Leave no Footprints

 There was a report this week that in the Cerrado region of Brazil, the savanna is being cleared for fields to grow soybeans. Huge areas are being burned all the time. It's doing enormous environmental damage and driving species to the edge of extinction.

 It made me think about the idea today that we can save the world if we go meat-free two or three nights a week. But we can't. If we abandon beef the fields will just be converted to grow soybeans, or sugarcane for bio-fuel. That's already happening - the orangutan is in critical danger because of forest clearance for bio-fuel crops. So we reduced fossil fuel dependence to save the world, and instead smashed the ecosystem of Borneo.

 The truth is that there are simply too many of us. Too many humans. We need too much land, too much water, and using one product instead of another only moves the disaster to somewhere else. We have to reduce our demands on the land, not just change them. And we know it can be done, because there are cultures from the past which did it. Most famous of these are the Plains Indians, whose ancestors slaughtered pretty much everything except the buffalo, leaving a threadbare ecosystem to their descendants. The Indians learned to take what could be taken without damage - "leave no footprints", they said, no mark that you'd been there at all. In a different way the Garamanta of North Africa did it too, living in one city amidst the Sahara as they did. It must have meant tight restrictions on water use and on food, and population control too.

 Those are our choices. We could leave fewer footprints, by taking less from the land. It means a drastic reduction in standard of living; we'd have to use half the energy we do now, half the water, and much less food (at least in the developed world). Or we could reduce population, globally, by several billion people.

 Both options are unpalatable and both are ridiculously hard. No voting public is going to elect a party that limits the right to have children. Even if it did, how do you enforce that abroad, in Africa for example? Or India? As for reducing our standard of living, don't waste my time. Voters opt for whoever they think will give them the most money and gadgets the soonest.

 But here's the kicker. Another report this week estimates that the number of vertebrates worldwide has fallen by 60% since 1970. More than half of nearly every species except humans gone in half a century. And with losses like that the ecosystem will soon collapse, and human beings will see a catastrophic fall in numbers and living standards anyway. And we can't stop that happening, because we won't vote for it.

 In a thousand years there really might be no human footprints left on the Earth.

A Great Week

 It's been a tough week. Elder daughter Bella had gastroenteritis, which meant sleepless nights, crying, and a whole lot of sick. I mean, wow... wouldn't have thought one small girl could produce all that. We had to keep younger daughter Evie at the far end of the room to avoid contamination, bleached everything twice a day up to about quarter of a mile away, and somehow got through it. Bella's better now, she's eating and putting on weight, and best of all her tummy is not emptying itself every two minutes.

 All in all, not a great week.

 Better than for most people in Cuba, Florida, St Martin and all the rest, though. Better than for millions caught up in the South Asia floods, too. People are crying out about global warming again, but the floods in Asia are due almost wholly to overuse of the land - too much forest clearance, too many buildings, drainage of wetlands and so on. In short, they're due to population pressure. We're at a point where the Colorado river often runs dry before it reaches the sea, and the Yangtze brings down so much silt that it blocks its own channel. Orangutan habitats are so damaged by clearance that the species could soon vanish. Meanwhile forest clearance in West Africa has reduced evaporation, so the winds which flow east to the Ethiopian massif carry less water and the Horn of Africa suffers terrible droughts.

 David Attenborough says that when he started to make wildlife documentaries, there were 2.5 billion people on Earth. Now there are 7.5 billion, and they all need food and water, they need a place to live, a job, maybe a car. That all impacts on the land. We clear more forest so we can grow enough food, drain rivers so we have enough water. We use billions of tonnes of sand every year for concrete and that can never be replaced. Our impact on the world is enormous and almost entirely negative.

 Writers have used this theme before - remember the Matrix, when Agent Smith describes humankind as a virus? He's not far wrong, but hopefully there are more subtle ways to reflect our destructive behaviour back at ourselves. I have an idea myself (don't I always, squirrels?). Unfortunately I need to write at least three full novels, and probably four, before I reach the point in my story at which the idea becomes applicable.

 That's a pain, but the concept for that series is a really great one, and as far as I know it's original. I've never read anything that comes close to its central theme. So I'm going to throw everything else over the side for the moment and run with that idea. Volume one is already done, two through four are blocked out and ready to go, and I have the outlines for volumes five through ten. Quite a big project, eh?

 But as they say, if your project doesn't frighten you then it's not big enough... and as I say, God hates a coward.

 Pip pip.