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Abundant Earth, Toward an Ecological Civilization

2020; Ecological Society of America; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bes2.1651

2327-6096

David Johns,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

A review of Crist, Eileen. 2019. Abundant Earth, Toward an Ecological Civilization. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Abundant Earth documents the Earth's plummeting abundance, analyzes its causes, and suggests a path for reversing that decline. The book brings together, organizes, and evaluates a wide-ranging literature from biology, human ecology, and other disciplines. It is organized into three broad sections, roughly dealing with the problem, its causes, and the steps that must be taken to deal with the causes. Whether one thinks an ecological civilization is a contradiction in terms, or not, Crist's book raises critical issues and analyses that anyone trying to address the current extinction crisis can benefit from. The first chapter catalogues the long list of human-inflicted violence on the biosphere and its residents. Although this “list” will be familiar to many, Crist offers insights into the many synergies among the causes, proximate and ultimate. Many come together, for example, in the industrial agricultural system: high energy use, overexploitation of soil and freshwater, conversion of land to more simplified ecologies, use of toxic chemicals, spread of invasive species, the growth of domestic animal populations, and plunder of the oceans to name a few. The current round of globalization (long-range trade goes back millennia) exacerbates the ability of wealthy places to export much of the damage they do to poorer areas. Leaning to philosophical idealism, Crist argues in the second chapter that anthropocentrism or notions of human supremacy is the cause of the destruction of the natural world. We are the center of the universe and the world is ours to use and exploit as we want. This view is mostly implicit making it difficult to target for refutation, though some thinkers and many religions throughout history have argued explicitly for human specialness and the right to dominate other species. Initially, a Western world view, ideas of human centrality, and self-importance have come to dominate global civilization, adding to its invisibility. At the same time, Crist argues that this world view emerged with agriculture and civilization, suggesting that efforts to control and conquer attendant on agriculture might be the causal factor or at least co-emergent. There is little reference to the anthropological literature on early agriculture or the emergence of hierarchy and the state (Johnson and Earle 2000, Flannery and Marcus 2012), which might have better grounded the discussion of whether the ideas are causal, a rationalization, or mutually reinforcing from the beginning. Probably one of the most important points Crist makes is in Chapter 3. She reminds us that human domination of other species and the Earth is violent. Most humans ignore the violence because its victims are not valued, but like the violence of human on human subjugation, there is injury to the perpetrator and perpetrator societies as well as the victims. Along with the blowback from efforts to control gone wrong (pollution, climate disruption, water, and other “resource” shortages) is emotional damage. Some see the consequences, but for the most part the institutional response is to reassert managerial domination and seek a technological fix. As David Ehrenfeld (1978) observed, every solution creates more problems and more complex ones, and there is less capacity to solve them. One of the primary problems she identifies is the pervasiveness of supremacist ideology which prevents alternatives from being seen, let alone developed or broadly acted upon. The second part of the book seeks to disentangle the mess humans have gotten themselves and the Earth into. She states in Chapter 4 that domination is so deeply engrained it appears natural. Crist focuses much on the proposition that belief in human supremacy is not hardwired, but is a product of socialization and enculturation. If seen as hardwired, no action is likely to be taken against this toxic world view, but she has little to say about its origin; understanding its origin (in agriculture and the separation of humans from other creatures?) might contribute to “deprograming,” questioning, and cultivating new views and behavior. Crist argues that when humans stop asking “How are we special?” the seeds of new possibilities will emerge. (A more interesting question might be why do we feel the need to be special?) In Chapter 5, Crist seeks to dismantle the many red herrings advanced to undermine the notion and importance of wilderness (self-willed lands and waters): that no place is free of human impact or has not been for a long time, that wilderness divides people from the natural world, and is a peculiar Euro-North American concept and is therefore suspect because of the mistreatment by Euro-Americans of those humans who arrived earlier. She examines each of these in some detail, has some fun poking at absurd claims such as the Amazon being a human artifact, and reminds readers that humans have been destroying wildlife for millennia but have greatly speeded up the process in recent centuries. Huge flocks of passenger pigeons are gone; wolves have been diminished from half a million to a few hundred, and beavers, otters, and many populations of fish also decimated. Wilderness (lands and waters free from human domination) are vitally important to maintaining and recovering many species. If wilderness is indeed a North American idea, it is because its destruction was so rapid and therefore visible in North America. Throughout human history, not only has habitat been routinely stolen from other species and converted to human uses, but it has been fragmented, denying its use to others. In the modern era, human movement via roads, railroads, and other means has been, Crist observes, at the cost of nonhuman movement. Not only does human infrastructure create obstacles but also results in the slaughter of millions of creature. Roads allow access by poachers, pollution, and ongoing conversion of habitat. Human control of geography extends, Crist summarizes, to the oceans. Ship traffic, noise from ships and seismic exploration, and pollution from runoff and oil extraction constrain fish, marine mammals, and other species. Protected areas also constrain nonhuman movement in an effort to protect nonhumans from humans. The third part of the book seeks to chart a path forward, away from destruction, and toward a rewilded Earth. In the seventh chapter, Crist documents the fantasies of those who think we can feed billions more without doing harm. This magical thinking is predicated on a belief that humans do not have a carrying capacity because we have limitless power to rearrange the planet to suit ourselves. We do possess great rearranging power but it comes at a cost, to other species and to ourselves. Industrial agriculture not only displaces natural systems and wildlife, but also makes humans dependent on turning the food supply over to large-scale enterprises that drive smaller farmers to ruin, poison the air, water, and soil, exhaust topsoil, and ignore a variety of ethical issues from toxins in food to turning the planet into a feedlot for one species. Crist addresses the issue of human population in the eighth chapter, an issue which is finally returning to the conservation agenda from which it was misguidedly banished decades ago. The right human population is one that does not steal the livelihood of wild species, allows for rewilding, and can be fed with organic food production. (She says nothing about the relationship of population size to hierarchy and the division of labor which generates many problems among humans and between humans and nonhumans.) That number, she says citing others, is probably around two billion. She also notes that while a growing developing world middle class is diminishing differences between global north and global south, migrants cannot be ethically excluded from richer countries for ecological reasons because those countries export ecological harm. The last chapter is necessarily the most speculative. It describes what aspects of an ecological society might be like, but has little to say about how to make it happen and avoid bad alternatives. Crist calls for direct protection of 25% to 75% of the Earth, after Reed Noss (1992). Some groups, such as the Wildlands Network and Marine Conservation Institute, are working on this; the Ecological Society of America called for large-scale protection in the 1920s. Creating islands for civilization in a wild matrix is preferable to the reverse, and Crist notes that others have called for island civilization as well, for example, historian Rod Nash and former US Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. She sees the future of human society in bioregionalism modeled on some Native American cultures and societies. Why political devolution should lend itself to this rather than less appetizing adaptations such as warlordism or the conflict many chiefdoms engage in is not clear. Crist describes what she considers the attributes of desirable (ecological) societies (transcendence of nationalism and fundamentalism, roots in the regional but also cosmopolitan) but does not say how to get there or why humans are likely to take this direction rather than ones more typical of our species over the last 12,000 years. Some might consider Chief Joseph's statement that the Earth and he are of one mind to be an arrogant project; many make claims about the Earth that are self-serving. Perhaps it needs to be tempered with some Robinson Jeffers: He writes that it is time to kiss the Earth but also warns us to “be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master” (1925: 95). Crist has given us an extraordinarily thoughtful book, addressing many pressing issues. In the course of that she fashions an impressive synthesis of much of the relevant literature. There is too much weight on the cognitive, and although she herself is passionate about the living world, there is little about emotion as a prime human motivator, and what has gone wrong with our emotions. Likewise, more emphasis on the structural and societal dynamics would greatly strengthen the book and aid those looking for a way out of the current predicament. As conservation is increasingly compelled to deal with causes of biodiversity decline rather than just symptoms, this book contributes much.