Human Ecology and Peace

By
Charles Avila

Rome’s Advice to Copenhagen
"If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation," said Pope Benedict XVI in his Message for World Day of Peace on Day One of 2010. His predecessors, of course, had always shown concern for the environment long before such concerns became fashionable or laden with economic interest.
From their standpoint nature is neither an adversary to be conquered or destroyed nor an evil from which one must be freed. Rather, it is the garden from which God fashioned the human being, and which God gave as gift to man and woman to keep and till (cf. Gen 2: 15); it is the place and plan for which man and woman, who were made “in his own image” (Gen 1, 27) are to feel truly responsible.
In their view the Creator willed the human being to evolve more and more into a co-creator, not an exterminator, though this latter role is what we’ve seen humans often choose to play.
Vatican II affirmed that human beings are right in thinking that by their spirit they transcend the material universe, for they “share in the light of the divine mind”( Gaudium et Spes, 15). Who can be blind to the progress made by the tireless application of human genius down the centuries in the empirical sciences, the technological disciplines and the liberal arts (GS, 15) so that “especially with the help of science and technology, man has extended his mastery over nearly the whole of nature and continues to do so”(GS 33)?
Not all is good news, however, as one international conference after another has shown lately. Today a planetary crisis affects all existents on Earth due to the fact, precisely, that, instead of increasingly becoming co-creators in the on-going multi-billion-year story of creation, humans have become more and more like “exterminators” in the manner they chose to produce and reproduce their means of life and livelihood. They had chosen mainly an extractive rather than an organic way of undertaking economic actions and thus became the one main cause of the massive extinction of plant and animal species that characterizes the current era.
Modern technologies and the industrial establishment went into the unqualified human conquest of the forces of nature. The integral functioning of Earth’s life systems that had been going on for 4.6 billion years came under the assault of humans determined to use and absolutely own Earth’s resources regardless of the consequences for the natural systems of the planet or the integrity of creation. The words of counsel came late: “one must take into account the nature of each being and of its mutual connection in an ordered system” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 34), although much, much earlier the same thought, long since forgotten, was often discussed by early Christian philosophers known as the Church Fathers.
At first humans embraced the organic economy - which by its nature is an ever-renewing economy, living within the bounty of the seasonal renewing productions of Earth’s biosystems, making it capable of continuing into the indefinite future. Later, however, humans got into an extractive economy, which by its nature is a terminal or biologically disruptive economy, dependent on extracting non-renewing substances from Earth, surviving only so long as these very finite resources endured.
The Church, for her part, cautioned that the human being must not “make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray” (Centesimus Annus, 37). When the human being forgets this, he “ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him” (CA 37). Hence, today’s advice to Copenhagen from Rome is simple: "If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation."
Thus, “it is now clear that [many discoveries and technologies] in the fields of industry and agriculture have produced harmful long-term effects.” We should not, for instance, “interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention both to the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations” (1990 World Day of Peace, 6).
Humans, of course, may yet intervene in nature without abusing it or damaging it; then, they would intervene “not in order to modify nature but to foster its development in its own life, that of the creation that God intended” (JP II, at the World Medical Association, 1983).
Reducing our ecological footprint
It is by now axiomatic to say that our livelihoods and indeed our lives depend on the services provided by Earth’s natural systems. We are, however, consuming the resources that underpin those services much too fast – faster than they can be replenished, according to the Living Planet Report 2008, a report of the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, and the Global Footprint Network. If our demands on the planet continue at the same rate, in less than two decades we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles. Our reckless consumption as a species is simply depleting the world’s natural capital to a point where we are endangering not only our future prosperity but our very survival. Of course, as Leonardo Boff the liberation theologian-turned-ecologist recently pointed out: “Earth can go on without us, without human beings.”

Clearly we need to reduce our ecological “footprint” or our impact on Earth’s services. A country’s footprint is the sum of all the cropland, grazing land, forest and fishing grounds required to produce the food, fiber and timber it consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted when it uses energy, and to provide space for its infrastructure. It measures the amount of biologically productive land and water area required to produce the resources an individual, population or activity consumes and to absorb the waste it generates, given prevailing technology and resource
management. This area is expressed as global hectares, hectares with world-average biological productivity.

Right now, our demand on the planet’s living resources already exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 30 per cent. This global overshoot is growing and, as a consequence, deforestation, water shortages, declining biodiversity and climate change with the resultant mega-typhoons and fatal flooding are putting the well-being and development of all nations at increasing risk.

The huge quantities of human-caused carbon dioxide and other green house gases that get trapped in the atmosphere are excessive that as a result the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere – and oceans – get dangerously higher and warmer. Warmer water in the top layer of the ocean drives more convection energy to fuel more powerful typhoons and hurricanes in increased frequency, as so many people saw in An Inconvenient Truth. As water temperatures go up, wind velocity goes up, and so does storm moisture condensation. It also causes more of both floods and droughts. Then, too, the warming sucks more moisture out of the soil and, as a consequence, increases desertification, causes more fires, and experiences less productive agriculture.
Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas are extracted from the Earth’s crust and are not renewable in ecological time spans. When these fuels burn, carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted. To keep CO2 levels in the atmosphere from rising, only two options exist: human technological sequestration of these emissions, such as deep-well injection; or natural sequestration. Natural sequestration occurs when ecosystems absorb CO2 and store it in standing biomass such as trees. Currently, it must be noted, only negligible amounts of CO2 are sequestered by human means.

To reduce our ecological footprint we humans must get better at managing the ecosystems that provide us Earth’s services on nature’s terms and at nature’s scale, not in terms of our greed or artificial need. This means that decisions in each sector, such as agriculture or fisheries, architecture or transportation, must be taken with an eye to broader ecological consequences and, more concretely, to carbon cutting – given that the carbon footprint is the most critical at this time. We would then find ways to manage the ecosystem as a whole across our own boundaries – across property lines and political borders, and certainly, at the very least, across the various divisions and sectors in a given government and nation.

We can’t deny that biocapacity is not evenly distributed around the world. The eight countries with the most biocapacity – the United States, Brazil, Russia, China, Canada, India, Argentina and Australia – contain 50 per cent of the total world biocapacity. Three of them– the United States, China and India – are ecological debtors, with their national footprints exceeding their own biocapacity.

At Copenhagen last month those three blew up the United Nations by equivalently telling all who cared to listen that “you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees. But when you get too close to the center of things that count--the fossil fuel that's at the center of our economy--you can forget about it. We're not interested. You're a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves we don't want to hear much about it” (cf Alternet). China, the U.S., and India don't want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. In a way, despite a few glimmers of hope, Copenhagen effectively formed a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse.

Philippine applications

What are we in the Philippines today – debtors or creditors? What is our ecological footprint, our carbon footprint, our biocapacity, our common programs? Do we see the interrelatedness of environmental degradation and underdevelopment? Do we have concrete plans for our society’s various sectors to pursue tenaciously for the common good? We need to take counsel, gather together and make the strongest common resolve.

The fight against global warming has become like a religion and people want to be seen to be doing the right thing. Fathering in this area has indeed become quite prolific. For some, a move towards clean energy spells opportunity. They sell power-generation equipment and aircraft and train engines. New regulations requiring companies to adopt cleaner processes mean that capital equipment is replaced more quickly, to the benefit of such companies like GE and Siemens.
All this should be welcome news for the Philippines as it has been called now the fourth most disaster-prone country owing to climate change, according to Greenpeace. Citing the recent study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group said we’ve been bearing the brunt of climate change for more than a decade now, resulting in "changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events." The study, where 2,500 scientists from more than 100 countries took part, warned of the impact of greenhouse emissions on the atmosphere.
There can be no doubt that climate changes will greatly affect the Philippines as a whole. A country of some 7,100 islands, the Philippines is most vulnerable to stronger weather disturbances and the rise in temperature and sea levels that could bring serious flooding and affect agricultural and marine yields, in 64 of the nation's 81 provinces. In the last two decades alone, the Philippines has suffered over $5.2 billion in damage to property and agriculture, causing the death of over 25,000 Filipinos. According also to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), there has been an increase in temperature in the country at an average of 0.61 degrees Celsius over the last 55 years, from 1951 to 2006 and this is consistent with the global findings of the IPCC.
Earth’s surface temperatures will continue to rise between 1.8 and 4.0 Celsius and sea levels by 7.1 inches to 23.3 inches by end century. A one-meter rise in sea level may affect those 64 of our provinces covering 703 out of 1,610 municipalities. It will eventually submerge 700 million square meters of land across the country altering the country's coastline. It is estimated too that within this century, those 703 municipalities may be submerged in water and this could be sooner depending on the melting of ice from Greenland and West Antarctica. Worst-case scenarios of complete melting will create a 7 to 12 meters sea level rise.
Wind and solar energy already play an important part in a few countries – though not quite yet in the Philippines where these should be a natural. Around 20% of Denmark's electricity comes from wind and about 80% of China's hot water from solar energy. Solar photovoltaic power has grown by an average of 41% a year over the past three years; wind has grown by 18% a year. Increased demand has fuelled the boom. Power companies are getting more interested in renewables. But worldwide those two energy sources barely register.
This Christian country therefore needs to set its sights more seriously in generating for this and future generations the renewable sources of wind, sun and water of which we have plenty.
At Copenhagen the nations of the world agreed on a widened "REDD Plus" fund -- the mechanism for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation -- which would enable countries like the Philippines to obtain incentives for keeping standing forests. Recently a country like Guyana signed an agreement with First World Norway by which Guyana will accelerate its efforts to limit forest-based greenhouse gas emissions and protect its rain forest as an asset for the world. Norway, in turn, will initially put US$30 million into Guyana's "REDD Plus" fund and subsequent payments of up to US$250 million over five years would be contingent with Guyana's ability in limiting emissions and reducing deforestation, which, currently, is almost negligible. One wonders if the Philippines could not do something similar.
The journey to Copenhagen began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when nations adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as the basis for response to global warming. Then, in 1997, 37 industrialized nations and the European Union agreed on emission targets through the Kyoto Protocol. It was, however, largely unfulfilled. Thus the original goal of the Copenhagen talks was to forge a binding treaty that would go far beyond that pact in securing concrete actions worldwide. However, at the end of the day, Copenhagen concluded a climate change deal that was “meaningful” (per President Obama) but “not binding”. Seventeen years of talk is not enough. The talking will continue in Mexico City In November 2010. But it’s not clear if a binding agreement will be put in place then. If not, the next talkies on so urgent a topic will occur in 2015. It will all depend on the foxes governing the henhouse. Unless…until the power of the Spirit is allowed to move hundreds of millions listening to Rome for direct action. It may then be possible again to bring down the mighty from their thrones and allow the peoples of Earth to love the only planet that gave them their life and being.
Last week Pope Benedict XVI said that environmental care requires a conversion, a change in mentality: a change in lifestyles, making them more sober; a change in our development model, which is all too often designed for "narrow economic interests" without care for creation; and experiencing solidarity "that is projected in space and time." In a word: the problem of protecting the environment is a moral one. Thus, “humanity needs a profound cultural renewal; it needs to rediscover those values which can serve as the solid basis for building a brighter future for all. Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated."
Meanwhile, we hear the Pontiff: "If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation."