One thing that gets lost in the climate debate is that Earth’s climate is already severely deranged. This is hard to see when the conversation is about global averages and the predictions of computer models. But severe climate change is already devastating the lives of millions of people. To see it, we have to look through a different lens—not temperature and carbon, but water.
In recent decades, the word “climate” has increasingly become a proxy for “temperature.” Read almost any discussion of the droughts and floods that are striking nearly everywhere on the planet with increasing frequency, and you’ll see climate change mentioned as a major—if not the major—culprit. Traditionally, though, it was as common to speak of a wet or dry climate as it was a hot or cold climate. Increased levels of drought and flooding are not caused by climate change; they are climate change.
While most of the discourse around climate change focuses on temperature, water is the climatic factor that most directly impacts life. Life flourishes throughout the hot equatorial zone because of the presence of abundant rainfall, while deserts, because they receive little precipitation, are comparatively barren whatever their temperature.
The ability of land to support human life also depends on water. The more regular and abundant the precipitation, the better able the land is to sustain large numbers of people. A hotter-than-average summer is usually no great threat to crops; a drought threatens catastrophe.
Of course, temperature bears a strong influence on precipitation patterns, most directly through its effect on wind and ocean currents. Moreover, the water cycle and the carbon cycle are closely entwined. We cannot speak of one without speaking of the other. The shift of emphasis I am about to offer is nothing as simplistic as “Water is more directly impactful, so we should forget about carbon.” What we will see is that by putting water first, the carbon problem and the warming problem will be solved as well.
Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas on the planet, accounting for 80 percent of the greenhouse effect. Its effects are hard to model, however, because unlike carbon dioxide it is not evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere. Furthermore, when it condenses into clouds, water exerts a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight during the day, as well as a warming effect by insulating the surface and absorbing long wave infrared radiation, especially at night, depending on the type and height of the cloud. The evaporation and condensation of water also transfers heat from lower layers of the atmosphere to higher layers, and horizontally from one region to another. The interplay of these regionally variable effects is what makes water difficult to accurately model.
Making it harder still is one critical factor: life. Until recently, rainfall patterns and cloud formation were thought (by scientists) to be primarily a function of geophysical processes. Where there happened to be ample rains, life flourished; where there was little rain, drylands formed. This view is at home with the deeper belief that the planet is a host for life, but is not itself alive; that life is but a fortuitous biological scum atop an inanimate rock.
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia Theory, which posits that life creates the conditions for life, put an end to the conceptual separation between geology and biology. As this paradigm percolates through science, it encourages a new perceptual stance that reveals things that were previously invisible—invisible to scientists, that is, although not to traditional and indigenous people.
The paradigm shift when it comes to climate is not really from carbon to water; it is a shift from a geomechanical view to a Gaian view, a living systems view. Whether we are looking through the lens of carbon or water, from the living systems perspective we see that climate health depends on the health of local ecosystems everywhere.
The health of local ecosystems, in turn, depends on the health of the water cycle, and the health of the water cycle depends on the soil and the forests.
An alive planet is a resilient planet, capable of responding to fluctuations in atmospheric gases, volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, solar fluctuations, and other challenges. Standard climate theory says that forests have an ambiguous contribution to temperature, contributing to warming because they absorb more sunlight than bare ground, and to cooling by storing carbon. Recently, the trend in research has been to demonstrate that forests store and sequester much more carbon than previously thought. According to one paper, if we continue current rates of deforestation then the planet will warm by 1.5 degrees even if fossil fuels were eliminated overnight.1 These computations did not include lost sequestration potential, but only the carbon from the lost biomass and exposed soil. (Deforestation exposes soil to heat and erosion, leading to massive emissions of carbon dioxide.)
On carbon grounds alone, forest conservation and reforestation should be much higher priorities than they are today. Through the lens of water, their importance is even more critical.
Because forests store and transpire moisture, they convert solar radiation into the “latent heat” of water vapor. Some of this heat is released back at night when the water vapor condenses into dew, but a lot of the vapor rises to form clouds, transferring heat from the ground level into the atmosphere. When the water condenses as clouds, the heat is released again. How much of that heat radiates out into space and how much returns back to earth is a contentious matter—the effect of clouds is one of the most important and controversial variables in climate modeling2—but there is little doubt that forest transpiration has a cooling effect on at least a local and regional level; there are also strong arguments that the same is true on a global level.
Intuitively, everybody already knows that it is much cooler in the forest (during the day, and a bit warmer at night). Research confirms this commonsense knowledge. One study in the Czech Republic compared air temperatures under conditions of high solar irradiance (i.e., sunny days) on neighboring parcels of wet meadow, harvested meadow, asphalt, forest, sparse vegetation, and open water. The air temperature over the wet meadow, lake, and forests was cooler than 30 degrees; the harvested meadow was over 40 degrees and the air above the asphalt nearly 50.3
These are local effects; forests also apparently cause regional cooling. Kenya, which has lost most of its forest cover over the last half-century, is also suffering persistent droughts and higher temperatures. Regions in Kenya where the daytime temperature in the forest might be 19 degrees record temperatures in nearby, recently cleared agricultural land of 50 degrees.4 In Amazonia, pastureland was found to be on average 1.5 degrees hotter (day and night combined) than forested areas despite its higher albedo.5 In Sumatra, land cleared for palm oil plantations was 10 degrees hotter than nearby rainforest, and stayed hotter even when the palm trees matured.6
A real, living forest interacts with the water cycle in complex ways that science is just beginning to understand. One way is by converting humidity to rain. Water vapor in the atmosphere doesn’t necessarily fall as rain, but may instead persist as haze in what is known as a “humid drought.” One reason for the formation of haze is an overabundance of small condensation nuclei, which prevents water droplets from becoming large enough to fall as rain.7 Pollutants, smoke from forest fires, and dust from desiccated soil are among the culprits in haze formation. Over forests, the condensation nuclei are mainly biogenic, including plant detritus, bacteria, fungal spores, and secondary organic aerosols originating as volatile organic compounds emitted by vegetation.8 These aid the formation of clouds rather than haze, and allow cloud formation at higher temperatures than abiotic nuclei.9 Recent research confirms the increased cloud cover over and near forests.10 These lower, thicker clouds have a greater cooling effect than high-altitude clouds. According to one researcher, a 1 percent increase in albedo from forest-generated clouds would offset all warming from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.11
On the other hand, the haze that forms in the absence of forests exercises a powerful greenhouse effect. It lets in the sunlight and covers the earth in an insulating blanket that prevents heat from radiating back into space at night. The result is intense heat and humidity, but no rain. This demonstrates the principle that life creates the conditions for life.
Some of the bacteria that serve as cloud condensation nuclei seem almost custom-designed to seed clouds. The most studied species, Pseudomonas syringae, bears ice-nucleating proteins that allow clouds to form at higher temperatures (and thus lower altitudes) than they otherwise could. Found around the world, they originate as plant pathogens.12 Their ice-nucleating proteins lead to frost damage on plants, which they are more easily able to feed on. Ominously, crop scientists are working to genetically engineer strains of Pseudomonas syringae that lack the ice-nucleating proteins. This is a typical control-based approach that may have the utterly unanticipated consequence of altering rainfall patterns and intensifying climate change.
Deforestation sets off a vicious circle of drought, extreme weather, and even more deforestation. Familiarity with the water cycle makes it clear why. In a healthy water cycle, evaporated water from the ocean moves over the continents, where it falls as rain. A tiny fraction of that precipitation runs off directly; most of it is absorbed by soil and vegetation, while some percolates into underground aquifers, eventually surfacing as springs that feed streams and rivers. Once the water is in the soil and water table, plants and especially trees steadily transpire it back into the air, providing a source of rain through the dry season. Depending on the region, some 30–90 percent of rainfall originates not directly from the ocean, but from evapotranspiration of water from soil and vegetation.
In vast areas of the earth, trees are critical to the ability of soil to absorb rainwater:
Deforestation, on the other hand, leads to soil erosion and the reduced capacity of the land to absorb water, and consequently worse flooding after heavy rains. Furthermore, without the deep roots of trees to bring moisture from deep underground and replenish atmospheric moisture, droughts tend to be longer and drier. This in turn puts greater stress on remaining forests, which become susceptible to fires and disease. When the rains do come, they run off the parched earth, taking the soil with them.
Deforestation alters atmospheric circulation in another way: it leads to stronger updrafts and higher clouds, which produce rainfall that is less in total quantity but greater in intensity—aggravating the familiar drought/flooding cycle.13 The transition from reliable rainfall to the drought/flood pattern exemplifies the aforementioned “climate derangement” that may be a bigger threat than outright global warming. Not only do weather patterns change, but Earth’s ability to handle those changes diminishes.
It gets worse. Forests do more than recycle moisture originating in the oceans; apparently, they actually generate wind patterns that bring the water from the oceans in the first place. It has been a commonplace belief around the world that forests bring the rain, but for a long time scientists scoffed at this notion: forests grow where there is ample precipitation, they said, but they do not cause that precipitation. It comes via winds that are governed by large-scale geomechanical processes originating in polar/equatorial temperature differentials, the spin of the planet, and other factors. Now this view is changing.
In the last decade, a scientific theory called the “biotic pump” has been gaining prominence that validates the universal vernacular wisdom that forests attract rain. First proposed in 2006 by Russian physicists V. G. Gorshkov and A. M. Makarieva, the theory says that evapotranspiration from large forests, especially old growth forests, creates low pressure systems when the water vapor rises and condenses.14 Because winds generally blow from high pressure to low pressure areas, moisture-laden winds from the ocean are pulled toward forested continental interiors, bringing the rain that in turn maintains the forest.15 That is why forested continents enjoy reliable, abundant rainfall deep into the interior; that is also why these rains have begun to fail as deforestation approaches critical levels in Amazonia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Siberia.
The theory sparked intense controversy, as is common when a challenge to long-established dogma comes from outside a discipline (Gorshkov and Makarieva are nuclear physicists, not atmospheric physicists). It is also difficult to prove, either experimentally or through computer modeling; furthermore, it suggests that existing climate models are neglecting an extremely important process. It also carries alarming implications given high levels of deforestation globally. For example, it means that Amazonian deforestation will not lead to a mere 15 percent or 30 percent decrease in rainfall, as conventional models predict, but to as much as a 90 percent decrease.16 This would mean a transition of Amazonia not to a savanna but to a desert.
Indirect evidence for the biotic pump abounds in the form of droughts and declining rainfall that accompany deforestation from Siberia to Australia to Indonesia to Central America. Total rainfall in the Amazon declined from 1975 to 2003 by an average 0.3 percent a year,17 in direct correlation to deforestation rates, culminating in severe droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015. More recently, direct evidence has accumulated as well, based on precipitation patterns and isotope analysis.18 While the theory defies the geomechanical bias that still exerts strong influence in climatology, it resonates deeply with the living planet perspective. Again, life creates the conditions for life.
Even in the conventional carbon frame, rainforest conservation should be more prominent for its storage and sequestration of carbon. In the living system frame, to preserve and restore forests is a matter of utmost urgency. Today, the number one priority of conventional environmentalism is emissions reduction, but that is the convenient problem, fitting comfortably into the familiar blueprint narrative of the onward march of technology. But the ecological crisis will not be resolved by adjusting a few inputs. We are called to deep partnership with nature and respect for all life.
Crucial forests are tipping into a death spiral: deforesting causing drought, drought causing more deforestation. We have to start protecting forests as if they were sacred (they are), and restoring damaged forests as if our lives depended on it (they do).
The connection between forests, water, and life has always been obvious to people living in deep connection to the land. Here is the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa describing the destruction of the hydrological cycle:
We never tear away the earth’s skin. We only cultivate its surface, because that is where the richness is found. In doing so, we follow our ancestors’ ways. The trees’ leaves and flowers never stop falling and accumulating on the ground in the forest. This is what gives it its smell and its value of growth. But this scent disappears quickly once the ground dries up and makes the streams disappear into its depths. It is so. As soon as you cut down tall trees such as the wari mahi kapok trees and the hawari hi Brazil nut trees, the forest’s soil becomes hard and hot. It is these big trees that make the rainwater come and keep it in the ground.…The trees that the white people plant, the mango trees, the coconut trees, the orange trees, and the cashew trees, they do not know how to call the rain.19
Note the last sentence, which asserts that a forest is more than a collection of trees. If we do not see forests as living beings too, will we ever treat them as such?
The necessity of conserving and re-growing forests is undeniable when we see Earth as a living being and the forests as one of her vital organs. The necessity of protecting and revering the water is obvious when we see it as the blood or vital fluid of a living planet. It is the same as for the human body: If you understand it as a coherent, intelligent living system, then you do not need physiological reasons to convince you that yes, you do need your lungs, your liver, your appendix, your tonsils. It is only in a mechanistic view that we would imagine that some organs are useless and could be cut out without repercussions for the whole. Finally today more enlightened doctors are realizing this and overturning seventy years of medical fads like the routine removal of appendixes, tonsils, and wisdom teeth. Isn’t it time we do the same for the Gaian body?
Forests are certainly not the only Gaian organ crucial to the maintenance of life. Based on the principle that life creates conditions for life, the most important organs would be the ones that are most abundant with life: forests, wetlands, estuaries, coral reefs, and rich grasslands with their vast herds of animals. All are in steep decline around the world, while the biota-poor areas—the deserts and oceanic dead zones—are spreading.
The carbon fundamentalist paradigm has brought welcome attention to wetlands, forests, seagrass, and prairies, which have enormous carbon storage and sequestration capacity. The ten-foot-thick topsoil of the American Midwest testifies to that capacity and to the disastrous consequences of tilling the land and exposing the soil to erosion and oxidation of its organic matter into CO2. I will look at these non-forest ecosystems, together with cultivated land, through the carbon lens in the next chapter.
Looking past carbon to water and beyond, we see even more clearly the acute planetary importance of these ecosystems. Virgin grasslands exercise many of the same functions that forests do, effectively soaking up rainfall and protecting soil, preventing flooding, ameliorating drought, seeding cloud formation, and building the water table. The thick mat of sod softens the impact of rain on soil, preventing erosion; the carbonaceous soil organic matter that the roots deposit over time is a sponge for rainwater, binding it to organic molecules and slowing evaporation as well.
Just as a forest is more than a collection of trees, a grassland is more than a concentration of grass. It is a living ecosystem that also includes herbivores, predators, and invertebrate multitudes. Earthworms aerate the soil and produce rain-storing humic aggregates; herd animals crop, trample, and fertilize tall grasses that then become mulch and eventually soil. Fungi bind earthworms, bacteria, roots, insects, and each other into complex communities that cycle nutrients and exchange chemical information. Each member of the grassland is alive, and the totality is alive too.
If forests, grasslands, wetlands, coral reefs, etc., are among Gaia’s vital organs, then perhaps species can be seen as her cells and tissues. They may not have a visible, direct effect on carbon or water cycles—but then again they may. A traditional Navajo proverb went, “Without the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for rain.” That seems like bald superstition, except that the near-extirpation of prairie dogs in the twentieth century indeed coincided with declining rainfall in the American Southwest. And now it turns out that the Navajo belief was not so superstitious after all, but rather an astute insight into ecological hydrology. Bill Mollison, preceptor of the permaculture movement, wrote, “Amused scientists, knowing there was no conceivable relationship between prairie dogs and rain, recommended the extermination of all burrowing animals in some desert areas planted to rangelands in the 1950s ‘in order to protect the sparse desert grasses.’ Today the area has become a virtual wasteland.”20 Mollison offered the explanation that the burrows of prairie dogs and other animals are like lung alveoli. As the moon passes overhead, tidal forces bring up water from aquifers closer to the surface, providing moisture for rain. Judith Schwartz adds that prairie dog tunnels allow rainwater to penetrate the ground instead of running off, thereby replenishing aquifers;21 prairie dogs also control water-hogging mesquite.
Wetlands, as the name suggests, are also crucial for a healthy water cycle. They slow the migration of water from land to sea, giving it time to soak down into aquifers and evaporate up into the atmosphere to be a source of rainfall. Wetlands have been in decline throughout history as human beings drained them for agricultural purposes, a process still under way today. The current landscape of North America, with its brooks, streams, and rivers running through well-defined channels, is actually the result of severe land modification. According to researcher Steve Apfelbaum, “Many currently identified first, second, and third-order streams were identified as vegetated swales, wetlands, wet prairies, and swamps in the original land survey records of the U.S. General Land Office.”22 Owing to civil engineering projects (such as the straightening of meandering rivers for navigation) as well as the near-extirpation of beavers, the slow progress of water from land to sea was greatly hastened: flow rates of rivers increased by orders of magnitude. Globally, this means that the land is losing water faster than it receives it, making drought an inevitability and contributing to the rise of sea levels.
Ironically, a large part of wetlands destruction in recent times is done in the name of fighting climate change, since big hydroelectric projects often involve severe hydrological disruption. The African Sahel was once home to vast, fecund wetlands of incredible biodiversity, fed by seasonal floods. They have been in steep decline since the dam-building era began in the 1980s, encouraged by development agencies to generate electricity and control floods. As a result, Lake Chad stands at 5 percent its former surface area. Social disruption has followed, fueling Boko Haram and waves of migration to Europe. Next in line is the Inner Niger Delta, a vast wetland the size of Belgium threatened by a new mega-dam planned in Guinea.23 Writing in Yale Environment 360, Fred Pearce observes, “Dried-up wetlands are often blamed on climate change when the real cause often is more human interference in river flows.”24 How convenient it is to blame climate change, compared to questioning a basic strategy of Third World development.
I will mention two more biomes here that are normally excluded from that category: agricultural land and urban land. As I will discuss later, the healing of this planet is not a matter of humanity stepping out, creating a separate human realm and leaving nature untouched. It will not come through minimizing our impact; it will come through changing the nature of our impact. It will come through a different kind of participation in nature, one where humanity returns to being an extension of, and not an exception to, ecology.
As it stands, wherever modernity has spread, lands heavily influenced by humans are damaged lands, ailing lands, unable to fulfill their function in maintaining Gaian homeostasis. Naked soil, such as that plowed up for farming, is almost never seen in nature, and for good reason. It is like an open wound, flesh without skin, that quickly loses its life-giving moisture and blows away. Baked by the sun and lacking a root structure to hold it and aerate it, it can neither absorb as much moisture when it rains, nor hold that moisture very long thereafter. Chemical-intensive agriculture adds injury to injury by destroying earthworms and other soil organisms that help water penetrate to deeper soil layers. Not only do earthworms increase soil moisture capacity, they and the soil ecosystems they facilitate increase soil carbon storage and promote the growth of methanotrophs—bacteria that feed off methane and reduce levels of this greenhouse gas.25
Not only do naked, disturbed soils hemorrhage carbon into the atmosphere, they also contribute to direct regional warming: one study notes the correlation between the increase in cover cropping in the Canadian grain belt, lower summer temperatures, and higher humidity and rainfall.26 Cover cropping is part of a growing regenerative agriculture movement that seeks to restore water and soil through farming.
Other modern agricultural practices that compound the damage to water and soil include:
These and other unsustainable practices will stop when we understand that human well-being is inseparable from the well-being of soil and water.
In urban environments the damage to soil is even more severe; often it is paved over entirely. Unable to filter into the earth, the water is a nuisance that is sluiced away through drainage systems as “wastewater,” returning swiftly to the ocean without entering the hydrological cycle of evapotranspiration or groundwater recharge. Meanwhile, cities draw down surrounding water resources to meet their use needs.
Without much vegetation to transpire water and cool the air, cities are subject to the urban heat island effect. The heat affects wind patterns, generating high pressure systems that push precipitation into surrounding areas—for example, cooler mountain regions—which then experience torrential downpours, erosion, and flooding.27 To a lesser degree, any devegetated area (such as plowed fields) becomes a heat island that generates high pressure and pushes rain away to mountains or the ocean.
Climate change skeptics sometimes cite the heat island effect to claim that global temperature data is skewed, since temperature gauges are increasingly located in or near urban heat islands. Even if true, that is of scant consolation if the whole planet is becoming a heat island due to urbanization, development, and deforestation. The effects are not only local; through their disruption of hydrological heat transport they influence global temperature as well as drought and flood, often through complex, nonlinear chains of causation. For example, deforestation and wetlands draining along Europe’s Mediterranean coast have led to decreased evapotranspiration and fewer summer storms near the coast but more intense storms in central Europe. Fewer coastal storms then leads to salinization of the Mediterranean and changes in the Mediterranean-Atlantic salinity valve, which in turn intensifies Atlantic storms and changes weather patterns as far away as the Gulf of Mexico.28
As the paramount environmental narrative today, climate change obscures the much larger, more direct, and more local influence of “land management changes” in causing drought, flooding, heat waves, and other kinds of extreme weather. Climate change, instead of being an incentive to enact more ecologically beneficial policies, becomes a convenient scapegoat that diverts attention from effective local measures and shifts responsibility for ecological healing onto distant, global institutions.
For example, understanding that deforestation and soil tillage lead to topsoil erosion, which makes the land unable to absorb rainwater, which then leads to flooding, one necessarily must respond locally: conserving forests and wetlands, practicing organic no-till agriculture, and rebuilding soil. Ignorant of these things, the environmentally concerned person is left with actions like putting solar panels on the roof or offsetting jet travel by donating to a tree planting fund. Environmental zeal stays focused far from home, and most of the damaging activities continue.
I write these words in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey, proclaimed by the media to have been exacerbated by climate change. While I understand the scientific logic behind that claim—warmer water evaporates more quickly, warmer air can hold more water, etc.—the argument appears tenuous under close examination.29 Total accumulated cyclone energy has not appreciably increased in recent decades, nor has total precipitation, storm frequency, or storm strength. Regardless, the controversy over whether climate change is responsible deflects attention from local factors that make such storms more damaging to humans and ecosystems. Chief among them, at least in Florida and Texas, is the widespread draining of wetlands, which can soak up rainwater and buffer storm surges. Both regions have also experienced deforestation, agricultural soil abuse, and extensive suburban development. Blaming climate change obscures these factors and allows these practices to proceed as usual.
As with flooding, so with drought. I recently read an otherwise insightful article on immigration by Vijay Prashad that stated, “The causes [of emigration from Central America] should be found in the collapse of agriculture in these countries—driven largely by climate change induced drought and flash floods, extreme heat and forest fires.”30 Let’s leave aside for a moment the economic and political causes of the collapse of agriculture, such as free trade agreements that make traditional peasant agriculture uneconomic, benefit transnational agribusiness, and turn the agricultural economy toward exportable commodities. While global climatic patterns (namely, the strong El Niño of 2015–16) precipitated the latest famine, these countries have also suffered intense deforestation. Guatemala lost 17 percent of its rainforest in just fifteen years from 1990 to 2005; subsequently the rate of deforestation accelerated threefold;31 losses have been especially heavy in its famous cloud forests.32 A similar story transpired in Honduras, which lost 37 percent of its rainforests in the same period with no letup in sight. El Salvador is the saddest case of all, having suffered 85 percent deforestation since the 1960s. When these forests are cut down, rainfall runs off instead of being absorbed to recharge the water table, resulting in erosion, landslides, and flooding. Springs dry up, rainfall decreases, and the local climate becomes hotter and drier. The stage is set for devastating drought.
Before deforestation, the rainforests of South and Central America received plenty of rainfall, El Niño or not. That’s why they are called rainforests. Moreover, El Niño (a weather pattern that brings drought and heat waves to much of the northern hemisphere) has been rising in frequency and intensity since the 1970s. Typically blamed on “climate change,” it may also be a by-product of deforestation, particularly in Indonesia, where severe deforestation may weaken the persistent zone of low pressure that helps drive the Walker circulation, whose weakening results in El Niños.33
Blaming climate change for Central American droughts diminishes the urgency of addressing local deforestation, shifting emphasis onto global-scale solutions. It relegates to secondary importance a whole complex of other causes far beyond deforestation. Besides, what causes deforestation? Whether in Central America or elsewhere, the causes can include:
Obviously, these are not isolated dysfunctions in a fundamentally sound system. The system itself, and the Story of Separation woven through it, generates the dysfunctions. If pressed to distill them down to a single culprit, I would say it is the truncating, the simplifying, and the impoverishing of relationships—human to human and human to world. And if I were pressed to offer a universal solution, it would be to see and treat the world as sacred again.
If anything on earth is sacred, it should be water. So far I have actually not upheld it as sacred in this discussion; I have merely illuminated the bad things that are happening to ourselves and the planet through the maltreatment of water, trees, and soil. To treat them as sacred we must go beyond that. As my friend Orland Bishop says, the sacred is something that requires a sacrifice; that is, it is something we value—and would sacrifice to protect—beyond its use-value to ourselves.
Other cultures upheld the sacredness of water through ceremonies and taboos, protecting water from anything that would insult or pollute it. I do not advocate imitating indigenous ceremonies; rather, we can find a contemporary counterpart that draws from their knowledge and fits into our own evolving story-of-the-world. Our water technologies will take on the energy of ceremony when they draw from the perception that indigenous and traditional people have held of water, that it is a living being. The door to that is opening as the familiar scientific conception of water as a homogeneous, structureless chemical fluid becomes obsolete.34
The hydrological arguments of this chapter offer a nudge toward treating water as sacred, but do not touch on other water issues that are more difficult (to our current way of knowing) to connect to climate change. One day, though, I am sure that we will learn that contaminating water with pesticides, pharmaceutical residues, industrial chemicals, and radioactive waste will threaten planetary well-being just as much as deforestation or greenhouse gas emissions. Water is life. What we do to water, we do to life.
The Standard Narrative of climate change contends that climate was relatively stable until the twentieth century, when industrial emissions started to become significant. Whether or not this is the case in terms of temperature, in terms of water the last few thousand years have seen dramatic changes in climate. The earth has become significantly drier, and I am afraid that yes, much of the blame rests on the shoulders of human civilization.
According to some researchers, the buildup of CO2 and methane was well under way long before the Industrial Revolution. William Ruddiman claims that anomalous (compared to previous interglacials) buildup of both gases coincided in its onset with Neolithic deforestation and land cultivation.35 His paper assembles diverse evidence—historical, archaeological, and geological—that massive deforestation had occurred by two thousand years ago in China, India, the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and to a limited extent in the Americas. Its contribution to greenhouse gases, he says, is double that of the industrial era, which has merely accelerated a long-term trend.
Ruddiman adopts a conventional greenhouse lens in discussing the issue; from the perspective of water and the biotic pump, the situation is even more alarming. Have you ever looked at a satellite image of the globe and felt a chill of foreboding seeing the vast and growing deserts stretching eight thousand miles from the west coast of Africa through the Arabian Peninsula all the way to Mongolia? Plus their smaller cousins in the American Southwest, the west coast of South America, and most of the continent of Australia? Not to mention southern Africa, and now even parts of Spain and Brazil? Most of these places were once green. Mongolia became desert just some four thousand years ago, not millions of years ago as previously thought.36 The Sahara was a lush savanna six thousand years ago. Geomechanically oriented scientists typically attribute its desertification to a shift in the tilt of Earth’s axis, but human activities probably exacerbated it.37 As recently as Roman times, elegant cities stood in what is now desert, nourished by long-gone forested watersheds.38 The Middle East, the cradle of civilization, was likewise once a fertile paradise; deforestation there is recorded as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as in pollen and charcoal deposits. Biblical forests like the Wood of Ziph and the Forest of Bethel are now desert; gone as well are the cedars of Lebanon and the forests of the Greek isles where Artemis hunted. Deforestation accelerated in Roman times, and is often blamed for the demise of the Roman Empire.
In Critias, Plato offers a vivid and accurate description of the effects of deforestation:
Now that all the richer, softer soil has been washed away, only the bare ground is left, like the bones of a diseased body. In former times … the plains were full of soil and there was abundant timber in the mountains.… The annual rainfall used to make the land fruitful, for the water did not flow off the bare earth to the sea.… Where once there were springs, now only the shrines remain.
In many places the deserts continue to spread, and new deserts to form. Earth lost more than 3 percent of its remaining forests from 2000 to 2012. At present, Earth has only about half of the trees it had at the dawn of civilization.39 The United States has lost an area of forest the size of Maine in the last decade. Deforestation in Brazil increased by 29 percent in 2016, before dropping a little in 2017 to a rate still higher than 2012. Queensland, Australia, lost a million acres of trees in 2015–16, contributing to the sediment-induced stress of the adjacent Great Barrier Reef.40 Globally, tree cover loss rose by 51 percent in 2016.41
You get the picture: In developed and less-developed countries alike, the extent and quality of forests are deteriorating. Owing as well to other kinds of land and water abuse, desertification is claiming 12 million hectares of land per year globally, according to the U.N. Moreover, desertification is just the most conspicuous manifestation of the general impoverishment of life on earth that extends to every region and biome. Life is on the decline almost everywhere, even in places that look nothing like deserts.
In other words, the land is dying before our eyes, as it has been doing since ancient times. We have to stop killing it. This is bigger than cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It is reversing a relationship to soil and sea that has been part of civilization for thousands of years. I am sorry, but merely switching to so-called renewable energy sources is not enough. We are called to visit deep questions like “What are we here for?” “What is humanity’s right role on earth?” “What does the earth want?”
As we explore these questions, some of the measures advocated by climate activists will take on new motivation and significance, while others will be revealed as yet another iteration of the old relationship. Big hydroelectric plants, endless landscapes of solar arrays and wind turbines, and in particular biofuel plantations damage the ecosystems they occupy. In the new relationship (new for civilization, though not for the indigenous), whenever we take from the earth, we seek to do so in a way that enriches the earth. We aren’t unconscious of our impact, nor do we seek to minimize our impact. We seek to make a beautiful impact that serves all life.
The answer to the above questions (What are we here for?…) that I will explore in later chapters starts with the understanding of this chapter and the next, that life creates the conditions for life. And who are we humans? We are life too. We are life, born into a certain form, with a unique array of gifts. Like all life, our purpose is to serve life—to serve both what it is and what it might become. For never is life static. Each unfoldment of complexity builds on the last. What is the dream of life? What wants to be born next, and how can we serve that? These are the questions that need to replace civilization’s former question: How can we most effectively extract resources from the earth to build the human world?