The World In Overshoot
What should we do when the world is in overshoot? An article in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books looks at depletion of natural resources in a world of ever increasing demand.
John Terborgh reviews "Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery", by Steve Nicholls. Nicholls is an entomologist and wildlife film producer who became alarmed at the progressive devastation of nature he saw in his perennial travels across America. Says Terborgh, "The World Is in Overshoot" communicates its message
"...on two levels, emotional and philosophical. The emotion is a restrained outrage at the wanton and often savage slaughter of wildlife -- cod, salmon, seabirds, curlew, beaver, bison, passenger pigeons, sea turtles, oysters, seals, walrus, and on and on. One feels it viscerally. And that drives home the philosophical point that all the excess and destruction were ensured by the cast of mind of the European colonists, the conviction that God created the wealth of nature expressly for man's benefit."
The current plight of Grand Banks cod fisheries illustrates the problem that many species face. John Calbot discovered the Grand Banks in 1497. Today the adult cod population of the Grand Banks is 3% of what it was then, an outcome that Thomas Huxley certainly didn't predict. In 1883 Huxley wrote about the fish he called "Darwin's bulldog":
"I still believe the cod fishery...and probably all the great fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish"
We've held this perception of nature for hundreds of years, it's almost part of being human, harvesting the endless bounty of nature. Garrett Hardin popularized the "Tragedy of the Commons" concept in 1968, but the Grand Banks pillage had started long before that and would not be stopped by increased awareness of scarcity. For over five hundred years the Grand Banks were fished by Europeans and Americans. Technology improved over the centuries and catches increased with each improvement, hand lines to long lines to gill nets to larger nets; wind to steam to factory ships; the "inexhaustible" bounty grew more precarious. At one point the Canadian government imposed a moratorium on cod at tremendous cost to the fishing economy, but for many reasons, now, 17 years after the moratorium the codfish has yet to recover.
The NY Review of Books author talks about the alterations in Grand Bank's species like snow crabs, shrimp, lobster, skate and dogfish, which make up the damaged ecosystem that can't support cod populations. Another damaged ecosystem is the "political tragedy of the 'commons'", says Terborgh. The fisherman naturally maximize their gains, but the politicians contribute to the tragedy by failing to pass effective regulations:
"The reluctance of official bodies to protect natural resources manifests a failure of political systems, particularly of modern democracy."
Nature, Idealized
The article is accompanied by an Albert Bierstadt painting, "Among the Sierra Nevada". The painting is an interesting choice for the article. Bierstadt made trips to Western United States in the latter 19th century, then composed over 500 paintings, many of them depicting idealized western landscapes dominated by lush forests, plentiful wildlife, and majestic mountains, all bathed in surreal golden light. This particular painting was painted while Bierstadt was in Europe, nine years after the artist visited the Sierra Nevada in California, Critics say the mountains look more like the Alps than the Sierra Nevada, as Bierstadt
"painted the West as Americans hoped it would be, which made his paintings vastly popular and reinforced the perception of the West as either Europe or sublime Eden."1
Other critics say his paintings resemble not Europe, but Arcadia. Either way, Bierstadt paints a west to seduce potential travelers, free of unwelcoming animals (and indians), free of hostile mountain passes. His paintings were labeled blatant propaganda by some critics, encouraging people to go West. According to more extreme views, his art contributed to the destruction of the wilderness.
Terborgh, however, notes, not about Bierstadt:
"The diminution of nature is a price to be paid by a society obsessively dedicated to unending economic growth. To lay the blame on the past obscures the lesson for our own time."
Terborgh rightly points out the weakness in pinning resource depletion on past actions. Past failures don't absolve us of the pressing need to act today. The pairing of the painting with the essay - perhaps inadvertently - also points out that sometimes we give in to temptations to paint the past more idyllically than it was. Other artists depict the west much more harshly then Bierstadt's commercial aims ever allowed him to. Terborgh writes of Paradise Found.. that Nicholls-
"turned to writing to lay out a sweeping panorama of what North America has lost in the centuries since the first explorers wrote back to their European sponsors of an exuberant nature so bountiful we can no longer imagine it."
Nature was bountiful, but some depictions, like Bierstadt's, were over-imagined. Overplaying the beauty and tranquility of nature served economic interests (encouraging settlers) long ago. Do we as easily overestimate economic security and but overlook nature today? Same bias, different outcome? Does short term gain obscure the long term value of the environment, to our long term detriment?
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1 Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York, 1974), 51058, 149-50; Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, 74-77, in Hyde, A., Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception in the History of the American West, The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol 24, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp 351-374.
Photo courtesy of WikiCommons: here.
Acronym Required sometimes writes about the environment, and we critiqued a proposal that applied the Tragedy of the Commons parable to antibiotics here.
