Of course, it still remains true that, as far as my own politics are concerned, environmental issues are number one (which tends not to be the case with Wizardly-diposed people). I think the thing that the book did was wiggle my credences around a bit on what the world is going to be like in 20 years etc as a result of the book (mostly, I genuinely feel like I am moved towards a more epistemologically sensible position of radical uncertainty). I still feel pretty confident that environmental issues in general (like, we're talking pollution plus soil erosion plus water contamination plus national parks) are majorly consequential for the future wellbeing of humans on the planet and massively neglected in proportion to their consequentialness. That comes across here.
Honestly, it's a pretty boring essay, so sorry for that. I tried to be 'intellectually serious' for once and the combination of tight word-constraints and being intellectually serious necessitates that you don't ramble wildly in absurdly long, sprawling sentences and talk about yourself constantly like I do normally, e.g. here.
Disequilibrium, Model
Uncertainty, and the
Interminable War of Wizards
and Prophets
1 Introduction
Before trying to solve future civilisational dilemmas, it
would seem wise to take stock of the relevant
scientific knowledge. Sadly, whilst
this may sound a useful principle in the abstract, the deep uncertainty that
attends predictions of the longer-term trajectory of human societies makes the
idea somewhat complicated in practice. The problem of how to feed the global
population over the next 50 years is
no exception. As I will show, there
is a high degree of uncertainty even around the global population in the nearer
term, not to mention the political state of play,
the unfolding of climate change or the progress of energy technologies
like carbon capture.
Thankfully, I believe
there are some things we can be confident about.
My first aim is to demonstrate this. In
particular, I draw on research
in climate science,
ecology and agriculture to show that the environmental
issues we face are of central
importance to the challenge of feeding the world of 2070, and therefore that we must find some way of dealing with them in order to meet this goal. My second
aim is to defend a vision of how we can succeed—more precisely, how we can increase the probability that we can sustain
tolerable living standards for the majority of future humans. To this end, I borrow the dichotomy
established by a book titled The Wizard and the Prophet (2018) by Charles Mann, and argue that the
archetypal attitudes of both titular characters are mistaken. In particular, I give reasons
why what I call
“The Radical Redesign Proposal” of the Prophets seems
forlorn, and attack
the “Just Keep Swimming Theory” of the Wizards
for its failure
to take the issues seriously. I finish by briefly
defending a positive
vision which belongs to neither pole: international
co-operation on an aggressive pro-science and environmentalist agenda of a
scale unprecedented in history. The
core idea of this agenda is that, although we
need radical action, we must
create and invent rather than tear down.
2 The Challenge
2.1 How Many Mouths Exactly?
Perhaps the
deepest uncertainty around future global food security concerns how the
population will grow over the next several decades. To be sure, the
hierarchical-Bayesian modelling approach used by the U.N. to develop the
figures that most of us rely on is a sophisticated process worked on by
hundreds of scholars with the world’s best databases at their disposal [United
Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017)].
But that doesn’t mean that it escapes the fundamental constraints of all
relatively far-future statistical modelling of human societies.
As one might hope, some of these constraints can be found
discussed in the official methodology document for the 2017 projections (which
put the 2050 population at somewhere around 9.8 billion people and the 2070
population at somewhere around 10.6 billion). One is, of course, just poor
data-quality on population, demographics, land use and more, particularly in
Africa [U.N. Population Division (2017), 7-10]. Of more importance, there is
the necessary theory-dependence of the process: we find, for example, that the
embodiment of the Demographic Transition Theory in the model carries with it a
number of assumptions about the persistence of demographic trends like rising
female education in developing countries and low fertility in developed countries
[11-16]. In my estimation, of more importance still are the implicit elements
of sociological and other theory undiscussed
in this document. For instance, one might claim, per the Limits to Growth researchers (see, for
example, Jorgen Randers’ 2012 book 2052:
A global forecast for the next forty years), that there is a kind of
‘Continuity Theory’ baked-in to the Bayesian approach. By contrast, the
ecology-inspired assumptions and Systems Dynamics modelling approach of the
original World3 model and its refinements lead to significantly different
results. In the aforementioned book, Randers settles on an astonishingly low
peak of 8.1 billion around 2040 [Randers (2012)].[1]
Evidently, the ‘centre’ of the UN Projections up to 2070
plots a path where our civilisation does not slide into the “overshoot”
scenario the LTG researchers imagine.
However, even if we do find ourselves in a non-catastrophic scenario in 2070,
we cannot have escaped the challenge. One heavily-cited 2013 paper suggests we
may have to double current food production to meet the food demand as near as
2050, a target for which we are currently well off the pace [Ray, Mueller,
West, & Foley (2013)]. And even if this estimate is too high, as a 2017
paper claims [Hunter, Smith, Schipanski, Atwood, & Mortensen (2017)], the
environmental threats to agricultural production and political stability I am
about to review still leave a heavy pall over our ambitions.
2.2
Climate Change
Climate change is the most widely discussed environmental issue of our time, and it may be the most serious. It is potentially relevant to our food concern in two ways:
(i) Through its
effect on the more specific environmental problems I will discuss, it is
disposed to have deleterious effects
on agricultural production overall;
(ii) These and
other effects of climate change may have significance
as a force of political and economic disruption that reduces the number of
well-nourished humans in more convoluted ways
(i.e. by creating refugees).[2]
Climate change is also a phenomenon whose dynamics are
very hard to predict—and thus, in exploring it, we once again find ourselves wandering the moors of model uncertainty. As before, we are fortunate to have a fog-blasting light to guide us
through the darkest sections: the reports of an authoritative, global
institution which uses the work of a large number of scholars, the IPCC. But we also have
esteemed climate scientists in the field who think that the IPCC’s Fifth
Assessment in 2013 may have been too ‘conservative’ in some respects.[3]
One of these dissidents is the decorated English ocean
physicist, Peter Wadhams, who last
year published a short book titled A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic. Wadhams documents the physical evidence
that melting Arctic ice, combined with decaying permafrost in the Arctic
circle, is beginning to cause a gigantic methane
leak that may alone push global temperatures up by “0.6◦C by 2040” [Wadhams (2017), 125]. According to the
modelling on which he worked with two colleagues,
this pulse of methane into the atmosphere would “bring forward by fifteen to thirty-five years the date
at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2◦C above
pre-industrial levels to 2035 for the business as usual scenario and 2040 for
the low emissions scenario” [126].
Wadhams believes that climate
change is a civilisational dilemma in itself, with his own findings about
methane at the centre of the picture. Pertinently,
he notes that the Fifth Assessment, as gloomy as it may be in some respects, “scarcely mentions”
the methane risk at all [128]. Late in the book, he again criticises the
assessment for what a calls a “paradox”: the report advocates a trajectory for
which emissions reductions are, in his view, totally insufficient [183]. Wadhams may well be wrong about the total inadequacy of a reductions-only
approach, but then again almost no-one on the planet knows as much about the state of the Arctic as he does.
On the specific issue of sea-level rise, one can tell a
similar story. The Fifth Assessment places the
upper-bound of the “likely” sea-level rise by
2100 at 0.82m (a level that, though not intuitively terrifying, would
likely induce massive infrastructure projects in many coastal cities around the
world and large-scale migration from flood-prone regions of the world (South
Asia is a particular area of concern,
with two heavily populated zones at
risk: Bangladesh/North-East India, and Sri Lanka)). A 2016 Nature article by Robert
DeConto and David Pollard, using a model calibrated for the vulnerabilities of
Antarctica in previous events of major sea-level rise, finds
that “Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than a metre of sea-level
rise by 2100 and more than 15 metres
by 2500, if emissions continue unabated” [M. DeConto &
Pollard (2016), 591]. Of course,
just like Wadham’s
work, this model is not an oracle and there is countervailing research. As many climate scientists are keen to emphasise, the
climate system of the planet is complex, potentially generating many feedback
effects with different impacts. Nevertheless, the severity of the warning is unassailable.
2.3 The Other Problems
(and How Climate Affects Them)
2.3.1
Water Scarcity
Whilst, overall, efficient access to water (“improved drinking
water”, as the World Bank calls it) has been
increasing over the last few decades
[Roser & Ritchie (2018b), section 1.1], there has been a related rise in
water use and loss. Using definitions of “water stress” from the World Resources
Institute, several countries
across the Middle East,
North Africa and South Asia have extremely
high levels of water stress, and several countries in East Asia (including
China) are experiencing medium-high stress [Roser & Ritchie (2018b), section 1.8].
Although water is not a “stock” like metal ore, it is also
very much unlike an archetypal renewable resource (or “flow”) like solar
energy. Aquifers are as non-renewable as fossil fuels, and all freshwater
sources are vulnerable to pollution—most commonly, salinisation/mineralisation
from overuse or silt-dumping, eutrophication and algal bloom from fertiliser
runoff, and bacterial contamination. All of these impacts are far easier to
bring about than to reverse.
It’s worth nothing
that, although on the World Bank definition Australia is experiencing low water stress, our country is, in fact,
vulnerable to water shortage due to the fragility,
overuse and pollution of our most vital agricultural water source, the
Murray-Darling Basin, and a general proneness to drought created by the ENSO cycle that affects our key
agricultural regions (c.f. Flannery (1994/2016)). Incidentally, as of early
August, all of NSW and most of Queensland struggling through perhaps the worst
drought in a generation [Woodburn (2018)].
Since climate change is likely to increase
extreme weather, it may be that we see even worse droughts in future in
drought-prone areas of the world. This could have
great significance for food production.
2.3.2
Soil Degradation
According to the UN-sponsored 2017 Global Land Outlook
Report, “approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s
vegetated surface shows persistent declining
trends in productivity” [United Nations Convention to Combat
Desertification (2017), 8]. In large part this is due to loss of top-soil
from erosion, the rate of which is likely
somewhere in the billions of tonnes annually
(a sophisticated analysis
of European soil erosion in 2015
found a “total soil loss of 970 Mt annually”, despite far better land-management practices
on this continent than in Asia or Africa [Panagos et al. (2015), 438]).
The “Green Revolution” begun in the late 1960s, characterised by the package
of super-efficient mutant wheat/rice and intensive chemical
fertiliser and pesticide use, allowed global crop yields to increase rapidly from the 1960s to the 1990s
[Roser and Ritchie (2018c), Mann (2018)], but over
that same time exacerbated soil loss by destroying the ‘humus’ which stores water and fosters microbiota and insects that are
beneficial for agriculture in the long-run. Factors
like deforestation, water scarcity, and
overgrazing/overtilling are of equal or more significance for soil degradation
[United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (2017), 41-51]. As
described earlier, current yield improvements are radically out of step with
future food requirements.
Increased
atmospheric CO2 will boost
plant growth over the coming decades, but the other effects of climate change
completely outweigh this benefit, according to all analyses I have reviewed.
2.3.3
Pollution
Nitrogen pollution from fertiliser runoff
is a problem comparable in scope and significance to climate change. Along with ocean warming, it
seems to be playing a very large role
in the current problem of ocean deoxygenation and acidification [Breitburg et
al. (2018)], and—more directly relevant for
human concerns—has a large effect on freshwater contamination. Global nitrogen fertiliser use is somewhere around 115 million
tonnes per year and rising
[Roser & Ritchie
(2018a)], of which a very
large percentage ends up in waterways and oceans. In China, the effect of overuse on vital freshwater
sources seems to be reaching crisis proportions, while the rest of Asia struggles
with similar [Stone (2011), Pearce (2018)].
There are, of course, other disturbing pollution concerns
in the world today. One is the increasingly discussed problem
of plastic pollution, which seems most pernicious in aquatic ecosystems and may also be having an impact on human health and fertility [Moore (2017)]. Such general
environmental concerns cannot easily be tied
to food production, but they cause
social and economic problems that are likely to have relevant flow-on effects.
2.3.4
Insect Decline
A recent article
in The Guardian titled “Where
have all our insects
gone?” [McKie (2018)] summarises the evidence
that insect numbers have been in
sharp decline across the world since roughly the 1970s. This evidence consists
in both a handful of long-term studies and anecdote (from entomologists and
non-specialists alike), as well as
in the awareness of several causal mechanisms active in this period disposed to
cause a decline: spraying, urbanisation, light pollution, and climate change. This
decline is also connected to a fall in bird populations, and, given the crucial
role of insects in ecosystems generally, is likely already causing more damage
than we can easily detect [McKie
(2018)].
Although the full consequences for humans are yet to be
seen, bee decline has already had a clear agricultural impact in at least one
area of the world, causing farmers in the pear-growing region of China, Hanyuan
Country, to resort to hand-pollination [Williams (2016)]. Again, the
consequences for overall food-production are somewhat opaque, but there is reason
to think they could be non-trivial.
3
But there is (maybe) hope!
3.1
The Eponymous
War
Christopher Mann’s 2018 book
The Wizard and the Prophet directly
concerns the issues under discussion in this essay.
Mann creates detailed portraits of two
important but very different American scientists of the mid-20th Century, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whom he calls, respectively, The
Wizard and The Prophet. He traces their impact on the modern world and in
relation to the current environmental issues the planet faces as we prepare for a future of “10 billion
people”. In so doing, he develops a useful, if imperfect, framework for classifying approaches to this grand issue of civilisational sustainability.
3.1.1 Team Prophet
Vogt, a literature-graduate
turned ornithologist and ecologist, was best known for his 1948 book Road to Survival. This best-selling
treatise, one of the first in the genre which Mann dubs “Apocalyptic
Environmentalism”, pioneered the idea of “the environment” as a global concern,
and corporate greed as a primary threat. Mann claims Vogt thereby played a central role in kickstarting the modern ideology
of environmentalism and all its offshoots.
In essence, the core strategy proposed by
Prophets to deal with the challenge is to ‘degrow’—to restrain the power
of big corporations, to rein in industrial agriculture, perhaps to set
population-reduction as a goal in itself—and to ‘regrow’ in a more localist and
communistic world of green technology, public
transport, organic farming, expansive national parks, and (for many)
participatory democracy and worker’s co-operatives. I call this ambitious programme The Radical
Redesign Proposal. Prominent
candidates (to my mind) include the environmentalist journalist, George Monbiot; the economist,
Kate Raworth; the academic and activist, David Suzuki; and the political journalist,
Naomi Klein.[4]
3.1.2 Team Wizard
Borlaug, a forestry graduate turned wheat-geneticist, is
most significant for kick-starting the Green Revolution in the late 1960s via
the creation of rust-resistant, ultra-versatile dwarf wheat—for which in 1970 he won the Nobel Prize. Mann mainly traces
his Wizardly legacy
onto the modern biochemists and CRISPR researchers
working to make the next big agricultural breakthrough.
Wizards not in the business of such research are defined by their strong preference for such
large-scale technical research projects, for large-scale technical solutions in
general (for nuclear plants, desalination plants, and sometimes “clean
coal”) over more holistic remedies for environmental problems, and for
a more human-centred and pro-urban
perspective. One might characterise the Wizardly strategy as keeping things
stable, with the belief that the
continuing innovations of
privately and publicly funded researchers will be enough to maintain the positive global hunger trends of the last couple of decades—just so long as governments make some effort
to stick to targets.
I call this notion The Just Keep Swimming
Theory. Prominent candidates include the
economist, Julian Simon; the economist, Bjorn Lomborg; the businessperson and philanthropist,
Bill Gates; the scientist, Steven
Pinker; and the businessperson, Elon Musk.
3.1.3 Evaluation
When one is
reviewing the issues soberly, I don’t think it is clear how we should go about
resolving them. This is the obvious shortcoming of some of the more extreme
Prophets and Wizards alike.
My biggest problem
with The Radical Redesign Proposal is its ambition: it aims to solve a
gargantuan problem of unclear
scope and definition—abolishing capitalism, or maybe abolishing the rule of big corporations—which
surely must involve a lot of
sub-goals and cannot be expected to
happen quickly, in favour of a new global economic system
which surely must also take time to evolve, all in order to solve a crisis
which is acting right now in the
world we actually live in.
Non-totalitarian social engineering projects of such a scale (presumably) take
several orders of magnitude longer than physical engineering projects that
could directly counteract the problems.
As already covered
in part, I am meanwhile
deeply sceptical of the Wizardly
confidence in safety without
any radical action. The climate of the planet is a complex system, our
societies are complex systems, and complex systems are characterised by disequilibrium and unstable dynamics.
Given the evidence that we could be in for a very rough ride indeed, my response
is, All hands on deck! It’s
hard for me to see how it could be
sensible to think otherwise.
3.2
Synthesis
In my view, the amount of state money pouring into renewable-energy research
and environmental clean-up programmes in China demonstrates
a calibration of priorities that is desirable for all developed countries (c.f.
Gleeson-White [2017]). For many
reasons, ideological and incentive-related, I don’t see much reason for hope in this regard. On the other hand, the
specific proposals I am about to suggest are not blocked by either legislative or fundamental
economic constraints.
One of the simplest policies I would like to see is a
considerable hike in the funding for both national research bodies (like the
CSIRO in our own country), and for science research in general. The latest
available statistics suggest that the Australian federal government is spending more on so-called “Defence” (2.042%
of GDP as of 2017 [The World Bank 2018]) than our country’s gross expenditure on Research and Development (1.88%
of GDP as of 2015-16 [Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017]), so there is clear
room for improvement in this country. A more complex proposal is that
governments around the world could foster direct co-operation between national
research bodies by agreeing to
inaugurate a series of ‘Manhattan Projects’— massive, centralised research
projects bringing together world experts in specific areas. These projects
could be targeted, for example, at
developing more efficient methods of carbon capture, pushing the frontiers in
precision/computer-monitored agriculture, improving recycling techniques, or on
genetically manipulating faster-growing and more nutritious mutant crops.
It’s possible that nuclear energy’s ship has sailed, but
it’s worth remembering that, unlike solar or wind technology, nuclear plants are currently efficient generators of
non-fossil fuel energy for millions of people.
For example, nuclear power
generates roughly 70% of France’s energy
currently (in 2017 it produced roughly
62% of the total, but it has been higher in previous
years [R´eseau de transport d’´electricit´e (2018)]). Similarly, desalination plants, whilst
harmful to aquatic
life in input (life-rich
water) and output (brine), have the potential
to ameliorate water crises in several parts of the world.
Finally, as commonly argued, it would also be desirable if
people took it upon themselves to reduce their carbon and ecological footprints
by taking fewer flights, eating less energy-intensive foods, using less water,
taking public transport, and recycling more. Some of these changes could be
encouraged by policy also. Obviously, a heavy carbon tax is a common proposal
that could be expected to have some flow-on impact on consumption habits.
Infrastructure spending on public transport and improved recycling-works are
two more very obvious policy options.
Sadly, I think there are game-theoretic, economic and social
reasons to expect people and governments not
to rise to this challenge. Nor would it be reasonable to expect that even the majority of environmentally-concerned people will soon agree with all of the above suggestions. But these proposals seem to me sensible
and, in principle, rapidly implementable.
We ought to get moving as soon as possible!
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[1]
It seems fashionable in
certain circles to claim that the original 1972 Limits to Growth report made predictions of collapse and famine
that have been falsified since. This claim correctly applies to Erlich's
similar 1968 book The Population Bomb
(often grouped together with LTG),
but it is not, I believe, true of the sophisticated modelling project,
involving multiple `scenarios', explicated in the original The Limits to Growth or the later updates. There are, to be sure,
valid criticisms to be made of the project. Firstly, the utility and precision
of the concept of “carrying capacity” is diminished in application to a
scientific species like our own, since it is divorced from the energetic
capacity of the planet that, in principle, we could keep pushing towards (see
Mann's discussion of Weaver's objections to the idea in The Wizard and the Prophet [Mann (2018), 160-162)]). Secondly,
there is—at least in hindsight—too
much emphasis on the concept of ‘peak oil’ in these works, and other errors of
priority. Nor do I mean to imply that Randers' 2012 population projection
should be given equal weight to the UN's 2017 one. However, given the timeframe
of the forecasting even in the original, and the striking areas of correct
prediction so far, I think a total dismissal of the modelling approach is
unfounded [c.f. Turner (2014)].
[2]
Hence the general, rather
than food-focussed, treatment of the issue in this subsection.
[3]
To be sure, there are
esteemed climate scientists who push in the other direction, but I don't have
space for a comprehensive review. I also note that basic risk analysis tells us
that we (or at least policy-makers) probably should pay more attention to the extremely bad scenarios. This is
not to imply that the very fact that a logically possible scenario is extremely
bad makes it worth preparing for—clearly, we
shouldn't prepare for the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. The difference in
this case is that we are talking about outcomes not on the far edge of the ‘probability
density function’, but ones derived from projections which use the best methods
of the field and plausible assumptions. In addition, there's an asymmetry in
amelioration: preparing for the worse outcomes should make less bad scenarios
easier.
[4]
Mann becomes very profligate
in applying his dichotomy in the middle chapters of the book, but I think it
works best as a Platonic categorisation. Thus, largely Prophetic but
politically atypical figures like Tim Flannery or Jared Diamond (who favour
concrete policy discussion in their writing over exhortation to the visitation
of harm upon entities like “capitalism” or “the establishment”) are not clear
Prophets to my mind.
