The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at a Crossroads

By Rob Jackson and John Graves

Writing especially for people who've tuned out the environmental debate, Rob Jackson persuasively argues that we're at a crucial turning point in environmental history, where choices we make now will determine the quality of life into the unforeseeable future. Laying out the scientific facts in plain language and with flashes of humor, he shows how the escalation of population growth and resource consumption in the twentieth century caused problems from ozone depletion to global warming, habitat destruction, and biodiversity loss. At the same time, however, he highlights ongoing solutions to these problems and ways in which we can create a sustainable future for subsequent generations and all life on earth. His urgent message is not that we've already failed, but that we can succeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292788640

Book preview

The Earth Remains Forever

Generations at a Crossroads

Rob Jackson

FOREWORD BY

JOHN GRAVES

Publication of this book has been assisted by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2002 by the University of Texas Press

Foreword copyright © 2002 John Graves

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Second paperback printing, 2003

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press,

P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

This book is printed on New Age TCF paper which is produced with totally chlorine-free pulp (TCF) to prevent harmful toxic byproducts from entering the environment. New Age is also produced from well-managed forests ensuring that no old-growth trees are utilized in the pulp. To ensure fewer trees are used to produce New Age, high-yield pulping technology ensures an environmentally friendly product.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-292-70623-1 (library e-book); ISBN 978-0-292-78864-0 (individual e-book)

Jackson, Robert Bradley, 1961–

The earth remains forever : generations at a crossroads / Rob Jackson ;

foreword by John Graves. — 1st ed.

       p.        cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-74054-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-292-74055-7 (pbk. : alk.paper)

1. Environmental degradation. 2. Consumption (Economics)—Environmental aspects. 3. Population—Environmental aspects. I. Title.

GE140. J32       2002

333.7—dc21                                                               2002001874

DOI: 10.7560/740549

A generation goes,

and a generation comes,

but the earth remains for ever.

ECCLESIASTES 1:4

Contents

Foreword by John Graves

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Living with Success

The Richness of Life

Ozone Awareness

The Changing Earth

Epilogue

References

Index

Foreword

Rob Jackson is my son-in-law, the father of our three grandsons and a bright and decent man. Hence when I learned he was writing a book, I wanted to like it. But books have been a major part of my life, and I know from experience that I truly care for only about half or fewer of the ones I read, regardless of their subjects, who has written them, who has recommended them, or the publicity they have received. So I waited for this one with hope and a good bit of suspense, and in the end was especially delighted to see how fine The Earth Remains Forever had turned out to be.

Rob’s concerns in this book are among the main concerns that have been with me during most of my life, ever since I graduated from a standard hunting-and-fishing youth to a general affectionate awareness of nature and its complexities, and finally to a perception of the great damage our times and our ways of life have been wreaking on the natural framework.

Persons of my dwindling generation have watched during their lives an increasingly rapid decline in the wholeness of that framework, though I might note, from an oldster’s dour perspective, that the decline had been in progress, more slowly, for many centuries before our time. The great forests of Europe nearly vanished long ago; places like the Balkans that were once breadbaskets for Rome were farmed down into rocky sterility; and creatures like mammoths and great cave bears were wiped out by people so early that only a few Stone Age paintings, kill sites, and other remains give evidence that they existed at all. Etcetera…

The fact that destruction has speeded up in more recent years has two main causes besides the (in my view) innate and formerly useful rapacity of the human race. One is a voluminous new array of technology that enables people to do to the natural world pretty much all that they think they want to do, with a good many large, unforeseen, and disruptive side effects. The other cause, itself in large part a result of medical technology, is a swift, huge surge in the world’s population and its demands upon earth’s bounty and integrity.

I am not going to dwell on these matters here, because Rob dwells on them thoroughly and interestingly in his chapters. His thoughts and observations are those of a first-rate scientist, a botanist whose interests have not been restricted to plants, though the fact that the plant world has been suffering great recent vanishings and shrinkings among its species is a firm basis for his view of the plight of the whole spectrum of living things, including people.

He recognizes the enormity of the problems—the wealthy nations’ prodigal consumption of goods and resources along with their discharge of pollutants; the flourishing extinction of species through excessive harvest, habitat destruction, and competition from introduced non-native forms of life; the impending crisis of water supply; the loss of wetlands; ozone depletion; global warming—and also recognizes the grounds for pessimism. But, characteristically and admirably, he sees these things as a challenge to humanity to seek solutions and carry them out while it is still perhaps feasible to do so, for the benefit or even the survival of those who will come after us on this planet.

I have read a great deal on these subjects, but I have not previously seen a treatment of them that combines warm understanding, wide and detailed documented knowledge, and a clear accessible language in the way Rob’s book does. It gets off into technical matters on occasion; it has to do so because technology is so much a part of the whole mess and of the possible cures. But it never loses an attentive lay reader of the sort that he obviously has in mind, and is sprinkled with passages that bring his points and discussions to life—convincing examples as well as personal anecdotes and memories. It adds up to a full and eloquent statement of our current environmental dilemma, with some plausible reasons for hope.

I am proud to be his kinsman.

JOHN GRAVES

January 2002

Acknowledgments

To hazard writing a book, you have to be naive enough to believe that you have something to say and, more importantly, that someone might actually listen. What I have to say here stands squarely on the shoulders of a host of scientists and authors whose work I gratefully acknowledge in the references. Their work made this project possible.

Various quotes, political cartoons, and limericks are sprinkled throughout the book. I selected the quotations to illustrate aspects of the text and because the books they came from mean something to me. Good writing is a gift (with good being the difficult part), and I thank the authors for the pleasure their words provide. The cartoonists deserve similar thanks for expressing so much information so concisely. The limericks are original.

A number of people helped bring this book to fruition. My sincerest thanks go to Bill Bishel and Lynne Chapman at the University of Texas Press and to a number of reviewers for their suggestions, including Martyn Caldwell, John Firor, Camille Parmesan, Amy Austin, and Laura Turcotte. Various family members also read parts of the manuscript, especially Sally Jackson (my better half), John Graves (my better half’s father), and Ken Jackson (my uncle). To them and to my parents, brothers, and extended family—thank you. As for my sons, this book would never have been written, but might have been finished more quickly, without your daily presence in my life.

Any mistakes that remain are mine.

ROB JACKSON

Stanford, CA

August 2001

A warming of several degrees

Melted ice and raised oceans and seas.

The Army was finished,

The Air Force diminished.

But the Navy was quietly pleased.

Introduction

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: You had content but no force.

Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: And you have force but no content.

IVAN TURGENEV,

FROM THE ORIGINAL EPIGRAPH TO Fathers and Sons (1862)

My father always told us to turn off the lights when we left a room. My brothers and I rolled our eyes at his collective wisdom, environmental and otherwise, attributing it to a depression-era mentality and middle age. We knew that the world would be different by the time we grew up.

We are living in an unusual time. It isn’t unusual for the reasons one might think—the millennium, the internet, the economy—it’s unusual because of us. Every generation believes that its time is somehow special, with pronouncements about change and the future so common that we tend to ignore them. But today is unusual nonetheless, and the goal of this book is to show why, to examine how these changes came to pass and what they mean for us and for our descendants.

The earth is being quietly transformed in ways and at a pace never seen before, with more people using more resources than at any time in history. This isn’t alarmist sentiment; it’s simply an observation. At about the same time as the passing of the recent millennium, India quietly became the second nation in the world with a billion people. That so little fuss was made of this milestone shows how quickly we lose interest in extraordinary events. When China became the first giganation in 1980, the news coverage was immense. Why was either event unusual? Until the 1800s, there weren’t a billion people on earth, and my grandparents lived much of their lives in a world without two billion. In contrast, we added more than three billion people to the earth in the last generation of the twentieth century, a billion people per decade. That is truly unusual.

We in the industrialized world tend to see environmental problems through the filter of overpopulation. If we could just slow the growth of tropical nations, then the earth would be safer and the environment more stable. Today’s population growth is indeed unprecedented, but this worldview conveniently absolves us of any responsibility, and improving the environment becomes someone else’s job.

The times are unusual in developed nations as well, and we in the United States are the most unusual, the most developed, of all. Whether driving our cars, heating our homes, or casually leaving the lights on, we generate a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel emissions with less than five percent of its population. As a nation, we spend fifty billion dollars a year on weight loss, about two hundred dollars apiece, roughly equivalent to the annual incomes of a billion of the earth’s people. That we spend as much money to lose weight as a sixth of the world spends to survive is something we rarely consider because most of us have never known anything else. Without realizing it, we have become the greatest consumers in the history of the planet.

Like population growth, growing consumption affects the earth in many unusual ways, some of which we will see in this book: the ozone hole, habitat loss, global warming, and, in consequence, rising sea level, to name a few. In fact, more people on earth probably see consumption as a threat to their livelihood than overpopulation. The Maldives is a nation of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, most of it less than three feet above sea level. In the coming century, global warming is expected to raise the oceans by two feet, give or take a bit. I doubt that Maldivians see overpopulation as their greatest threat.

The changing earth—the consequences of rising population and consumption—is the subject of this book, including some evidence for why things like biodiversity loss, the ozone hole, and global warming are unusual. The list looks suspiciously depressing, but it needn’t. Repairing the ozone hole is a remarkable success story that we can learn from and apply to other more difficult problems. We need to act quickly though to provide the quality of life our descendants deserve and to preserve as much of our natural heritage as possible.

This urgency to act now isn’t apocalyptic. Calls for the earth’s demise have come and gone throughout history, especially in recent decades. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth sold thirty million copies in the 1970s, and its dire predictions notwithstanding, the seventies came and went quietly, as did the eighties, the nineties, and the millennium, and we’re still here. It is entirely possible, of course, that this decade will be our last, but I’m betting that it won’t be, that we and the earth will still be here in a hundred years and in a thousand. The stewardship and vision that we show today will therefore help determine the type of world that our descendants inherit. This book isn’t about the end of the world, it’s about the middle of it, the mundane middle of our daily lives and the choices that we consciously and unconsciously make.

Finally, this book is also about kinship. Who will be excluded from the circle of haves? How do we best provide for the needs of our descendants and for the other species on earth? How do we balance the lifestyle that we have with the needs of people in poorer regions of the world, in poorer corners of wealthy nations like our own, and in future generations? Inequities in wealth are inevitable, but they have never been larger than today. Perhaps no generation before us has had to consider so seriously that what we use, how we live, and the choices that we make might reduce our descendants’ opportunities. That thought is both frightening and empowering: frightening because it’s such a dramatic departure from the way we are used to thinking, empowering because it provides the ultimate motivation for change.

That change is my hope for this book.

My father was right about the lights. I can admit that now, decades later, though a small part of me begrudges him knowing it. Once you’ve lived long enough to do things you swore you never would, admitting your mistakes comes easier.

My father also drove a four-door, 455-cubic-inch v8, baby-blue Buick Electra 225, one of the biggest gas-guzzlers ever made. No one gets off that easy in this book.

Living with Success

A moving target

Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go?

Fresh as a lark mounting at break of day,

Festively she puts forth in trim array;

Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow?

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1807)

More than three thousand years ago a group of Polynesians loaded their families and possessions into outrigger canoes and sailed east, seven thousand miles east, if you extend their journey over two millennia and countless generations. The Lapita lacked compasses or sextants, navigating instead by stars, prevailing currents, and chance. They reached Fiji first and then Tonga, extending their network to such remote islands as Hawaii and, for a time, Easter Island, at about the time that Attila the Hun roamed Europe.

Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated places on earth. Its closest neighbor is Pitcairn Island, thirteen hundred miles away, and it is more than two thousand miles from Tahiti to the west and Chile to the east. Slightly larger than Manhattan, the island’s modern name commemorates the Easter date of discovery by Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen in 1722. Its true discoverers called it Te Pito ‘o Te Henua, the navel of the world.

The first Lapita to arrive looked out from their canoes and saw a lush island of jagged cliffs and sharp black lava, the wooded landscape dominated by three large volcanoes. Landing on the only large beach, the white sands of Anakena, the seafarers undoubtedly said a prayer—of thanks for reaching the isolated paradise and of appeasement for intruding upon it.

Over the next thousand years the Lapita created a striking civilization. Their most famous legacy was the Moai, a set of peerless statues sculpted from the tuff of the volcano Rano Raraku. The Lapita moved each finished statue miles across the rocky landscape, rolling the thirty-foot figures on a jostling treadmill of logs that they cut along the way. Anthropologist Jo Anne