The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere

Human industrial growth is systematically dismantling the natural ecosystems which constitute our life support system. Rightly so, there has been an enormous amount of attention given to climate change (though action to rapidly reduce emissions still lags far beyond what is required). Climate change  is becoming abrupt and runaway; and threatens just by itself to collapse societies, economies, and ultimately the biosphere.

At least 10 planetary boundaries exist that
 threaten to make the biosphere uninhabitable

Yet climate change is only one of at least ten global ecological catastrophes which threaten to destroy the global ecological system and portend an end to human beings, and perhaps all life. Ranging from nitrogen deposition to ocean acidification, and including such basics as soil, water, and air; virtually every ecological system upon which life depends is failing. Gaia is dying.

The threat to global ecological sustainability goes well beyond climate change, and represents a more systematic failing of current political and economic models. Namely, the commodification of natural ecosystems – that are our and all life’s habitat – and their unsustainable industrial clearance for short-term profit, is sheer ecocidal madness.

Read the essay by Dr Glen Barry on EcoInternet - “The End of Being: Abrupt Climate Change One of Many Ecological Crises Threatening to Collapse the Biosphere.”

It’s simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up

Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham.

'The mother narrative to all this is carbon-fuelled
 expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots.' 

Go on, take a guess. Ten times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It's 2.5 billion billion solar systems. It does not take you long, pondering this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Read George Monbiot’s observations on The Guardian - “It’s simple. If we can't change our economic system, our number's up.”

How healthy soils make for a healthy life

The next time you bite into an apple, spare a thought for the soils that helped to produce it. Soils play a vital role, not just in an apple’s growth, but in our own health too.

Soil can be replaced in just a few
years or take an entire millennium.

The formation of soil, pedogenesis, is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of soil coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium.

But with soils around the world under threat, we’re in danger of losing their health benefits faster than they are replaced.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Professor from the University of Melbourne, Deli Chen, and a research fellow, also from University of Melbourne, Ee Ling Ng  - “How healthy soils make for a healthy life.”