Abundant Earth

Toward an Ecological Civilization

Eileen Crist

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226596945
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In Abundant Earth, Eileen Crist not only documents the rising tide of biodiversity loss, but also lays out the drivers of this wholesale destruction and how we can push past them. Looking beyond the familiar litany of causes—a large and growing human population, rising livestock numbers, expanding economies and international trade, and spreading infrastructures and incursions upon wildlands—she asks the key question: if we know human expansionism is to blame for this ecological crisis, why are we not taking the needed steps to halt our expansionism?Crist argues that to do so would require a two-pronged approach. Scaling down calls upon us to lower the global human population while working within a human-rights framework, to deindustrialize food production, and to localize economies and contract global trade. Pulling back calls upon us to free, restore, reconnect, and rewild vast terrestrial and marine ecosystems. However, the pervasive worldview of human supremacy—the conviction that humans are superior to all other life-forms and entitled to use these life-forms and their habitats—normalizes and promotes humanity's ongoing expansion, undermining our ability to enact these linked strategies and preempt the mounting suffering and dislocation of both humans and nonhumans. Abundant Earth urges us to confront the reality that humanity will not advance by entrenching its domination over the biosphere. On the contrary, we will stagnate in the identity of nature-colonizer and decline into conflict as we vie for natural resources. Instead, we must chart another course, choosing to live in fellowship within the vibrant ecologies of our wild and domestic cohorts, and enfolding human inhabitation within the rich expanse of a biodiverse, living planet.

PART ONE

The Destruction of Life and the Human Supremacy Complex

ONE

Unraveling Earth’s Biodiversity

The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.

JULIA WHITTY

There are so many stories narrated in scientific reports, naturalist and environmental writings, and the internet conveying the biodiversity holocaust. Tropics going up in smoke; grasslands turned over to monocultures; forests, coral reefs, savannahs, and steppes emptied of their animals; frogs, butterflies, bats, sea horses, freshwater fish, and honeybees blinking out; dwindling migrations; incalculable numbers of wild fish fished out of existence; plummeting populations of big carnivores and herbivores; elephants and rhinos gunned down by the thousands; coastal dead zones multiplying, and seas awash in plastic.

While each story demands attention in its own right, it is only by congregating them in our mind’s eye that we can grasp the systemic scope of the crisis under way. Humanity is dismantling the very qualities that constitute the living world: variety of life-forms, complexity of life’s interrelations, abundance of native beings and unique places on Earth, and diversity of nonhuman forms of awareness. These intertwined qualities form the cauldron of Earth’s beauty and creativity. They are the ground of life’s evolutionary power, fecundity, and endurance.

Biodiversity’s facets of diverse life-forms, abundances of wild organisms, complexity of ecological relations, and variety of nonhuman lifeways may be described as the flame of life. Flame of life is a metaphor for life’s richness at the levels of species, subspecies, populations, genes, behaviors, minds, and small- and large-scale ecologies—a richness that is self-perpetuating and builds more of itself over time. In the wake of the human onslaught, the flame of life is being extinguished. The richness of the living world is coming undone as the human juggernaut eclipses the stupendous diversity of our only cohort in the universe, turning the Earth into a biologically impoverished human colony and “stretching our loneliness to infinity.”1

Biodiversity is disappearing because of the wholesale takeover of previously vast, connected, and free landscapes and seascapes, and the virtually unrestrained invasion into the planet’s remaining wild nature. Wilderness, the matrix within which biodiversity thrives, is shrinking and becoming fragmented, resembling shards of natural areas in the midst of hostile developments such as industrial agriculture fields, grazing ranges, roads, highways, clear-cuts, mining projects, suburban sprawl, fences and other constructed barriers, and oil, coal, and gas ventures.

How big the human sea has become is captured by environmental analyst Vaclav Smil, who recently compared the biomass of wild vertebrate animals to the biomass of all humans and domestic animals. He found that “even the largest species of wild terrestrial vertebrates now have aggregate zoomass that is only a small fraction of the global anthropomass,” and that “the zoomass of wild vertebrates is now vanishingly small compared to the biomass of domestic animals.”2 In brief, the combined weight of humans and domestic animals dwarves that of the planet’s remaining wild terrestrial animals. Smil’s measure starkly captures the upshot of human expansionism—of population, economic, agricultural, and infrastructural growth. Humanity and its domestic animals have overtaken the biosphere, while wild creatures and places are dwindling. The destruction of life’s diversity, complexity, and abundance profoundly downgrades the human understanding and experience of life’s magnificence. As the living world is vandalized and its richness diminished, human beings become increasingly oblivious to the full spectrum of Earth’s splendor.

Abundant Life

Imagine yourself one sunny morning in the late eighteenth century, standing on the shores of Wales and watching the undulations of a vast school of herring dodging a multitude of predators:

The arrival of the grand school [of herring] is easily announced, by the number of its greedy attendants, the gannet, the gull, the shark and the porpoise. When the main body is arrived, its breadth and depth is such as to alter the very appearance of the ocean. It is divided into distinct columns, of five or six miles in length, and three or four broad; while the water before them curls up, as if forced out of its bed. Sometimes they sink for the space of ten or fifteen minutes, then rise again to the surface; and, in bright weather, reflect a variety of splendid colors, like a field bespangled with purple, gold, and azure. . . . The whole water seems alive; and it is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible. . . . Millions of enemies appear to thin their squadrons. The fin whale and the sperm whale swallow barrels at a yawn; the porpoise, the grampus, the shark, and the whole numerous tribe of dogfish, find them an easy prey, and desist from making war upon each other. . . . And the birds devour what quantities they please.3

This extraordinary display of marine wildlife was by no means exceptional, but typical of the biosphere’s abundance of biological phenomena on land and seas.

Biodiversity is often misunderstood as referring to species numbers on Earth (or in any given ecosystem). This conception does a disservice to its meaning: numbers of species is a critical component of biodiversity, but biodiversity encompasses far more. The description above serves as an exhibit of its multilayered import. In the arrival of “the grand school,” we discern a diverse cast of species and can infer the existence of many more. We also see huge numbers of animals and their relationships—an ecology in motion. The scene additionally points to the ways abundant life significantly shapes the environment: the erstwhile vast numbers of marine animals contributed to churning the seas vertically and horizontally, distributing nutrients and molding physical and chemical conditions. The feasting mass also tells us about emergent phenomena of interacting life-forms; marine biologist Callum Roberts writes that the appearance of the herring and their predators “ranked as one of the world’s most remarkable wildlife phenomena.”4 We additionally glimpse another intrinsic quality of the ocean: its immense store of nutrients to support such seemingly “inexhaustible” numbers of herring5—even as the description depicts only one population of herring, while herring themselves are only one species among numerous other small fish.

The eighteenth-century author who encountered the grand school with its attendant millions of predators exclaimed that “the whole water seemed alive.” Yet the scene intimates a bigger truth: the whole ocean was alive.

Even as this ensemble offers a view of biodiversity’s many dimensions, so it serves as a window into biodiversity’s crisis. The snapshot of life’s richness conveyed in this eighteenth-century description suggests a baseline to begin to understand the profound declension that life is experiencing. A paramount aspect is the extinction of species that today is extremely high and heading the biosphere toward a mass extinction event. (I will elaborate on this shortly.) Yet equally significant dimensions of biodiversity destruction include plummeting numbers of wild organisms, the loss of wildlife and biological phenomena they give rise to, the diminishment of wild beings’ ecological roles in food webs and nutrient circulation, and the eclipse of their contributions in cocreating complex biological, physical, and chemical environments.

The loss of such phenomena of abundance, as described above, also lifts the curtain on the colossal public ignorance surrounding biodiversity’s unraveling. Ignorance about this momentous event has been conveyed through such expressions as “the declining ecological baseline,” “the extinction of experience,” and “ecological amnesia”—all ways of highlighting the collective obliviousness surrounding the eclipse of life’s former richness.6 Indeed, even as humanity is impoverishing the biosphere through species extinctions, extirpations of populations, unwinding ecologies, biological homogenization, and silencing of the polyphony of nonhuman lifeways, most people encountering such depauperate environments regard them as normal. Dimming knowledge and shriveling experiential horizons surrounding the wealth of planet Earth reveal how the human mind is afflicted by life’s destruction.

The ongoing, cumulative forgetting of the biosphere’s autochtonous nature is bringing humanity to the verge of losing the cosmic privilege of witnessing what can be neither fully comprehended nor, in the very long run, subdued: Earth’s intrinsic being. Earth’s being is a cosmos that self-creates itself through the resonances of its innumerable members, who, barring rare and large-scale catastrophes, keep swelling into a plenum of diversified kinds, abundant numbers, different ways of life, and exquisitely convoluted relationships—all unfurling as a slow-motion upsurge of biodiversity over geological time. The myriad, intertwining living elements scale up into the luminous mandala of the biosphere that we belong with. Life’s multileveled diversity choreographs, even as it is shaped by, the inorganic dimensions of Earth. Earth is the most artful entity of the known universe, drawing wonderful compositions of life over unfathomable stretches of time.

Not that long ago, the salmon and other migrating fish of the Old and New Worlds fed the animals, the trees, and the soil, and their numbers still swelled to burst the rivers’ seams. Before people turned the world into their ecumene—the human-dominated world—there were lions in Greece, cedars in Lebanon, whales in the Mediterranean, elephants in China, wolves in Japan, jaguars in North America, aurochs in Europe, bears in England, and temperate rain forests in Scotland and Ireland. There existed species of birds and fish that numbered in the billions. Herds of hundreds of thousands ungulates, including yaks, antelopes, gazelles, and wild asses, animated the Tibetan plateau. Cheetahs ranged from North Africa to India. One hundred thousand tigers roamed from the Caspian Sea through China and from Siberia to India, Sumatra, and Java. Whales abounded and ate krill in megatons, and the krill still proliferated to feed so many others. The carcasses and feces of millions of whales sustained a bizarre deep-sea life, one till recently unknown. Not that long ago immense numbers of sharks, swordfish, marlin, tuna, and other big fish traveled the ocean, and rainbows of living coral hallowed islands and coastal seas.

Rivers flowed free, nourishing some of the most life-abundant places on Earth within and around their waters. The world was filled with birds—seabirds, migrating birds, wading birds, flightless birds, huge and tiny birds, colorful and drab birds, vast flocks of birds, and raptors and scavengers with breathtaking wingspans. Massive herds trailed moving ecologies, plowing and fertilizing grasslands that overflowed in plenty, only to feed in turn the herds and their numerous, ever-in-motion attendants. Once the living world spoke to an Oglala Sioux named Black Elk, and he recorded the following: “I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”7 The biosphere gutted of diverse, abundant life is not normal. For the biosphere, normal is abounding in endless, wonderful forms of life.8

Scientists do not often describe biodiversity in epic terms, but they do describe it comprehensively, as life’s variety at the levels of species, genes, and ecologies. Roughly two million species have been discovered, with many more still undiscovered. The total figure remains unknown with estimates spanning between five and thirty million.9 “We live on a little known planet,” life scientist E. O. Wilson likes to say.10 New species of worms, insects, fungi, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish are discovered all the time. For example, 10 percent of all known mammal species have been discovered since 1993; 26 percent of all known amphibians have been discovered roughly in the same period.11

Within species diversity lies even greater variety: the plush, gray zone of subspecies, varieties, and distinct populations that comprise a species. While “species” does refer to actual biological entities, the designation is, at the same time, an abstraction. In the real world, a species consists of a varied and dynamic tapestry of living beings. To illustrate with a couple examples, in pre-Columbian North America as many as half a million wolves enjoyed continental range.12 Wolves roamed North America in distinct populations (called “metapopulations”) and were composed of at least three subspecies. Africa and Asia were inhabited by millions of rhinos into historic times. The total numbers of the five species of rhinos today are estimated around thirty thousand, and three species—the black rhino, the Sumatran rhino, and the Javan rhino—are critically endangered.13 Similar profiles were extant in many other species that existed in large numbers, wide ranges, different subspecies, and distinct populations prior to being decimated. Indeed, distinct populations of a species define a vital facet of biodiversity: metapopulation diversity at the global scale is, or more precisely was, enormous.14

Historic ranges, distinct metapopulations, total population numbers, subspecies, and varieties are all constitutive of the elliptical, monolithic notion of species. A more nuanced understanding of how species manifest opens a vista to the extraordinary phenomenology of life—to the experiential dimension of its bountiful manifestations. At a biological level, the above dimensions point to something equally vital though far more hidden: genetic diversity. According to biologists Rodolfo Dirzo and Peter Raven, a huge (and only partly explored) degree of rich genetic variation exists within populations as well as between them. “Many species,” they add, “are composed of populations that are more or less genetically distinct from one another.”15 Genetic diversity is an indispensable ingredient of life, for it underpins the resilience of life-forms in the face of environmental flux. Variation at the genetic level enables nature to mold new life compositions, so that species are not only retained but also modified and diversified over geological time.

Biodiversity includes rich ecological variation as well. Diversity of places, composed of life assemblies that are morphologically and physiologically distinct, is described as Earth’s biodisperity.16 Continents and islands (both being types of landmasses separated hundreds of millions of years ago) became home to native, unique life lineages. Ecological diversity is also captured through the term “biome,” which refers to large-scale ecologies comprised of interdependent plants, animals, fungi, and other life-forms within specific regions, climates, and altitudes. Examples include wet and dry tropical forests, temperate and boreal forests, deserts and alpine biomes, river watersheds and estuaries, grasslands and shrublands, tundra, continental shelves, and the high seas. Distinct ecologies are—or into historic times have been—homes for unique communities of beings.

Humanity is driving immense losses at all levels—species, genes (i.e., subspecies, varieties, overall numbers, and metapopulations), and ecologies. Life’s diversity is in free fall on multiple fronts, through multiple causes, and in multiple places. The onslaught under way foreshadows the imminent reckoning of biodiversity destruction: humanity annihilating a living cornucopia that is self-replenishing and self-creative, and leaving in its wake a diminished, human-colonized planet. The systemic character of this onslaught impels us to recognize that if humanity chooses to keep life’s flame ablaze, biodiversity collapse must be addressed at the scale it is occurring—piecemeal, bandage solutions will fall short.

The Systemic Assault on Life

The extinction crisis is a profound dimension of biological impoverishment. Because of life’s evolutionary power (its ability to generate new life-forms) and its facility in spreading over the biosphere, biodiversity has steadily increased over time, beginning about 3.8 billion years ago and accelerating after the Cambrian explosion some 550 million years ago. Biodiversity’s gradual swell has been virtually uninte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• part one  The Destruction of Life and the Human Supremacy Complex
• part two  Discursive Knots
• part three  Scaling Down and Pulling Back
• Notes
• References
• Index