WHY WE NEED THE WILD
ON APRIL 15, 2019, the Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in Paris burned. I was shocked as I watched on television how the flames mercilessly devoured thick oak beams, causing the collapse of the roof. Brave firefighters prevented the destruction of the whole structure. French citizens and tourists alike cried without solace on the streets of Paris. The morning after, the tragedy was on page one of newspapers all around the world. Within 48 hours, French billionaires had pledged hundreds of millions of euros for the cathedral’s reconstruction, and President Emmanuel Macron committed to rebuild it within five years.
The wooden beams that supported the roof came from oaks in the Middle Ages, so large that the like could not be found in France anymore. Over the centuries, people have logged the ancient forests where those old trees grew, all throughout Europe, until now they remain standing in only a few places, like the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, or the Bialowieza Forest straddling Poland and Belarus.
I have been to both places. In the Retezat Mountains in Romania, I walked through pine forests and meadows so wild and untouched that they are among the only places left in Europe that are home to bears, wolves, and lynxes living together. I felt like I was walking in the magical Rivendell Forest, expecting an elf to appear at any moment. In Bialowieza, I marveled among oak trees a hundred feet tall, old enough to have shaded some of the last remaining wild European bison—those depicted in European cave paintings from 30,000 years ago. These last wild places are few, far apart, and disappearing. Romanian illegal loggers are clear-cutting the largest patch of intact forest in Europe, and some Polish officials are violating European Union rules and trying to log Bialowieza. But no billionaires appeared after these incidents were in the news, promising hundreds of millions of dollars to save the last old forests in Europe (notwithstanding the heroic efforts of a handful of philanthropists and conservationists). Governments are not acting effectively to stop these natural massacres, either. Why not?
Why is the world not feeling the same tragic sense of loss about our natural cathedrals? We were all touched by Nôtre-Dame—myself included—because nobody expects our historic symbols to vanish. Nôtre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the ruins of the Parthenon, to name a few: They are part of our immutable cultural landscape. We all expect them to be there. But only when these icons are at risk do most people realize that they are more than just stones and wood. These places are part of our identity as a civilization. They are global tourist destinations and, for many, sites of sacred devotion. Shouldn’t the natural world be all of that, too: part of our identity, revered destinations, sacred sites?
The truth is, we need forests more than we need cathedrals. Without the natural world, there is no good food to eat, no safe water to drink, no oxygen to breathe, not even rain in many places. Everything humanity worries about, everything we count on, is built upon a healthy natural world. A degraded environment is a hotbed of all the problems affecting humanity. My friend Lee White, minister of environment of Gabon, told me that the Congo Basin forest in West Africa produces the rain that waters the highlands of Ethiopia, on the other side of the continent. If the Congo forest were destroyed, no more water—or food—in Ethiopia. That’s 125 million people as of 2019, probably double that by 2050. In addition, those highlands provide the water for half of the Nile. Enter Sudan and Egypt, with an additional 138 million people, and growing. We have already seen the consequences of a region without water and food: riots, instability, collapse of governments, and massive migration to wealthier countries.
Stability and prosperity in northeastern Africa starts with a wild forest in Gabon and Congo, thanks to the work of large trees that “call the rain” and absorb massive amounts of our carbon pollution, of forest elephants and lowland gorillas that eat their large fruit and defecate their seeds a distance away, of insects and worms and fungi that degrade the recent necrosphere and turn it into nutrients that will be driven up the trees using sunlight and the water that they themselves helped to produce. A miraculous web of interactions so complex that we could never re-create it. Millions of species of microbes, fungi, plants, and animals carrying out their individual interactions—competition, predation, facilitation, symbiosis—in self-assembling systems over time (advancing along paths of ecological succession) and space (creating the mosaic of ecological communities at different stages of maturity that form the ecosystems that make up this amazing world).
The wild is here in all its baroque glory because it’s what has worked throughout the history of life on our planet. Every interaction that didn’t really work isn’t here anymore. Only what fits in the giant puzzle remains. The irony is that the fate of all the species on which our very existence depends is in our hands. And we are squeezing them off the planet at a rate second only to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. We have become the asteroid. But we still can save ourselves and our natural world.
Yet some will say: “Won’t we have to feed nine billion people by 2050? We have to use all that land that is now unproductive forest or grassland!” Here again is the perceived conflict between production and protection. Short-term wants and needs make food production prevail over conservation of natural ecosystems. Agriculture, forestry, and other land uses are the main driver of biodiversity loss on land and the human activity that uses up more freshwater, pollutes the rivers and ocean, and emits 24 percent of the greenhouse gases globally. If we continue on this trajectory, letting our economy eat away the intact ecosystems that keep us alive, the prospects for sustainability of our planet are grim.
If we get a little smarter about the way we eat and about the way we cultivate the land and sea, however, we can actually have both a healthy Earth and a healthy food supply without increasing the footprint of either agriculture or fisheries. How would that happen?
First, it turns out that we already produce food for 10 billion people. We just waste a third of it, from the field to the table. The economic value of global lost food amounts to one trillion dollars every year. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that this lost food could feed two billion people each year. On top of that, if food loss and waste were a country, it would rank as the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Only China and the United States would beat it.
We could eliminate much of this waste, especially in North America, Europe, and industrialized Asia, where waste predominates at the end of the supply chain. How? By not overpurchasing, by reducing oversize portions (much of which are left and wasted), and by ordering fewer takeout meals. (The third practice would also eliminate food container waste; in 2019, takeout lunches resulted in six million food containers discarded each day in China.) Less waste and slimmer waistlines seem like a good combination. We could learn to appreciate fruits and vegetables for their flavor rather than their appearance, rather than preferring the perfectly shaped, tasteless items we see in most supermarkets in the global North. A different effort would be needed in less developed countries, where food losses tend to occur closer to the farm, often before the produce even gets to the consumer. Investment in storage and refrigeration and efficient distribution systems and markets would contribute to the solution.
Second, with simple changes to our diet we could reduce our footprint—and greenhouse gas emissions—radically. Currently, a third of the global agricultural crops are used for animal feed. This is food that does not even reach humans but goes to feed our domesticated livestock. Industrialized beef is the least efficient food to raise. Typically it requires 30 kilograms (66 lb) of grain to produce a single kilogram (2.2 lb) of edible boneless beef. In addition, cows are the largest producer of methane gas, which is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In the United States, livestock production—mostly cows—takes an astonishing 41 percent of the land, mostly for grazing. A 2018 study showed that animal farming takes up 80 percent of the world’s agricultural land, but it delivers only 18 percent of our calories. That means that many former grasslands and prairies have been converted to overgrazed ranges where the ecosystem stores less carbon, produces a lot of methane via cow burping and flatulence, and has lost the capacity to provide all other ecosystem benefits to us.
A “flexitarian” diet based mostly on plants, with occasional meat consumption, would deliver all nutrients our bodies need, including protein, and actually make people healthier. Small shifts from beef to poultry would also have significant benefits. And, very important, a dietary shift like this would reduce the environmental impacts of food production. The current agricultural footprint could produce 50 percent more calories and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. Land that we no longer use to produce food could then be restored as natural grasslands. We would slow or stop deforestation and reduce our agricultural demand for freshwater.
Third, we can find many ways to produce food more efficiently. Large-scale monoculture agriculture is especially egregious. Heavily subsidized by governments, industrial agriculture poisons the soil with pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, and excess fertilizer. The healthy soil with its marvelous micro-ecosystem ends up dead. Industrial agriculture overuses freshwater by irrigating arid areas and depleting aquifers much faster than nature can replenish them. Frequent tilling fractures the soil and destroys its natural structure, reducing its ability to retain water and causing the loss of fertile soil. Each year, 24 billion metric tons of soil are lost to surface runoff worldwide. To put it in perspective, every year we’re losing 3.4 metric tons of soil—two cubic meters (2.6 cu yd)—for every person on our planet. And the fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals that have been pumped into that soil ultimately end up in the ocean, creating dead zones that choke out most life in them. We already have 500 of those, growing in size and number all the time.
To reverse these ominous trends, we could shift to what is called regenerative agriculture, a conservation and restoration approach to food production. Soil can be regenerated through, among other practices, reduced tilling, planting cover crops, rotating crops, and using farm waste—compost—instead of synthetic fertilizers. These age-old practices were lost when humanity shifted to industrial and chemical agricultural practices. Returning to them will succeed in regenerating topsoil and increasing biodiversity, thus enhancing productivity, providing natural pest control, and reducing water waste. The key factor is improving the health of the soil, bringing it back to that complex underground ecosystem that not only increases fertility but also retains more water, recharges aquifers, reduces soil erosion—and captures large amounts of carbon. Studies suggest that a global shift to regenerative agriculture would help to sequester much of the carbon pollution that we expel into the atmosphere, thus helping to mitigate climate change.
Fourth, in the ocean, we must address the loss of biodiversity caused by the overextraction of its living biomass. Our recent research suggests that we can protect much more of the ocean (at least 30 percent) while boosting fisheries productivity, thanks to the spillover effect of fully protected areas. In addition, we can manage fisheries sustainably in the unprotected part of the ocean through several actions. There are too many fishing vessels chasing too few fish. A World Bank report suggested that cutting fishing effort by 40 percent would increase the efficiency and profitability of fishing. We need to move from the open access regime that results in overfishing in much of the ocean to rights-based fisheries, giving fishermen a vested interest in preventing overfishing and increasing compliance with catch limits. Subsidies that perpetuate overcapacity and overfishing need to be eliminated. That would also save the world more than $35 billion annually, which could be used to restore artisanal fisheries within countries’ waters. We need better aquaculture. Currently, aquaculture has enormous negative impacts by polluting the coastal environment, spreading disease, and depleting local fish populations through introduced farmed species. Therefore, aquaculture needs to abandon its current dependence on fish feed, enhance the production of seaweed and filter feeders (for example, mussels and oysters), and close its production cycle in order to avoid pollution of the marine environment. A recent study suggests that the current total catch from wild fisheries could be replaced totally by aquaculture, using less than .015 percent of the global ocean area.
Finally, global heating (euphemistically called “climate change”) is an overarching threat to biodiversity, from species to ecosystems. Much has been written elsewhere on how the impacts of increased temperatures will affect life on land and at sea. A great resource is the 2019 book Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, edited by my friend Tom Lovejoy.
Just to give one example, many species will not be able to tolerate future higher temperatures and will thus move toward higher altitudes and latitudes to escape the heat. This is not a theory. It is already happening. Birds, mammals, and even trees are moving higher on mountains as temperatures increase, and fish are moving from tropical to colder seas. But the species living on top of the mountains or in the Arctic will have nowhere to go as their habitats heat up, and many will go extinct. With species moving around, the ecosystems they form will change. We’re already witnessing a global transformation of our biosphere at a pace much faster than it took for current ecosystems to self-assemble and evolve. This is diminishing the ability of complex ecosystems to deliver all the services we enjoy and to be resilient amid the current continuous climate disruption.
Future changes in the structure of ecosystems are likely to be abrupt, as species in a given ecosystem respond to temperatures above their tolerance limits almost simultaneously. A 2020 study suggests that if we continue on the current trajectory toward 4 °C of warming relative to preindustrial levels, these abrupt shifts will begin before 2030 in tropical seas and by 2050 in tropical forests and higher latitudes. Protected and unprotected areas would be affected equally—temperatures do not observe such boundaries. Therefore, phasing off fossil fuels and shifting to a carbon-neutral society is a sine qua non for preserving the stability and resilience of our life-support systems.
YES, SOME WILL SAY it’s all too expensive; that we cannot afford to make these changes. That’s like saying we cannot afford to save ourselves. It is absurd to even ask whether we should do it or not—unless you are one of those trying to make as much money as possible in the casino of the Titanic—after hitting the iceberg.
The question was supposed to be settled once and for all with the Stern review, conducted for the Treasury of the United Kingdom in 2006 by Lord Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank. Stern compared the cost of responding to global heating with the cost of leaving it unchecked. He found that by responding to global heating, we would be shaving 1 to 2 percent from the world’s GDP growth rate per year, whereas doing nothing would cost at least 5 percent of GDP per year. His analysis has been widely backed up since. Many countries spend 2 percent of their GDP in defense. If that’s too much to spend in combating global heating, then maybe it’s our current economic system that’s not affordable.
Those who argue that we cannot protect more of nature say we need a balance between the needs of humankind and the needs of nature. The situation is indeed unbalanced—but in favor of humans, and especially those who overexploit nature for economic advantage. The economic growth favored by the powers that be is based on the destruction of biodiversity and the excessive use of fossil fuels, and we have been told that theirs is a better metric than measuring the actual prosperity and happiness of people. We are running our planet like a Ponzi scheme, wrote my friend Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia. We use capital from one investor to pay another, pretending we are sharing a profit, and then need to find a new investor to pay the former. But a Ponzi scheme works only as long as there are new investors to fool. Once the pyramid becomes too large and we run out of new investors, the whole construct collapses. Ditto for our land and ocean. We’re running out of forests to destroy and fishing grounds to empty. But we do not need to tap the last ones to realize that this growth-based construct is unsustainable. Consumption grows, but our planet and the number of other creatures within do not. Now is the time to repair the damage we have done to our brothers and sisters throughout nature, and give them more space, so they can heal—and heal us along the way.
So what do we need to do to conserve the wild that we so desperately need in our lives? Studies suggest that half of the planet should be protected—both for the preservation of most creatures on Earth and also for us to obtain maximum benefits from the natural world. We are far from that goal.
To date, only 15 percent of the land on Earth is protected, and only 7 percent of the ocean has been designated or proposed for protection. We have a long way to go, but it is possible. Some countries have already protected large fractions of their land (for example, Bhutan has protected 60 percent; Venezuela, 54 percent). Others have already protected large fractions of the seas they control (for example, Palau has protected 80 percent; Chile, 42 percent; Niue, 40 percent; the United Kingdom, 30 percent; the Seychelles, 30 percent; Gabon, 28 percent). These countries are leading the way in making more space for nature to survive and thrive.
In 2021, the countries of the world will meet under the auspices of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to decide how much space we are all willing to give to the natural world. At the National Geographic Society, alongside our colleagues at the Wyss Campaign for Nature, we have been pushing for a global target of at least 30 percent of the planet—land and sea—protected by 2030, proposing that as a milestone on the way to protecting half of Earth so it can return to its natural state of health and productivity. We believe that 30 percent protected by 2030 is the minimum, and unnegotiable. As I write these lines, leading countries are building a High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, chaired by the governments of Costa Rica and France, that is pushing for 30 percent by 2030 as an apex target for the CBD framework. Recent surveys around the world show that citizens believe that we have already protected 30 percent of Earth, and overwhelmingly express their desire to see half of the planet protected. The science and the economics are clear, leading governments are responding to the urgency, and people are asking for it.
IN 1949, Aldo Leopold wrote of a land ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Now we know that the community encompasses the entire biosphere: the land, the seas, and even the atmosphere. We have learned enough about the nature of nature to know that every living being on our planet, including ourselves, is linked in complex and inextricable ways to other living beings, no matter where their home is. Therefore, it is time for us to move beyond a land ethic to a planetary ethic. Let us all envision the overview effect experienced by astronauts who have seen Earth from space, understanding that it makes no sense to base our behavior on a set of ethics that applies only to our most immediate social network, and that we must see ourselves as part of an integrated whole, interconnected to, dependent on, and responsible for the entire natural world. It’s our moral imperative.
This will be a transformation as revolutionary as the discovery that Earth orbits the sun, not the other way around. The planetary ethic moves humans away from a self-proclaimed center of the world and into a humble and respectful membership in the greater biosphere. It moves us from a position over the natural world to a place within it. Because of our higher intelligence, we also carry a great deal of responsibility—but that is not the same as dominion over all creatures. Now is the time to use our intelligence and compassion to protect the right of all other creatures to exist. Our reward will be the sense of awe and wonder we enjoy by living in this diverse and beautiful world.