18 October 2022. Biodiversity | Latour
Biodiversity is going to hell in a handbasket. // Remembering Bruno Latour
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1: Biodiversity is going to hell in a handbasket
I’ve been reading the biennial Living Planet Report on the state of the planet’s biodiversity, and there’s no way of sugarcoating this. It’s grim all the way through, although fragmentary glimpses of better news are popped in so we can hold onto some small shards of hope.
What I’m going to do here is share some of the more depressing charts and summarise their main conclusions.
The Living Planet Report 2022 is written by WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, and published by WWF with ZSL, the Zoological Society of London. It includes the largest dataset yet on biodiversity, and has been able to draw on recent work from both the IPCC and the IUNC Red List. The first section characterises the state of the “double emergency” of biodiversity and climate change; the second looks at the speed and scale of change—and believe me, there’s nothing good there; and the third at the steps we need to take to become a “nature-positive society”. There’s too much here for one piece, so I’m going to use some of the charts from the report by way of commentary. But the executive summary spells it out:
Land-use change is still the biggest current threat to nature, destroying or fragmenting the natural habitats of many plant and animal species on land, in freshwater and in the sea. However, if we are unable to limit warming to 1.5°C, climate change is likely to become the dominant cause of biodiversity loss in the coming decades.
A chart from the report shows the impact of different degrees of global heating on biodiversity loss. It’s pretty stark.
(Living Planet Report 2022: Projected loss of terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity compared to pre-industrial period)
This chart shows the historic data that sits behind this, going back over sixty years. We’re now at a point where biocapacity is the equivalent of 1.6 hectares per person, while consumption is at 2.5 hectares per person, globally. Strikingly, since it’s the 50th anniversary of the Limits to Growth report this year, the cross over into negative biocapacity happens just as Limits to Growth was published.
(Living Planet Report 2022: Global ecological footprint and biocapacity, 1961-2018)
The effect of this on the state of wildlife populations is both predictable, and stark:
In its most comprehensive finding to date, this edition shows an average 69% decline in the relative abundance of monitored wildlife populations around the world between 1970 and 2018. Latin America shows the greatest regional decline in average population abundance (94%), while freshwater species populations have seen the greatest overall global decline (83%).
There’s a useful chart showing where human biocapacity consumption comes from, in terms of planetary activities.
(Living Planet Report 2022: Ecological footprint by land use and activity)
The two circles here are telling us different things. The inner circle shows the ecological footprint by activities: food consumption is the largest, followed by housing, followed by personal transport.
The outer circle shows land use, with 60% taken up by the carbon footprint, and the rest, apart from a tiny proportion of land that is built on globally, is different forms of land use that are mostly associated with forms of food production.
I’m going to come back to Section 3 of the report later this week (the “what is to be done?” section), since there is quite a lot of detail in it.
But a couple more charts set the tone from this “transformation” scenario, as they describe it. Here’s the first one of these—a bad things and good things chart that any consultant would be proud of.
(The Living Planet Report, 2022).
Just stop all of the extraction, over-exploitation, and pollution, and we’ll be home free, right?
And here’s the sister chart, which shows how quickly we need to do that if we’re not going to kill off a lot more biodiversity in the meantime:
(The Living Planet Report, 2022).
And one of the things that this reminds me about is the Limits to Growth report, 50 years old this month, and monstered when it came out—partly be people who didn’t understand the model and partly by people who chose to misunderstand the model. (I’ve written about this here before, and also edited a Special Edition of the APF newsletter Compass which is available online.
The base case from among their dozen of so scenarios projected that we would see declining industrial production in the 2020s because of a modelling bucket called ‘pollution’. In turn this would lead to declining global population in the 2030s.
As has been well documented, the base case is—depending whose analysis you read—either the scenario that has tracked actual outcomes since the 1970s most closely, or one of the two of the dozen or so modelling scenarios that have done this.
In the LtG model, as I understand it, ‘pollution’ is a bucket which bundles up the external costs of industrial production. It then reduces agricultural production, and this in turn sucks investment away from industrial production—while not successfully restoring food production.
It’s impossible to read the IUCN report without concluding that this is where we are—and possibly that the so-called “productivity crisis” that we have been living through is a harbinger of this deeper, more fundamental, and potentially more fatal change in the way the world works.
And, connected to this, a second point. This is that the emerging interest in how we start to respect the interests of other species, rather than treating them as a resource to aid human consumption, is an intuitive recognition of these deeper and more fundamental roots of our current crisis.
I’ll come back to some of the policy prescriptions in the Living Plant Report later this week, about getting to a nature-positive world, but it has a useful list of indicators. But: we really need to get here by 2030:
When governments protect 30% of the world’s land, freshwater and oceans through rights-based and community-led approaches; tackle the drivers of nature loss that largely originate in the other 70%; ratchet up their actions if they are collectively falling short; and commit the requisite resources for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, then a naturepositive world will be within reach.
2: Remembering Bruno Latour
Lots of people have been paying their respects to Bruno Latour, the influential French academic who died of cancer last week. It’s no more than he deserves. I’m going to share a couple of extracts here, from two different pieces.
(Drawing of Bruno Latour for “The New Free University” conference. Credit : Stéphanie Samper)
The philosopher Justin E.H.Smith devoted an edition of his newsletter to Latour’s death, starting with an engaging story about Latour’s response to a multi-captioned artefact in a French church:
Down in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Baume, in the South of France, there is an exquisitely rare object. It is a skull, behind a wall of glass, and it is described by two separate and very different labels. The one label tells you it comes from a woman in her fifties, likely born in the Eastern mediterranean in the early first century CE. The other label tells you it is the skull of Mary Magdalene. ... In 2017 my spouse and I were standing and looking at the skull behind the glass. I was inspecting the two labels, and thinking about the ironies of the contrasting accounts they presented, when, behind us, we heard a voice: Ah, c’est bien, ils nous donnent un choix, the voice said. We turned around, and saw that it belonged to Bruno Latour.
“It’s nice, they give us a choice.” ... It is not just a matter of giving everybody what they want, letting each person choose one label, but rather giving all of us both labels.
Smith’s posts are always long, and sometimes labyrinthine. On this occasion he sketches out the elements of Latour’s work that he has found valuable (and, indeed, some of his differences). Had Latour died in the 1980s, for example, he would have been known mostly for his large contribution to shaping the emerging thinking around “science and technology studies” (STS), notably his work with Steve Woolgar on what scientists actually do in the lab when they do “research”.
But by the 2000s, he was worried about climate change, and by the way in which—in Smith’s version—“facts” and “values” had become disconnected from one another. There’s a rich discussion here that I’m not going to summarise about the role of “things” that is a thread both to and from his earlier STS work. Briefly, though:
That is, a thing is a sort of coming together, not just any coming together, but one that is of particular salience for a society in its efforts to chart its course into the future.... But some things can be matters of fact and fail to be matters of concern, or, to put it differently, we can fail to be concerned about them — e.g., plastic milk jugs in the ocean, which were made just like any other human artefact, but were then cast off and, at least for a while, ignored.
And one such “thing” might be the famous Earthrise photo of the earth from space, that became a “thing” only in the mid 1960s, but prefigured a whole lot of environmental innovation, from Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis to the Whole Earth Catalog to (see above) The Limits to Growth.
(Image: NASA Space Observatory/flickr. CC BY 2.0)
The second piece is a warm (and charmingly French) tribute from Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and Mathias Vicherat of Sciences Po, the French ‘grandes ecole’ where Latour worked for his last 15 years, and which, by their account, he transformed. (I’m grateful to John Naughton for spotting this).
Presented as unclassifiable, the scientific and intellectual work of Bruno Latour is above all original, powerful, abundant and inspiring. It takes the form of fieldwork, surveys, articles, books, online collaborative platforms, exhibitions and plays, mustering philosophy, the sociology of science and technology, anthropology, theology, the arts and political thinking on the environment, all of which he constantly mobilised, trading in the professor's gown for the costume of an exhibition curator or actor with enthusiasm and delight… Through political and theatrical performance, the students who participated in Copenhagen, what if it had happened differently? (in French) and Paris Climate 2015: Make it Work were party to a life-size simulation of the COP negotiations.
Perhaps appropriately, his last public lecture, just a month ago, marked the 150th anniversary of Sciences Po—but looked forwards as much as back. There’s lots of rich discussion here about how the university curriculum, and indeed science, needs to respond to climate change, but for the moment let me mention his idea that Humboldt’s 19th century “trickle down” model of the university is dead:
The theory of trickle-down knowledge is as outdated as that of trickle-down economics... I knew this, but I was struck when learning that the city of Cambridge had overwhelmingly voted Remain in the fateful Brexit referendum but that the shire of Cambridge had just as massively voted Leave. Obviously the fountain of knowledge of Cambridge colleges had not inundated the shire! This is a great simile for what could be called the complete irrelevance of universities based on the trickle-down model of knowledge production when dealing with the climate mutation.
Notes from readers
I promise that this is my last reference to Vaughan Williams for a while, anniversary notwithstanding. But a couple of responses to my Vaughan Williams article last week, here and on Salut Live!, are worth sharing.
Thanks, first, to Caroline Holland for her link to the newsletter ‘Vaughan Williams’ journey into folk’, written by Caroline Davison, who has a book coming out on this subject. The newsletter is a series of accounts of some of RVW’s recording field trips, with different singers in different parts of the country.
Perhaps as esoteric, the futurist and writer Paul Raven noted to me that Vaughan Williams appears as a minor character in Rob Holdstock’s book Lavondyss:
Holdstock wrote some of the most singular works of British fantastika---not elves'n'goblins guff, but rather a much deeper and darker engagement with the substance of myth and its form, and the centrality thereof to culture and the psyche and landscape. Lavondyss is his masterwork (literally, according to Gollancz's genre classics imprint of that name), but you might be better off starting with the first book, Mythago Wood, which is an easier read, and lays the fundations for the later book.
I got Paul’s email shortly before heading to Charlie Byrne’s fabulous bookshop in Galway, which happened to have a copy of Mythago Wood on the shelves.
(Photo: Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop. Andrew Curry, CC BY-SA-NC 4.0)
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