Threats to the biosphere

Martin Henry

WE ARE well into another Environment Week, an extension of World Environment Day. Some years ago the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) declared June 5 World Environment Day to focus global attention on the state of the environment. That state is not pretty.

Compared to the precarious state of the biosphere, the condition of Kingston Harbour is a minor problem. For US$60 million, we are told by the experts, the harbour can be cleaned and resuscitated. The IDB is now putting up US$30 million towards the clean-up. What we have not seen or heard to date is the cost/benefit analysis. A great many other very urgent things can be done with US$30 million dollars.

Environmentalists have become tenacious experts at pressing Business for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs). The reverse is also necessary: asking environmental projects to justify their costs in terms of benefits. The growing feeling that if it is labelled green it is good, no questions asked - how dare you? - is wrong.

Environmentalism is rapidly and decidedly moving beyond public scrutiny and criticism even as the power of the movement to have its own way grows by leaps and bounds. Considering the truly magnificent capacity of nature to reverse damage perhaps the most cost-effective approach to the resuscitation of Kingston Harbour is to cut the pollution inflow by least-cost methods and leave the harbour to renew itself with time.

The American and Western Europeans have demonstrated that with enough money and will, serious but localised environmental damage can be reversed. Rivers, lakes, city air, forests, etc., have been resuscitated. Even the Amazon forest, where chunks the size of Switzerland are chopped down each year, could be rehabilitated by technically simple and feasible means were the will to do so to emerge from somewhere.

On the purely national scale we, thankfully, are faced with no environmental problem that I can see that is not amenable to feasible solution. We can cut pollution, reforest the mountain slopes, save endangered species, restore fisheries, and so on. And we should make every reasonable effort to do so. Not that this will change the world. For what is truly frightening is what humankind has done with the biosphere ­ the life-supporting skin of land, air and water of the planet ­ and the intractability of reversal.

As I wrote in my 'Millennium Series' in January under the title 'A battered biosphere', "The 20th century has witnessed the most profound human impact on the environment to the extent that the biosphere has been significantly altered in fundamental ways. The outpourings of unnatural chemicals have penetrated and altered the huge, intricate biogeochemical cycles which sustain life on the planet."

There are some 100,000 'man-made' chemicals in use, most of them creations of the 20th century chemical revolution. One-quarter of these ­ 25,000 ­ are thought to be carcinogenic. Almost everyone is now familiar with the impact of synthetic chemicals on the ozone layer which absorbs ultraviolet radiation from space.

The atmosphere has been pumped up with CFCs which have a lifetime of over a century. International protocols for eliminating CFCs can do nothing about what has been released already and which will continue to eat ozone for long years to come.

The fact of the matter is that the composition of the atmosphere has been fundamentally altered by human action. There are the greenhouse gases which are supposed to be trapping heat and raising global temperatures. The atmosphere is a regulatory buffer between the planet and space and is the principal theatre of weather and climate. We should expect more widely oscillating weather and climate conditions from the disruption of atmospheric balance with huge devastating consequences.

The chemicals have infiltrated the bodies of organisms. Before DDT was banned, traces of this insecticide was found in the fat deposits of virtually every human being tested in the United States.

We now know a lot about the unintended negative effects of DDT; that's why it is banned. But tens of thousands of other chemicals have been unleashed into the environment, many of which have entered the food chain and are concentrated along the chain. Quite apart from direct impact, much of which is unknown anyway, these chemicals enter into numerous, complex interactive synergies which we have no science to either understand or undo. Some of these chemicals are known to mimic human hormones. Many others, alone or in combination, are carcinogens and mutagens.

The planetary gene pool has experienced significant, rapid alteration in the 20th century. Alteration has come from several sources. The extinction of species at an unprecedented rate is one of the more obvious. The mutational impact of increased radiation is another. Radiation has not only increased from space with the degradation of the ozone layer, but humans have created a radiation-saturated environment by harnessing the electromagnetic spectrum for use. Planetary life has been immersed in a sea of artificial radiation from TV and radio waves at the long end through microwaves to x-rays and gamma rays at the short end.

Cellphones

The carcinogenic potential of em radiation is also a growing cause of concern. Note the worry about cellphones.

We are witnessing the emergence of resistant strains of pathogenic micro-organisms under the selective pressure of life-saving antibiotics over a mere half a century. It is difficult to see how we can escape massive resurgences of pandemics of infectious diseases unless a new generation of super antibiotics, with their own problems, can be generated.

And now we have crossed the Rubicon of genetically engineering new organisms. No one knows how the new GM organisms will interact in complex, delicately balanced, slowly developed natural ecosystems.

But from our experience with transposed natural species we can expect plenty of trouble.

All in all, humankind has properly shegged up the biosphere. For the first time in human history, human action has produced not just some localised environmental mess like Kingston Harbour, but has altered the entire planetary life support system in fundamental ways.

It is the now ordinary taken-for-granted, everyday things of life, consumed on an altogether unprecedented scale in both magnitude and speed, and which few want to cut back on or to give up, that are causing the greatest damage to the biosphere.

It is hard not to conclude that we are face to face with the ultimate human hubris and the attendant nemesis, which may be open to amelioration but certainly not cancellation. The world's most advanced civilisation has been its most destructive. Technical power has not been counterbalanced with wisdom and humility. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths."

Martin Henry is a communications consultant.

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