whilst man could harvest those resources, they were duty bound to thank and propitiate the guardians of those resources.”
Do you see the shift in perspective here? Instead of imposing a human will on the Earth as Whare Timu told us about, in te ao Māori the gods were guardians of the environment. Their will was what determined how the environment would behave towards human beings, and it was only by showing respect, treating the natural world well and in accordance with custom, that she would in turn offer her bounty for human beings to harvest.
Marsden tells us that “the resources of the earth did not belong to man, rather, man belonged to the Earth.” We often hear that the common word for Earth, whenua, is the same as the word for placenta in te reo Māori. According to Māori, humans are born out of Papatuānuku, Mother Earth, and therefore can be seen as her children. Human beings, as coming from the Earth, could not lay claim to their own mother – rather, their mother laid claim to them, and offered them her “resources” in the form of nutrition for life.
In another article on the concept, Merata Kawharu writes that “kaitiakitanga is equally about the past and managing sets of relationships that transcend time and space: between atua ‘gods, spiritual beings’ and ancestors on one hand, and their living kaitiaki on the other.” As we can see, kaitiakitanga is not just about managing what we now call “resources.”
Kaitiakitanga refers to the relationship that Māori hold between themselves and their environment, which is like the relationship that we have with our own mother. Part of this relationship involves obligations towards our mothers, to keep them alive and healthy, and responsibilities to preserve her life-giving properties. In return, our mothers raise us, give us nutrients in both material, spiritual and knowledge-based ways, and allow us to flourish.
Perhaps the most obvious way that Māori enacted “resource management” to look after Papatuānuku was to declare rāhui, or bans, on particular areas of forest or sea, to allow these areas to regenerate. Tõhunga, or experts in noticing the states of particular resources, would alert the chief of the need for a rāhui to be put in place, and, after consultation, this ban would be effective for a certain period of time. In his article, Marsden tells us that this tõhunga would perform a ceremony so that the mauri, or vital life force, of the resource, would be asked to return. After this, the area would be left alone, for it to regenerate without human intervention.
We can see now that to understand kaitiakitanga, we need to make reference to many other concepts in te ao Māori. Kaitiakitanga isn’t about being a guardian of nature. It’s about maintaining a particular relationship between the environment and the community, which is based on bonds of kinship, and relationships of respect and care.
What happens when we disrespect this relationship with our Earth mother, as we are currently doing with pollution, over-consumption, the generation of waste, and the extraction of resources? Marsden puts it quite bluntly: “Man becomes a pillager, despoiler and rapist of his own mother.” The ecological problem, looking from the viewpoint of kaitiakitanga, is about human beings overstepping the boundaries of their relationship with the environment, not showing respect and care, and not giving back as we would give to our mothers in our human relationships.
A key part of kaitiakitanga is reciprocity, as Whare Timu drew our attention to earlier. When we think about managing resources, we don’t think of care, reciprocity, and giving. We think about how we can take in a way such that the resource will still be available for future generations (according to the definition of sustainability, for example). We think across generations, but not about our relationship with the environment itself.
Kaitiakitanga therefore isn’t about managing resources. It’s not a ‘way of managing the environment.’ We do not call our relationships with our birth mothers ‘resource management’, because our mothers are not resources, and our relationships with them are not managerial, but familial. Kaitiakitanga asks us to rethink our relationship with the environment by considering the environment, Mother Earth, as we consider our family relationships.
What happened to kaitiakitanga, that we should end up so far away from its intended meaning?
When we remove all the layers of meaning that we have just added to kaitiakitanga, we seem to be left with a fairly empty concept. One which refers to a romanticised way of looking at nature, and justifies the current rhetoric of “environmental governance” and “sustainable management” by pretending to apply a Māori lens to these words.
The two worlds couldn’t be further apart, however. What we commonly call the “Western view” in New Zealand, which is really one of United States capitalism and foreign relations, British jurisprudence, and a Judaeo-Christian morality, tells us that the environment is a resource, which can be measured, owned, divided, taken, and therefore dominated. We think about “resource management” because the same management techniques of control and direction from the business context can apparently be applied to nature itself.
In 1995, C.S. Holling analysed the impact of these so-called management strategies on populations of fish, cattle, trees, and water. He concluded that any attempt to manage ecological variables inexorably [leads] to less resilient ecosystems, more rigid management institutions, and more dependent societies. The very success of management […] set[s] the conditions for collapse.” In short, environmental management doesn’t work. Worse – it leads to the collapse of the whole ecosystem.
Māori therefore have good reason to doubt the rhetoric surrounding resource management. Maori Marsden writes that “Maori are extremely sceptical regarding the government’s resource management plans, its conservation policies and sustainable management efforts. Based as they are within a society driven by market considerations, conservation and sustainable management policies must eventually fail. So long as the prime values are based on economics, then the values implicit in sustainable management plans are diametrically opposed, and the latter must eventually succumb.”
Kaitiakitanga as another possible way forward seems to have lost its power, and been incorporated into this way of thinking. Merata Kawharu writes that “A problem has developed, where kaitiakitanga has become almost locked into meaning simply “guardianship” without understanding of (or in the case of the Crown, providing for) the wider obligations and rights it embraces.” Kaitiakitanga became a way to refer to the management of a particular environment that we owned individually, rather than, as in tikanga Māori, the relationship with environment as a whole. Kaitiakitanga doesn’t instruct us to look after only our portion of the river, but rather the whole river and its surroundings.
It would seem that kaitiakitanga has been appropriated for use in judicial and governmental contexts, where its full meaning is not understood. This so-called “colonisation” of the word has trickled down into everyday vocabulary, meaning that we end up with kaitiakitanga being translated as “guardianship,” and referred to as a “way of managing resources.” In the end, the consumerist attitude of reducing plastic use, recycling, and being an ‘ethical consumer’ has been mistaken for a way of modernising the concept of kaitiakitanga, when really, it’s just reinforcing a certain problematic worldview.
On the other hand, perhaps the popularisation of the concept has been beneficial, despite its lack of traditional meaning. By including kaitiakitanga in something like the Resource Management Act, Māori have found another justification and way of showing a loss of rangatiratanga (authority) over their lands. Claims against the Crown under the Treaty of Waitangi often make reference to how Māori can no longer exercise kaitiakitanga over their lands and the resources that these lands offer. Kaitiakitanga as a concept still allows us to see that there are two different worldviews at play, which are seeking reconciliation in Aotearoa New Zealand.
What could we do, now that we know more about kaitiakitanga, and how it has been used? Being careful with how we refer to this concept is important. Kaitiakitanga is about a fundamental relationship with Mother Earth, based on an ethic of care. It’s not really about consumer actions – though these might follow if we are living according to kaupapa Māori (Māori first principles).
One of the main places where kaitiakitanga is referred to is in the workplace. Next time you are discussing the environment and kaitiakitanga, instead of thinking about how you as an individual can take care of the environment, try thinking about how your community, society, or business relates with the environment. By recognising how we currently interact with the natural environment, we can begin to see the impact that we have on it, and also what we could be giving in return for the resources that it gives to us.
It took more than 30 hours of research and writing to produce this article, which will always be open and free for everyone to read, without any advertising.
All our articles are freely accessible because we believe that everyone needs to be able to access to a source of coherent and easy to understand information on the ecological crisis. This challenge that confronts us all will only be properly addressed when we understand what the problems are and where they come from.
If you've learned something today, please consider donating, to help us produce more great articles and share this knowledge with a wider audience.
Why plurality.eco?
Our environment is more than a resource to be exploited. Human beings are not the ‘masters of nature,’ and cannot think they are managers of everything around them. Plurality is about finding a wealth of ideas to help us cope with the ecological crisis which we have to confront now, and in the coming decades. We all need to understand what is at stake, and create new ways of being in the world, new dreams for ourselves, that recognise this uncertain future.
We're part of the .eco network of organisations committed to support positive change for the planet.