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Man the Destroyer - or Man the Restorer?

Patrick Worms

发布日期: 2022年3月14日

Last year, I re-read J B MacKinnon’s deeply affecting “The Once and Future World”, in which he highlights what a depleted world we live in.

Since we modern humans started spreading across the planet, we have killed off the megafauna of every continent but Africa (we evolved there, giving the local wildlife time to become wary of us) and Antarctica (not much megafauna to be had on miles of ice). Today, we live in a world in which on average, wild species have seen their numbers collapse by 90% and the range they inhabit by 90% too. And those are the lucky ones: across the globe, we precipitated the extinction of thousands of species across dozens of genera in every kingdom of life. The world we inhabit today is but a pale shadow of the one in which we lived a mere 20 or 30,000 years ago.

Last year marked the start of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. At a UN meeting in Kunming, China, the world will have to recognize that it failed to achieve a single one of the biodiversity targets it set itself 11 years ago in Aichi, Japan. Just like the destruction of the climate, the destruction of the natural world continues unabated.

Few places have been more affected by this radical simplification of nature than Europe. Our continent has been more profoundly transformed by agriculture, urbanization, mining and industry than any other. And while we are blessed with amnesia – I don’t know many people who cry because they don’t see woolly rhinoceroses in their gardens anymore – we agroforesters are reminded of this disaster whenever we look at an expanse of large, treeless arable fields. Our science shows what we know in our bones: such systems are unlikely to be sustainable, resilient or friendly to wildlife.

Agroforestry is the effort to reverse that radical simplification in the agricultural sphere. A single tree species in, say, cereal alleys, invites dozens of species of birds, arthropods, reptiles and others to resume their lives in agricultural landscapes. They will accelerate the biological pump and generate externalities, some negative but many positive, that will help the farm become more resilient, more profitable, and more pleasant to work in.

The devil is of course of the details. And we see the devil at work right now, in the travesty the new CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy, has become at the hand of the agricultural lobby and the EU Member States.

The European Commission played its favourite agroforestry game: praise it to the skies in preliminary documents and studies, and then studiously ignore it when the inevitable pushback from the agrochemical industry and its allies comes. And the agriculture ministries of the members states confirmed yet again that they do not have the interest of farmers at heart, but only of the giant input industries that in the aggregate field thousands of lobbyists in Brussels and every national capital.

These lobbyists have not missed the opportunity provided by the Ukraine war: despite the utter absurdity of advocating for the use of more inputs based on petrochemicals at a time when the price of oil, gas and fertilizer is exploding, they are convincing policymakers to double down on reductionist agriculture.

Few of the players involved are true nihilists of the kind that get a hard-on from the thought of destroying the planet. So what gives? McKinnon’s book provides part of the answer: it is the general amnesia about the collapse of the natural world that affects us all. If you live in a city and work in a glass tower, as so many decision-makers do, nature is reduced to the flowerpot on your windowsill and to David Attenborough on Netflix.

That amnesia is dangerous. While we cannot be sure about exactly how much destruction our world can take before it stops delivering the essential services required for civilized life - clean air, clean water, fertile soils, relatively stable weather, pest and disease suppression and so much more - we should certainly not assume that we can carry on with our heedless ways.

And better ways exist. Much better ways. At Mpanshya, Zambia, which I visited last week, the skilful management of the communal cattle herd - over 430 animals belonging to 57 different owners - has restored a dying forest to full productivity in four years.

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