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.

Erro!

 My little Isabella has spoken her first words. "Erro!" came first, then "Mama" and "Yeah", and now today "Dada." It's all incredibly thrilling. I expect her to be reading her own bedtime stories by the time she's two, and writing novels before she turns seven. Seems reasonable.

 People keep telling us that Bella is open, warm-hearted and always cheerful. It was her fifth day in nursery before the staff ever saw her cry, and then it was because another baby was upset. My parents often said I was the same as a toddler. I don't remember it. By the time my long-term memory started up much of the joy had been knocked out of me.

 Why do we do this to ourselves? Children need to learn about stranger danger, to be careful crossing the road, and not to touch hot things. They'll become warier, but we do more. Too often we fill our kids with our own hotchpotch of fears and biases, some of them society's, some of them our own. Caz and I are trying not to. If we succeed well enough that Bella grows into a happy, confident young woman, we'll have done all right.

 I say I want her to be the first woman on Mars, but I don't really. I want her to be the best she can be at whatever she chooses to do, while still being happy.