Lester Brown is one of America's leading environmentals, and founder of the Earth Policy Institute and Worldwatch (which produces the annual state of the planet reports). World on the Edge, his latest book, outlines the Earth Institute's "Plan B", a big-picture blueprint to save the world/civilisation from environmental catastrophe.
The first part of the book rounds up our current environmental woes. It's familiar territory, but a useful overview nevertheless.
The underlying problem, Brown says, is over-population (itself made possible by using fossil fuels, soil nutrients and water at unsustainable rates). This, in turn, is driving rapid deforestation, soil depletion and desertification, draining ancient freshwater aquifers and pushing fish stocks to collapse.
Rapidly rising consumption in emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil is exacerbating these problems.
On top of all that, increased use of fossil fuels is causing climate change. This will devastate agriculture through sea level rises, changing rainfall patterns, heat stress, increased drought and melting glaciers. For instance glaciers, most notably in the Himalaya, act as frozen freshwater aquifers on which a quarter of world food production depends. A one metre sea level rise would shrink Asia's rice harvest. Drought is spreading Africa's Sahara desert south. Ocean acidification and ocean warming will destroy coral reefs and devastate already depleted fish stocks.
Depressing, huh?
But Brown believes we already have the knowledge, technology and money to prevent climate change and environmental disaster.
Read the book if you can, but here's a condensed summary of Brown's plan to save the world...
1. Drive a switch to greater energy efficiency and clean energy by including the full environmental and social costs in the energy price. Make energy companies pay to clean up their pollution; they will pass the cost to the consumer. That would instantly make renewable/zero-carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuel and make energy efficiency more financially compelling. (Currently, taxpayers subsidise fossil fuel through government spending on health and environmental cleanups, and the loss of environmental services and amenity.)
2. Reverse population growth. It is well-established that improved primary education, healthcare and birth control will achieve this in poor countries, which are where the growth is taking place.
3. Implement an "earth restoration plan" of massive reforestation and more environmentally aware farming techniques. This will check soil erosion, stabilise water supplies and draw down carbon from the atmosphere.
4. Redefine "security". Most conflicts and failing states are due to environmental stresses, which leave governments unable to feed their populations. If we redirect some of our "security" budget from military spending to environmental restoration, Brown calculates we can fund his population and earth restoration programs with just 12 per cent of the world's annual military spending. (Or, 28 per cent of the $661 billion US military budget alone; America accounts for 43 per cent of global military spending.)
5. Act quickly: history shows change of sufficient speed and scale is achievable, if the political will is there. Brown cites President Roosevelt harnessing America's industrial might in the second world war in less than three years, and how Iran halved its birthrate between 1987 and 1994.
Of course, generating the political will is the real problem. Brown doesn't have an answer to that. I guess it's up to the rest of us.
Here's the deal. Ecuador is a poor country and needs money for development. A rich supply of oil under its eastern lowlands is an obvious source of that money, and in recent years, Ecuador has derived 40 per cent of its national income from oil revenues.
Now oil companies have identified a vast supply of oil beneath the Yasuni National Park. Jackpot! Well, yes and no. The problem is Yasuni is one of the most biodiverse spots on earth. Maybe THE most biodiverse. This is the upper Amazon, a place where cool moist cloudforest tumbles down the eastern slopes of the Andes into steaming rainforest.
The Tasmanian forestry industry stands on the verge of a historic deal. The question is, can it, and its estwhile green adverseries, get the thing over the line?
Instead, according to a new report in the journal Science, it was the Amazon rainforest, courtesy of a devastating drought that resulted in billions of trees dying. As they rot, the trees release vast quantities of carbon dioxide. The 2010 drought follows a similar "once-in-a-century" drought in 2005.
The fury aroused by proposed cuts to water allocations in the Murray Darling is understandable - and illustrates why the river is in a mess in the first place.
Opponents of water cuts argue for a "balance" between the needs of the environment, business and community. But this represents a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between economics and the environment.
A sustainable economy depends on a healthy environment - you can't trade one for the other. We can get away with environmental damage only by passing the cost onto future generations - a debilitating "ecological debt" for our grandchildren.
Put simply: we have to fix the river then built industries around sustainable water extraction.
The same applies to the planet.
The United Nations Environment Program' (UNEP) recently published The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report. Described as the "Stern Report of Biodiversity" it tries to put a price on the massive loss of biodiversity Earth is now experiencing.
(This article on the BBC website summaries the report.)
The key concept here is "natural services" - a term for how nature delivers resources and services we need, such as clean water or protection from the elements. For instance, coral reefs, mangrove swamps and coastal dunes reduce damage to coastal communities from storms, cyclones and hurricanes. Without them we'd have to spend billions on massive artificial sea defences.
For the record, the TEEB calculates that price as between $2tn and $4.5tn a year.
In reality the price is infinite, because the loss of these natural services is felt forever (as in: $4.5tn x infinity) or at least for however long humans are likely to be around.
But the TEEB report at least draws attention to the damage we are doing to the planet's ecosystems - and underlines how our economic wellbeing depends on a healthy environment.
Unlikely as it seems, the Tasmanian forestry industry could be a beacon of hope in all this darkness. After decades of forestry wars, a historic truce is in the offing to end logging in native forest. Up to 60 per cent of forestry contractors could leave the industry, with funding for reskilling, relocation and alternative job creation.
The same sort of thinking could save the Murray Darling. And, just possibly, the planet.
Badmouthing the sausage sanga may be positively un-Australian, but the humble, belchin' and fartin' five-stomached cow emits more than her fair share of the greenhouse gas methane (scientists are looking at ways to bottle it). Cattle also require huge tracts of rainforest in the Amazon, Queensland and elsewhere to be cleared for their grazing pleasure. A cow consumes about a hundred times more food than it yields as meat, which means meat-eating means humanity needs more land to feed itself. Pork is not quite as bad, but you still have to put a lot more food into a pig than you get out. Meat consumption is soaring among the new Asian middle class in places like China, the world's population is soaring, the amount of cultivatable land is finite... you do the maths. At least we've still got hot chips.
South East fibre Exports - who run a woodchip mill near Eden, New South Wales - have failed to convince major electricity companies that a biofuel plant run by burning wood is worthy of being called accreditable renewable energy.
You wake up to a beautiful day, blue skies and birds singing. Then you read something like this, an article about oil exploration in the western Amazon. In Peru, 72 per cent of the country's Amazon region has been approved for oil exploration - most of it since 2003.
