Blogging for Biodiversity
Since I started specialising in making environmental films in the early 1980s, the ‘job’ seemed more about convincing viewers about the dire over-the-horizon threats to our welfare and economy than straightforward reportage. Except for a few diehards, that’s no longer the case. The UNEP Executive Director tells Nature Inc. that the green economy is underway.
The ‘how’ has overtaken the ‘why’.
As we report in ‘Union of Green’ governments are investing billions in the green economy. And as we have found out in our sister series on BBC World News, World Challenge, there are thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs who seek profit by working within nature’s boundaries and, moreover, boasting of being socially-responsible as a way to increase sales. Both World Challenge and Nature Inc. demonstrate that initiative and ideas are not lacking.
What is lacking is an enabling environment that properly rewards the husbanding of our embattled ecosystems. On the whole, a free market does not have any convenient way of fixing a true price on the ecological services we feature in the series – wetlands, native species, watersheds, climate stability, pollinators and pest predators – even nature’s tried and trusted evolutionary design.
Squandering a renewable resource such as supplies of clean water or a native forest, is what the economists call an ‘externality’. A fancy way of saying it is not us, but a new generation who are likely to pay the price in the form of lost resources.
Our editorial policy is predicated on T.S. Eliot’s observation that humans can only take so much bad news. So we go out of our way to find ‘scaled-up’ cases where these costs are internalised. However, our obligation is to report the facts, properly sourced and so the recurrent theme of Nature Inc. is a failure to fix a price on wastage that our assessments of GNP cannot measure: at least in a form that works its way into effective policy.
According to the The Economics of Biodiversity assessment (TEEB), we are wasting over US$ 4 trillion worth of environmental services every year – where is the coverage of that in the geyser of media attention given to the recession? The scientific evidence is overwhelming that we are asset stripping the planet. But it is not showing up sufficiently on the radar of public concern to make us change our ways and to force governments to take the lead in giving environmentally-tempered development real traction. No wonder the TEEB study leader, a former top banker, describes this as the “real credit crisis.”
In ‘Natural Prevention’ we report on how the wrecking of the protective wetlands of Louisiana had left New Orleans so exposed to Katrina. There were warnings a-plenty, of course, from ecologists, but they went unheeded. For me, nothing puts this in starker perspective for a viewer than Nature Inc.’s comparison with the two Caribbean islands of Cuba and Haiti – in the former which took the policy of safeguarding coastal forest and mangrove as part and parcel of policy of disaster preparedness, a few individuals perished whereas in Haiti thousands died and – perhaps more importantly – were robbed of topsoil, the basic means of recovery for all poor villagers.
At the root of it all is governance. Without the ‘good’ variety you can’t have much in the way of sustainable development.
The great and abiding problem with that over-worked and ill-understood term, ‘sustainable development’ is that for the billion or so absolute poor such as the Haitian farmer, it doesn’t seem to deliver survival. And in the commercial realm, it often doesn’t deliver the buck for the short term most industries and businesses operate under.
There’s lots of profit to be made from carpet-bagging renewable resources, especially in corrupt environments where graft can pay handsomely. (I discovered this a long time ago when I returned in the 1990s to what just over ten years before, had been a thickly forested area on a S.E. Asian island to find its hardwoods had been completely liquidated and the profits invested – in the case of one illegal feller, I was told – into a BMW concession: highly sustainable for him!)
In Nature Inc. we have taken no satisfaction from anticipating what were to become – for the environment – ‘big’ stories in 2009. The honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder (which led our very first programme) has sent alarm bells ringing on just how frighteningly quickly nature – with its intimate and still poorly-understood connections – can bite back. As now an oft-quoted Einstein once said, mankind has about 4 years if the bees disappear.
I am writing this blog on a farm in New England. A mysterious fungus is spreading rampantly and threatens the survival of insect-eating bats (the beneficent role of bats were also featured in the first series of Nature Inc.). The US Congress is debating what to do: if the fungus spreads to the rest of the country – and even the whole continent – the billions of dollars in services the bats provide in consuming insect pests of staple crops could be lost.
And since North and South America account for much of world food surpluses, what does that mean for the gobal food supply? Radically reduced populations of the pollinators and pest predators taken with other serious trends (such as ocean acidification and the irreplaceable water-supplying role of the Amazon to the food baskets of southern Latin America identified in Nature Inc.) could do much more to unhinge the global economy and political stability (remember the food riots of 2007?) than anything else.
On the ‘plus’ side we have new winds blowing from the White House and leaders such as Chancellor Merkel sounding as green as green can be. And a small country like Norway divvy-ing up several hundreds of millions to save the rainforest.
The next big test will come from the Copenhagen COP in December – and our final programme in the series – ‘Now and Forever’ takes a lead from the Stern thesis that the only rational course is to invest now in anti global warming measures to save up to 4% of global expenditures by mid century.
Pre Copenhagen, Western nations and Japan are looking for complementary commitments from the other G20 countries. For there is a new order emerging from the economic recession with the relatively unscathed Brazils, Chinas and Indias (all countries featured prominently in the current series) increasingly calling the shots. Their demand for resources to pursue destructive Western patterns of development is one reason why despite patches of good news, the rate of extinction and the unravelling of the web of life, in general, are gathering pace.
As with so many things, Mahatma Gandhi got it right when he was asked if a newly independent India should be like Great Britain: “If it took half the resources of the world to make England so rich, how many worlds would India need?”
A quarter of century after reading Gandhi’s observation, I still think this one of the most succinct statements about our finite world. Are we coming round to the same point of view?
To mix three metaphors: are the stories we feature in Nature Inc (and World Challenge), straws in the wind? Or green shoots with deceptively deep roots? The Jury is still out.
