Modelling forests from space

This is the text of a talk I gave on ABC radio a year or so ago. It's a bit technical, but was written for a 'lay'(non-technical) audience, so I hope you find it worth reading. 

And of course, there are forests, and forests. The top picture is Diana at the base of a giant spruce in Oregon; the bottom one two friends, at a conference, in a plantation in Brazil

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Forests are diverse and fascinating ecological communities. They range from the luxuriant rainforests of the tropics, where the warm, wet and stable conditions encourage enormous plant and insect biodiversity, to the biologically hardy but impoverished forests of the boreal regions. In between, there are temperate deciduous and coniferous forests and mixed and broad-leaved evergreen forests. These include the Eucalyptus forests of Australia. In some countries they are protected and well managed but in others economic pressures, and those associated with growing human populations, are bringing about their destruction.

Forests are important for their aesthetic, ecological and direct economic values, and because they absorb around 20% of the carbon dioxide that modern human activities emit into the atmosphere. (The oceans absorb about 30%.) If we are to manage forests, assess their economic value, evaluate whether the changes taking place in them are sustainable, and improve our estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide they are likely to absorb or emit, we need to know the mass of material in them. We also need to know how fast they are growing.

So the business of modelling forests is concerned with determining the mass of material in them – their biomass – and their growth rates. The models we use, like all mathematical models, are sets of equations that describe how we think forests grow. We provide them with input data, press the buttons on the computers and out come estimates of forest biomass and growth rates that can be mapped and tabulated and used in decision making.

The question that has to be answered is: how do we develop and test such models?

Conventional estimates of the amount of wood in a forest, and how fast it’s growing, are based on laborious, time consuming and expensive measurements. Standard-sized plots, which are necessarily rather small, are located across selected areas, taking pains to sample the variations caused by differences in soil type and topography. The dimensions of all the trees in those plots are measured. Equations must be developed for each species to convert the diameters and heights of the trees to wood volume. Biomass and carbon content are calculated using knowledge of wood density. As you can imagine, for complex natural forests, with a number of tree species and a range of unhelpful tree shapes, it can be difficult to get accurate values. Furthermore, although vast amounts of work have been done all over the world in forest biometrics, only a tiny fraction of the world’s forests has been sampled.

However, we can now estimate forest mass and growth rates from measurements made by some of the wonderful range of earth-observing satellites carrying all sorts of instruments in various orbits that provide complete coverage of our earth. These instruments continuously record enormous amounts of information in digital form.  They include the instrument called lidar — which is the­ acronym for light detecting and ranging  - from which laser beams are projected directly downwards. The beams bounce back to receivers with intensities that vary depending on the amount of foliage they strike, or on whether they hit gaps in the canopy. The differences between reflections from the top of the canopy and out of gaps provide estimates of forest height.

Radar, projected both sideways and downwards, can provide an accurate picture of the three-dimensional structure of forests. The return signals from radar of different frequencies reflect differences in the size of objects in their pathway. Small objects like leaves return higher frequency waves. Larger objects, such as tree trunks, reflect lower frequencies. Combining all this with data from lidar, it becomes possible to estimate the above-ground biomass, and hence the carbon content, of the forest stands.

To calibrate these satellite-derived estimates of tree heights and biomass, and test their accuracy, research in various places around the world is comparing them with conventional, ground-based measurements of the type I outlined earlier. The areas where measurements have been made on the ground are identified by what the remote sensing people call georeferencing – made much easier nowadays with GPS. Agreement between directly measured and satellite-derived estimates of forest mass is generally excellent.

Therefore, because the forest biomass in small areas can be accurately estimated from space, we can confidently use satellite measurements to estimate it for any area of the earth.

The next question is: what about growth rates?

On the basis of what we know about tree physiology and growth from thousands of measurements by scientists all over the world, over many years, we can construct models that allow us to calculate how fast forests are growing. For these we need the right input data, which we can either collect on the ground or get from satellite measurements.

We know that plants capture carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Photosynthesis is driven by radiant energy from the sun, absorbed by foliage. Some satellites provide estimates of cloud cover and from these, and the date and latitude, we can calculate the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth at any location on any day. Now, if we know how much foliage a forest is carrying, and something about the photosynthetic characteristics of that foliage, we can calculate how much solar energy the forest is absorbing and therefore how fast it is capturing carbon dioxide and how fast it is growing. Rates of growth are also affected by temperatures.

There are instruments on satellites that monitor the radiation reflected from surfaces in the visible and near-infra-red wavebands. The amount of foliage carried by vegetation in any pixel can be estimated from the reflectance ratios in different wavebands. The optics in satellite sensors can also indicate differences in the greenness of the leaves, in the same way that our eyes can detect those differences. Conventional physiological research has shown that leaf greenness can be equated with different nitrogen content in the leaves, which is associated with changes in photosynthetic capacity.  The water status of forests – that is, whether they are well-watered or suffering from drought – is also indicated by the reflective properties of the leaves, so the development of drought, which affects the uptake of carbon dioxide by vegetation, can be identified from sequential scans and factored into estimates of photosynthesis rates.

So satellite measurements allow us to estimate the amount of foliage per unit ground area. They provide data on solar radiation and allow us to keep track of changes in greenness, and of indices of plant water status. Land surface temperatures can be estimated from their emissions of long-wave radiation.  Putting all this information into our models, and integrating over seasons, we can calculate how much carbon dioxide has been fixed by the forest and used for above-ground and below-ground growth.

The obvious question that now has to be answered is: what evidence do we have that these modeled estimates of forest growth rates, based on satellite measurements, are correct? Do they accurately reflect reality?

To estimate growth rates from conventional forest biometrics the whole on-ground measurement exercise has to be repeated at intervals. These are usually a few years. Growth is then calculated as the difference between sequential sets of measurements, but the uncertainty in the results is considerable. Also, because soils, topography and microclimate all vary, the results are not transportable: that means you can’t, with any confidence, apply estimates of growth rates obtained from one forest region – or even one stand – to another. And the growth of trees is determined by weather, acting on physiological processes, so even if the forest is undisturbed we can’t assume that the growth rates determined over some interval will apply over the next one – particularly if the climate is changing. Finally, when there is a disturbance, caused by harvesting or fire or storm or insect attack, there’s no way, on the basis of conventional measurements, that you can predict with any confidence how the forest is going to recover.

Despite all that, areas for which good biometrics data exist serve as benchmarks against which modelled estimates of forest biomass and growth, derived from satellite measurements, can be compared. Many such comparisons have been made. The satellite-derived estimates are usually within the error of the ground-based measurements.

We can also test models against direct measurements of the rate of carbon dioxide capture by forests.

The rate of exchange of carbon dioxide between forests and the atmosphere, and the flow of water vapour into the atmosphere from forests, can be measured continuously using sophisticated instruments placed on towers situated above different types of vegetation. The towers have to be placed in quite large areas – a square kilometre or more - with uniform topography covered by forest of uniform age and composition. The difference between the downward flow of carbon dioxide because of uptake by photosynthesis during the day, and the upward flow because of respiration, at night – gives a direct measure of the rate of carbon capture by photosynthesis, and hence forest growth rates. Around the world, hundreds of these ‘flux’ towers, as they are called, have been installed in different types of forest. They provide the ‘gold standard’ against which to compare our models. We have seven of them over forests in Australia, covering tropical rainforest and several types of eucalyptus.

There have been many comparisons between measurements of forest photosynthesis, made from flux towers over days, weeks and seasons, and estimates derived from models using satellite measurements of forest structure, foliage area, radiation interception and foliage condition, associated with the area round the towers.  The results indicate that the models can be used with confidence to predict the rates at which forests capture carbon dioxide and convert it into carbohydrates.

So the evidence from two entirely independent techniques indicates that we can satisfactorily model forest growth rates from measurements made in space.

And we can do more. Forests are disturbed and damaged by logging, wildfires, insect attacks or climate change. The remarkable array of sensors on earth-observing satellites allows us to identify these disturbances, and the areas affected across the whole globe. We can monitor, over time, the recovery – or progressive degradation – of the forests. To identify the effects of climate change we need models that allow us to evaluate the importance of extended droughts or increasing temperatures. We also need to evaluate the effects of pollutants or other factors that change the structure and productivity of forests. The ubiquitous satellites above us provide us with the information we need to do all this.

The whole business is fascinating, exciting and very important. I just regret that I am no longer involved with it – but then I’m even older than Robyn Williams so am comfortably retired.

Life report

I wrote this a few months ago in response to a request from a columnist who writes for the New York Times for 'life reports' from older Americans; he wanted to do a piece about their experiences. I'm not an American, but I am older, so I sent in my piece which, not surprisingly, he didn't refer to. I wasn't too hurt; he did say he got thousands of offerings and, as I said, I am not an American. However, thought it might be worth putting up on my blog, so here it is.

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I was born in 1938 in the country then known as Rhodesia. An African farm was a good place for a boy free to wander in the bush, much of the time with an air rifle. I was vaguely aware that things were tough for my parents, and also aware that the African people who worked for us were extremely poor, but concern over that, and the fact that we — the white people — had taken over their country, only came much later. My mother taught me until I was 11, when I was packed off to boarding school.

Seven undistinguished years later school was over and, after 18 weeks national service training I took an excruciatingly boring job in a government office. To the undisguised relief of my boss, I resigned after about 18 months. Which left the question: what to do now?  My school results were marginally good enough to get me into a South African university (there was no university in Rhodesia at that time) so, after difficult discussions  with my long-suffering parents I applied to study agriculture and they found the money to fund my first year. After that, assuming I passed (an event that my relatives all assumed was unlikely), I was on my own.

If you don’t enjoy being an undergraduate you have a problem. I did enjoy it. Also, an element of stubbornness (the idea of proving my relatives correct was not attractive) and the emergence of a surprising capacity to focus, combined to get me through my first year. Later I learned how to study effectively. Money problems were sorted out by loans and a small scholarship and after four years, to everyone’s surprise, I emerged with a first class degree and a beautiful fiancée: Diana had one year to go when I finished.

My first job was on an agricultural research station in rangeland country in the southern part of Rhodesia. There was a staff of about 20 white professionals and of course (this was still a white-ruled country) many more black assistants and labourers. The research we were doing wasn’t particularly high-powered, but it was interesting and potentially very useful to the country. Diana and I were married not long after she finished her degree and she had to adapt to life in a rather limited community. She managed fine, but I got an itch to get more involved with science — to publish papers and test myself in a  wider world,. This led to us moving to South Africa and then, through a set of curious chances[1] to Scotland on a one-year fellowship, intended to support one post-graduate.

We had four little girls by that time — we were good Catholics and anyway, it took us a while to figure out what was causing them — so this move was, in the view of my wife’s parents anyway, irresponsible lunacy. But we went. My wife is a brave lady; it was the only chance we were going to get to go overseas and we reckoned we would survive somehow. It was the key move of our lives. Life wasn’t easy because we were really dirt poor, but we survived the Scottish climate, and the social customs — the third time we had had to adapt to a community new to us. It’s different when you have kids.

I also had to learn a lot of new science quickly: I became an ecophysiologist working on the interactions between weather and trees. That’s been my area of research ever since then. The fellowship was extended from one year to three and I began to work my way into the sub-culture of scientists with PhDs from Oxford and Edinburgh and Stanford. There were opportunities to go to international meetings and I found that I could get scientific papers published in international journals. A job came up in England leading a small team, so we moved there. Another community. Dreams of returning to Africa were pushed ‘onto the back burner’.

The girls knew they were African, but settled comfortably for England. Diana taught school and ran girl guides. I obtained my PhD and gradually moved up (if that’s the right word) through the system: more meetings, more publications. Eventually I noticed that some younger scientists were seeking ME out! Science was exhilarating and satisfying.  I was a visiting lecturer[2] in Western Australia for a year we all enjoyed then, when we had been in England longer than we ever thought we’d stay, I was appointed to a senior research management job in Australia’s premier scientific organization. So, it seemed, the boy from the African bush had made it in the world of international science.

We have been in Australia for 30 years. The girls are all married — apparently happily: we were blessed with comely, smart kids, who can manage their lives. (Maybe we did things right in their growing up.) They are our greatest friends and we have 12 grandchildren. I am now retired — we’re in yet another community — my third book was published last year and my golf game is deteriorating  (old age is not a condition I would recommend, except for the alternative).

Regrets: not many, except for the usual embarrassing events that we probably all have locked in our memories, undoubtedly far more important to us than to anyone else who may remember them. With regard to the big decisions — no regrets. We took our chances and they paid off.  If I were to presume to give advice to young people, I would say: ‘go for the thing that will let you challenge yourself; take the long, high-risk shots (unless, perhaps, the consequences of failure could be catastrophic.) That way lies fulfillment.’

But there’s a price to be paid for a peripatetic life. Every time you move you have to adapt to a new community and that takes time and effort and, sometimes, a psychological toll. We have lived in five different countries and I have worked in several others for extended periods — including the United States, at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, TN, and with NASA in Washington DC. We have left a trail of great friends round the world, but we seldom, if ever, see most of them. At this stage of my life I find myself looking back with vain regret: it would have been good to have ended up in Africa, where my roots are, in the community that I grew up with. Many are gone but a nucleus remains. And most Africans are great people, although Zimbabweans are currently afflicted with an appalling kleptocratic tyranny.

I might presume to say a word about marriage. The central support through my life has been — and is — my wife. The essential ingredient for a happy and successful marriage, we believe, is that the first consideration in any decision must be what is best for your partner. What does she/he want to do? It might seem that Diana has made all the concessions for my career, and indeed she worked very hard for it, but for 17 years in Australia I supported her, financially and practically, in the work with youth that she loved and did so well. (For that she was rewarded with a national medal.) We are not calculating balance sheets, just trying to fill with rewarding activity the time we have left.

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[1] With acknowledgements to ‘The Mikado’

[2] ‘professor’ in the American system

A sense of place

A great many people round the world today live in countries that are not those they grew up in. This may be from choice — they emigrated from their country of origin, looking for a better life — or because they left, intending to go back, but never did, or because they were forced out by war or persecution. That may have been political, racial or even religious — the last less common than it used to be, but it still happens.

It’s a conventional cliché to picture expatriates getting together and reminiscing about (what was) home. I remember when I was a young man in the country then called Rhodesia, I and my fellow-Rhodesians used to get quite irritated with the English immigrants who poured into the country after WWII. They constantly referred to England as home while, as far as we — the native white Africans – were concerned, these people had come to Rhodesia to make a life and a home, so they should refer to their adopted country as ‘home’, and get on with adapting to whatever was different in the way of life there. This matter of integration into adopted countries is one of the major issues arising in relation to immigration programs. In Australia there have been long and heated arguments about multiculturalism, which is the policy that says immigrants are welcome to preserve and indeed maintain the cultural practices of their native countries, provided always they do not violate Australian laws and customs. This tends to result in ghettos; enclaves of foreign cultures within, but separate from, the mainstream. The other approach — far more sensible in my view (I haven’t moved far in my opinions in this area since I was young!) — is to aim at assimilation: integration of immigrants into the mainstream culture and society. This, in due course, should lead to a more coherent and unified society

But, whatever system pertains, most people who have emigrated (I suspect) hold in their hearts (as the saying goes — it’s actually nothing to do with hearts but all to do with heads) some image, some concept, albeit usually idealised, of the country and society in which they grew up. In most cases there is a strong element of nostalgia about this. I am not immune to it. I am Australian; this country has been good to me and my family and we are well integrated into its society. But at the root of my being, in my blood (another widely-accepted saying with doubtful physiological justification) I am an African. My roots are in the country where I, and my parents, were born; where I grew up. Intellectually I am well aware that that country no longer exists: it has been destroyed, socially, by the Mugabe regime that has governed it almost since the hand-over to black government in 1980 (there was a short-lived interim regime before he took over). Mismanagement and corruption have also gone a long way to destroying it physically. The countryside is denuded of trees around the towns; farms  that were well-kept and well-run have fallen into decay and ruin. Population pressure and poor farming practices are degrading the land. Except in remote areas, such as along the Zambezi, the wildlife has gone — although it must be acknowledged that this was largely the situation under white government. So I harbour no delusions about returning: that is not an option; there is no place for the likes of me in Zimbabwe. All I can do is visit Africa occasionally and sometimes, when something about Australia is particularly frustrating and irritating (such frustration and irritation are usually generated by politicians and the media) indulge in dreams of what might have been.

Diana and I left Rhodesia in 1964, just before Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, which led, a few years later, to bloody civil war with the African freedom fighters. The Rhodesians called them terrorists, but in the end international pressures and sanctions, as well as unsustainable losses, forced them to negotiate, leading to black government. We weren’t part of what was called ‘the chicken run’: those who left Rhodesia because of the political situation, but if we had stayed I would have had to fight in that war and could well have been one of its casualties. We left because I was pursuing a career — I wanted to be a scientist and to achieve that had to go where there was more opportunity. So we left Rhodesia and went to South Africa. A few years later, taking an unlikely opportunity, we went to Scotland. I wanted to find out if I could compete with people with PhDs from Oxford and Stanford; I wanted to publish papers in international journals and attend meetings where clever people presented the latest results from their research at the cutting edge of the field. So in Scotland and, later, England, I began to work my way into the sub-culture of the area of science I worked in and found that I could compete compete with those people with PhDs from Oxford and Stanford. I could publish papers in international journals and present my own research at high-powered meetings. I became a recognised member of the sub-culture. Time passed and dreams of returning to Africa faded and died. Eventually I was offered a senior job in Australia’s premier scientific organization. So we moved again.

The job in Australia represented the peak of what I could aspire to, a position from which I could influence science as well as work at it. Taking it up required a very steep learning curve, since I had become a manager and director of research and also needed to deal with the politics involved in forestry — the field of research that my division (as the unit was called) was concerned with. And we settled comfortably into Australia. My children thrived and grew into wonderful people with families of their own.

Through all this my wife, Diana, supported me loyally, ran our home and was the major partner in raising the children, so the way they have turned out owes much to her. For seventeen of the twenty-one years we spent in Canberra she also ran a large group of young people — more than a thousand passed through her hands over those years — organizing, supervising and taking part in activities that included challenging hikes, camping, hunting, teaching life-saving in winter-cold rivers and, through it all, endless counseling and discussions that prepared her charges for later life. It took a great deal of her time — weekend after weekend, trips into the bush that lasted ten days, often several times a year. It was my turn to provide support, both personal and financial. For that work she was awarded the Medal of he Order of Australia.

Now we are retired and have to admit to getting old. I am sad that there’s nothing I can do for Africa. The experience and knowledge — perhaps even a modicum of wisdom — that I have accumulated over fifty years could be useful there, but no-one would be interested. The teeming populations of Zimbabwe and South Africa, and all of sub-Saharan Africa, will continue to increase, pushing the cities and sprawling shanty towns ever further into the country; the bush and farmlands will be progressively degraded, either in the name of progress and mismanaged development or because of the continual pressure of poor people moving into any area where they can clear land and scratch a living. African politics seem unlikely to improve: corruption and nepotism will continue to flourish, driven by greed and selfishness and the lust for power.

Perhaps I am unduly pessimistic but I don’t think so. I regret that the world my grandchildren will inherit will be uglier and poorer than the one we have known, rent by tensions and wars generated by competition for water and resources and the increasing pressures of the poor and desperate on those places that remain good to live in. I regret that my grandchildren will never see the Africa that I like to remember. Perhaps they will be expatriates too, leaving Australia or Bermuda, where some of them are now growing up, to wander and settle in other countries, either on purpose or, like us, because of circumstances. In that case, as has always happened, dreams of the homeland and society where they grew up will probably haunt them too. But perhaps — who knows — my pessimism will turn out to be misplaced and humans will exercise the wisdom that undoubtedly exists in our societies to solve the world’s problems. That wisdom is currently smothered by materialism and stupid ideologies, but it needs to be released so that we might conserve and live in harmony with the natural world of which we are an integral part, not just in Africa, but everywhere.

On our problems and their (hypothetical) solution

2. Things that need attention – and how we might go about it

One of the obvious areas of concern for the world is the use, particularly by developed countries, of fossil fuels. We need to massively reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn. Fossil fuels provide most of the energy used throughout the world. The energy is far too cheap since no country puts a price on the adverse consequences of burning coal and oil. These include the air pollution emitted by cars and power plants, congestion from overloaded streets and highways caused by our obsessive love affair with motor transport in all its forms; oil spills, the health costs of coal mining and the damage to water supplies and landscapes caused by effluent from coal mines. The dangers of climate change caused and exacerbated by ‘greenhouse gases' such as the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, are becoming increasingly apparent.

All these effects should be costed. Imposing appropriate costs, probably best in the form of taxes, would radically alter patterns of resource use and pollution, but such taxes are ferociously resisted almost everywhere, and the political will and mandate to impose them on self-interested and willfully blind business communities do not exist in any of the major world economies. (The new carbon tax in Australia is a move in the right direction, although it’s seriously flawed in the level of refunds to polluters — for purely political reasons — which will greatly reduce its effectiveness.) Nevertheless, it is inarguable (assuming the arguments are objective and focussed on empirical information rather than ideological assertion) that the innovations associated with energy substitution, changes in transport systems, substituting other materials for plastics, and so on, would not only reduce pollution and conserve oil for high priority uses but would also generate new industries and jobs.

Mass production based on robotics, computer controlled machine tools and assembly lines turn out avalanches of cheap goods, ranging from cars to clothes. These production methods had their origin in the Industrial Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, and the American innovations in assembly line production of the early twentieth. As computer power, and the sophistication of machine tools have increased, the number of people employed, relative to the output of factories, has almost certainly fallen steeply (although I have no data to support this). Suggesting that we should ‘wind the clock back’ and revert to far greater use of manual labour — preferably skilled, with enough variation in the jobs done by individuals to make those jobs reasonably interesting and fulfilling — might sound like impractical utopianism, but it is conceptually possible. Converting concept into reality is another matter.

Plastics have a multitude of uses in modern societies, but many of them are trivial and wasteful. Packaging, and the waste to which packaging is a major contributor, uses absurd amounts of resources and energy. Most items purchased from a modern shop or supermarket are encased in at least two, and frequently up to four layers of packaging, most of which are plastic in some form. Rationalisation of this unnecessary use of materials is urgently needed.

Modern, large-scale but intensive, agriculture is responsible for world-wide soil degradation as well as being an enormous direct consumer of energy, and of artificial fertilizers herbicides, insecticides. The practices are defended on the grounds that they are essential to provide the food needed by burgeoning human populations. In fact agriculture practiced this way is essentially big business, and little of the food produced reaches the hungry masses in Africa and Asia. For example, huge amounts of corn in the United States go to feeding animals in feedlots and to ethanol production. Soy bean production in Brazil underlying large-scale destruction of the Amazon forests, is aimed at the American market. There is also an alarming trend for countries such as China (particularly) and the UK to buy up land in poor countries — mainly in Africa — and use it for large-scale food production. The products are exported out of the poor country, which may itself be short of food.

The soil loss and degradation associated with most large-scale agriculture will, in the near future become a matter of immense concern and importance as crop yields fall. The suggestion that large-scale agriculture should be abandoned in favour of small-scale, much more labour intensive systems, geared to conserve the soil as well as produce food and fibre, will no doubt be scornfully dismissed by many. They will argue that large-scale agriculture is essential to produce the food the world needs, which is a very dubious argument since most large-scale agriculture is carried on by agri-business companies and not much of the food produced by those, in the US and Australia and Canada, actually gets to the billions of underfed — or, indeed, starving — people in poor countries. They are expected to pay for it, and of course they can’t. A big re-think is needed in this area.

Factory farming — the cruel practice of raising chickens, pigs and cattle in intensely crowded conditions, where they are fed with (usually purpose-grown) grains, frequently laced with antibiotics — is said to be essential to provide the eggs and meat that society needs. There are other solutions, not least the perfectly feasible possibility of reducing the amounts of eggs and (particularly) meat in modern diets in developed countries. Furthermore, factory farming produces large quantities of manure which, because of the location of the production units in small areas, and the costs of transport and distribution, are not returned to the land.

Overfishing and the destruction of the once bountiful ocean fish stocks are already having massive impacts round the world. Large ships that can cross the world deploy nets kilometers long, clearing the oceans of life, dominate the fishing industries. United Nations statistics indicate that 80% of the world’s fisheries have either collapsed, or are on the brink of collapse. Collapse is indicated by population reductions to levels where they can no longer replace themselves and, unless fishing is stopped completely, the target fish species will become extinct. In some cases it is too late; they will become extinct anyway. In developed countries the lives of communities that have, for generations, been based on fishing, are no longer the same. Small trawlers, operating in areas where the catches are steadily falling, cannot compete with the industrial-scale ships. In many South-east Asian countries, and coastal areas of China, millions of people have depended on fishing for hundreds of years. Their livelihood has disappeared with the collapse of fish stocks, not only from over-fishing but also as a result of pollution from the land that has destroyed fish spawning areas. (This has some unexpected results: for example, many of the fishermen in southern Indonesia have resorted to using their boats to transport people trying to enter Australia illegally — people smuggling.)

And so we could go on. The question is: HOW are we going to change things? How can these developments be reversed in the face of ever-increasing human numbers and demands? The answer, I think, is already clear. Action has to come from the younger generation; the people born in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s have to lead and implement action. The problems will be solved — unless solutions are imposed by disasters — by leadership from that generation and by groups of young people developing solutions to problems that they want to focus on, whether those be concerned with energy and transport, the use of plastics, agriculture, fisheries, local pollution or whatever. Campaigns will have to be political and at every level: local, regional, national and international. Eventually, the economic and political dinosaurs who dominate the scene in the developed countries will have to be swept away and replaced by more enlightened groups who understand that wealth and survival in a pleasant world do not consist of rampant and unbridled materialism, which destroy in the name of progress, the natural systems of our world, and the world of every other creature. (It all sounds a bit like early communism and the workers’ campaigns, but we should remember that those were remarkably successful; the fact that state communism was a flawed system does not alter that fact.)

A principle that should be followed in every case is that the problem solving and campaign procedures should be evolutionary. Evolution in biological systems is a process of producing optimum solutions to the problems of survival of living organisms — whether they be plants or animals. The individuals or groups best adapted to particular conditions, and therefore best equipped to survive, are more likely to do so than less well-adapted individuals. If the traits that confer an advantage are genetically transmissible, they are likely to be passed on to succeeding generations. An essential part of the process is selection in response to pressure, whether that is engendered by environmental factors, predation, competition or whatever. So, by analogy, in trying to produce solutions to the problems created by humans, it is not sensible to focus single-mindedly on particular actions that appear, at first sight or to some group or individual, to be the most likely to solve a particular problem. Obviously the solutions proposed must be feasible and economically sensible — which doesn’t mean they have to create financial wealth, but does mean they have to recognise that people need an income to live. Initial decisions have to be taken about what actions should be implemented. In parallel with their implementation, there should always be evaluation of the results and there should be flexibility to change if the results are not as good as they could be or the approach adopted is clearly not working well. In other words, select out the sub-optimal solutions. To do this there has to be a mechanism of evaluating the results, and a willingness to constantly think of better solutions. That way, the procedure evolves with time towards the best that can be done, and can be changed if conditions change. There is no room for stubborn ideology.

In all this, we have to remember that changes in developed countries will affect the billions of people alive today who are not in any position to worry about resource use and environmental matters. For most of the teeming poor of Africa, India, South America and Asia the problem is  getting hold of enough food and fuel to survive and live half-decent lives, with a reasonable modicum of dignity and some hope of improvement. So, while the rich world has to think about reducing its extravagant consumption, ways must be found for the poor and underprivileged to raise their standards of living to levels commensurate with that reasonable modicum of dignity and comfort. But the history of virtually any part of the world shows us that humans are basically selfish, short-sighted and more inclined to aggressive defence of what they have than to large-scale altruism. There is not much chance that the rich nations will unselfishly cut their energy and resource use while making serious contributions — by which I mean a lot more than the nominal contributions to aid made by most of them — to the development of poor countries. We will hold stubbornly to our course, with predictably ugly results, mainly in Asia and Africa but increasingly in the developed western world (which includes China). The human race is unlikely to become extinct, but it is very likely that the combined effects of climate change, massive human populations and the resulting degradation of the earth will mean that those parts of the world where life can be enjoyed in pleasant environments, without enormous stresses, will be progressively reduced.  A cheerful outlook!

On our problems and their (hypothetical) solution

1. The overall situation

I have the word ‘hypothetical’ in the title of these pieces because I doubt the problems of the world will be solved before the ecological and human disasters already happening in Africa and India and parts of China become more widespread. Part of the trouble is that the problems are not universally acknowledged. Denial cannot  lead to solutions. The will to solve them is lacking at both the political and social levels. How widespread and serious the problems become before serious efforts are made to address them is an open question. Despite this, it seems worthwhile to think about how they could be solved. Maybe some of the ideas will be useful to someone.

Large numbers of people, especially among the educated classes — those the conservative (‘right wing’) press calls the chattering classes — are well aware of the problems that humans have generated for themselves and this planet. We know that the way we live now is unsustainable: we’re using renewable resources faster than they can be replaced – destroying fish stocks and forests and using up non-renewables, ­like oil and phosphates for fertilizer, without putting enough effort into solving the problem of what we will substitute for them when they’re all used up. We also know about the consequences of unbridled resource use, in terms of pollution and land degradation and, among the nastier results of human behaviour, the gross pollution of the world by plastic — thrown away to degrade the land and float in the oceans as millions of tons of long-lived garbage, killing huge numbers of sea birds and turtles and dolphins that ingest it.

Most of those who know about all this are worried by it, and there are indications that their numbers are growing, but they’re still small compared to the number of those who don’t understand the consequences of human behaviour or, in many cases, don’t want to know. Many people also realise that unbridled materialism —the accumulation of possessions and indulgence in the luxurious lifestyles that the well-to-do in developed countries take for granted — is not necessarily conducive to happy and contented lives. To a large degree it’s those luxurious lifestyles that are responsible for the pollution and ecosystem degradation; to maintain them demands inputs of energy and resources at greater rates than the world can sustain. Consumerism and luxurious living are the hallmarks of success in our societies; the idea that people should forego buying anything they want has been anathema until recently. A ‘quotation of the day’ in the New York Times, recently, provided a neat summary of the situation: "It was nothing to buy whatever we wanted. Now we just think about what we really need.” Clearly it’s time that everyone thought about what they really need.

None of that will be news to most people. The problem is: how to break the pattern and change the model. Humans being what they are, there’s no point in proposing solutions that would be unacceptable to all but the most idealistic individuals. Nevertheless, the solution — insofar as there is one — must lie in reducing our standards of living, and altering the way the economies of the developed world function. And that has to be achieved without reducing the opportunities for everyone to find what is called ‘gainful employment’; work that pays them enough to keep themselves and their families in reasonable comfort in terms of housing, food and clothing. What constitutes ‘reasonable comfort’, and how much more than that we can expect will certainly be matters for argument, but it’s probably realistic to assume that those whose jobs in themselves offer satisfaction are likely to be content with less in the way of material possessions than those whose work is nothing more than a means to an end. Unfortunately, for most people work is, in varying degrees, tedious, tiring drudgery or, at best, an acceptable way of passing the time with the benefit of providing an income. Ideally, it should be fulfilling and rewarding, providing a sense of accomplishment, of something worthwhile achieved on a timescale satisfying to the individual.

Politicians tend to be sensitive to joblessness and, when the numbers of people without jobs get too high — as is currently the case in the United States, where the jobless rate is around 9% (exactly how that is calculated is not clear to the general public) — there is much pontificating about the need to create jobs, although how this is to be done usually remains opaque. The usual approach is to try to generate more (conventional) economic growth, more consumption. The same old, same old story. But, besides the fact that ever-increasing consumption is unsustainable, the advocates of economic growth tend to ignore the fact that, in the United States and much of Europe in recent years, it has been funded by excessive borrowing, and the resulting debt and has got those countries into serious difficulties. So we need to think again. The aim must be to create millions of satisfying jobs that that lead to more contented and equitable societies and are consistent with reduced consumption of energy and resources. This alone will need a considerable re-think about economics.

I don’t accept the bland (and, in my view, stupid and shortsighted) assurances of various economists, right-wing commentators and red-necked conservatives that all will be well if we can maintain economic growth and consumer spending. The idea that economic growth can continue indefinitely, which is the assumption underlying the way most modern societies are run, is completely unrealistic. Economic growth reflects the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services. It therefore reflects the consumption of energy and materials, as well as human inputs as services. It is modern consumption of raw materials and energy that cannot be sustained.

In seeking solutions for the world’s problems it is sometimes tempting to entertain the idea that we might free ourselves entirely from the tyranny of economics, but that isn’t a useful approach: economics (which should not be confused with economic growth) is a system of assigning values to goods, services and labour; human interactions have been governed by economic systems for millennia. But it’s not an inviolate set of rules; the values assigned to particular goods or activities change with time and from place to place. We have to bring about changes in our economic systems that are based around the re-ordering of values. For example, we will have to change the — generally very low — values we assign to environmental services. We will also have to re-value upwards (i.e. make much more expensive) goods  that use a great deal of energy in their manufacture, including plastics made from oil.

This will require political action as well as changes in consumer demand, neither of which will come easily. Nevertheless, it seems worth thinking about the sort of changes and action that are required. It’s also worth thinking about the procedures we would need to follow to make progress; I have some comment on that later in this piece. At the moment there’s no indication, in any developed society, that the political will to restructure society exists; most politicians are concerned primarily — if not entirely — with their own influence, prosperity and political survival. These are seen to depend on pandering to their electorates and being seen to be acting in the (perceived) best short-term and selfish economic interests of those electorates. Leadership and vision are conspicuously lacking in virtually all the developed world —at least in the democratic countries, where focus groups and opinion polls substitute for political leadership. In the United States the whole political process is distorted by the financial power of special interest lobbyists.

Following on from that, it is also essential that international banking and finance systems, with their arcane and complex packaged securities, bonds and derivatives and structured debt packages, be brought under control to halt the distortion of markets that they cause. The behaviour of these institutions has undoubtedly contributed to the extent of current problems, since they represent and enhance the delusion that money and materialism are the ultimate arbiters of value.

Friends

We have led rather peripatetic lives, have lived for periods of years in five different countries and for shorter periods in several others. So we have been to a great many interesting places and met lots of interesting people. Which may sound exciting, and it has been – it certainly hasn’t been boring – but there is a downside: we have left good friends all over the world, many of whom we hardly ever see, and some of whom we will undoubtedly never see again. I’ve written about friends before (blog of Nov. 2010); this piece has a different slant on the subject.

 Brian, here with our daughter Sue, goes back to university days

 

 

 

 

Diana and I met when we were students at a South African university, and some of the best friends we ever made are from that era, 50 years ago. We were conventional people of our time and married and had kids when we were quite young: among the most durable of our friends were those we made when the kids were little, which in our case was in South Africa, and then in Scotland. At that time of life groups of young mothers, dealing with small children and their activities, meet regularly. The progress and problems of kids are matters of consuming mutual interest and there’s a very good chance that strong friendships will develop. These lead to socializing that includes husbands; in some cases couples find themselves compatible, leading to family friendship. In our case there were also, of course, professional friends, although from a family point of view these were more likely to stay in the category of acquaintances than become family friends. We're still in touch with some of the friends from that time, although it was all more than 40 years ago, but since we moved on contact has generally been reduced to Christmas cards (now heading for history as the Christmas letter circulated by e-mail takes over) and the occasional e-mail.

We moved from Scotland to England and were there for ten years, covering the main period of the kids’ schooling. The patterns of social contacts changed as everyone got older, but we still made some good friends. Then we went to Australia and had to start again: new schools for the kids, a new social milieu, new activities and professional friends. We were many years in Canberra, long enough to put down quite strong roots – we felt we belonged and there was time for friends to become ‘old friends’. We hadn’t intended to move when it was retirement time, but we did. There were good reasons for it, but that’s another story and the move had all the usual consequences: try to keep in touch with the friends you left behind; make new friends, adapt to a new social environment.

Looking back on all this it’s inevitable that I think about what constitutes good friends; what’s the difference between them and the countless acquaintances who have come and gone over the years. A great deal has been written about what friendship means, and its importance. Without getting too involved in psychology and philosophising, I would say that the basic criteria of real friendship are interest in the other person, enjoying their company, being prepared to accept inconvenience  - or even make significant sacrifices - for them, if necessary. The list could obviously be expanded, discussed and elaborated. At its best friendship is a kind of love, and has many faces. 

Where we live now, we're in an era of acquaintances, of friendly people but few real friends, a time of polite social interaction at dinner parties where conversation is often banal and we start watching the time half way through the evening, wondering when we can politely leave; of community activities and gatherings of various sorts where we go through the motions, share food and a few drinks and go home. Friends at the golf club really don’t matter in any basic, visceral sense – they’re just acquaintances. We meet some good, generous and public spirited people who would not hesitate to help anyone who needed it, but whether we really connect with them in a way that matters emotionally is another matter. That gets harder as the years go by.

Sune, from Sweden, and Dick, from Oregon; our friends across 30 years

I suppose it’s a very different story for people who stay in one place virtually all their lives, part of a stable community, socializing in adulthood with people they have known since they were all children together. This must be conducive to comfortable relationships; where there is a long shared history there is no need to explain allusions to people and events of the past. (There is a darker side to this, of course, and that’s the persistence of old feuds, and possibly hatreds. There are advantages in being able to leave unpleasant people and events behind!) An interesting question is: is the situation of old-established, relaxed and comfortable companionship, with its lack of novelty, long history of shared experience and possible underlying tensions, much better than our situation?

Probably. Those who have lived all (or most) of their lives in one place have a much better sense of place and of belonging. They know the community they belong to; in fact they probably seldom if ever think about it. Life goes along in its accustomed rhythms, with the well-known faces around. Strangers can be ignored – in old and conservative communities strangers may be treated with suspicion: they don’t fit in. One of the disadvantages of the peripatetic lifestyle is the feeling of rootlessness, of not really belonging anywhere. We have met hundreds – possibly thousands – of interesting people over the years, in various places, and have made many good and interesting friends but (as I said earlier), we’ve left most of them behind. If we travel to see them, or they come here, their company is as good as ever, but the opportunities are limited. We have also met many people who are amiable and pleasant, whose company we have enjoyed, but who have never come to mean a great deal to us. 

Diana with Auro, who came from Brazil, a friend of 20 years

Bu the question that keeps coming up, for those who have lived in various places, is: “where do we belong?” The answer depends on more than friends, although they are very important. Do we ‘belong’ where we live now, or is this another temporary stop? Few of our important friends live here – or near here. I think it’s fairly general, in fact fundamental to most people, that their sense of where they belong is anchored in the place they grew up, in childhood friends and neighbours who knew them, and so on. In our case going back to where we originally came from, to live the rest of our lives there, is not an option. The communities we grew up with are gone, those we knew are dead or scattered across the world. The countries we grew up in – Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa – have changed beyond recognition. 

There's no point in whingeing about it, or feeling sorry for ourselves. A reality check is provided by thinking about the way refugees feel: we had options, none of which were bad, but, according to the UNHCR, there are currently about 16 million people in the world who are classed as refugees, fleeing violence, war and oppression, not to mention another 25 million so-called displaced persons. For most of them all the options were unpleasant. Every one of them would like to live in a safe and stable place, never mind where they grew up. For millions of children the growing up place is a squalid, crowded, camp. The implications are obvious and I could get seriously side-tracked here, but will leave it at that, just adding that the world’s exploding global human population is a significant factor among those causing all that misery.

And those who matter most - family.

Our wandering lifestyle has brought us great rewards and the friends we made were immensely valuable and remain valued. In periods when I feel down, I might wish that some things have been different, but they weren't. We made our choices and can only be grateful for the good things, and the good friends, we've had  - and still have, scattered across the world – and the good things that we have now.