HELP! — Our Biosphere is being replaced by an Econosphere
Commentary by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor and Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
When I was about 16 and began to drive, I noticed the yellow spots on the map, and how much space they occupied. These were cities, of course, too densely developed to draw in the streets at the scale of whole-state road maps.
The world I grew up in consisted of the farm where Dad made our living and which provided most of our diet, thanks to Mom’s hard work with help from the three children. It was a great green continuum in all directions broken by houses and by the 30′s and some paved roads. By the 40′s strip mining was in progress, but it was understood the strip jobs would return to trees and grass in a decade or so. Cities were something else, large areas covered with concrete, roofs of metal and shingles, and a lot of bare spots. Later I learned about pollution from garages, chrome plating shops, and the huge amount of sewage towns produce.
This growth process in time lead to understanding what is called “environmental services.” We are essentially part of an ancient system, the organic world. Every atom of our bodies comes from the natural organic world through the food we ingest. When we die, we return to it, in spite of the effort we civilized folk make to delay the return. As a famous book says, we “come from the dust and we return to the dust,” this is through the ancient cycle of life.
Think of how it works: the atoms needed for our bodies are widely dispersed in the surface of the earth. Plants are able to gather them for their own use, and we eat the plants, or eat animals which have eaten plants. The part of the food we do not need is returned to the earth in our waste (when we live in a state of nature). When we die, the atoms of our bodies are also returned to the earth (again if we live in a state of nature). This system has served millions of species for a very long time. More microorganisms than you can imagine mediate it. We simply cannot exist without supplies from these natural processes for our food, and largely for our clothing and our shelter.
Our civilization separates us from the natural world. Stone age people continued to live in it, and many in the civilized world lived very close to it until recently, but much of today’s world has lost track of the organic necessity. One of the stories told here on Jesse Run is about a young couple that moved here from town. The husband told his wife he wanted to get a cow, so they could have milk. She replied, “I don’t want no milk that comes from a cow.”
Our offal is carefully carried to a sewage treatment plant where it is decomposed to the mineral state, with only a little fertility left in the sludge. Our artifacts go into a landfill. Our bodies are preserved in such a way it is difficult to return to the organic world. We extract what we need by organic means and then discard it in a way that it is not returned to the organic world. Mining and dumping. Our use of energy produced hundreds of millions of years ago by organisms using energy from the sun is prodigious.
Worse, our mining methods infringe on the organic world, green space, whatever you want to call it. This organic world is responsible for clean water, timber, food, oxygen in the atmosphere, and disposal of organic waste. What would the world be like if the dead dinosaurs and other species hadn’t decomposed and returned to be reused time and again?
We humans have been tremendously successful. The total weight of the seven billion of us is greater than most species. Some 350 million tons, as of 2012. The only species to exceed us in weight are bacteria, ants, marine fish (total), domestic cattle and termites. All whales (ten species) come in with only 40 million tons.
Another statement seen in the press lately is that the human race has doubled in the last 40 years and the total number of animals has dropped by half in the same time! Shocking?
How long can this go on? Population rise is inexorable. Famines and plagues and wars are only a temporary setback. Look for a graph of population rise over the centuries. For several hundred years people have been talking about the “carrying capacity” of the earth, the maximum number of people can live here, followed by the same number of people generation after generation. Malthus in 1798 is given credit for the first written account of the idea. When the limit has been approached for one technology, another has been found. Potatoes and corn from the New World have supplemented cabbage and wheat, which poor North Europeans lived on.
There was a graph of the population of China vs. Time over many centuries published several years ago in Science. There was a series of stair steps of increasing population. Each was labeled with the introduction of a new foodstuff. Far back in time was millet, then dry land rice, then wetland rice. More recently, maize (which we call corn) and potatoes.
Also, fertilizer is making a difference, but we cannot count technology to go on forever. And, the population curve is rising.
I’d like to see a map with the yellow extended to houses, industrial areas and their pollution, buildings and roads of all kinds and all development. I’d like to know just how much land has been removed from production by civilization. I’d like to know how much each industry is killing the natural world, and how our “environmental services” are being reduced by them. We need to know. This kind of “return on investment” is both unknown and uncounted.
In the absence of such a map, the best we can do is get on Google Earth and “fly” over the earth at a low level. Stay a couple of thousand feet above the surface and move around. If you do this and learn to identify the “development,” you’ll be amazed at how much of the earth’s habitable surface is already preempted by what I call the “econosphere”, and lost to the biosphere.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. This really made me think.
It is great to take such a long-range and holistic look at civilization. We don’t reflect on that often enough.
It is truly sad what we are doing to this majestic planet, given as a gift, entrusted to us to care for. In our human weakness, we have chosen to squander those gifts.
If I were the Creator, I’d be really pissed off right now.
Does he think this is what happened? ”By the 40′s strip mining was in progress, but it was understood the strip jobs would return to trees and grass in a decade or so.”
We know that most of the top soil is lost, so we get very few
trees, and scrubby at that ….
Here is another problem …….
“…the water won’t ever clear up until you get the hogs out of the creek.”. …… from Jim Hightower’s Lowdown newsletter