About Planetary Boundaries
Fossil-fueled and extractive activities have led to dangerous breaches of many environmental boundaries. With joint action, we can go back to the safe zones.
The planet has different personality traits and boundaries, quite like you and I do.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre, housed at Stockholm University, has conceptualized nine spheres of earth’s natural operations, as below, and the ‘safe operating’ planetary boundaries for each of them. The group’s research demonstrates that human extractive activities have violated more than half of the thresholds. As the planet is a web of complex processes and elements, no one dimension is isolated – if you disturb one, there are cascading effects on others.
In the figure below, the green shows, per usual, good things – the planet is operating safely in that particular sphere. The red, per usual indicating some anger, means that we have crossed the safe boundary. We are quite angrily past the boundaries of biodiversity and ‘biogeochemical’ flows, and nearing land system changes. What does this mean? We are causing mass extinction of nonhuman species (plants, animals, fungi, you name kin), and also now, our bodies have ‘forever chemicals’ in them.
These planetary disturbances have become the defining human timestamps and this era is often labeled as the Anthropocene. I also refer to it as the ‘time when humans thought extraction and burning things were activities of growth, and this destructive tendency messed up the globe’ era (yes that should’ve rhymed like a rap). Experts call this, more succinctly, the Capitalocene.
Here’s an example of how the different illustrated dimensions are interlinked: As the tree cover declines (land use change), animal species in the ecosystem are in peril (biodiversity intergrity), less carbon is absorbed naturally, more carbon in the air means the globe gets even hotter which causes extreme weather events and melting of the permafrost in the Arctic (climate change), which causes sea level rise + release of more globe-warming gases, further causing mass extinction events. See the pattern? (Hint: it’s circular). And this is just one linear stream of events.
This newsletter is meant to be a solution-provider, so here is a thought-solution: like the problems, the solutions are circular too. When you walk to get ice cream instead of taking a gas-run car, you avoid release of some additional units of air pollutants, which may help an asthmatic person breath better; when you buy loose fruits instead of thin-plastic-wrapped sliced ones, you may have avoided the plastic that would’ve made its way to an albatross chick and avoided kin’s death from a ruptured organ.
Yes, the onus of climate change is on Big Oil and all those entities that destruct rather than cultivate, and they must be stopped. So go vote for change! Yes, also, we all must be cultivators of change, to do what we can from where we are. So go and talk to folks, build communities that work in concert to reverse the damages already caused to Mama Earth. Grow a garden, let your front lawn run wild, walk barefoot in the morning dew or even collect morning dew, and all the while, bring environment into your day job and conversations (if it isn’t already).
I do realize some changes to the planet are irreversible in our lifetimes. Call me whimsical (please do): with the future in mind, I do envision that joint actions of growth and well-being will place deep roots into the ground instead of drills, bring forth buds to rebuild a well-functioning world, and then fruition – a planetary economy and way of existing in synergy with the planet, all within safe boundaries.
A Note of Welcome, II
Hi and welcome to the second post of TIERRA! I am Shivani, a budding climate writer and a subject-matter comprehender. I share resources and thoughts biweekly on climate and ecological matters as they unravel. My vision is to inform you with hope, solutions and a life-giving future, with only an occasional dose of the doom-and-gloom (often the reality these days), as we wade through the oily muck into clean waters as a whole.
I am delighted to have you here and hope we build a community through this interaction. Always feel free to share thoughts!
More on the last newsletter: J. Drew Lanham also finds promise in urban ‘wild life’ in this essay.
Three Servings of News
A climate win! The US Senate joined 137 countries in ratifying the Kigali Amendment (a section of the Montreal Protocol, the treaty that succesfully reverted the ozone hole). This will help with rapid phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in the country, a category of greenhouse gases released from refrigerators and air conditioners. (NYT, The Verge)
A climate justice win! Denmark offered ‘loss and damage’ funding of about £12 million to poorer countries and is the first Western country to do so. ‘Loss and damage’ financing is directed to communities that don’t have sufficient resources to adapt to climate impacts and is used to build resilience measures. So much more redistribution of climate financing is needed though this is a great example! (The Guardian)
Giant sequoias are suffering due to wildfires, with a fifth of our elder’s population cut in the past two years. A report by the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition found that 6,109 acres of giant sequoia groves burned in 2021, with additional stressors from bark beetle attack and prolonged drought. Inside Climate News shares a solution to prevent future losses: bring back Indigenous prescribed burning practices and ‘fight fire with fire.’
Events + Media of Interest
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is conducting a webinar series ahead of COP15 (more on the COP in the next newsletter!). Here’s the lineup!
New York: *This Is Not A Drill* Exhibition at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The exhibition on ‘technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice’ will be open to public between September 28 - December 4, 2022. More on this.
India: Do check out the docu-series, Faces of Climate Resilience, in partnership with India Climate Collaborative, Edelgive Foundation and Drokpa Films. With 16 stories from all across India, the series highlights local climatic issues being faced, and then addressed, by locals.
From A Member of the TIERRA Community
Shared by Max Snyder, a doctoral student of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California, Berkeley: “Building a green economy will require changing so many aspects of our lives that it can be hard to know where to start! That’s why I feel fortunate to work in climate policy research: by carefully studying what has and hasn’t worked to reduce emissions, we can find solutions to equitably solve the climate crisis.”
Indeed, all hands on deck for building a better, rethought global economy!
A Question To Members of the TIERRA Community
Did you recently have an interaction with your environment that led to a feeling of awe or wonder? Do share!
Hope you have a moment of joy in letting go as we transition into fall!
Barking Deer. Copyright: Sartaj Ghuman.