Tag Archives: climate change

The 7 Generation Rule

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Some of the First Nations people of northern Canada believe that we are stewards of the Earth, and for their particular area the land must be managed within a time horizon of 7 generations, approximately 200 years. If we are serious about sustainability, we need to ask for each situation how the impact of this or that environmental decision will track for the next 7 generations. It is quite clear to anyone who listens to any of the news media that we are not at present even living by a 1 Generation Rule. The guide of governments and corporations of virtually all developed nations is economic growth, producing societies that are more and more inequitable, the rich 1% and the poor 99%. The environment is almost never mentioned. What might we do if we lived by the 7 Generation Rule?

The first item to question might be the transportation system of the world and the use of fossil fuels. All is well you might argue, gasoline and diesel are cheap, we carry on. But if we think of future generations we might worry about whether increasing CO2 is causing climate change; the naïve belief that burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with climate change means that we do not believe any of the laws of physics. There is yet another problem somewhere on the 7 Generation horizon – fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource. At some point sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels, or as an economist would say fossil fuels will not run out but will get very expensive. How far will you be driving in 7 Generations if the price of gasoline is $10,000 a litre? Round that to $40,000 a gallon if you calculate in those units.

But if I cannot drive my car on gasoline, surely someone will invent a car that runs on solar power. Technology will save us. This is akin to a religious belief for many people, and it might be true. If it is, then we can leave the coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground, which is what we ought to plan in any event if we live by the 7 Generation Rule. It is good to be an optimist but it is also good to have a Plan B.

There is one more problem that might be even more important than driving our cars – the provisioning of food. The demand for food in the world today grows at a rate exceeding the rate of food production. No problem, you say, we have plenty of food as long as we continue to neglect one-third of the people on Earth that are undernourished and as long as we operate with the 1 Generation Rule. There are several ways of solving this problem but many of the suggestions are quite impossible. We can become more vegetarian in our diets, and that would be good. But we cannot develop more farmland because virtually all of it is in use. We can increase the productivity of our crops by genetic means, but we cannot compensate for losses in soil fertility and erosion. Fertilizer which is essential to modern agriculture could be problematic. Nitrogen fertilizer is now made largely from fossil fuel (natural gas) and phosphate fertilizer comes entirely from phosphate rocks which are being mined but are also a non-renewable resource. What does our 4th or 5th generation do when phosphate runs out? Might we consider recycling starting now to prepare for the 7th generation?

Ecologists fight now with minimal funding to describe and protect the biodiversity of the Earth, which might be useful already to generation 3, while governments spend much more money subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that is destroying the Earth. There is little money left for environmental protection. How is your government tracking toward a sustainable planet? What Generation Rule are they following? Ask yourself these questions the next time you vote.

Diamond, J. 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin Books, London. 608 pp. ISBN: 9780241958681

McKibben, B. 2013. Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. Times Books, New York. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780805092844

Bandwagons in Ecology

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Scientists are like most people in their attraction to bandwagons. Often this is good, since some parts of any particular science may move more quickly than others, creating a bandwagon for scientists building a career. But sometimes this is detrimental in diverting efforts and money from one aspect of a science to another. All would be fine if the older parts of a science were thoroughly understood, and the new bandwagon opened up the solutions to critical problems.

So what does all this have to do with ecology? Ecology has been one example of a science beset by one bandwagon after another during the past 50 years. Many of these bandwagons were relatively harmless because they started with the promise to solve all problems and ended up contributing a small bit of understanding to the subject as it matured. I am thinking now of energy flow in the 1950s, systems ecology and density dependence in the 1960s, competition theory in the 1970s, and mathematical modelling from the 1980s onward. Other examples could be added to this list. At the moment we have two bandwagons that deserve some discussion – climate change and evolutionary ecology.

Climate change is one of the three most critical problems of our day and so it is understandable that much is written about it. Consequently it appears on all grant and scholarship applications as a relevant field. The problem is twofold. First of all, we should not take weather, the ecological side of climate, as the universal explanation for everything that is changing without considering alternative hypotheses for change. If the geographical distribution of a species is expanding toward the poles, climate change is only one of several possible reasons for this. The factors limiting geographic ranges are multiple and have been studied less well than any ecologist would like. We need to keep in mind that there are other ecological problems out there that are not directly tied in with climate change, and these need to be pursued as well. If you want an example, consider the problem of biological control of invasive species.

Evolutionary ecology is a second bandwagon and I fear it is tilting the entire focus of ecological research. The reason is quite clear – technological advancements in genetic studies. Much of science is driven by technological advances and that is good, but again it should not mean that we ignore other unresolved problems. In particular evolutionary ecology has the great potential to describe the world in great detail without necessarily adding any critical insights. In many cases it is stamp collecting and it reminds me of the saying that “Nero fiddles while Rome burns”. Should we as ecologists be concerned more about the practical problems of our day, or about simply understanding nature? There is no reason of course not to do both, and different individuals have talents in different areas of science. But some ecologists might feel as I do that ecological questions are poorly served by much of evolutionary ecology. I listen to many evolutionary ecologists telling us that their work is solving some ecological question when it is obvious that this is a leap of faith with little substance.

I think we need to ask as ecologists what are the problems we wish to solve, and if we could ever decide on a list of these problems, we could ask where we currently sit in solving these problems. It causes a great focus of the mind to look at a practical problem and ask what ecologists are doing about it. At the moment I am in the Philippines at the International Rice Research Institute, and I am overwhelmed by the ecological questions that interface with sustainable rice cropping in Southeast Asia, of pests and beneficial animals and plants, of migratory birds, of chemical poisons and their impacts on non-target species, the list goes on. The assumption at the moment seems to be that plant breeding and genetics will conquer all problems, but we ought to have a Plan B to look at the community and ecosystem dynamics that centre on a rice paddy, and how that might interface with the changing varieties of rice that are produced. We would be more humble if we moved away from genetic determinism to consider that there are other issues, currently ignored, that only ecologists can solve.

Bandwagons will always occur in science, but we should be careful that not everyone follows the pied pipers of the moment.