The Fires Next Time: Roger del Moral @ Town Hall
This will no doubt turn out to be the easiest Science Lecture to get a seat at: next week brings Harvard psychology profesor Steven Pinker (9/26) and double-helixer James Watson (9/27), and then in November there's Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist (11/13).
An old hand at this public presentation business, del Moral came well equipped with photos of various natural disasters, and impressive looking graphs (which he copped to finding on Google). One of the graphs illustrated that, around 1980, the combined human ecological footprint exceeded bio-capacity (some would argue, even earlier). Just as important, not only are our demands on the environment increasing with the population size, but our degradation of the environment is decreasing bio-capacity as we go along. In other words, not only have we been dipping into savings, but we're earning less and less.
The degradation is primarily thanks to overgrazing, desertification, deforestation, and the failure of unsustainable agricultural methods -- none of which, if you've read Jared Diamond's Collapse, is new news. Over-irrigation salted up the Fertile Crescent some time ago. (70 years after the Dust Bowl, we still lose two billion tons of midwestern topsoil each year.) But today, other less visible drivers are keeping the four horsemen above in business worldwide: global warming, habitat fragmentation, and plunging biodiversity. Global warming means breaking out an official Category 6 for hurricanes.
Something called "naturalistic restoration," claimed del Moral, is necessary if we don't want to live out worldwide cultural collapse. (See also Anthony Bradshaw's book.) Or burn like the dry brush of Canberra in 2003 (pictured top). Or be overrun by feral camels.
Why won't nature just heal itself and not kill us if we let up on overusing and toxifying it? Sometimes it will: del Moral has been studying vegetation responses to natural disasters, especially on Mt. St. Helens, and watching how nature comes back. But the process (for our purposes, i.e., keeping people alive) is very slow and inefficient, depending on chance. And as real estate types are fond of saying: They're not making any more land. As we retire degraded land from agricultural or habitable usage, the amount we've got left to live on shrinks.
His research on ecological succession indicates that it's possible to give nature a hand -- not from an engineering (bigger! better! stronger!) perspective, but from an understanding of natural alternatives. Much of that understanding comes from decades of study of what he broke out as the four major landscapes:
- 1) infertile and unstable: volcanic ash and sand dunes
- 2) infertile and stable: lava fields and glacial forelands
- 3) fertile and unstable: landslides, sea shores, flood plains
- 4) fertile and stable: good farmland, but vulnerable to fire, storms, overgrazing, and invasive species
Successful examples of naturalistic restoration (where severely degraded land has been returned to some productive use) include San Francisco's Chrissy Field and Seattle's own Gasworks Park. These sound like tiny pilot projects when you think of the scope of global warming and human greed, the evaporation of seas, boreal lakes seeping into melting permafrost, giant aquifers being depleted. Meanwhile, more and more of us live in at-risk areas like coasts, and only add to the risk with development.
It's a crisis, said del Moral, but one with a solution. We need to make restoration a top priority, he said, estimating Washington State's restoration needs could be met by the cost of a week of the war in Iraq. The audience was in complete agreement, but as we noted, it was small.
