ESSAY 2

. I

An Environmental History of the World Humankind's changing role in the community of life

Second edition

· J. Donald Hughes

I~ ~~~!~:~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First edition published 2001 Second edition published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXl 4 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the-Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2009 J. Donald Hughes

Typeset in ITC Galliard by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now~- known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hughes, J. Donald (Johnson Donald), 1932- An environmental history of the world: humankind's changing role in the community of life/ J. Donald

Hughes. p. cm. -- (Routledge studies in physical geography and environment)

"Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Human ecology--History. 2. Nature--Effect of human beings on--History. 3. Biotic communities-- History. I. Title.

GF13.H83 2009 304.2'8--dc22

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-48149-6 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-48150-2 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-88575-8 (ebk)

ISBN 10: 0-415-48149-X (hbk) ISBN 10: 0-415-48150-3 (pbk) ISBN 10: 0-203-88575-9 (ebk)

2008053780

9 Presep.t and future

While histories do not often concern themselves with the future, it is appropriate for a world environmental history to look at the trends active in the present that are likely to persist into die future and will continue to affect the worldwide picture. Some of these were discussed in Chapter 8. In this introduction, I will comment briefly on three kinds of change that are patticularly salient and which promise to shape the future in positive and negative ways. These are high technology, including space technology; the world market economy in rela- tion to naturaLcapital; and the reduction of biological diversity.

A pervading transformation that seems certain to dominate human interaction with the environment is the continuing spread of high technology and its rapid series ofinnovations, ~o radical as to merit the historian's designation as a new technological revolution. Machines wirh greater power and sophistication in making environment:J;l changes will be created.

/f'he speed and spread of the reach of communication will contihue to accelerate. Informa- . tion of many. kinds, including the facts of environmental change, will be more easily availa-

(ilc. At the same time, governments will be able to watch social developments, gather >Ji1lormation on their citizens, and possibly control their actions as never in the past. Satel- hrcs and other instruments in space will provide ever more detailed knowledge about the Barth's environment, and information on processes of change that will aid in making judg- ments about sustainability and the advisability of various kinds of projects. The purposes to '"hich such knowledge will be put remains in question. · ln the latter half of the twentieth century, the exploration of the universe beyond the

1th provided a series of startling insights. People everywhere saw images of the Earth hotographed from the Apollo 8 space capsule on the way to the Moon, as a single planet, 11divided by borders, a small island of life in a sea of space. Some have dated the beginning f prevalent modern environmental conc~rn from that glimpse of our planet; as the poet f!.;hibald MacLeish put it,

For the first time in all of time men have seen the Earth with their own eyes - seen the whole Earth in that vast void as even Dante never dreamed of seeing it . . . It may

\. ,remake our lost conception of ourselves ... To see the Earth as we now see it, small and ,, •· ,blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on ,i .,t:he Earth together ... 1

(Is\ view back toward the home planet, with the incredible detail of its environment that ' d -be discerned in every part of it, is an aspect of the various national space programs

ong-term value. In fact, that was the justification given by the United States and the Rin 19 5 5 when both nations announced that they would launch earth-orbiting satellites

226 Present and future

as part of their participation in the International Geophysical Year sponsored by the United Nations, which covered the eighteen months from July 1957 to December 1958.2 The Soviets launched two satellites, Sputnik I and II, in late 1957, and the Americans followed with Explorer I in early 1958. Within the following three decades, eight nations had placed satellites in orbit, and others had participated in some of these flights. Many of the experi ments were surveys intended to observe the Earth's atmosphere, geology, ecology, oceans, and land use. Also graphically revealing were time-lapse images of clouds and precipitation, now routinely used in forecasting and television weather programs. The patterns of globe circling atmospheric systems resembled organic circulation and may have suggested the renewal of the idea that the Earth (Gaia) is alive. 3 But much more than weather can be observed from space. Applications of satellites like the American Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite (GEOS) and Landsat include forecasting crop production, assisting in soil and forestry management, locating energy and mineral resources, and measuring urban popula- tion densities. Landsat management was privatized in 1984, and much of the information gathered is available for commercial as well as scientific use.

While national investments in space programs slowed late in the century, it was nonethe- less possible to gather a tremendous body of data not only about the solar system and th<: galaxies, but also about the process of environmental change on the Earth. Ecosystems could be inventoried and the process of change within them measured. The pace of defor- estation ancvof atmospheric change, to give two examples, could be monitored. The UN has no satellites of its own, but coordinates information from member states. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), described in more detail later in this chapter, collects remote sensing data i~ part of a cooperative effort called Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS), and has assembled a Global Resources Information Database (GRID) as a major data management program. UNEP programs have been concerned with constructing natural resource databases, monitoring changes in tropical forest cover and desertification, asses.sing soil erosion and lake sedimentation, making analyses of watersheds, and testing the applicability of high-resolution satellite data to urban management and plan" ning.4 The European Space Agency has an Earth observation program, with environmental studies and monitoring of resources among its objectives, and there are several other inter- governmental organizations with similar tasks.

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Program was proposed in the late 1980s and carried out in the 1990s. This was a global research effort to study the interrelated processes of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere, necessary for a comprehensive understanding and evaluation of the effects of human activities on the environment. It had the support of the International Council of Scientific Unions and, in the US, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Two satellite photographs of the Brazilian state of Rondonia placed side by side, one taken in the early 1980s and the other in the early 1990s, show a startling pattern of defor- estation. A branching system of long, straight roads with bare fields along them has spread across and fragmented an expanse that was once unbroken rainforest. In ten years, more than half a million settlers were brought into this frontier region and had managed to clear about 25 percent of the land, or 60,000 sq km (23,000 sq mi) out of 243,000 sq km (94,000 sq mi). 5 The pace of blight continued even after the rate of immigration fell, because when the farms first opened lost their fertility, many of their tenants moved further into the forest to eke out a living in new clearings. At the same time, though almost invisible in the photographs, native South American Indians who lived as hunter-gatherers within the rainforest found the means of their subsistence destroyed, and in many cases were killed

Present and future 227

en .into isolated tracts where they were given little protection even when these areas 1designated as reserves for them. Rubber tappers, who had earned a living over the · es by gathering latex sap from the widely separated rubber trees in the natural forest,

their jobs in peril, and when they organized to resist, their leader, Chico Mendes, was •· ered. 6 The environmental history of the Amazon basin is the subject of a later section is chapter. The images of rapid environmental destruction .in the late twentieth century umerous and striking, and information technology has made possible a degree of accu- ln their gathering and an extent of dissemination that makes an unprecedented impres- ,on human consciousness.

e of the most far-reaching ways in which human impacts on the natural environment ,augmented in present times is the growing world market economy. This is true because ustrialization and intensive agricultural production increase demands for land and mrces and generate pollution, and trade accelerates economic growth. Demand in one 'on can be met by impacting the environment in a distant part of the world. For example, an North Americans who want fruits in the winter can import them from Chile in the

uthern Hemisphere, where seasons are reversed. Japan prefers to import timber from the pies rather than increase the pressure on domestic forests. This distancing of the con- ner from the sources of resources makes ecological awareness difficult. Where people

ipended on what local ecosystems could supply, they were aware of environmental wors- ting and anxious to reverse it. But the world market economy transfers resources from the ,p.ion where they were produced to a second region where they are consumed, and may ispose of the wastes in a third region. As Gilbert Rist analyzes it,

Everything undertaken in the name of expanding international trade allows production to be dissociated from consumption and consumption from disposal (that is, from con- version into visible or invisible waste). This sp)(ries the consumer-polluter from realizing that he is involved in using up resources and accumulating waste, as the trade circuit obscures what is actually taking place. Transnational companies favor this dilution of responsibility, operating as they do in many different places at once and constantly splitting creation from destruction of resources. The "polluter pays" principle does not do away with pollution, but implies· that those with the means can reserve the right to pollute/

s mentioned in Chapter 7, the world system of"free trade" which gives a degree ofunre- ricted operation to multinational corporations is facilitated by a number of supranational

':ilp,rcements and organizations including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the >World Bank ( officially, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or lBRD), which emerged from the Brettop Woods Conference ofl944. The GeneralAgree- ,mcnt on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was negotiated subsequently. At first focused on the need to help Europe recover from the Second World War, these agencies later concentrated their efforts on encouraging economic growth in the less industrialized countries and world trade generally. The organization intended to oversee GATT was the International Trade Organization (ITO), which was fairly weak, but was succeeded in 1995 by the more effec- tive World Trade Organization (WTO) as a result of the "Uruguay Round" of trade nego- tiations.8 The WTO, with a membership of over 150 nations, can make a claim to universal

• oversight. It is committed to ceaseless growth in trade and the world economy. These organs of the international financial system have eroded the traditional sovereignty of the 11.1tion-state, and their effects on the biosphere have yet to be measured.

228 Present and future

Dominant economic thought today presents a neoclassical model that treats the environ, . ment as a factor of production, a subset of the human economy, instead of what it is: a biophysical system which embraces the human economy and makes it possible.9 Market economists discount the importance of natural resources, maintaining that the market and human technology will find substitutes for whatever we run out of. Living organisms and their diversity are attributed no intrinsic value in their calculations, which become so mathematically abstract that they usually ignore human values as well. An attitude that treats the natural world not as a series of ecosystems that include human beings, but as ,I set of resources and commodities separate from humankind, is dangerous. Unfortunately, this way of resigning from the community of life has been embodied in institutions of the world economy which have nullified some national laws including several intended to protect endangered species in international trade. Some economic theorists regard environ- mental regulations as an unnecessary restraint of trade. Fortunately, there is a growing number of environmental economists who argue for sustainability, conservation of resources, and the protection of biodiversity, such as Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, and Robert Goodland. 10

The WTO provides very limited support to measures for environmental improvement. It permits its member nations to enforce laws necessary to protect the life and health of humans, animals, and plants, and to conserve natural resources, but does not address the broader area of environmental protection. A landmark case was brought by Mexico in I 991 before a GATT panel. The US, under its Marine Mammal Protection Act, had decided that Mexican-caught tuna would be excluded unless Mexican fishermen used methods that would spare the thousands of dolphins that were being destroyed in their nets. GATT decided that this was an improper attempt by the US to impose its own environmental regulations on Mexico, and ordered the US to accept tuna that was not "dolphin-safe." 11

Critics of the decision pointed out thavan appointed panel had negated a law passed by the democratically elected government of a member state, a state which is not among the weaker ones economically or politically. GATT also has determined that a Canadian law to conserve fisheries, a Thai limitation on cigarette imports, and US measures that use taxes on oil and chemical feedstocks to pay for cleaning up hazardous wastes are unfair obstacles to trade. 12

Neoclassical economists oppose on principle such measures as the ban on trade in ivory, while the global economy seems designed to assure by inflating prices on rare commodities that the trade will continue until the last tusker is harvested. Living forests are conceived as economic abstractions, which means clearcutting to save on labor costs, not careful selective silviculture. The subsidy the economy has been taking from wild nature may be near an end, 13 as the last wild places yield to the inexorable advance of tree farms, industrial agricul • ture, strip mines, power plants, and urban encroachment. Pollution carried by air and water to formerly distant regions affects even protected wilderness.

The emerging world trading system ignores an ecological principle, namely the limiting factor. Ecologists point out that any organism can increase in number and total biomass, and spread geographically, to the point where it encounters an environmental factor that prevents further increase. Liebig's law of the minimum means that growth is limited by the least available factor. 14 That factor may be another species in the ecosystem, or water, a chemical substance, or physical space. Obviously none of the limiting determinants is infi- nite in availability, so that every organism, every species, faces a limit to its growth.

The principle of the limiting factor obviously runs counter to the present doctrine of economists, who regard unbounded growth not only as a possibility, but as the preferred solution to poverty. Since they contend that environmental quality is a "luxury good"

l I Present and future 229

!'•,il'ed only by people whose basic needs for food, shelter, and economic security are already .l'I, they believe that economic growth is the best way to achieve environmental improve- !'llt. 15 The world market economy seeks to escape from local limitations by tapping

iu.rces around the globe, but fails to recognize the limits of the Earth itsel£ Looking at . H' beginning of the new millennium, neoclassical economist C. Fred Bengtsen predicted,

standards of living will rise sharply almost everywhere, even as the global population rises to between 12 billion and 15 billion, as technology continues to expand exponen- tially and virtually all regions adopt the policy reforms that began to proliferate in the late 20th century. 16

his "rosy view," which posits China and India with more than 2 billion apiece with a living Midard equal to or greater than that of the present-day US, pays no attention to the Jit:e dimensions of fossil fuel supplies and the ultimate constraints of the laws of thermo- . ,,amics. · 11eologists point out that the environmental degradation contingent upon the resource tr; required for such growth would interfere with meeting the basic needs of the vast new

nan population. One recalls the images of settlers in desolate, logged, and burned-over retches of the Amazon basin, or the workers in polluted districts of Romania covered with mt. By 1985, the proportion of the world's population living in cities was more than 40 ··i'cent, and in the twenty-first century, m.ore than half of all humans will live in large urban mcentrations. Cities in the less industrialized countries are growing most rapidly, and their lllnS make up most of this growth. There are limits to human population. Malthus advanced one: the availability of agricul- ml land. But we should look for other factors that may come into play even before we run !I: of arable soil. An independent group of economists~_;;cholars, and industrialists called t: Club of Rome met for the first time in 1968, appropriately in the Accademia dei Lincei, me of a society to which Galileo Galilei belonged. They launched a program to determine th the aid of computer analysis when the world economy might run out of essential non- iewable materials and reach what their first report called The Limits to Growth. 17 Their

omputer models indicated that a complex disaster of resource shortages, overpopulation, nd massive pollution would happen during the· tw:enty-first century unless drastic and nlikely counter-measures were taken. Economists attacked the methodology and conclu- . 'HlS of the report, with some accuracy, since a number of the deadlines set by the report ve already passed without the debacles it predicted.18 The Club of Rome undertook a vised study in light of the criticisms and in 1992 concluded,

The human world is beyond its limits. The present way of doing things is unsustainable. The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing. Poverty cannot be ended by indefinite material growth; it will have to be addressed while the material human economy contracts. 19

·1tcanwhile, in 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development, created ,by the United Nations and chaired by Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, t1mued a report, Our Common Future, which brought to the fore the concept of"sustainable \fovelopment," two words which were to resound in the halls of international organizations iilld receive the endorsement of numerous conferences. This idea represents the hope that tconomic improvement and environmental protection can go hand in hand. According to

230 Present and future

the report, "sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the presem without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. "20 Such ,1 definition implies living within limits, but the report mentions only "limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs." But there are limits other than those set by our abilities to use resources; there are limits set by natural systems. Humans cannot use more biomass than photosynthe sis produces. We cannot generate more heat than the atmosphere can dissipate. We arc limited by deterioration of soils, loss of biodiversity, and degradation of the ozone layer Y Unfortunately, in many discussions of the world market economy, sustainable development is taken to mean indefinitely continued growth, which evades the question of limits and iM intrinsically impossible.

Herman Daly and other economists envision a "steady state" economy that would operate within the constraints set by the biophysical environment. 22 This would mean that the size of the human population would stabilize, perhaps at a level lower than at present. Use of non-renewable resources would slow and eventually depend entirely on recycling, while use of renewable resources would remain below the replacement level. At present, these ec(J· logical economists, however discerning they may be, have little influence on the course of the world market economy. Still, even many of those friendly to expanding markets have been forced to admit, "There1l not much point in growth that completely lays waste to the environment. "23

Salient among the processes of change that will extend into the new century is the impact of changes caused by human intervention in natural ecosystems, including habitat destruc, tion, extinction of species, and loss ofbiologicalJiiversity, often called biodiversity. Although it is perhaps most often used to indicate the number of species in an ecosystem, biodiversity is "the variety ofliving organisms at all levels, from genes to species, populations and com, munities, including ... habitats and ecosystems."24 Evolution seems to foster biological diversity by its innate tendency to variation, producing forms of life to occupy every availa ·, ble niche in the environment. These forms in turn offer niches for additional forms, i.e. "other bugs to bite 'em ... ad infinitum." Many ecologists contend that a high degree ol' biodiversity helps to maintain the balance and productivity of an ecosystem in reaction to moderate stress, according to the analogy that when one of its strands is broken, a net 01· web can continue to hold better if it has many strands instead of a few.

We can appreciate the value of diversity to ecosystems as a manifestation of life itself. There is also value to humans, since we are inevitably part of and depend upon functioning ecosystems. Historians of science and medicine have pointed out the importance of biodi versity in the discovery of drugs and other useful substances. The synergy of the diversity of human cultures with biodiversity has provided much of the knowledge necessary to this discovery. Societies living in close contact with abundant ecosystems have complex ethno botanies and ethnozoologies, so that humankind as a whole can potentially gain from them and has an interest in preserving both biodiversity and indigenous peoples.

The destruction of both kinds of variety is a notable fact of world history, especially in the last century or two. Habitat destruction, with attendant extinction of species, and pollution with toxic substances are among the ways in which biodiversity is being diminished, along with human cultural diversity. E.O. Wilson conservatively estimates the rate of decline of' biodiversity by comparing the present rate of extinction caused by worldwide human inter ference, 27,000 per year, or seventy-four per day, with the "background" extinction rate over millions of years in the past, and finds that the rate today is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural rate. 25

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Present and future 231

ii:the twentieth ~entury, more powerful technologies, increasing exploitation of natural rces, and an expanding human population led to an accelerating destruction of other s of life by humans. A hundred years ago, large sections of the continents were still ingwith wildlife. Th~re seemed to be no end to the bounty of the sea. By the 1990s, ctions had occurred_on a scale matched only by catastrophic events of the geological d. 26 Wildernesses shrank to isolated retreats, and few were safe from destructive inva- ,Narieties of frogs and other amphibians inexplicably disappeared in ecosystems around

world. 27 India had 4 million blackbuck antelope in 1800; only 25,000 remained in -o. One of the blackbuck's major predators, the cheetah, vanished from India. Similar lines have been recorded for other animals around the world. Wild ecosystems shrank

d their component species declined in number or disappeared. Technology provided humans with immense power to fracture ecosystems and to alter c environment. Assault weapons designed for use in war came into the hands of poachers. ppen-pit mines, bulldozers and excavating machines large enough to dwarf the dinosaurs pped away vegetation, soil, and underlying rock. Giant dams impounded reservoirs that ded extensive lowlands, former homes of many forms oflife. Ancient forests fell to clear-

Jtting so rapidly as to threaten their disappearance before the twenty-first century is half 1cr. The unparalleled ecological richness of the rainforests, with the genetic record of mil- ms of years of evolution, gave way to agricultur.a! and mining projects of questionable 1g-term value. Their removal means a crisis of extinction. Between the mid-1970s and d-1980s, the timber extracted legally from the primeval forests of the Brazilian Amazon sc more than 270 percent, from 10.36 to 28.10 million cum (13.5 to 36.5 cu yd). 28 In dition, entrepreneurs and settlers cut and burned muchl~;rger amounts, and the amount ken illegally can only be guessed. By 1980, according to the UN Food and Agriculture eganization, 78 percent of Ghana's forests had been logged, and Costa Rica was cutting percent of its forests annually. 29 When a single ridge top in Peru was cleared, more than

0 plant species known only from that locality were lost. 30 At the same time, the original . brcsts of giant trees in the northwestern United States and western Canada, and the vast H1iga of the Soviet Union, were being logged faster .than the Amazon. In the United States In the 1960s, Congress had enacted laws to protect endangered species, but there is as ytt no law to protect endangered ecosystems. International concern appeared over the

. imminent extinction of single species: the panda in China, the tiger in India and Siberia, and {Jhc elephant in Africa. These are highly visible indicator species, but the real problem in -

e,Kh case is the diminishment of the ecosystem to which each of them belongs. It is a process often called "habitat destruction," but in fact it is the fragmentation of communities oflife.

Biodiversity was on the agenda of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992. Most discussion was not on the need to preserve species and ecosystems, but their usefulness for sustainable economic development, ;rnd the demands of industrializing nations to distribute the gains realized from the develop- 01cnt of biological resources more equitably. A primary document produced by the confers cnce was the Convention on Biological Diversity. 31 Its goals are the conservation and Nttstainable use of biodiversity and fair trade and compensation involving products made from the genetic resources of nations. It charges each signatory to mike plans to protect habitats and species, and provides for aid to developing countries to help them do this. 'I 'here are regulations concerning biotechnology. The treaty was signed at the conference by 153 nations ofl78; only the US voiced refusal to sign, on grounds that the financial obliga- tions were open-ended and insufficiently supervised. President Clinton later signed it, but

232 Present and future

when it was submitted to the Senate for ratification, although the Foreign Relations Com- mittee approved it, a sufficient number of conservative senators to defeat it expressed oppo- sition (a treaty must be approved by a two-thirds vote), and consequently a vote was not scheduled, Theoretically, it could still be revived. As John Rodman remarked, "The ecology movement, to the extent that its central worry is the rapid extinction of ecological diversity, is essentially a resistance movement against the imperialism of human monoculture. "32

Some environmental non-governmental organizations, therefore, objected to the Conven- tion on Biological Diversity because it assumes that non-human forms of life on Earth are the property of nation-states. It forbids interference in the way any nation chooses to protect or exploit species within its borders. But national frontiers rarely coincide with ecosystems, and the welfare oflife on the whole planet is of concern to all. Of course, no other species had representation at Rio, nor did any ecosystem.

If the cultural attitudes of the modern industrial age remain the determiners of human actions in regard to the ecosystems of which humans are part, while the human population continues to increase, or remains at its present excessive level, an unprecedented crisis of survival is likely in this century. Humankind is subject to change as a result of the impact of a rapidly diminishing biosphere. As E.O. Wilson put it, "We are in the fullest sense a bio- logical species and will find little ultimate meaning apart from the remainder oflife."33 It is the community of life in its many forms, not humankind alone, that made us what we are.

Amazon: threats to biodiversity

A canopy walkway gives access to theitreetops in the rainforest near the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER) in Peru. Usually a visitor to the ancient tropical forest must peer upward through many layers of foliage that grow as trees strive to reach and use every bit of available light, along with the epiphytes: bromeliads, orchids, and other plants that perch on the tree trunks and branches. But the canopy walkway ascends by a series of wooden stairways and long, hanging bridges suspended between the most massive emergent trees, reaching a level almost 60 m (200 ft) above the forest floor. From that height, above the early morning mist, I looked out over the unbroken rainforest in a bio- sphere reserve, the largest remaining refuge in the western Amazon basin, the least dis- turbed part of a sea of trees.

The variety oflife in that place strikes anyone who looks for it. The trees are of scores of different species; standing in a platform on one, the observer may have to look far to find a second one of the same kind. I saw one tree covered with bright yellow leguminous flowers, and never saw another. There are at least 60,000 species of plants in the Amazon basin, and there can be hundreds in a single hectare. Then there are the birds; different ones in the canopy from those near the ground. A friend also staying at ACEER was a bird-watcher who had a life-long list of those he had seen. In one week in this forest, he recorded many species, including toucans, macaws, oropendolas, woodcreepers, antbirds, and curassows, to name a few, more than the total number that have ever been seen in my home state of Colo- rado. We also saw the archaic-looking hoatzins, but only after a long hike in search of them. Insects were extremely numerous, of many different kinds and striking forms and colors; with the exception of ants, I never found myself surrounded by many of the same species. Scientists believe that the number of species of insect in the Amazon numbers in the mil - lions, most of which have never been described and named. 34 I photographed a remarkable lizard with a reddish-brown head and a blackish body; later on, a researcher at ACEERsaid that this species has never been noted anywhere else.

Present and future 233

High species diversity is characteristic of moist tropical forests, and nowhere is it more notable over a large area than in ,the Amazon. Most major groups of living things there exhibit an amazing number of varieties, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians ( the frogs around ACEER are numerous and of kaleidoscopic colors and patterns), fresh water Hsh, insects, spiders, snails, flowering plants, and ferns. 35 Each species represents a long history of evolution in this warm, moist environment, in competition and in cooperation with others. The information contained in the DNA of any one of those species represents a priceless fund of biotic information that will be lost if it becomes extinct. ACEER is located in an area drained by the Rio Napo, a tributary of the Amazon, which has been identified in several scientific surveys as a Pleistocene refuge. That is, during the temperature d1anges and desiccation of the Ice Ages, the rainforest and its species survived there, and spread to reoccupy the entire basin. The Forest Development and Research Project of the tJN's Food and Agriculture Organization designated it as the largest First Priority Conser- vation Area in the Amazon. 36 If the area near ACEER had been logged, my lizard and her kind might have disappeared forever along with unknown numbers of beetles and other species. Such things are unfortunately happening every day along the Amazon and its tribu- taries, and around the world in tropical forests.

The Amazon is the largest river in the world, in volume. It drains an area of7 million sq km (2.7 million sq mi), and the outflow to the Atlantic Ocean is 175,000 cu m (6.25 million cu ft) per second,37 an amount exceeding the total discharge of the next ten largest rivers. This outpouring carries fresh water into 'the sea for scores of kilometers. The river is often 11 km (7 mi) wide, and ocean-going ships can navigate upstream 3,700 km (2,300 mi) to Iquitos, Peru. The volume of fresh water is due to rainfall in the Amazon basin aver- aging 2,300 mm (90 in) annually, reaching 3,600 mm (142 in) in the northwest. More than half the water that falls as rain is returned to the at:1119sphere by evaporation and transpira- tion, and much of it falls again as rain as the air masses that carry it move westward toward t'he Andes. The existence of the rainforest and the physiological processes within it increase the rainfall upon which it depends. The activities oflife improve the conditions for life. But ''if the forest is destroyed, the system will regress from the current dynamic equilibrium to

, · !I . . . state characterized by lower annual precipitation, which would represent a climatic ,. d1ange. " 38

The richness and variety of animal and vegetable life in the Amazon rainforest, and the enormous biological mass which it contains per unit area, led potential exploiters to assume rhat the basin had fertile soil, and that if the forest were cleared, rich crops would grow there. But experience has proved otherwise. Soils in much of the area are poor in minerals and organic matter, some of them extremely so. Luxuriant rainforests grow on, not in, these

. Infertile soils. Almost all the organic material is in the forest, not the soil, and an efficient .ijystem of recycling keeps it there. There is a thin layer of decomposing material on the .,forest floor. Tree roots spread out in thick mats on the surface to absorb the available miner- >11ls; many trees are buttressed to give them support in the absence of deep root systems. •· ()lten roots will climb up the trunks of adjacent trees to absorb nutrients leached from those trees. Every leaf that falls represents valuable nutrients and is quickly reabsorbed by the living portion of the ecosystem. •'.,The removal of a large section of rainforest is a catastrophe for the ecosystem. Initially, the

· (li'ganic material left on the surface of the ground, or the minerals in the ashes left by fire, may ft'lrtilize the soil enough for a crop or two afterwards, but that will be all. Erosion is rapid as Jt'lrrential rains beat down on fragile soils. The forest will not return quickly, and may be

rttt.placed by grasses. Also, soils found commonly in the tropics, when exposed to downpours

234 Present and future

Figure 9.1 A lizard in a rainforest tree on the canopywalk at the Amazon Center for Environmental Educatiqp and Research near the Rio Napo, Peru. According to a researcher at ACEER:, this remarkable lizard with a reddish-brown head and blackish body represents a species that has never been noted anywhere else. High species diversity is characteristic of moist tropical forests, and nowhere is it more notable over a large area than in the Amazon Basin. Photograph taken in 1995.

and heat, turn into a bricklike substance called laterite and lose their productivity. 39 The popular image of the aggressive jungle invading open country may be true for small clearings in the forest, such as those native people made for swidden agriculture, but it is a myth insofar as the wide swaths made by fire, bulldozers, and logging machinery are concerned.40

The present state of the Amazon basin must be viewed in perspective of the history of human occupation. Indigenous people occupied the lands around the river for perhaps 12,000 years before Europeans arrived. 41 They displayed a great variety of cultures, many of them village societies depending on hunting, gathering, fishing, and swidden agriculture. Recent archaeological research has shown that some of these peoples had more complex societies and more sophisticated agriculture than had hitherto been expected, and artifacts including pottery and large earthworks. Students of prehistory in this area have raised their estimates of the size and density of native population, and the scale of human effects on the rainforest and its denizens.

The routes of European exploitation followed the rivers, and their first settlements were in the floodplains. The Spanish explorer Vicente Yafiez Pinzon sailed into the Amazon's mouth in 1500, and Francisco de Orellana descended the river by ship in 1541-2, reaching the Amazon from Ecuador by the Rfo Napo. The Portuguese gained the upper hand against Spanish, British, French, and Dutch interests in the lower and middle sections of the river. Pedro Texeira ascended the Amazon and Napo and eventually reached Quito, reversing Orellana's route, in 1638. Europeans sought gold, unsuccessfully at first, although it would

Present and future 235

J1y be found. Their relations with the native peoples were ambivalent; they founded · to civilize them, but also made efforts to defeat, enslave, and destroy them. The contracted diseases brought by Europeans and died in great numbers. The Jesuits,

authoritarian and suppressed tribal customs, but who tried to protect their native were expelled from Portuguese and Spanish dominions in 1759 and 1767, leaving ns in the hostile hands of secular authorities. Native communities suffered extreme

ns, and many were wiped out, although not without fierce resistance.42 Settlers ented in establishing plantations of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, and rice; and in the

lfon of forest products including valuable woods, nuts, oils, and flavorings such as ·(chocolate), the most important export during colonial times, vanilla, root beer, and lttes for clove and cinnamon.43 Clearings were limited to lowlands near riverbanks,

se were the areas that had been most densely occupied by native peoples. By the there were few Indians left there. As late as 1840, however, the vast interior of the n forest was relatively intact, due more to barriers to travel than to governmental ration efforts.44

en came the Great Rubber Boom. Charles Goodyear perfected vulcanization of rubber 39, and latex from wild trees was in demand for hoses, belts, shoes, and raincoats. 45

· M thousands of men were recruited as rubber tappers. The trees that could be bled for were widely distribnted, so tappers had to travel long distances. They came into con- vith tribes in the inner forest, and genocide and slavery spread.46 There were serious <.'.ts on flora and fauna. An upsurge of population followed as laborers flocked in from ' parts of Brazil, especially the impoverished northeast, and from abroad. River traffic sed. The population of the Amazon basin increased by a factor of ten from 1820 to , Manaus grew from 5,000 in 1870 to a city of 50,000 in 1910, boasting an opera and public library. Iquitos was founded as a port for rubber export in 1864.47 But the r balloon burst as rubber plantations C8Jle into production in Malaysia and south

t.'18 The price ofrubbe;r dropped, and it was no longer profitable to send men into Bra- n forests on long collecting trips. Prosperity disappeared, livestock production dropped, the economy and population stagnated between 1920 and 1940. Henry Ford started

brr plantations in Brazil, but leaf blight swept through the monoculture and his .mpted modernization of production was_ a financial failure. 49

'hr Second World War began the period ofgreatest environmental change in the Amazon 'Rt. With the Japanese occupation of southeast Asia, the United States turned again to ;i,il for rubber. But then it became possible to manufacture synthetic rubber from petro- 11, and the market for Amazon wild rubber shrank once more. Other economic factors · nµ;ht in more population, denuded forest land, and caused a crisis of such proportions 1 1 he survival of the rainforest became an international issue. Most of these large-scale nµ;cs have occurred since 1970.

One agricultural incursion, especially in the Peruvian and Colombian headwaters, was r,1, the raw material for cocaine. 50 A multimillion dollar illegal business, it is protected by international crime syndicate. The area carved from forest for coca production in Peru

T from 16,360 ha (40,425 acres) in 1964 to 200,000 ha (500,000 acres) in 1990.51 The .,r are often forced into actions which are ecologically destructive through no fault of

vir own, but necessary for survival. This is the case in the Brazilian province ofRondonia, . wrc thousands of square kilometers have been stripped of their trees and countless animal cries by destitute people from overcrowded cities, who have been promised land in the 11:rior, but who lack the resources to exploit it to support them, if indeed it ever could. Her destroying the environment they had come to farm, many are forced to hunt and fish

236 Present and future

for subsistence, or move back to the cities worse off than before. Meanwhile, cattle ranching by large landowners returned to the Amazon, driven by demand from fast-food companies in the US and elsewhere. Livestock raising involves clearing vast areas of forest, largely by burning. It exposes the soil to erosion and its productivity declines rapidly, causing further cycles of deforestation.

Timber corporations in the Amazon have selected the most valuable species to the extent that merchantable examples of mahogany, cedar, podocarpus, etc. are rare or nonexistent. Logging to meet demand in industrialized countries no longer takes high-grade trees only, since even low-grade wood can be used for wood chips, pulp, and paper. Clearcutting has become a practice in the Amazon, facilitated by a far-reaching network of highways.

In earlier times, rivers were the avenues of invasion into the rainforest. Now they have been augmented by roads cut through blocks of wilderness. Brazil signaled its intention to exploit the interior by establishing a new capital, Brasilia, in 1960, halfway between the old coastal capital, Rio de Janeiro, and the Amazon. A highway was pushed from Brasilia to Belem, followed by work on the Transamazon Highway cutting east to west through the heart of the rainforest, with plans to connect through Peruvian highways to the Pacific, bisecting'-the continent. Meanwhile, other roads pushed into Amazonia from the south, bringing ecological impacts in their wake.

Hydroelectric dams destroyed expanses of rainforest. The Amazon descends only 55 m (180 ft) in elevation from the Peruvian frontier to its mouth; since the gradient of the Amazon and its tributaries is so low, even a low dam will impound a reservoir covering a vast area. Many dams have been proposed, and if built would result in a greater loss of biodiver- sity than anywhere else on Earth. 52 They would also displace indigenous people. The Tucurui Dam, with a length ofl.2 km (0.75 mi), impounds the Rio Tocantins. Five major dams and a number of smaller projtcts have been built. Balbina Dam near Manaus drowned 250,000 ha (618,000 acres) of rainforest and two native towns, generates little power at high cost, and represents a public works fiasco. Reservoirs interfere with migration of fish populations and provide a breeding ground for the disease-spreading mosquito.

El Dorado, the lure of gold, was a myth for early explorers of the Amazon, but in the gold rush after 1979 it became reality. The international price of gold had reached phenomenal heights. Prospectors and wildcat miners in the hundreds of thousands probed every part of the basin, and many of them found what they were looking for. The richest find was Serra Pelada, in the Carajas mountains of Para state, where swarming miners scratched out 40 tons of gold by 1986. Mining damages the rainforest by tearing up the soil, exacerbating erosion, and most seriously by causing mercury pollution. The effect on the native people is devastating. The Yanomamo people, one of the few remaining tribes in the Amazon that maintain their traditional ways, live in northern Roraima state and adjoining Venezuela.53 A gold rush beginning in 1987 brought in 40,000 miners -there were only 20,000 Y anomamo. Violent clashes occurred. The Yanomamo are fierce warriors, but the miners, better armed, slaughtered more than a thousand of the natives, raped women and forced many into pros- titution. Drugs, venereal diseases, malaria, and tuberculosis took a heavy toll. The Brazilian government vacillated between colluding with the mining interests and declaring that the rights of the Yanomamo would be protected, but with patchy enforcement. In contrast, another warlike people, the Kayap6, who live on the Xingu River near Serra Pelada, have become familiar with non -Indian law and politics and have used their knowledge adroitly to gain native rights and title to their land.54 Petroleum and natural gas have been located in the western Amazon, and oil operations in the Ecuadorian rainforest have caused excessive pollution and damage to native people.55

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Present and future 237

A fisherman casting a net into the River Amazon below Iquitos, Peru. The people in this area depend on fish for much of their food. Many of the species of fish subsist on fruit from the rainforest trees, which are being cut down, especially in the river floodplain. An ecological cycle is being broken. Photograph taken in 1995.

Roads, dams, mines, oil wells, and cattle ranches have contributed to a population explo- ;,ion in the Amazon. Cities from Belem to Iquitos have mushroomed; in the years from 1960 to the present, Manaus has grown from a city of200,000 to a sprawling agglomera- 1 ion of more than 1 million, many of the new inhabitants living in makeshift shacks, a Nymptom of prevailing unemployment.56 In 1970, the population of Brazilian Amazonia

-· was 4.5 million, of whom nine-tenths lived in Belem and Manaus. President Emilio Medici ,rnnounced a policy of providing "land without people for people without land," but poor people from the Brazilian northeast had little success in becoming landholders in the inte- rior. Wealthy ranchers moved in, making it "land with cattle for men with capital," in the words of John McNeill.57 In 1992, the population had increased to 20 million and its p,rowth had not slowed.58 Environmental changes in the Amazon rainforest in the last quarter of the twentieth century exceeded by far everything seen before.

238 Present and future

Forest removal is presently at an annual rate of 405,000 ha (10 million acres). During fourteen years, 1975-88, 24 percent of the Brazilian state ofRondonia was deforested, and the process continues. In 1995 the Amazon Treaty Organization set guidelines for the sus- tainable management of tropical forests by the nations of the Amazon basin, and listed indicators for judging progress, but its effect has been minimal. 59 Logging receives state subsidies. The Peruvian Amazon is being subjected to massive mechanized deforestation. But a larger area of forest is burned off during the dry season. The total loss of forest cover from the Amazon basin by 2000 as revealed by images taken by satellites was 15 percent, and the forest shrinks noticeably every year. Only 2 percent of the Brazilian Amazon is within designated parks or reserves, and these areas are not well protected; in many cases, farmers and ranchers have located within the boundaries, and miners and l9ggers have invaded.60 Experiments have demonstrated that when "islands" of forest remain in a cleared landscape, the forest ecosystems continue to lose species even in the absence of hunting and other disturbances. 61

Animal species are being reduced to rarity as rapidly as the tree species that are in highest demand. Not only do residents shoot monkeys and other animals for food, but commercial hunters kill anything in the forest that people will buy in city markets. Rare species are cap- tured for sale to unscrupulous collectors, and are shipped illegally to northern countries. Most die in transit, and even those that survive represent a loss to Amazon ecosystems. But more devastating than the death and removal of individual animals is the destruction of the forest habitat, which means that all forms oflife adapted to it disappear.

Mammals such as jaguars, tapirs, anteaters, and armadillos were abundant, but now are seldom seen. Monkeys have been decimated by a combination of deforestation and hunting. Sloths, easily caught, are declining; in numbers. Birds, especially those adapted to the flood- plain, suffer from hunting and loss of nesting sites. Parrots and songbirds are frequently trapped, caged, and sold. Reptiles are exploited for food; turtles are killed and eaten and their eggs collected wherever they can be found. Between 1951 and 1976, Colombia exported 10 million caiman hides. 62 ·

Fish constitute the main protein in the diet of Amazonian people; at least 200,000 tons are taken from the river every year. Their numbers have been decimated by dams and pol- lution, and fewer fish mean malnutrition for impoverished residents. The greatest reduction in fish population results from the removal of forest from the riverbanks. Many fish are dependent on fruits, other vegetable matter, and small animals that drop into the river. In the undisturbed Amazon forest, trees hang over the water, but as I traveled along the rivers near Iquitos, I noticed that they had been everywhere cleared some distance back from the water's edge. By cutting these trees, people are reducing the number and size of the fish they want to catch. If fishing is to remain viable, substantial areas of floodplain forests must be preserved. 63 Many colorful tropical fish in demand for aquariums come from the Ama- zon's tributaries; collecting them is illegal, but a major trade continues.

Use ofpoisoris in agriculture destroys many non-target organisms. It troubles me that a typical method of studying rainforest biodiversity is to fog a tree with insectidde, killing all the insects and then identifying and counting them. It is quite possible that this could make species extinct just before they were first noted by biologists.

The Amazon rainforest is the largest remaining tropical forest on Earth, and contains the planet's leading reservoir of biodiversity. Because deforestation is proceeding even more rapidly in Indonesia, southeast Asia, and Africa, the Amazon's green robe will in all proba- bility be the last of the great tropical forests to disappear in the course of the twenty-first century. When it disappears or shrinks to a few protected forest remnant "islands," the

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nillion acres). During ia was deforested, and ;,;w.delines for the sus zon basin, and listed ogging receives state anized deforestation. al loss of forest cover lites was 15 percen1, 'Brazilian Amazon i~ :cted; in many casn, rs and loggers ha\'(' t remain in a clear('d ·ence of hunting ,111d

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Present and future 239

Earth will be impoverished. The loss of millions of tons of moisture formerly sent into the atmosphere by transpiration will reduce precipitation, and therefore the volume of the Amazon River. 64 As a result, hydroelectric dams will generate less electricity. The replace- ment of the bulk of the rainforest's carbon-rich biomass by the less voluminous vegetation resulting from human interference may result in an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmos- phere of about 8 percent, adding to the greenhouse effect and contributing to global warming. 65 But the greatest deprivation will be the extinction of millions of species, many of which will never have been seen by human eyes, and the reduction of the world's most complex and balanced ecosystems to a simplifie~ and impoverished condition. Some of the lost species might have had important medical or economic uses. The economies of the Amazonian nations, and the world market economy which they in large part serve have received a fleeting "subsidy from nature"66 in degrading the ecosystems of the Amazon rainforest, but one which, at present rates of destruction, cannot continue for much longer.

New Orleans: causes of environmental disaster

In August 2005, New Orleans was a historic city, a cultural center, the birthplace of jazz music, and one of the world's busiest ports. It attracted 10 million tourists in a year. 67 It was also a city with most of its surface located below sea level, and in the path of a storm that would bring heavy rains and a surge of water from the sea on the 29th of that month. I saw New Orleans eighteen months later, after the disastrous Hurricane Katrina had breached the levees and flooded more than four-fifi:h_s;of the city with toxic, sewage-laden water as deep as 6 m (20 feet) in some places. Much of the debris had been cleared away, but the city

•Was still suffering from its wounds. On the shore of Lake Pontchartrain there was a light- house smashed over at an angle, and bare pilings in the water where there had been restau- ntnts and theaters. I went to the Lower Ninth Ward with university professors who have _studied the city, to see first hand something of what had happened. There were whole

locks where houses had been swept away by water exploding from a breach in the flood- . 7.tll. Some houses were left smashed and crushed, and a few turned upside down. When I

oked at the ground and the sidewalks, I saw shells from the canal along with knives, forks, issors, and children's toys. Block after block were empty houses still erect but often win- >wless and gutted, stained with mold. All were marked next to the front door with a large and the necessary data: the date inspected, the inspecting agency, and the number of dead

11d. In most cases, the latter figure was zero, but Katrina and its aftermath had killed ut 1,500 people in New Orleans. In spite of all that, there were signs of hope: someone scratched in the concrete at the base of a re-erected electric pole, "Ninth Ward Lives!"

et people wearing T-shirts with the motto, "Re-New Orleans!" ''he driver in the taxi that took me from Baton Rouge to the New Orleans airport was an

n-American resident of New Orleans who had been at work in a K-Mart the day ina struck. She had brought her nine-year-old son with her. When the floodwall broke, water quickly rose to chest height. She put her son on an inflated air mattress and · ged to get to a bridge. The other side was not flooded, but that was a predominantly t:e-inhabited neighborhood and police with guns stopped the people from crossing. copters later evacuated old people and children, including her son; eventually she made ay out to Baton Rouge and was reunited with him. Like our driver, more than half the lation of New Orleans resettled elsewhere, in Baton Rouge, Houston, Atlanta, and ler numbers across the US. Approximately 200,000 of an original population of

240 Present and future

440,000 now live in New Orleans, and the African-American proportion has dropped from 67 percent to 47 percent. Certainly the poor suffered more than the affiuent. It took a week to evacuate all of the 122,000 people who were stranded in the Superdome and the Con- vention Center.

Ari Kelman, my colleague who wrote a fine book on the earlier history of New Orleans entitled A River and Its City,68 said that the idea was:

Move the homeless, the elderly, the impoverished, the unlucky, all those poor souls who couldn't get out of New Orleans in time to avoid Hurricane Katrina; move them into the city's cavernous domed football stadium. Anyone who has seen a disaster movie could have predicted what would happen next: Katrina slammed into the Super- dome, ripped off the roof, and knocked out the power, cutting off the drinking water and the air conditioning. Those trapped inside had to be moved again - to Houston's Astrodome, of course. If it's not too callous to say so, the stadium mishap is an apt metaphor for New Orleans' environmental history. The sodden city has long placed itself in harm's way, relying on uncertain artifice to protect it from predictable disasters. 69

If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, similarly New Orleans and all southern Louisiana are the gift of the Mississippi River. Each was formed of the debris deposited by a great river from a vast watershed draining part of a continent. The Mississippi, before the dams and diversions, carried water and sand, silt, and mud from 40 percent of the land area of what became the United States, and a smaller-v¥ea in Canada, over many thousands of years. Without human interference, the river would continue to add to its vast, flat delta, flooding and shifting from one channel to another. Most of New Orleans today is below sea level, because the alluvial soil compacts as it accumulates, and further shrinks when it is drained. While in Louisiana, I took another field trip into the wetlands and bayous, where forests of huge bald cypresses and tupelos flourished in the fresh water brought down by the river. Those wet- lands, along with grassy marshes, and the barrier islands formed further out on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, are rich in fish, alligators, water birds, and other wildlife. They provide a stopping place for 70 percent of the migratory birds in the Great Mississippi Flyway. In the past they also formed insulation against hurricanes. New Orleans has been hit by a major hurricane every few decades, but the earlier ones tended to do less damage due to the pro- tection offered by these millions of acres of wetlands, forests, and barrier islands. They were like a series of speed bumps against the storm surges of salt water. It was a case of healthy ecosystems serving as natural defense~. But much ofit has disappeared and the rest is endan- gered, and the reason why can be explained by the environmental history of the region. That protection has been stripped away in large part by human projects, not by natural processes alone.

Hurricanes, like other natural djsasters such as floods, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, present a problem for historians. Are they events that happen to people without choice, often without much warning, and make humans helpless victims? To what extent can humans control them, or at least modify them and guard against them? And in what ways are humans responsible for the destruction they and their works suffer from natural disasters because of the choices they do make? The damage caused by a hurricane depends not just on the force of the storm, but also on what people have done to the land. That includes city planning and activities that weaken and destroy natural entities that might protect them, such as the wetlands of the Mississippi delta.

Present and future 241

New Orleans: One of the houses overturned by a surge of water from the collapsed floodwall of the Industrial Canal during Hurricane Katrina, August 2005. This is in the Lower Ninth Ward, where floodinEf'was deep and widespread, and almost no houses escaped damage. Photograph taken in 2007.

For European colonists determined to exploit North America in the early eighteenth ;;;cntury, the delta of the Mississippi River was an ideal location, a portal to the immense

i:lmcrior along a myriad tributaries large and small. It was, however, an environment that did ,oot offer an ideal site for a city among its intermittently flooded and unhealthy swamps. The · jirench explorer and governor of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Mayne, Sieur de Bienville, ,11\cr making settlements at several other places, discovered a crescent-shaped bend where (he river had built a natural levee that seemed to him relatively safe from tidal waves and h11rricanes, and in 1718 decided to establish a city there, naming it La Nouvelle-Orleans. It became the capital of the Louisiana colony in 1722, a year which foreshadowed future events when in September a hurricane struck, blowing most of the houses down. The site of today's French Quarter was on slightly elevated ground (3.7 m, or 12 ft above sea level) near the river, and therefore somewhat protected from flooding. Nonetheless, there were !loods; the river always presented a threat and the colonists added an artificial levee ( a dike nr embankment) 1.2 m ( 4 ft) high on top of the natural one formed by the river, beginning ;1 process that would last at least two centuries of building barriers against river floods and r.1ising them increasingly higher. During the French period and the Spanish period that intervened from 1763 to 1800, the main flood threat was from the Mississippi River, and l;mdowners were required to build levees in the sectors ofland that they owned. North of the new settlement, in an area that was to become part of the modern city, cypress swamps ,md grassy marsh stretched to thecshores of Lake Pontchartrain. This almost completely flat expanse was crossed from east to west by the Metairie and Gentilly ridges, ancient natural

242 Present and future

levees of no great elevation along a former path of the river. These ridges were separated by Bayou St. John, a sluggish watercourse debouching into the lake.

New Orleans became part of the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleonic France in 1803. The city soon began to use boat-mooring fees to compensate landowners for levee building. The new Territory of Louisiana, and the State of Louisiana organized in 1812, lacked a central flood authority, and although levees ran along many kilometers of both banks of the river, the protection they offered was uneven and failed to prevent floods that occurred frequently, often only a few months to two or three years apart. Frequently breaches in the levees that caused the floods were some distance above New Orleans and entered the lower parts of the city from behind. In 1849 the Sauve Crevasse flood penetrated New Orleans, including part of French Quarter, and the river undercut levees, making extensive repairs necessary. 70 The state, and increasingly the federal govern- ment, took greater roles in flood protection as the value of development in New Orleans and' the Mississippi delta became apparent. Congress passed the Swamp Land Acts, which allowed the state to sell federal land for money to construct levees. Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court had ruled that the commerce clause of the constitution made the federal government responsible for maintaining navigation on rivers, and Congress delegated that job to the Army Corps of Engineers, whose role grew to a leading one in later years. The Corps built levees on the lower river leading to the Gulf, and it dominated the Mississippi River Commission created by Congress in 1879. After the Great Flood ofl927, the Corps was given oversight of flood control and navigation works on the entire Mississippi and its branches, and, after Hurricane Betsy in 1965, direction of the hurricane protection system of all southeast Loui'siana. Unfortunately, the projects undertaken for flood control also had the effect of changing the hydrological regime of the floodplain to prevent the deposition of new soil which formerly maintained the bottomland of southern Louisiana.

The attempt to control flooding, it is clear, depended almost entirely on building levees, and as this effort continued, the river was gradually contained between two sets of levees from far above New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. By constricting the river, the levees raised its level further above the surrounding land, with the result that floods that did occur had the potential to be higher and more destructive. They also shunted the river's load of fertile soil to the Gulf, effectively stopping the renewal of land in the delta. 71 In addition, the Atchafalaya River, a lower branch of the Mississippi, was straightened and contained between high levees that convey floodwaters rapidly to the Gulf, where the erosional mate- rials they contain are dissipated. 72 Most of the Mississippi's flow, however, was not allowed to enter the Atchafalaya and was directed past New Orleans. Several engineers pointed out the advantages of gates and spillways that could give river water and river mud alternate pathways to the Gulf, relieving pressure in the main stem and helping to build up the delta. There were experiments of this kind, but for the most part the policy was "levees only," and as far as the city's defense against the river was concerned, the policy was a success; from the late nineteenth century onward, the river levees usually held. In the Great Flood of 1927, the bowl of the city filled when 355 mm (14 in) ofrain fell and the pumps failed. The Army Corps broke a levee downstream at Caernarvon to relieve pressure on the levees next to the city.73 This action flooded St. Bernard Parish, but it may have been unnecessary. In 2005, none of the levees along the Mississippi River above or in New Orleans failed.

The main flood danger to the center of the city had shifted to another front: the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. 74 New Orleans grew rapidly in the nineteenth century as a result of its busy port and the success of steamboats in making swift upriver travel possible. The relatively high ground near the river soon filled up with structures, and the obvious

Present and /tl!t11/Pe

rection to expand was northward into the swamps toward the lake. For that to happen{ ,landscape would have to change. Largely to be cleared were the majestic bald cypress

; their wood was durable timber, so resistant to rot that it was called "the wood al."75 Cypress forests were exploited in Louisiana from early in the French period,76 but

though sizeable forest survived toward the lakefront, it was increasingly depleted and the JXimum period of removal was from the 1890s through the 1930s, after which there were

trees left that were accessible and of useful size. 77 Floods only made felling the trees by at and floating them out easier, but this was wasteful because they were sawn off 4-5 m 2-15 ft) above root level and the tall stumps remained. 78 Fortunately in the late nine-

th century the city and state created two large parks, Audubon Park and City Park, and ·h plans developed in part by John Charles Olmsted, scenic versions of the original land-

apes of the city were preserved. 79 The next step necessary before streets could be laid out ild houses built was drainage; the accepted way to do that in the early nineteenth century •as to dig canals, but the extremely low gradient toward the lake rendered canals ineffective

getting the water out, and in addition provided a way into the city for water driven by . rms from the lake. Steam-driven waterwheels were installed to lift water into the canals,

but drainage lowered the water table and the ground level, and left the canals, provided vith their own levees, higher above the city. Electric pumps and new canals provided more

icffoctive water removal in the years before the First World War, when there were seven pumping stations and 112 .km ( 67 mi) of canals and the water table had been lowered by as · much as 3 m (9 ft). 80 Development proceeded tow~~il the lake, from south to north, and the pumping stations stayed where they were first placed, toward the south ends of the canals, away from the lake,. instead of at the lakeshore levees, where they could have pumped water directly into the lake and served as barriers. As a Dutch engineer remarked after Hur-

' ricane Katrina had demonstrated the weakness of the canal levees, "Why in the world would . you invite the enemy deep inside your own camp?"81 The major construction oflakefront protection levees took place in 1922-34. In the 1970s, the lakefront levees were raised to il.25 m (14 ft).

Then in the eastern part of the city the Industrial Canal, opened in 1923, connected the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. About halfway along that canal, it is joined by two other canals from the east, the Gulflntracoastal Waterway, a navigable inland channel that parallels the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas, and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MR- GO), a navigation channel 122 km (76 mi) long completed in 1965 to connect the Port of New Orleans directly to the Gulf of Mexico, shortening the distance that ships would oth- erwise have to traverse along the curves of the riv;er. These two waterways, with their levees, form a "funnel" leading directly toward their T-shaped junction with the industrial canal, setting a scenario for disaster when hurricanes drive surges from the Gulf.

Never a stranger to hurricanes, New Orleans had discovered that the high winds could also drive waters from Lake Pontchartrain into the city. A hurricane in 194'.7 tossed waves over the lakeshore levees and caused significant flooding. By the 1950s, hurricanes received female names bestowed in alphabetical order, an idea taken from George R. Stewart's novel, Storm, in which meteorologists called a Pacific low-pressure system "Maria." Consequently, New Orleans suffered Hurricane Flossy, which burst gaps in the canal levees in 1956, and Hurricane Hilda in 1964. In the following year, memorable Hurricane Betsy brought winds of260 kph (160 mph) and breached the Industrial Canal, damaging 7,000 homes and 300 industries. Hurricane Camille also breached the Industrial Canal in 1969. Incidentally, the idea that hurricanes should be given feminine names was recognized as an instance of gender discrimination, and in 1978 the official lists of names began to contain alternately masculine

244 Present and future

Figure 9.4 Bald cypress in the Edenborn Brake, Louisiana. Wetland forests like this help to counteract the flood surges of hurricanes; their removal exposes homes and businesses to greater damage. Photograph taken in 1916. Courtesy of the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.

Present and future 245

d feminine names. It was the luck of the draw that gave New Orleans two female hurri- nes in 2005, Katrina and Rita. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry in the Louisiana wetlands was expanding to become e largest source of crude oil and the second largest source of natural gas in the United

es. Oil platforms were also constructed to access petroleum reserves under the Gulf of cxico, and oil tankers required delivery to the port at New Orleans, so canals were built l'ough the wetlands to provide access. Combined with those excavated for operations on d, the total distance of cuts and canals in the wetlands has been estimated at almost ·000 km (8,000 mi). These canals allowed salt water to flow into the wetlands, killing es and other vegetation and eroding away the land. The longest navigation canal was

R-GO, mentioned above, leading directly from the Gulf of Mexico to the heart of New leans, providing a channel for oil tankers to come into the port, but also providing a tential funnel for hurricane surges. This is exactly what happened during Hurricane

atrina. Some engineers predicted this danger and recommended building gates on MR-GO tat could be closed in case of a storm, but this was not done because of cost and other

·• bjections, some of them environmental. " In July 2004, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) brought together ,tnergency officials from fifty parish, state, federal, and volunteer organizations for a five-

y exercise held at the Louisiana State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge to •Ip officials develop joint response plans for a catastrophic hurricane. 82 It involved a simu-

.it.ed, computer-generated event called Hurricane Pam. Hurricane Pam was assumed to be ;ltegory 3, bringing sustained winds of200 f¢h (120 mph) and up to 510 mm (20 inches) f rain in parts of southeast Louisiana and a storm surge that would top levees in the New )deans area. More than 1 million residents were targeted for evacuation and Hurricane i;un was expected to destroy 600,000 buildings. According to the scenario, only a third of

jhc population was predicted to leave New Orleans before the storm hit. This was recogni- tion of the fact that much of the city's population lived in relative poverty, with approxi- mately 127,000 in households in which no one owned a car. Hurricane Pam turned out to

:he an almost exact prediction ofHurricane Katrina, the first of the two hurricanes that actu- nlly hit New Orleans just over a year later. I mention it because it indicates that no one

· ~hould have said that Katrina was unpredictable. There was earlier warning, indeed, from scientists, historians, engineers, and a newspaper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which

·.· had carried a series of stories in 2002 on the very subject, also predicting a disaster very much like that which actually occurred. In spite of this, the federal administration's unpre- p,1redness is epitomized by the slow response ofFEMA when the emergency occurred.

The large and destructive hurricane designated Katrina reached the northern coast of the Culf of Mexico on August 29, 2005, four days after it had crossed the Florida peninsula. When it reached the Mississippi delta in Louisiana, it possessed sustained winds of204 kph

, ( 127 mph). It produced a storm surge approximately 9 m (30 ft) high, with waves up to 16 m (52 ft), which did catastrophic damage when it smashed into coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Al.abama.83 Considered as a single event, it was one of the deadliest and most costly weather-related disasters up to that time in the history of the United States, causing more than 1,833 deaths and about $125 billion in economic impact. New Orleans suffered most of the deaths and a major share of the damages.

The storm surge ofHurrican.e Katrina found weak points in the system oflevees set up by engineers to protect the city. A surge into Lake Pontchartrain, pushed by winds from the north as Katrina passed by, entered the drainage canals and breached the floodwalls in several places, flooding the northern and central parts of the city. The surge from the east

246 Present and future

piled through the "funnel" into the Industrial Canal and breached its floodwalls in three major places, pouring violently into East New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, and parts of the city to the west. ·

Oil- and sewage-laden water flooded more than 80 percent of the city as power failed and the pumps ceased to function. In some places the water level rose more than 6 m (20 ft) above the ground. People who were still in the city were trapped in their attics as water came up, unless they could break through and seek rescue on the roofs, rescue that was all too often very slow to arrive by boat or helicopter, if it arrived at all. Indeed, the slowness of government agencies to respond to the disaster, on the federal, state, and local levels, con stitutes a lasting disgrace associated with the Katrina disaster. As Kelman expressed it,

Nor do I suggest that this was a natural disaster. It was not. It was an outgrowth of a host of bad decisions, large and small, of miscalculations, of ignorance, even of hubris, It was, in sum, a byproduct of the city's and the nation's environmental history.B4

Past efforts to protect New Orleans were in the main attempts to control nature, and although nature time and time again has demonstrated its forces to be uncontrollable, those efforts are parts of plans for the future. New Orleans will not be abandoned any time soon, although if a radical change in the way its problems have been addressed does not take place, that might become an unavoidable alternative. But if not abandoned, it must be defended by working technq!ogy. Other hurricanes, some of them more powerful than Katrina, will inevitably hit the city sooner or later, and the danger is exacerbated by the expected incremental rise in sea level caused by global increases in average temperature, Projects have been advocated, some of them already under way, to repair the breaches, raise and strengthen the levees and build new ones regionally, put pumps where the canals mecr the lake, and complete a lock system on the Industrial Canal. The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed to close the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. Perhaps using aspects of the Dut~h experience with dikes and gates, at the entrance to Lake Pontchartrain and elsewhere, will help. Projects like these are necessary, but they will not be enough.

The effort to keep New Orleans alive does not need to be only a struggle against nature; it can be a venture to cooperate with nature. The city is inextricably part of the Gulf Coast wetland ecosystem, and that ecosystem has historically operated to insulate the city against a number of dangers. The area of delta marsh that becomes open water every year is vari, ously estimated at 60-100 sq km (25-50 sq mi),B 5 but Katrina destroyed 250 sq km (100 sq mi), and chopped up the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier island chain.86 Many planners advocate a regional system of coastal and wetland restoration.B7 This would involve diver· sion of some of the flow of the Mississippi so that sediment can build up wetland where it has been lost.BB It would mean establishing new protected areas and limiting development within them, especially the excavation of canals. Cypress trees would be protected, includ, ing a ban on cutting them for chipping into mulch for suburban gardens, which is today th1,1 most common form of exploitation. The barrier islands could be strengthened, extended, and vegetated. Such a program would be very expensive, although perhaps not compared with the damage that has occurred by the neglect of the ecosystem.

Nairobi and the world: the United Nations Environment Program

The world headquarters of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) is an attrac.: · tive campus located on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya in a suburb called Gigiria. Most of

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buildings are of one or two stories, set among artificial streams and waterfalls, with care- :tended plantings of flowering shrubs, trees, and succulents. The colorful birds of East a,make themselves at home, and visit outdoor tables at the restaurants provided for rs and staff. Conferences take place in ample meeting halls provided with electronic

ities. I visited with an environmental study group, and we were impressed by a painting, Tree for Every Child," showing a group of children from many nations dancing in a e,around a newly planted tree, symbolizing environmental concern for the next genera- , We saw films on the organization of UNEP and on the dangers of ozone depletion, received printed information on many projects, including one on the status of efforts to

ve the African elephant. 89

.UNEP's mandate is "to provide leadership and encourage partnership among nations in ring for the environment, by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to 1prove their quality of life without compromising that of future generations."90 It was ttnned "as a catalyst, rather than an implementer or enforcer."91 At the same time, it

ame the first major UN agency centered in a country in the developing world. Jomo nyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, invited the international body to locate

le headquarters for UNEP in his country, and his offer was accepted over several others. 'he•choice of Nairobi, located so far from its sister UN agencies, created problems for fNEP, whose mode of operation was to coordinate efforts of other agencies on environ- ental issues. It made contacts with many governments, environmental movements, and

1c mass media more difficult. UNEP Nairobi keeps in contact with New York, Geneva, and rher UN "capitals," as well as its own regional offia€s in places such as Bangkok, Bahrain, nd Mexico City through the Mercure satellite communications network, acquired in 1997 ·om the European Space Agency.92 Particular responsibility has rested on UNEP's Regional Hice for North America in New York, which keeps contact with other major UN offices

nd bodies there, and the diplomats who visit them. From 1972 to 1995, the regional direc- tor at the UN in New York was Noel Brown, a citizen ofJamaica with a doctorate from Yale ,University, who represented UNEP at many important international conferences.

UNEP was an outgrowth of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environ- ment (UNCHE), the landmark international environmental meeting of the century, con-

. \lcned in Stockholm in June 1972, which included representatives of 113 nations, nineteen Intergovernmental agencies, and 134 non-governmental organizations (NGOs).93 That meeting was the first major modern international gathering on the theme of human activi- ties in relationship to the environment. It marked a major step in awareness among nations that many environmental problems are worldwide in scope, and must be addressed on an

· international level. Representatives ofindustrializedand developing countries attended, and • the issues that divided those two groups were subjects of searching discussion.

Stockholm 1972 was organized and chaired by Maurice F. Strong, a Canadian industrial- ist who subsequently became the first executive director ofUNEP. Unlike the 1992 meeting in Rio de Janeiro which was its successor, Stockholm 1972 was not an "Earth Summit." The only heads of state present were the host, Sweden's Prime Minister Olaf Palme, and Indira Gandhi ofindia, who served as an articulate spokesperson for views shared by many developing countries. Some developing-world representatives noted that environmentalist views were most vocal in the industrialized world, in the very nations which had reached their economic pinnacles by using· natural resources from around the Earth and producing the major proportion of the planet's pollution. Would measures for resource conservation and reduction of pollution limit the development of poorer countries while leaving the richer countries in relative affluence? Was the environmental movement

248 Present and future

a colonialist conspiracy to thwart development by imposing upon them extra costs and prohibitions that developed states had not faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in implementing their pollution-generating, resource-consuming industrial revolutions? 94

Indira Gandhi had a more measured view that environmental concern should accompany a desire for development: "Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?" she asked, adding, "The inherent conflict is not between conservation and development, but between environment and the reckless exploitation of man and earth in the name of efficiency. " 95 A major contribution of developing countries to the discussion was to insist that environmen · tal problems always be considered along with issues posed by basic human needs.

Concerned environmentalists from industrialized countries had to recognize the justice of these arguments, and at the same time made the point that a livable environment is a critical dimension of successful development. The principles approved by the Stockholm conference reflected a compromise on which the two major groups of nations could agree. These principles included recognition of the fundamental right of people to live in an envi- ronment ofa quality "that permits a life of dignity and well-being."96 They urged the con· servation of natural resources and the limitation of pollution. Industrialized countries, it was agreed, should aid other nations in development guided by environmental concern. Scien- tific and technological resear,fh and education should be undertaken to promote environ· mental protection. These e'nvironmental efforts should proceed through international cooperation that respects national sovereignty. After Stockholm, there was a more wide· spread belief that development and sound environmental management are not incompati• ble, but that both are necessary to create a sustainable society.

UNCHE at Stockholm has been called the single most influential event in the evolution of the international environmental movement. It heralded a period of deliberations in which several new treaties on environmental issues would be negotiated. And it laid the founda· tion of UNEP, which would forward environmental programs within the structure of the United Nations. UNEP was authorized by a UN General Assembly resolution in December 1972, and was charged with coordinating efforts to implement the recommendations approved at Stockholm. It was, however, to be a policy and information center that would assist and coordinate the activities of other agencies. Many other UN bodies had ongoing environmental protection activities which they would continue. For example, the UN had recently created a Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), so population was not included in UNEP's mandates. The new agency would be hampered by a small budget and staff. 97

The administrative expenses of its Council and Secretariat come from the general UN budget, which is seriously limited, and its programs depend on an environment fund that is financed with voluntary contributions from UN member states. UNEP chronically lacks enough money to finance urgent plans. Two-year contributions in 1997 totaled $140 million, less than three-quarters of the amount spent to make the motion picture Titanic, an ironic fact since the situation of people "on board" the Earth has been compared with that of the passengers of the great ship headed for an environmental collision. UNEP has a "big soul in a little body."98

Maurice Strong was the first executive director ofUNEP. Dr. Mostafa Kamal Tolba, who received his Ph.D. degree in micobiology from Imperial College, London, and served as education minister in the Egyptian government, took over in 1975, and charted the course ofUNEP for seventeen years.99 He was succeeded by Elizabeth Dowdeswell of Canada in 1993, and Klaus Topfer, former German environment minister, in 1998. Achim Steiner,

···-·--·---------

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-r head of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), was selected executive director in · • for a four-year term. A German, he was born in Brazil and studied at Oxford, the

rsity of London, and Harvard. e achievements ofUNEP were in three major areas. First, UNEP maintained an infor- n-gathering and retrieval program called Earthwatch. Second, it gave diplomatic rt to the evolution of a body of international environmental law, and served as a sec-

. t to several important treaties. Third, it educated and inspired nations and peoples to e the critical importance of environmental problems, and the necessity of efforts to

rcss them. ne of the most useful aspects of UNEP's work has been to facilitate the negotiation of ·~ational treaties and agreements. Dr. Tolba believed that UNEP could be an "honest r" between various interest groups such as nations, businesses, non-governmental •ies, and scientists. With diplomatic skill, UNEP generally proceeded by seeking to v¢r a scientific consensus on the environmental problem being considered, then trying d a strategy that would be effective in addressing it. 100 Many delegates found they · trust UNEP's legal and scientific expertise, as well as its willingness to take their inter-

. :t'n:to account. UNEP gained recognition, and eventually a mandate to work for the elopment of international environmental law. 101 Its negotiations led to the adoption of :e than thirty treaties, conventions, and other agreements. 102 Most international agree- ts depend on voluntary compliance by signatories. UNEP has little ability to provide

momic incentives to encourage observance. 103 Thus ~ampered by having neither a stick r very much of a carrot, it must depend on persuasion. Among major agreements in which UNEP has played a role are the Convention on Con- wation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), and the Convention on Interna- .mal Trade in Endangered Species ofWild Fauna and Flora ( CITES). These treaties protect ore than 35,000 endangered species. One of the achievements of CITES has been to strict the trade in ivory to combat the disastrous decline of the African elephant popula- m due to poaching. UNEP has taken the lead in getting together nations that abut on

regional seas to take measures to stop pollution and protect sea life. One of the most suc- (:cssful of these efforts produced the 1976 Barcelona Convention for the Protection of the Mediterranean Sea against Pollution, an amazing achievement considering the often antag-

·.-onistic dispositions of the nations around that inland sea toward one another. UNEP nego- . t:i.1ted the Convention on the Control ofTransboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes

:md Their Disposal, signed in Basel, 1989. Perhaps the most impressive achievement ofUNEP.'s labors is the drafting and negotiat-

ing of the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the 1987 Mon- treal Protocol, aimed at reducing the production of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals that weaken the Earth's atmospheric shield against harmful ultraviolet radiation. 104 This is one of the most successful international environmental agreements, with excellent compli- ance around the world. 105

A raising of environmental consciousness in the United Nations has been one ofUNEP's finest contributions. But UNEP has also helped to educate governments and peoples on the importance of environmental issues to all nations. World Environment Day, set on June 5 to mark the anniversary ofUNCHE in Stockholm, 1972, is celebrated in many countries. With the United Nations Educational, Scientific ·and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), UNEP has worked to encourage environmental education, training educators and provid- ing materials for schools. It has sponsored publications and films. 106

250 Present and future

Figure 9.5 Administrative building on the campus of the United Nations Environmental Program in Nairobi, Kenya. Located far from other UN facilities, this UNEP headquarters uses electronic media to keep in touch with them. UNEP's mandate is to provide leadership and encourage partnership among nations in caring for the environment, by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations. It was the first major UN agency to be centered in a Third World country. Photograph taken in 1989.

Another UN program that deals with environmental issues is the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), an initiative of UNESCO. 107 Launched in 1971, MAB studies "the interrelationships between natural ecosystems and socio-economic processes." 108 It e-volved the idea of biosphere reserves as representative samples of significant ecosystems and habi- tats of plants and animals including rare and endangered species. 109 Biosphere reserves arc proposed by the governments of the nations in which they are located. Some cross national boundaries; a large one includes Glacier Bay in the US (Alaska) and adjacent parklands in Canada. The biosphere reserve system is an international recognition that ecosystems have a claim on their human stewards to be preserved intact. It is an international network of areas intended to conserve genetic resources and ecosystems and to assist in the mainte- nance of biological diversity, with associated scientific and educational efforts. A key princi- ple of biosphere reserves is a zoning pattern combining a core area that is to be strictly protected, a delineated inner buffer zone, and an outer buffer zone or transition area. no The core areas are strictly protected, and as a result can serve as benchmarks for observation of long-term changes in the biosphere and in the ecosystems they represent. The biosphere reserve concept foresees a mutually beneficial relationship with the local human societies surrounding the reserves. m Traditional economic activities are encouraged in the buffer

Present and future 251

s, to provide indigenous peoples means of survival that use but do not deplete the rce. There were 531 biosphere reserves in 105 countries in 2008. Almost all were areas

dy set aside as national parks or nature reserves . . give an example, Amboseli National Park is one of five biosphere reserves in Kenya. It been pai;t of a tribal and game reserve since 1900, and Kenya made it a national park in L 112 The biosphere reserve, designated in 1990, covers 39,200 ha (151 sq mi). Situated e foot of the magnificent volcano, Kilimanjaro (which is on the other side of the border anzania), Amboseli contains an impressive remnant of the abundant wildlife that once

ged over much of East Africa. It is home to many Maasai people, whose traditional way life.is cattle herding. Among the MAB research projects approved for Amboseli are studies 'changing swamps, the effects of agriculture, ecosystem restoration, and long-term obser- don of baboons, vervet monkeys, and elephants. Unfortunately, the status of the bio- here reserve is in question because in 2005, President Mwai Kibaki decided to turn over

trol of the park to a county council and the Maasai tribe, a move that has been chal- .nged in court in Kenya. Does the biosphere reserve program hold the .promise of becoming an effective world

.etwork of diverse protected fragments of the Earth's living systems? Taken individually, of the reserves are large enough to protect all of the species needed to comprise a full

cosystem in the long run. 113 UNESCO can only urge the governments involved to protect 1c reserves adequately; there is no UN budget item to assist in managing them. Even ough the network continues to grow, those designated do not represent all of the Earth's

1ajor biogeographical types. 114 But even as fragments of an endangered whole, they serve s indicators of what a more adequate system of protection might be like.

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission recommended a second world conference on eco- logical and economic proqlems. The UN approved the idea, and the United Nations Con-

. krence on Environment and Development (UNCED), often called the "Earth Summit" . because so many heads ofstate attended, met in Rio de Janeiro during June 1992, on the

twentieth anniversary of Stockholm. Delegations from 178 countries, heads of state of 105 countries, and representatives of more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) ,mended. The conference was covered by 8,749 accredited journalists, about half of them from Brazil.

A separate Global Forum held at the same time in Rio's Flamengo Park attracted members of almost 8,000 NGOs. Some of these independent people perceived a narrowness at the

. ~overnmental level and drafted alternative treaties that attempted to express wider con- ccrns.115 Representatives of indigenous peoples from eighty-five countries, denied an official place in UNCED, convened their own Earth Parliament, appropriately held in a small village outside Rio called Kari Oca.

The presence of so many presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs assured that the con- krence would receive attention around the world from the first gavel to the last. The issues separating the developing countries from the developed countries occupied even more attention than at Stockholm, although by the time of Rio they were better defined. 116 Fern- mdo Collor de Mello, president of Brazil and also of the conference, opened the proceed- ings by declaring that the main enemies of the environment and of sustainable development are poverty and lack of opportunity. In his.opening address, he called for a new global part- nership to ensure the common future of all people, and stressed the need for aflluent nations to help the poor achieve the goals that would be set at the conference. The US president, (3eorge H.W. Bush (the first President Bush), announced his intention to attend the summit at a late date. His speech was received without enthusiasm by delegates who knew that the

l ,1

252 Present and future

US delegation opposed some and had succeeded in weakening others of the documents being considered at Rio.

UNEP was involved in the pre-conference preparation of most of these. The five principal agreements were: the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21, the Statement of Forest Principles, the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The Rio Declaration was a statement of principles emphasizing sustainable development. As approved, it affirmed: "Human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable <level· opment. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature." 117 It went on to say that states have the right to exploit their own resources, a principle that might be open to question on ethical grounds.U8 It called for priority to be given to the needs of developing countries, women, youtl1, and indigenous peoples. Environmental pro- tection was considered an integral part of the development process. The document asked for use of peaceful means in resolving environmental disputes and declared that war is destructive of sustainable development. Nowhere in this, or any other UN CED document, is there a recognition that development, and human population, might eventually face limits.U9 Since it is not a treaty, it has moral force only. Although the US agreed to the document, it was the only country to issue a written statement of dissenting opinions. Among these, the US objected to principles which stated that developed countries have obligations to developing cQ,untries; and that trade should be subject to environmental measures. 120

Agenda 21 is a broad statement of goals and potential programs related to sustainable development; it has forty chapters occupying more than 800 pages. Like the Rio Declara- tion, it is not legally binding, but UNEP regards it as a thematic guideline for its own pro- grams. It confirms UNEP's mandate and states the need for its "enhanced and strengthened role." 121 It affirms,UNEP responsibility in the process of formulating international environ- mental law, regional cooperation, technical environmental advice, and environmental emer- gency planning. 122

The Statement of Forest Principles is a non-binding agreement on preservation and man- agement of the Earth's remaining forests. Since deforestation is one of the most destructive processes affecting loss of biodiversity and the deterioration of the atmosphere (forests con- stitute a carbon reservoir almost equal to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and their destruction contributes a significant proportion of the release of carbon dioxide into _the atmosphere) it was h~ped that a treaty on the subject could be approved at Rio. However, nations treat their forests as internal resources and often object to outside interference. Industrialized countries called for regulations to stop the destruction of tropical rainforests, and developing countries countered by pointing out the ongoing loss of temperate forests in such nations as Russia, Canada, and the US, and demanded that it be limited. The gap between the two sides could not be bridged, so the principles approved were not binding. They speak of the need for sustainable forest management, but affirm the right of each nation-state to utilize its forests in accordance with its development needs, and call for free international trade in forest products. In 1995, the UN Commission on Sustainable Devel- opment created the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests to implement the statement.

The Convention on• Biological Diversity is a binding international treaty aimed at strengthening national control and preservation of biological resources. 123 The weight of discussion, however, was not on the need to preserve species and ecosystems, but the desir- ability of assuring sustainable economic development for nations, and to distribute equita- bly the gains realized from the development of biological resources. One argument for preservation of ancient forests was that they are storehouses of species producing substances

11

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ight prov~ of use to humankind as medicines or in other ways. This is certainly true; hers derivtd many healing drugs from tropical rainforests, and taxol, a derivative of

. w tree in northern forests, proved valuable in treating ovarian cancer. Biodiversity, the suddenly realized, had economic value, and the discussion had changed its tenor. The of the treaty expressed in the final draft were the conservation and sustainable use of ersity and fair trade and compensation involving products made from the genetic

rces of nations. It charges each country to make plans to protect habitats and species, provides for aid to developing countries to help them do this. The Convention on Bio- cal Diversity had its headquarters in Montreal beginning in 1996. he Framework Convention on Climate Change was an international agreement that

1ght to limit or reduce emissions of gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, with the t:ential to exacerbate global warming. It and the later negotiations to establish specific

s for reductions to give it effect are discussed below in the section on global warming . . Ori the final day of UN CED, Maurice Strong openly speculated about its accomplish- tnts: "Our experience in Rio has been as historic and exhilarating as the road that brought

ff here. The road from Rio will be long, exciting, challenging. It will open a whole new era (promise and opportunity for our species if we change direction, but only if we start JW. " 124 Some present expressed cautious optimism; Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysja said i;1t he would consider the conference "a success if there emerged a better understanding 'the enormity of.the problems we face and the need f<'.>'r us to cooperate on an equitable sis." 125 Others were less pleased with the course Rio had taken. Wagaki Mwangi, a Kenyan

outh delegate, exhorted:

Those of us who have watched the process have said that the Earth Summit has failed ... Multinational corporations, the United States, Japan, the World Bank, the Interna- tional Monetary Fund have got away with what they always wanted ... The Summit has ensured increased domination by those who already have power. Worse still, it has robbed the poor of the little power they had. It has made them victims of a market economy that has thus far threatened our planet ... Few negotiators realized how criti- cal their decisions are to our generation. By failing to address such fundamental issues as militarism, the regulation of transnational corporations, the democratization of international aid agencies and the inequitable terms of trade, my generation has been damned. 126

Many of these comments assumed that the success or failure of Rio would be measured by ils effect on the distribution oftl1e world's resources between rich and poor countries. It is

.· more difficult to find statements from observers who would ask whether, after the confer- ence, both rich and poor people would continue the destruction of habitats and ecosystems

· in a competitive search for wealth, or in a desperate struggle for survival in the short term. :. Genuine sustainability would require the continuation of the community of life.

Indeed, national interest is an inescapable component ofinternational agreements, no less in the field of the environment than in any other. "Nation-states, despite Rio, still consider themselves as the only important actors on stage."127 Nation-states have always taken a self- srrving political approach to problems that affect the entire world community. The histori- ;111s Thucydides in ancient Athens and Machiavelli in Renaissance Florence pointed out that states are never motivated entirely by ethics, and today it might be added that they are seldom motivated by science. By the end of the twentieth century, however, it had also become clear that nations are not the only entities that must be taken into account in

254 Present and future

reaching international agreements. Transnational corporations are often richer than many nations, and employ numbers larger than the working classes of smaller countries. Organs of the world market economy, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, can override national laws and command far more resources than the United Nations. 128 Leaders in many developing nations are convinced, rightly or not, that the burden of debt prevents them from taking certain environmental steps. This must not prevent those who work for positive outcomes in organizations such as the United Nations from using arguments based on ethics and science, but it will constrain them to a certain realism. They must be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves." 129

Global warming: an environmental historical perspective

When I entered the Main Storage Facility of the US National Ice Core Laboratory (NI CL), 130

I experienced the coldest temperature I had ever felt: -36°C (-33°F). There, on shelves filling a vast space of 1,540 cum (55,000 cu ft), lay an archive of the history of the Earth's climate and atmosphere in the form of cores of ice taken from the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, and from mountain glaciers. Many cores were drilled from the ice surface to bedrock, and some approach 4 k19 (2.5 mi) in length, so that one drilled hole is represented by thousands of cylindrical ice segments on the shelves. Looking at one of those segments removed from its silver sleeve, I could see layers one above the other representing the annual snowfall of a series of years many centuries in the past. These layers can be dated exactly, using electrical conductivity, visual layer counting, and stable isotope analysis - much more accurately than, say, a method such as radiocarbon allows. They represent unbroken records stretching back as far as 250,000 years in Greenland and 450;000 years in Antarctica. I was amazed to see a disk of ice that had not melted for a quarter of a million years.

The value of a physical archive of past snowfalls is immense, since it contains not only samples of the water that fell, but also atmospheric gases captured and retained as bubbles; dust including fallout from forest fires, industrial pollution, volcanic eruptions, cosmic par- ticles, and nuclear explosions; and sea salts carried by wind onto the ice sheets. 131 This valu- able record of the history of the Earth's environment is kept in a building whose concrete barrel vaults remind me of ancient Egyptian grain storage vaults near Luxor. But NICL is located in the Denver Federal Center, west ofDenver near the foothills of the Rocky Moun- tains. There are similar facilities in other countries including Australia, Denmark, India, and Japan. NICL makes core samples available to researchers for study, which can begin in the Exam Room, next to the Storage Facility and kept at a relatively balmy -25°C (-13°F). Among the many kinds of information about the past that can be learned from the samples are temperatures and weather patterns; the composition of ancient atmospheres including, for example, levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; sea level and biological productivity of the ocean surface; and size and frequency of natural catastrophic events such as volcanic eruptions. Especially interesting is the fact that the ice cores show that tl1c climate of the Earth has undergone many changes, some of them• long and cyclical and some, unexpectedly, extremely rapid. For example, the end of the last phase (the "Younger Dryas," 12,800 to 11,500 years ago) of the most recent ice age appears to have included a rise of about 8.3°C (15°F) in the average temperature within a period of a few years, perhaps only one year, not generations or centuries. 132

It is fortunate for human knowledge that the ice cores are being preserved and studied, since Greenland, much of Antarctica, and mountain glaciers are threatened by a worldwide

Present and future 255

enomenon during the Jast century or so: the rapid retreat of ice. Not all glaciers are e;iting, but there is an unmistakable pattern of loss of volume and shortening almost · here that measurements are taken, and photographs taken over decades show spec-

war losses. 133

tY<Nlelting glaciers are only one form of evidence that the Earth's surface temperature, taken ii!~a whole and as a general trend, has been rising since the mid-nineteenth century. Weather )it~tions and satellites indicate an average increase of 0.6-0.7°C (l-l.25°F) over the past

})years. The upper-level ocean temperatures have risen about 0.3°C (0.5°F) in sixty years. 1n the years between 1979 and 2004 the minimum annual extent of ice in the Arctic Ocean peclined by 8 percent, and its average thickness lost 1.3 m ( 4.25 ft), or 40 percent. The loss ~ontinues. In August 2000, open water was reported at the North Pole; this was not neces- ;sarily the first time it had occurred there in recent years, and most probably not the last time it will occur. The Greenland ice cap is losing volume rapidly. During the twentieth century, 'global sea levels rose at a rate of 1-2 mm (0.04-0.08 in) per year, partly as a result of the .expansion of warming seawater and partly due to meltwater from ice loss on the-continents . .Alterations in the ranges and migrations of many species imply that they are reacting to warmer temperatures. The majority of climatologists who st1:9Y all these changes judge that the Earth is in an episode of rapid global warming.

Climate changes, whether warming or cooling, have occurred throughout history and prehistory. During the last:few hundred thousand years, a series of glacial stages, or ice ages, has alternated with warmer interglacial stages. During recorded human history, there have been warm periods like the Medieval Climatic Optimum in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, and cold periods such as the Little Ice Age of the fifteenth through mid- nineteenth centuries. In trying to explain these phenomena, scientists in the last two centu- ries have developed a number of hypotheses of causation. An excellent history of ideas about global warming and the science of climatic change can be found in Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming. 134 While it is clear that climate changes of thousands of years in prehistory, at least up to the end of the most recent ice age, had causes that were entirely natural, 135 there has been discussion and disagreement about the extent to which human activities, in particular those that generate greenhouse gases, have contributed to climate change during historic times, particularly during the past two or three centuries. As will be further noted in this section, climate scientists have reached a broad consensus that the most important cause of the present rapid warming of the overall temperature of the Earth is the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide by human activities, including especially the combustion of fossil fuels ( coal, petroleum, and natural gas) which has increased exponentially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Recently the pale- oclimatologist William F. Ruddiman has argued that other human activities, including deforestation and agriculture including irrigated rice production that is a prime source of methane, have had a net warming effect over the past 8,000 years that has reversed what would otherwise be a natural cooling trend. 136 Ruddiman recognizes that the human-caused warming since the late nineteenth century represents a major acceleration above earlier cen - turies.

Probably the first person to maintain that global warming could be caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO

2 ) produced by human industrial activities was the Swede

Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), a Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist, in an article pub- lished in 1896. 137 He based this on the theory of Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) that the atmosphere slows heat loss and that without an atmosphere the Earth would be much colder. 138 Fourier had experimented with a glass-paneled black box and sunlight to show

256 Present and future

Figure 9.6 Margerie Glacier, a tidewater glacier in the Tarr Inlet of Glacier Bay, Alaska: the height of the glacier front here is about 75 m (250 ft) above water and 30 m (100 ft) below water. The retreat of the Grand Pacific Glacier has left this fast-moving tributary isolated. Most glaciers in this area are retreating, and over the last century the loss of ice has been spectacular. Global warming is expected to cause this process to continue. Photograph taken in 1998.

how heat could be retained in what Arrhenius called a "hot-house" and is now called the "greenhouse effect." In addition, in 1859, John Tyndall (1820-93) had discovered that methane and carbon dioxide, as well as water vapor, like other atmospheric gases are trans- parent to sunlight but unlike other gases are opaque to heat rays and therefore capture heat that might otherwise be reflected from the Earth's surface into space. Arrhenius thought that human-caused production of carbon dioxide by combustion of fuels could raise the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cause a significant rise in temperature. He attempted to calculate the amount of this increase but, although the principle was right, his calculations were flawed. He proposed that a doubling of carbon dioxide would take 3,000 years; it is now estimated at possibly 100 years. He thought the higher temperatures would be beneficial to humanity, making agriculture more productive at higher latitudes and preventing a new ice age. That there might be damaging effects of higher temperatures including rising sea level, desertification, and increased heat energy for violent weather systems did not occur to him.

Several natural causes for climate change were put forward in the following years. One of the most interesting of these was the proposal of Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958), advanced in the 1920s, that ice ages are related to variations in the parameters of the Earth's orbit around the Sun that affect insolation, that is, the amount of solar energy that reaches various parts of the Earth's surface. 139 These variations occur in cycles of different lengths

Present and future 257

·. t reinforce or weaken one another. Simply, the longest cycle is a swing from a nearly !ar orbit to a more elliptical one that takes about 100,000 years. Another cycle, about

;000 years in length, changes the tilt of the Earth's axis. The precession cycle, 19,000- ,{)00 years long as it affects seasonal insolation, is caused by the change in the direction · 1e Earth's axis of rotation relative to the fixed stars, a kind of circular wobble. These

cycles can be combined into curves representing changes in potential heating due to solar radiation for various latitudes in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

nkovitch's predicted variations do seem to correspond roughly with past ice ages. Inter- gly, they suggest that the Northern Hemisphere should now be slowly cooling. Some

1tists take this as evidence that the observed rapid warming over the past century and a is in large part the effect of processes initiated by humans. nother proposed natural cause of climate change is sunspot activity; when there are few ~pots, less solar energy reaches the Earth and temperatures may cool. There is an eleven- . cycle of sunspot frequency, first noticed in the nineteenth century, which seems to uence weather. But the Sun sometimes has an irregular phase when sunspots are rare. ward W. Maunder (1851-1928) studied historical records of sunspots and discovered a 'iod now called the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715, during which sunspots dropped to ow as one-thousandth their present numbers. That iorresponds to the coldest part of the de Ice Age, suggesting that it is one of the causes of that phenomenon.

Explosive volcanic eruptions can introduce into the high atmosphere massive amounts of !hr dioxide aerosols, which can circulate around the Earth. These cause cooling by reflect- sunlight before it reaches the Earth's surface. For example, Mount Tambora in Indone- crupted in 1815, apparently causing 1816 to be the "year without a summer," with ws in June in Europe and North America, crop failures, and famine. After the cataclys-

c explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, average world temperatures briefly dropped by l.2°C ,2°F). Notable cooling also followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philip- . ics. Looking further back in history, ice core evidence indicates that an equatorial erup- . n in AD 633-6 created an atmospheric dust veil that caused a severe cooling of worldwide nperatures. 140 This happened during the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian, and may

c weakened the Mediterranean population just .before the advent of the Great Plague, 1ich broke out within less than a decade. 141 A Greenland core contains a volcanic signal rresponding to approximately 1645 BC, undoubtedly evidence of the explosive eruption the island of Thera (Santorini) that was a catastrophe for the Minoan civilization cen- ·d on Crete. In an appropriate coincidence, that particular core was drilled at a station

med Crete. 142 The climatic effects of volcanoes usually subside two or three years after the ·11ption ends. Volcanism would not be a major factor in long-term climate change unless 1cre were periods of greatly increased activity. Human-caused generation of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases, iwever, continues and increases in volume. The extent ofits effect on the atmosphere and mate began to be understood in the years after the Second World War. Ironically, the ing trend of temperatures was interrupted by a period of cooling during 1940-70 in the orthern Hemisphere. Although it proved to be only a temporary pause in the overall :1rming trend from about 1850 to the present, it briefly reduced the level of concern about obal warming. The cause of this thirty-year pause in warming is now believed to be creased levels of air pollution during and after the Second World War, including sulfur 'oxide aerosols that acted to reflect solar heat back into space, very much like the volcanic

. rosols just mentioned, and particulate pollution that increased the turbidity of the atmos- phere. Eventually the warming produced by greenhouse gases overcame this cooling effect.

2 58 Present and future

It was later noted that in the less polluted Southern Hemisphere, cooling did not occur in the years in question.

One factor thought to slow the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been the fact that the oceans absorb carbon dioxide, providing a sink for the carbon dioxide pro, duced by the combustion of fuels. A question existed, however, as to how rapidly this absorption worked. Radiocarbon expert Hans Suess and oceanographer Roger Revelle made studies in the 1950s that at first indicated that the oceans take up carbon dioxide in ,\ decade or so, but they came to realize that at least 90 percent of the gas quickly evaporates from the ocean surface. The process of carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans, they con, cluded, does happen but takes thousands of years, leaving the unabsorbed balance in the atmosphere to increase carbon dioxide concentration. The carbon dioxide absorbed increases the acidity of the world ocean, with likely damaging effects for corals and other sea lite. Revelle and Suess made an ominous conclusion: "Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past no,· be reproduced in the future. " 143

It was difficult to assess the prob1~m without accurate measurement of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over a significant period of time. Governments granted money for such studies beginning with the International Geophysical Year of 1957-8, and Revelle encouraged a protege, Charles David Keeling, to embark on a project to measure carbon dioxide. 144 Realizing that accurate measurements required taking samples in places far from immediate sources of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, Keeling established stations on Mauna Loa, Hawai'i, far out in the central Pacific Ocean, and in Antarctica. His careful observations first demonstrated that there are sharp seasonal variations in carbon dioxide levels with peaks reached in the Northern Hemisphere winter followed by a reduction in carbon dioxide during the northern spring and early summer each year as photosynthesis increased, using it to form plant tissue. Later it became clear that carbon dioxide concentra- tions rose measurably higher each year, forming an overall upward trend now termed the Keeling Curve. From 315 ppm (parts per million) in 1958, the level reached 380 in 2005, a rise of more than 20 percent in forty-seven years, and showed an unmistakable tendency to continue increasing. Since then, measurements of the Greenland and Antarctica ice cores have enabled the extension of the Keeling Curve back into the deep past, and among many other observations have established that the concentration in historic pre-industrial times before the nineteenth century was approximately 280 ppm. Further, the long-time curve of carbon dioxide concentration and the curve of average global temperature closely reflect one another. The work begun by Keeling offers graphic confirmation of the fact that human technology has become a force of worldwide geophysical change.

New methods of measuring past climates were invented during the second half of the twentieth century that enabled scientists to put recent global warming within the context of the past several hundred thousand years. Harold Urey discovered that the proportion of two oxygen isotopes to one another in the shells of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera recorded the temperatures at which they were formed. Cores from the seabeds where these shells accumulate could show changing temperatures going back 300,000 years, as Cesare Emiliani noted in 1955 and later studies confirmed. Cores have been taken from the sediments accu- mulated in Lake Baikal, a very ancient and stable lake with depths down to a mile below its surface, and these contain the record of environmental changes for at least 10 million years. 145

These observations supplement the ice core studies, which began in 1956 with drilling into ice sheets in northwestern Greenland as the International Geophysical Year was about to begin. The first ice cores to reach bedrock were drilled at Camp Century, Greenland in 1966,

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nd.at Byrd Station, West Antarctica in 1968. 146 They have continued to the present, with ples now from widely representative sites throughout the Earth's great ice sheets.

·Athird source of observations bearing on climate change has been provided by artificial tellites. The first of these were Sputnik I, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957; Explorer ,by.the US in 1958; and Asterix, by France in 1965. More followed from Japan, China, lC UK, and other nations. Today there are perhaps 560 operational Earth observation ellites, not counting those intended for military purposes. They provide detailed informa - n. on changes in solar irradiance, stratospheric chemistry including ozone depletion such

.Ii the "ozone hole" over .Antarctica, temperature, precipitation, clouds and water vapor, fad velocity, ocean currents and surface temperatures including El Nino, sea level, vegeta- on and desertification, coastal configuration, volcanoes, snow cover, sea ice, glaciers and e sheets, and human activities such as fires and the growth of cities. 147 Even this long list

· incomplete. To give one example, photographs from satellites observed the break.up of 1e Larsen ice shelf, an area of 2,000 sq km (770 sq mi) in Western Antarctica in a matter f days in 2002. Almost as soon as computers were developed, there were attempts to use them to analyze

bservations and to predict future changes both in wt~ther and climate. In the years before e mid-1960s, however, computers were too slow and lacked adequate memory for this

. 1credibly complex task. Around that time, efforts were made using improved computers at ·several centers such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fluid l)ynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey to construct computer models that would :itllow credible climate prediction. 148 As might be expected, the first attempts had very limited NUccess, and the models had to be made more sophisticated to take account of complex

Assues such as the interaction of the atmosphere with the oceans, the reflectivity of ice and · snow, and the effects of douds. The climate models were used to predict, among other · variables, the effects an increase in greenhouse gases, such as a doubling of carbon dioxide, would have on global temperatures. By 1979 a consensus had emerged among scientists that such an increase would bring about a warmer world, perhaps an increase in the range

.of 2-4°C (3.6-7.2°F) by the year 2100. In the 1980s, many climate scientists concluded ,; that this was not just a scenario, but was actually underway as observations tended to wnfirm the computer models. They knew that climate could change, had changed in the past, and now warned that it would change in dangerous ways.

Increasingly, the threat of global warming moved from scientific investigation to public discourse around the world, and especially in the US and Europe. Some prominent scien-

. tists, such as Stephen Schneider and James Hansen, spoke to the media and advocated ·. programs to anticipate global warming and take action to mitigate its scale and effects; pri- ·, marily through reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. They

received widespread attention, and awareness of the likelihood of climate change spread among the general public. They also faced opposition on at least three fronts. There were a kw scientists who pointed out problems with the evidence and the models used in predic- tion. This was to be expected, and is part of the usual process of scientific inquiry. It is positive, because it leads to open discussion, further investigation, and development of hypotheses. It is accurate to say that the weight of scientific opinion moved toward the conclusion that global warming is occurring, and that at least a major proportion of the cause is assignable to human activities.

A second source of opposition to the idea that the danger of climate change merited major interventions to alleviate it came from among the industries whose activities were

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260 Present and future

evidently causing it, and therefore who might have to bear the cost of the efforts to counter it, such as oil and coal companies, other fossil fuel industries, and automobile manufactur- ers. They engaged in advertisements against the idea of global warming, seized on or spon- sored studies that questioned it, and even created false front organizations that claimed objectivity, but in fact engaged in tendentious campaigns designed to sow doubt about the reality of global warming and the idea that human activities are an important cause of it. This was not universally true of these business organizations; some of them saw their self- interest involved in the development of environmentally friendly technology, either genu- inely or at least to gain the public appearance of "greenness." A third group active in opposing programs to mitigate global warming was political, composed of right-wing organizations that fought the role of governmental intervention on principle. They feared that reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases would require regulation on national and even international levels, and used questioning of global warming and the role of humankind in causing it as a way of resisting the extension of government control.

Recognizing that scientific advances had begun to indicate that global warming was a pressing problem of worldwide sc~pe, and that trustworthy assessment of the state of scien - tific knowledge was important to inform international efforts, two UN agencies -the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) - established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.149 Composed of scores of scientists from many countries, the IPCC created three working groups with the following assignments: to assess existing scientific information regarding climate change; to assess environmental and economic impacts of climate change; and to formulate strategies for the management of responses to climate change. The IPCC does not directly carry out research on climate change, but it surveys published and refereed work throughout the world and issues periodic assessments. These are extensive multivolume publications that appear every few years: four so far, in 1990 (amended 1992), 1995, 2001, and 2007. Since IPCC operates by consensus, its conclusions are generally cautious and are widely regarded as authoritative, although some climate scientists and environmentalists think they may err on the conservative side. Also, the deliberations of the IPCC, while careful to maintain scientific objectivity, are not entirely insulated from pressures of the governments that are members of it.

The first report of the IPCC concluded, in part, that there is a greenhouse effect that keeps the Earth warmer than it would be without it, and that emissions from human activities are significantly adding to the concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and nitrous oxide. Since these gases are long-lived in the atmosphere, they will be slow to respond to reduced emissions, the report continued, recommending that reductions should be made earlier rather than later. Recognizing that predictions of future trends are uncertain, the report cautiously concluded that the global mean temperature would increase by about 1 °C (l.8°F) by 2025 and by about 3°C (5.4°F) by 2100, and that sea level would rise about 0.6 m (2 ft) by 2100, mainly due to the thermal expansion of the ocean. 150

The IPCC report became available during the preparation ofthe Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), an international agreement that seeks to limit or reduce emissions of gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, with the potential to exacerbate global warming. Although the preparatory negotiations for the Climate Change Conven- tion were a separate process, they were concluded so as to be ready for signature at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. The discussions took place with the positive background of the Montreal Protocol aimed at limiting the

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Present and future 261

ction of CFCs, compounds containing chlorine and other halogens that diminish ospheric ozone and increase the amount of ultraviolet radiation that penetrates a weak- , --ozone layer. All major nations supported the Montreal agreement, and CFC produc- was sharply reduced as a result. Mustafa Tolba, head of UNEP, energetically moved the ntreal process along and shared credit for its success. 151

he negotiation of the FCCC was a similar but much more difficult process. It was moti- ted by international concerns over the possible enhancement of the greenhouse effect by -production of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases that tend to retain solar heat in

te Earth's atmosphere, surface, and oceans. Its stated objective was

to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a low enough level to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner. 152

JI Observation by atmospheric scientists had shown that a rapid increase in the concentration nf these gases was occurring, and that it was associated with a rise in the average tempera- '! nre of the Earth. Computer models suggest that the effects of these changes, should they continue, will vary in different regions of the Earth's surface, but could include rising tern- -pcratures, changing patterns of precipitation, an elevation of sea level, disruption of fresh- water flows by removal of ice, and stresses on agricultural crops, forests, and wildlife, including coral reefs and fish because of changes in ocean temperatures and acidity. Many world leaders agree that these dangers call for an effort to reduce the level of greenhouse gas

·• emissions, but to do this for carbon dioxide and methane, the most important heat-trapping , gases, is more difficult than it was for CFCs in the Montreal process. Disagreement over the actions recommended to counter global warming figuratively raised the temperature of the

, meeting rooms. The US managed to keep any emission reduction goals or timetables out of the agreement. When the treaty's teeth were thus pulled, President George H.W. Bush signed it and forwarded it to the US Senate, which ratified it.

In the years after the Earth Summit, a number of international meetings were convened 10 carry forward the implications of the agreements reached there. Important among these were conferences to set arrangements for meeting the goals of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), including specific reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and timetables for achieving them. At a conference in Kyoto in 1997, representatives of the nations that had signed the treaty, including the major economic powers, reached a com- prehensive agreement after difficult negotiations. According to this "Kyoto Protocol," the world's emissions of the three major greenhouse gases ( carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) were to be reduced 5.2 percent from the 1990 levels by 2008-12. Japan was to reduce by 6 percent, the United States by 7 percent, and the European Union by 8 percent. 153 Other nations accepted goals, 6-ut developing countries, including such increas- ingly important emitters as China, India, and Brazil, were not required to agree to any specific reductions. Three other gases (hydrofluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride, and per- fluorocarbons) would be reduced calculated on the base year of 1995. The US successfully pushed for the inclusion of the principle of trading emission rights, that is, that nations that continue to pollute could do so by paying for that right to other nations that have reduced their pollution below the targets. As the most economically powerful nation, the US could trade for such rights and not have to reduce emissions to as great an extent. That the US

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initially agreed to the protocol is probably due to the direct involvement of Vice-President Al Gore in Kyoto.

Observers noted that it would take reductions several times those envisioned in the Kyoto Protocol to bring emissions down to a level that might be effective in countering global· warming. The cost of measures to achieve those reductions would be high; whether it would be greater than the costs incurred by actual global warming is perhaps unlikely, but unknown. Kyoto was at best a positive step, one of many that would have to be taken as the magnitude of the effects of global warming on human health, the economy, and the natul'al world becomes clearer, and when most nations come to see international cooperation to • initiate effective measures as being in their national interest. However, that has not yet occurred. In the case of the US, then and now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases (although China is not far behind and will probably soon pass the US), neither Presi• dents Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush (the second President Bush) sent the Kyoto Proto• col to the Senate for ratification, and Bush explicitly rejected it in 2001. By 2005, enough other nations had agreed to the protocol to enter into force, and this was done formally at the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Montreal, Canada. At the same meeting, the participating nations agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond its 2012 expiration date and to conduct negotiations on deeper emissions cuts. Unfortunately there was little indication that the original target reductions would be achieved by 2012.

The IPCC issued its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. Its important conclusions include the following. 154 There is no doubt that the Earth's climate system is warming. Concentra• tions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere have increased mark- edly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values over the past 650,000 years. Most of the increase in global average temperatures since the mid. twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in human-caused greenhouse gas concentrations. The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5 percent. Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise will continue for centuries due to the time lags associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized, although the amount of temperature and sea level rise depends on the intensity of emissions during the next century. Both past and future anthro- pogenic carbon dioxide emissions will continue to contribute to warming and sea level rise for more than a millennium. World temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4°C (2-ll.5°F) during the twenty-first century and sea levels will probably rise by 18-59 cm (7-23 in). There will almost certainly be more frequent warm spells, heat waves, and heavy rainfall in some areas, and probably an increase in droughts, tropical cyclones, and extreme high tides. 155 The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore, who had a prominent role in raising public awareness of the problem through a widely distributed motion picture and book. 156 The United Nations scheduled a conference in Copenhagen in 2009 to negotiate a binding treaty ori climate change, which if successful would be the next major agreement after Kyoto. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide emissions are already rising faster than the IPCC 2007 report predicted, in spite of numerous conferences and the international treaties that are in place. 157

The history of the recognition of global warming and its implications for global human society is an illustrative case of the interaction between the growth of scientific knowledge and the interests of political and economic entities. Science can tell us of the relative (not absolute) certainty of continued human-induced global warming and its probable effects. It can evaluate possible measures intended to forestall negative changes, or at least to lessen their magnitude, as well as courses of action intended to enable human societies to cope

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the negative effects of the likely changes. But the decisions as to what to do will be de, as they have generally been made in recent history, by governments and corporations t have demonstrated a tendency to act in accord with what they see as their own interests

e relatively short term. The common good of humans and the Earth has unfortunately eived less consideration.

Archibald MacLeish, Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, xiii-xiv. Clayton R. Koppes, ]PL and the American Space Program, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1982, 79. James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, New York, W.W. Norton, 1988. United Nations, Space Activities of the United Nations and International Organizations, doc. symbol A/AC.105/521, New York, United Nations, 1992 56-62. Susanna B. Hecht, "Valuing Land Uses in Amazonia: Colonist Agriculture, Cattle, and Petty Extrac- tion in Comparative Perspective," in Kent H. Reford and Christine Padoch, eds, Conservation of Neo- tropical Forests: Working from Traditional ReiJJurce Use, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992, 379-99, at 379. Andrew Revkin, The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest, Boston, MA, Houghton Miffim, 1990. Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London, Zed Books, 1997, 186-7. Simon Reisman, "The Birth of a World Trading System: ITO and GAIT," in Orin Kirshner, ed., The Bretton Woods-GAIT System: Retrospect and Prospect After Fifty Years, Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1996, 82-9. Thomas Prugh, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival, 2nd edn, Boca Raton, FL, Lewis Publishers, 1999, 16-17. Herman E. Daly, ed., Economics, Ecology, Ethics: Essays Toward a Steady-State Economy, San Francisco, W.H. Freeman, 1980; Thomas Prugh, Robert Costanza, John H. Cumberland, Herman E. Daly, Robert Goodland, and Richard B. Norgaard, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival, 2nd Edition, Boca Raton,FL, Lewis Publishers, 1999. "Mexico vs United States. Challenge to US restrictions on tuna imports under the US Marine Mammal Protection Act," Report of the Panel, DS29 /R, Geneva, GAIT, 1991. Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization, San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1997, 42-3. For this apt metaphor, I am indebted to a fine analytical study by Anthony B. Anderson, Peter H. May, and Michael J. Balick, The Subsidy from Nature: Palm Forests, Peasantry, and Development on an Amazon Frontier, New York, Columbia University Press, 1991. Eugene P. Odum, Ecology and Our Endangered Lift-Support Systems, Sunderland, MA, Sinauer Associ- ates, 1993, 131-2. Prugh, Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival, 16-17. C. Fred Bergtsen, "The Rationale for a Rosy View," The Economist 328, September 1993 (7828), 57. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, J0rgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, New York, Universe Books, 1972. Mauricio Schoijet, "Limits to Growth and the Rise of Catastrophism," Environmental History 4, 4, October 1999, 515-30, gives an analysis of various critics of the report. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and J0rgen funders, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse and Envisioning a Sustainable Future, Post Mills, VT, Chelsea Green Publishing, 1992, xv. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Oxford, Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1987, 43. Robert Costanza, John Cumberland, Herman Daly, Robert Goodland, and Richard Norgaard, An Introduction to Ecological Economics, Boca Raton, FL, St. Lucie Press, 1997, 8-13. Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1996.

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36

37

Brian McDonald, The World Trading System: The Uruguay Round and Beyond, Houndmills, UK, Mac· millan, 1998, 259. Edward B. Barbier, Joanne C. Burgess, and Carl Folke, Paradise Lost?: The Ecological Economics of Bio· diversity, London, Earthscan, 1994, 229. Edward 0. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992, 278-80. Ibid., 32. See also Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearancl' ofSpecies, New York, Random House, 1981. Kathryn Phillips, Tracking the Vanishing Frogs: An Ecological Mystery, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1994. Michael J. Eden, Ecology and Land Management in Amazonia, London, Belhaven Press, 1990, 94. Judith Gradwohl and Russell Greenberg, Saving the Tropical Forests, London, Earthscan, 1988, 36. Edward 0. Wilson, "Threats to Biodiversity," in Jonathan Piel et al., Managing Planet Earth: Readin,qs from Scientific American Magazine, New York, W.H. Freeman, 1990, 56. Edward A. Parson, Peter M. Haas, and Marc A. Levy, "A Summary of the Major Documents Signed at the Earth Summit and the Global Forum," Environment 34, 8, October 1992, 14. John Rodman, "Paradigm Change in Political Science: An Ecological Perspective," American Behav· ioral Scientist 24, l, 1980, 49-78, at 68. Wilson, "Threats to :fuodiversity," 81. Eden, Ecology and Land Management in Amazonia, 39. John C. Kricher, A Neotropical Companion: An Introduction to the Animals, Plants, and Ecosystems 1!f' the New World Tropics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989, 122-3. Ronald A. Foresta, Amazon Conservation in the Age of Development: The Limits of Providence, Gaines• ville, University ofFlorida Press, 1991, 32-55. , Eneas Salati, Marc J. Dourojeanni, Fernando C. Novaes, Adelia Engracia de Oliveira, Richard W. Perritt, Herbert Otto Roger Schubart, and Julio Carrizosa Umana, "Amazonia," in B.L. Turner II et al., eds, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 479-94, see 479.

38 Ibid., 484. 39 Kricher, Neotropical Companion, 73. 40 Carl F. Jordan, ed., An Amazonian Rain Forest: The Structure and Function of a Nutrient Stressed

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41 Anna C. Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1994.

42 John Hemming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1987. .. ·

43 Michael Goulding, Nigel J.H. Smith, and Dennis J. Mahar, Floods of Fortune: Ecology and Economy Along the Amazon, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996, 27-9.

44 Roberta M. Delson and John Dickenson, "Conservation Tendencies in Colonial and Imperial Brazil: An Alternative Perspective on Human Relations to the Land," Environmental Review 8, 3, Fall 1984, 270-83.

45 Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1983, 8.

46 Michael Edward Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slavery, and Empire in NorthwestAma· zonia, 1850-1933, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

47 Christine Padoch, "The Economic Importance and Marketing of Forest and Fallow Products in the Iquitos Region," in Willi~ M. Denevan and Christine Padoch, eds, Swidden-Fallow Agroforestry in th,1 Peruvian Amazon, New York, New York Botanical Garden, 1988, 74-89, at 75.

48 Donald Kennedy and Marjorie Lucks, "Rubber, Blight, and Mosquitoes: Biogeography Meets the Global Economy," Environmental History 4, 1999, 369-8 3.

49 Roger D. Stone, Dreams of Amazonia, New York, Viking, 1985, 77-81. 50 Eduardo Bedoya and Loren Klein, "Forty Years of Political Ecology in the Peruvian Upper Forest: Thr

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51 Salati et al., "Amazonia," 488.

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79 Colten, UnnaturalMetropolis, 73-5. , 80 Kelman, River and Its City, 154--5.

)11

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82 83

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96 Stockholm Declaration, Stockholm 1972, Principle I. 97 UNEP Biennial Report, 1996-1997, 64. 98 Said Mahmoudi, "The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): An Assessment," Asian

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102 Donald Kaniaru, Manjit Iqbal, Elizabeth Mrema, and Siraj Chowdhury, "UNEP's Programme of Assis- tance on National Legislation and Institutions," in Sun Lin and Lal Kurukulasuriya, eds, UNEP's New Way Forward: Environmental Law and Sustainable Development, Nairobi, UNEP, 1995, 153-70.

103 Petsonk, "The Role ofUNEP in the Development ofinternational Environmental Law," 354. 104 Mostafa K Tolba and Iwona Rummel-Bulska, Global Environmental Diplomacy: Negotiating Environ·

mental Agreements for the World, 1973-1992, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998, 55-88. 105 Ibid., 371. 106 UNEP has an international press service, and puts out UNEP News and the quarterly Our Planet. 107 Officially called the Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for the Rational

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108 UNESCO, Backgrounder: The MAB Programme, Paris, UNESCO, 1982, 3. 109 Peter I. Hajnal, Guide to UNESCO, London, Oceana Publications, 1983, 119~20. 110 Michel Batisse, "Developing and Focusing the Biosphere Reserve Concept," Nature and Resources 22,

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':·Adam Rogers, The Earth Summit: A Planetary Reckoning, Los Angeles, CA, Global View Press, 1993, 269.

6) .Ranee KL. Panjabi, The Eartb,Summit at Rio: Politics, Economics, and the Environment, Boston, MA, Northeastern University Press, 1997. Rogers, Earth Summit, 193. Stephen Luper-Foy, "International Justice and the Environment," in David E. Cooper and Joy A.

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127 John Gordon, "Letting the Genie Out: Local Government and UN CED," in Thomas, ed., Rio: Unrav- elling the Consequences, 13.7-55, at 153. Karlin er, Corporate Planet, 10-11.

129 Matthew 10. 16. 130 NICL is a joint program funded by the US Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation. It

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132 Richard B. Alley, ed., Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises, Washington, DC, National Academy Press, 2002, 24-36. See also Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine, 111-15.

133 Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman, eds, Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2008.

134 Spencer R Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming: Revised and Expanded Edition, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2008. This section is based, in large part, on Weart's ground-breaking work.

135 Richard W. Battarbee and Heather A. Binney, eds, Natural Climate Variability and Global Warming: A Holocene Perspective, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

136 William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005.

137 Svante August Arrhenius, "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground," Philosophical Magazine 41, 1896, 237-76.

138 James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, 55-64.

139 Milutin Milankovitch, Canon of Insolation and the Ice-age Problem, Jerusalem, Israel Program for Sci- entific Translations, 1969.

268 Present and future

140 L.B. Larsen et al., "New Ice Core Evidence for a Volcanic Cause of the A.D. 536 Dust Veil," Geophyi· cal Research Letters 35, 2008, L04708, doi: 10.1029 /2007GL032450.

141 The Plague of Justinian, believed to be an early occurrence of the Bubonic Plague, reached Constanti• nople in 642.

142 Willi Dansgaard, Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Cap Research, Aage V. Jensens Fonde, Odder, DK, Narayana Press, 2004, 81.

143 Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, "Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question ofan Increase of Atmospheric CO

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144 Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003, 34-8.

145 Kenji Kashiwaya, ed., Long Continental Records from Lake Baikal, Tokyo, Springer, 2003. 146 Dansgaard, Frozen Annals, 54; Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine, 18-19. 147 R.J. Gurney, J.L. Foster, and C.L. Parkinson, eds, Atlas of Satellite Observations Related to Global

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151 Rummel-Bulska, Global Environmental Diplomacy, 55-88. 152 Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 2. 153 Elizabeth J. Rowbotham, "Legal Obligations and Uncertainties in the Climate Change Convention,"

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154 Rajendra K Pachauri and Andy Reisinger, eds, Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Geneva, World Meteorological Organization, 2008.

155 See also Weart, Impacts of global warming, http://www.aip.org/history/climate/impacts. htm#impacts.

156 Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, Emmaus, PA, Rodale, 2006.

157 Robert Kunzig, "A Sunshade for Planet Earth," Scientific American 299, 5, November 2008, 46.