The land that time forgot..

This week I have been reading Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince, I’m only a quarter of the way in, but it has linked up some thoughts, memories and ideas for me.

Essentially, Gaia talks about the effects that humans have had on the world, and how we are now shaping it to such an extent that it is a new geological age, the Anthropocene. This is not new to me. Neither are some of her stories I have read so far, which are fascinating and fill in a number of the knowledge gaps that I didn't get on my travels – in fact I think this is why it is so compelling. It’s a year after I returned from working in Northern India on climate change adaptation research, and kayaking down lakes in Laos where the Chinese were busy dam building. Since then I’ve managed to hole myself up in Berlin, one of the West’s greatest cities and live again in my comfortable 21^st century life.

But talking about this new age, this new age we are going into, this new age we have made and must accept we are in, brings on a unexpectedly different meaning to the climate change problem for me. It has let me maybe move towards accepting things are as they are and they aren’t necessarily going to change on the timescale I would like. With so much human spirit dependent on the current system, indeed I’m not sure things can change. But time is so deceptive. More than anything, reading this book highlights the speed at which we are moving. All previous geological and climatic periods have a time span of at least some 10,000 years or so. Our most expansive terraforming has happened within the last 50 years, and yet the amount of mining in the world is supposed to triple by 2050.

If we were to look at London just 50 years ago, would we recognise it now? How much land has it sprawled over since then? The cities of today as we know them, as I and my generation knows them, have always been there. So many people, cars, buildings and perfect functioning infrastructure has always been there. This is not a new thing. Or is it? 

In 1900, did we have anything like the scale of building, movement and number of people we have in any city right now? Were the roads all lit up at night and made of smooth tarmac? But 100 years is a long time though right? To me, to all living beings, maybe. To a 4 million year old Earth it is literally nothing. To the modern human species, it’s just 0.05% of the 200,000 years that we have been around. Yet in just 100 years we have become an explosive, all-conquering human force, which has taken over every corner of the planet. We became exponential due to fossil fuels, medicine and nitrogen fertiliser. We beat survival and nature, to become a formidably successful species, so far.

Of course we will continue striving to overextend into the reaches of mother earth like never before. There are 7 billion people all trying to survive in whatever way possible driving this ‘economy’ forward. It’s instinct. Only time knows if there’s a way for us all to survive in this new paradigm; though in our favour we do have ingenuity and engineering, coupled more and more with sustainable thinking and compassion. Not to mention the extended brain power that the internet 2.0 provides, which is dramatically accelerating communication and learning beyond what was previously possible – when we don’t watch cat videos. Within this great mass of humanity, we have made some pretty amazing things.

But what linked up in my mind is a piece I read a few weeks ago, called This is Water by David Foster Wallace. It was an essay from a while back, talking about consumerism and why you should consider other people’s perspectives to reduce your own frustrations in the queue at Walmart (and much deeper reflections). The realisation that came with it was a deep one: there is only one person who really matters in my world, and that’s me. I’m the one who’s going to take care of breathing, eating, thinking and doing. All decisions I make are related to what I want to do right now or in the future, with varying outcomes I want to reach in the actions and feelings of those around me. This is mostly based upon me ensuring my future survival. 

Everything I know about the world is based on my experiences up to now. Each one of those experiences was from my viewpoint only. What this means, is that to me, the 24 years I have lived on this earth are everything. These years contain all that I know, and as such, these years are my only reliable reference for that thing we call time, or more appropriately: years, decades, centuries. Though normally we don’t manage to look more than five years ahead (at least not at 24), and unfortunately our memories are remarkably good at distorting the time we did experience. Furthermore, someone younger than me will see me as old: they won’t be 24 for ages. Whereas someone older than me will see me as young: 24 was great, but wow did those next 24 years go quickly. 

So what am I getting at here?

Well, in my 24 years I have known nothing more than the world in which we live now. As far as I can remember, or let’s say, the last 15 years, computers have always been around me. Therefore as far as I'm concerned, they've always been there. But I don’t have to go far back to find the time that they weren't. In my father’s 65 years, computers, amongst a plethora of other new inventions, were not a part of daily life when he was 24. He most certainly did not spend all day and all evening in front of one. Maybe he might say that he had something else, that there were type writers or filing cabinets or fax machines. But that’s irrelevant. Go back to when my Grandad was 24, and you won’t find many cars in his town. There was no TV, and a sizeable family including my father would have lived in not much more than a single room. In contrast, as far as my experience goes; cars have always been there, I’ve always had my own room and these things will always be this way. The economy and mass production have always been there. They are permanent fixtures because they exceed my own lifetime. Though in terms of the earth, what we have today is remarkably new. In terms of just one generation, what we have is entirely new. And there’s just so much of it.

Within my father’s lifetime, the planet’s population has more than doubled. But this is old news, didn’t we get used to this information so very quickly? We adapt. We adapt so quickly to being conservative. The idea of not having a computer is something my father also wouldn’t entertain. So long as things are apparently getting better and they don’t affect us yet, it’s fine. Once we get used to something, we don’t want to go back to what was there before. We adapt incredibly quickly to what we consider the best, and then we aren’t prepared to give it up once we get our hands on it. You can go somewhere incredibly breath-taking, but after a few days, you’ll get used to it. My life now, completely dependent on phones and computers: I got used to it pretty quickly. It’s hard to imagine them not being there, but they’ve only been around for a good 10 years or so. That’s such a miniscule blip in the grand scheme of things, and it necessarily remains beyond our own comprehension.

This 7 billion people on earth is really something that’s never been there before. It’s new. It’s changed Earth and it’s here to stay as long as each one of us continues to want to survive. Welcome to the Anthropocene. For the West it’s still a comfortable, interesting and exciting time to be alive. Enjoy your part of this moment on planet earth, your human instinct demands that you see everything as it affects you and your survival only. Though we should try to remember that atmosphere, water, food and the resources that go into our products are actually global commons. They do belong to all of us. This much was given to us by our ancestors. Maybe we should try to waste a little bit less of them.

Here's a great video which inspired the writing tonight:

Wake up call

Food and Consumption.

What is this world we live in? If I eat an egg I endorse killing male chicks and the awful living conditions of mass chicken farming, where the lights are left on all night to make them grow faster and the hens can’t move much. If I eat some chicken, pork or beef I have no idea where it comes from. I don’t know how the animal spent its life. I can merely buy based on an environmental label which I hope means the animal came through good conditions.

If I buy a vegetable from the Netherlands or Spain, it’s most likely grown on plains of plastic, under incomprehensibly large artificial greenhouse conditions, where immigrant workers from Africa are paid next to nothing and have no fixed contract. In Spain when they do get work, it's 35 euros a day; they live in slums on the outskirts of the fields without access to running water. The water is used to grow tomatoes, sucked out at an unsustainable rate from the region's groundwater.

Land is being bought up in Romania by investors looking to exploit ‘Bio’ organic labels, a business worth €21bn across europe and €7bn in Germany alone. They buy land from small landholders, receiving a subsidy of €300 per hectare from the EU to grow organic on an industrial scale, removing biodiversity, local culture and local livelihoods from the region. Making the land economic and building processing structures makes the land a very good investment. The aim: take and control vast areas of land to maximise profits and scalability. Smallholders sell their land at €2,500 per hectare, a fraction of the price of land in Switzerland or Germany (€35 – 70,000). What can the smallholders do after selling their land? Presumably work in the investors' factories for a limited wage – if they are lucky enough to get a job there and not viewed as unreliable. What justice is this?

As a consumer, how do I avoid causing massive destruction and contributing to social, environmental and animal distress? If I eat soya instead of meet, I deforest rainforests to make room for soya plantations. If I eat meat I cause animal suffering. If I eat vegetables/fruit I contribute to exploitation and mass scale unsustainable farming across the EU. This includes overuse of pesticides, biocides and nitrogen fertilisers. If I drink milk or eat cheese I cause calves to be torn away from their mothers directly after birth, who are artificially kept on hormones that keep their milk coming. My own body ingests various toxins and hormones along with the nutrients. All this before we even consider produce from outside the EU.

Yes, I can buy my vegetables from a certified farm shop or local market. That's no solution for those who are forced to buy from discount supermarkets - unless we maybe agree that food should be a larger part of our consumptive budget. What about the other billions of people on earth? Is it really possible to feed that many mouths with this form of production?

Besides, I eat more than I need to and exercise too little. I stare at my computer screen all day, sitting on my office chair. I expect to be kept warm in winter and cool in summer, supplied with goods to meet my every desire and I am relentlessly advertised goods which I have no need of. I expect to get healthcare on demand and fair working rights. I am one of 80 million people living in Germany. I am one of 1.2 billion living in developed countries. I am one of over 7 billion humans living on this small planet. I am one of the lucky ones.

Fairtrade, bio/organic labels and certifications claim to solve these problems. Yet they remain by-in-large unchecked and untrue to their original goals. They do not achieve what the consumer might hope - and normally assumes. I could eat vegan and grow my own food, but that is a huge challenge. Besides, if I do that what impact would it have on the poorly paid and exploited workers? Who is the real winner in this system? The consumer, the producer, the worker, the supermarket, or wealthy stakeholders? How do we propose to feed 7 billion people with bio products? Industrial scale is still necessary, low prices and market share even more so.

The rich list in the UK doubled their wealth to £519bn in the last 5 years, while the average growth rate from 2009-2013 was -0.03%. Does this seem like an equal distribution of wealth, with a large trickle down potential? Not to mention that GDP is generated as much from producing goods as it is from selling cigarettes, cleaning up oil spills and treating cancer.

What is this world we live in? What are we doing in the name of profits, production and consumption? The great success of the 20^th century was that humankind solved production. We became able to produce more goods than we could consume. It stopped being a case of not having enough workers to produce products, but not having enough people to buy our products. The free market. Success goes to those who can sell. More, more, more. Most of us are workers supporting the system, driving it ever forwards in the pursuit of exponential growth. Exponential - a function humanity doesn't understand. We forgot about the planet that supports us and that scale has its limits.

The planet cannot continue in this way for much longer. What are we doing?

Please help me figure it out.