Project Franz: A german initiative. Farmers are people who do not desire the destruction of the biosphere any more than anyone else, even if circumstances force them to contribute greatly to it. So, in Germany, environmentalists and farmers associations came together to see. Could the way of working be improved in the existing reality so as to be less harmful? Can one actually embed source links in the title image caption text?
It will be widely appreciated in the readership of this site that we are collectively, in this century, heading into an ever accelerating biodiversity crisis — sometimes also given the memorable title of the Sixth Mass Extinction. The one we cause, and which we are already into .. going on right now, not at any point in the near future.
In the minds of many, as far as I can see here, this issue seems to be connected to the Climate Change issue — more narrowly understood as the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions issue and the climate shifts that follow from it. But this is not sufficient. Climate Change strictly seen is part of the causes. But in reality, we drive the collapse of the biosphere that sustains us not “just” by climate change. It is our generalized “way of life” that drives it — even if the CO2 molecule would not have this infrared absorption band that makes it so troublesome, we’d still be on a racing course to the wall.
“The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” — GHW Bush, in the run-up to the Rio summit, 1992.
This is his lasting legacy.
I would like to give an impression of the scale of what we are collectively doing, at this moment, before I come to the driver. People need to be aware of it. The actual extinction of species is only the last step in a long process of decline — population losses, habitat losses, until a species loses its ecological function long before the last individuals may die out. Dirzo et al 2014 (Science), Defaunation in the Anthropocene, was a landmark paper that should be widely read in the general public. (Links often go to pdf’s directly. Its not hard to read the scientific originals, people should do it more often). It can be used like a cartoon. From it:
Population development of all invertebrates since 1970. This is the number of individuals, not the number of species.
The reality of this development has become clear in recent years, with studies in various parts of the world (Central Europe, Puerto Rico) showing similar trends. The decline did of course not suddenly begin in 1970, its when the estimates begin. It has also come into wide public awareness as the studies have been publicised.
At a certain point, it becomes clear that to even think about extinction in terms of individual species is to commit an error of scale. If entomologists’ most dire predictions come true, the number of species that will go extinct in the coming century will be in the millions, if not the tens of millions. Saving them one at a time is like trying to stop a tsunami with a couple of sandbags. …
But to think about the coming invertebrate extinctions is to confront a different dimension of loss. So much will vanish before we even knew it was there, before we had even begun to understand it. Species aren’t just names, or points on an evolutionary tree, or abstract sequences of DNA. They encode countless millennia of complex interactions between plant and animal, soil and air. Each species carries with it behaviours we have only begun to witness, chemical tricks honed over a million generations, whole worlds of mimicry and violence, maternal care and carnal exuberance. To know that all this will disappear is like watching a library burn without being able to pick up a single book. Our role in this destruction is a kind of vandalism, against their history, and ours as well.
You are safely under the earth, Mr. Bush. But onward. Dirzo’s invertebrate graph shows a decline (sorry, the actual scientific term that becomes established for it, is biological annihilation) in full swing by 1970. Mammals, fish, amphibian fare no better.
Decrease (in biomass) of major organism groups since the development of human civilization. Green is what is still there, of the amount originally there. The numbers may be hard to see: Wild Animals 85% loss, Marine Mammals 80% loss, Plants 50% loss (!), Fish 14 % loss (! — only).
This graph is a HuffPo Infografic based on data from a recent Bar On et al, PNAS (2018) global biomass inventory. In fairness, this is the cumulative effect of humans since very early on — its little appreciated that we were responsible for massive defaunation already in the stone age (mammoth and its brethren), which is important for the leftest column with its astounding 85% loss rate. But most of the other effects, that we have been much more recently. Whales were effectively massacred in the 19th century, thanks New Englanders (et al).
However this may be (and its a fascinating and grim field) the larger point in it is, this is not climate change. This is our way of life in action.
Now what specifically drives this? Two interrelated things — land use change, and modern agriculture. To survive, at whatever level, the biosphere (that part of it that is not directly our livestock or plantation) must have a place to exist, and in it, conditions to exist. I’ll give exemplary fotos, from the country i’m living in myself, which people look at without realizing that they see biological annihilation in action.
Look at that. Imagine you were .. a butterfly? Or a mole. Or a lark? As a rat, you can make it there. Where would anything live? Do you see any dandelion on the green land, or any daisy? a stinging nettle even? Anything? This is green land, its “the rural sphere”, but its a biological desert. It’s not meant to be anything else. Down to literally the last centimeter, the land is a factory surface for the agroindustrial production of crop and produce. Its not just any grass growing there, its a very specific, closely bred high nutrient grass (english ray) that is seeded, anything else exterminated, highly fertilized, here it feeds sheep directly who are production animals, it also serves as deposition plane for the manure of the concentrated industrial mass animal stockage around (cattle, pig and chicken), if the rains slack it is even irrigated (in this country!). The sloots (water lines) arent containing anything either — they are strictly and regularly machined, desilted, growth removed (even the ultraeutrophicated iris and waterlily that might settle, so as not to endanger water flow); they take the runoff in phosphate, nitrate and herbicide / pesticide, so much so that 50% of all Dutch water measurement stations actually exceed at least one regulation limit for a pesticide content, and in some waters the pesticide concentration is so high that the water itself could be used as a pesticide, as a recent study has shown. Eh, my little moths, how do you even survive that?
A bird can fly, but what does it eat? If in the open land it is a bottom nester, how does it raise a brood here under the regular tact of production grass mowings?
This is extremely efficient, and also very profitable modern agriculture. The fields here generally are smaller than in the US, for reasons. Our agricultural model is also quite different than the US one — we have the European Common Agricultural Policy (Mansholt’s legacy) which is being attacked by all and sundry — its topical — because it long has been and sometimes still is an easy target, but it is changing and many of the recent attackers (e. g. Brexiteers) dont do it in good faith. The CAP traditionally was regulated to produce maximum output. Mentally, that was an afterglow of the war, it has to be said. From the 80s on it was more and more becoming an absurdity and it has generally put farmers into a double bind between regulated low prices for food and high prices for land and industrial operation, necessitating a concentration on very few profit produces and at the same time a maximal utilization of he land at hand. Machination operates here no different than in the US and it wants to remove as much as possible any small scale — the larger the scale the more economic the use of a machine park. The net effect has been the loss of biodiversity and of simple biological existence of anything but us and our produce on a grand scale throughout the countryside.
One could say that the Netherlands is a known monstrosity, but this is the same mechanism that plays world wide. Spain entered the EU in 1981 IIRC (or was that the last mad colonel with his pistol?). It still has, but back then had much wider areas of low intensity, extensive dryland agriculture that was subsistence oriented as much as market oriented. Over time, in the logicality of the industrial agriculture, it has become one of Europes large providers of lettuces, paprika, and all kinds of high value fruits that populate our supermarkets. Its fair economical development in a sense. But it has introduced intensive overfertilisation, nutrient runoff, landscape scale pesticide walloping and the land use change that leaves no space anymore for the existence of a significant, ecosystem services providing biosphere. The Mar Menor, used to be a coastal lagoon in the Murcia province, which was famous for its crystalline waters, and posidonia beds, and seahorses.
caballito del mar. posidonia.
… until the nitrate and phosphate runoff from the greatly expanded high intensity agriculture for the inner-european market overwhelmed the arid catchment area.
I took the caballito photo from a 2017 article from the local press: “Desciende un 90% la población del Caballito de Mar en el Mar Menor”. Do I need to translate that? The video shows the resultant algae bloom. This same has happened in Lake Erie, I learnt on this site, quite often in recent times. Is it know where that comes from? Yes — the midwestern agriculture, Ohio agriculture, that is the pride of the state, as I read the Democratic gubernatorial candidate saying on an agricultural association event, promising them that the problem should certainly be studied with the best experts one could find, before anything so rash as compulsory runoff limiting measures might be considered.
Uh wasnt there an issue recently along Florida’s coasts?
Looking further afield. the cases are innumerable. One can point a finger at someone in every case, and that is necessary to do, but as the cited Guardian article above says. In aggregate the matter transforms from an array of cases to a systemic feature. Its inherent in the modern industrial agriculture and it matters not it aspects of it are laid at Monsanto’s feet or a gubernatorial candidate’s because they are constrained actors in a global system of conventional agriculture that creates coastal dead zones from nutrient runoff even in the Chinese Yellow Sea, for which Mr Cordray is not responsible.
We still have residual institutions from the bygone days of US global leadership, like the UN, which studies these things in its proper suborganisations. The UNEP has recently put out the “Global Ressources Outlook 2019”. Its recommended reading. From it I take:
This comes out very small, so I implore readers to look at the original sized image here.
It tries to address the impact of agriculture on global biodiversity loss by types of agriculture, to come down to a bit better grip on where efficient countermeasures are most needed. The darker the red shade, the greater the contribution of the crop types (in the small sub-images) to the total global biodiversity loss. Its easy to see that annual crops and pasture are the largest impactors — and a part of this is already instinctively known to many people, in that they are aware (if they dont refuse to hear) that their meat is fed from Brazil even if it is raised in a Dutch pig-factory. None of the others should be overlooked, forestry especially, about which to talk we have qualified people on this site.
What is shown is the systemic effect we are having on the world though our agriculture, which translates into an ongoing, rapid devastation (physical annihilation) of the biosphere that we ultimately depend on to live. Don’t we? Do we?
My home-country’s leading conservative newspaper a while ago carried the anecdotal story of a dutch farmer renting land on a grand scale in the depopulating german northeastern provinces. He wanted to implement his Dutch trained style of high intensity, high efficiency, high profit agriculture there. Reporter asked him if that land (soil) wasnt a bit too poor in fertility for his plans. (its a famously poor land). The Dutchman waved it away, saying — we dont need anything. We only need the land as such, to hold up our plants against gravity. Whatever the plants need in terms of fertilizer, plant food, chemical protection from any other organism or illness, we give it. Robotic pollination. It could be Mars.
Is it true? Could we feed our planet — ourselves — without a biosphere, from raw materials, if we had turned it into a barren globe? Technically? For the existing population? Or is it plain old hybris?
If it were true. Is it what we should want?
Apart from such fantasies — we are, through our collective way of life, on an experiment to try out what will happen. And, even if climate change (as per CO2 effects) were gone — solved today, tomorrow — this would still face us. I have by now strained your patience long enough, I wanted to lay out the background against which project FRANZ must be seen. I will have to actually describe it in in a second installment, which I promise to do promptly. I’ll end with a graph that for me summarises the severity of the coming crisis, even if its an engineering type graph.
Its from Schramski et al 2015, from Georgia. It calculates how much biomass there is on earth, converted into an equivalent plant phytomass. Then it calculates how much plant phytomass is needed to feed the human population at any time, given the known energy needs of a person and the average energy content in the plant phytomass. This naturally gives a number for how many times over, the biomass on earth could feed the human population in a given year. Thats his omega parameter on the left axis. In other words, 1/omega is the fraction of the existing biomass on earth that humans need to eat in a given year to live . It is a very crude approximation, but dimensional numbers are needed. And they plot this Omega value as a function of time through human history, using best estimates they could get.
And the curve is, as one can see, rapidly decreasing. His last data points are from 1990 and 2000 (inset). The numbers still may seem reassuring — the last point is close to 1000, meaning, humans need to eat 0.1% of all biomass on earth in that year to survive. That should leave room, one might think. But the decrease rate is dramatic. Within 6 decades, (from 2000) a projected Omega will hit the Zero bound. Thats within this century.
It’s a dispassionate way to look at it. At some unknown point way before this Zero bound, we — our civilisation and our life — must collapse. And not only we; the largest part of the biosphere will be going with us, through us. This is what our everyday normality means. This is what our everyday eating means, Our agriculture. It’s quite Malthusian. Climate Change is one thing, but this is the problem that awaits us with fury even if we solve Climate. Actually, Climate is only an extension of this problem: we are consuming earth (the biosphere), in a very literal sense.
So, are there ways how agriculture, as we do it, today, the conventional one, could be changed, to make it less harmful? That is what Project Franz is about and what I will describe next time.
[N]ow, for the first time in history, humanity is facing a global chemical energy limit. … Living biomass is the energy capital that runs the biosphere and supports the human population and economy. There is an urgent need not only to halt the depletion of this biological capital, but to move as rapidly as possible toward an approximate equilibrium between NPP [net primary production] and respiration. There is simply no reserve tank of biomass for planet Earth. The laws of thermodynamics have no mercy. Equilibrium is inhospitable, sterile, and final. (Schramski op. cit, with a bit of gratuitous melodrama, but is it not justified?)
