Name

: Muhammad Sulthoanuddin Akbar

Student ID

: 1306448634

Major

: Civil Engineering

Summary of Chapter 5 Natural Systems Under stress

Introduction
Note the feedback loop between ecology and economy and the basis of civilized life
on soil and the gifts of the earth. Brown does not mention the crushing foreign debt
that forces Haiti to sell its resources at bargain prices or the corrupt elites that
plundered Haiti's natural and human heritage.

Add to the mix population growth. As deserts expand and coastal area recede,
population densities rise and thousands become environmental refugees. Lester
Brown wrote of this in November, 2006:

Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing

deserts and rising seas. Measured by the land area that can support human habitation,
the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by the

addition of over 70 million people per year, are now also fueled by the relentless
advance of deserts and the rise in sea level.

The introduction to this dramatic chapter reminds us that all civilization is based on
the soil. Indeed, about half of humanity even today are land based people living in
subsistence-based cultures. But the land, even the sea, is under the threat of the
ecologist's nightmare scenario: overshoot and collapse. Brown, again in reserved
tone, tells a harrowing story.

He focuses on key natural life support systems under human assault:

1. Shrinking forests
2. Eroding soil
3. Deteriorating rangelands
4. Advancing deserts
5. Collapsing fisheries
6. Disappearing plants and animals, extinction

As members of the Ramapo College community, are generally not land based people.
Note how many of the ecological holocausts Brown depicts intersect within the
poorer regions of the world, particularly Africa and Asia, where 4.8 billion people
struggle to survive within subsistence cultures. This recalls the Malthusian dilemma
of humanity swamping and degrading the carrying capacity of ecosystems. Note,

however, that most of the damage can be averted with forethought and intervention of
the destructive patterns of human behavior, often rooted in the economy. Solutions
are not presented here, but issues are. Examine them, for they are serious, although
distant from our daily lives. Our children's future will depend on finding policy
remedies for the agenda elaborated in this chapter.

Shrinking Forests
Heed Brown's observation: "World forest loss is concentrated in developing
countries." Brown provides an overview here. Brown depicts how deforestation
occurs in different places, not citing a single cause for all regions. Hard pressed
native populations forage for fuelwood and destroy remaining patches of forest in
Africa's Sahel and on the Indian subcontinent. Commercial lumber logging, often for
tropical hardwood, clear cuts whole forests in Africa and Southeast Asia. Often,
foreign-owned countries purchase the rights to the forests at a discount provided by
national governments desperate for hard currency needed to pay debt service.
Ranchers and farmers destroy forests for easily exhausted plantations, then move on,
repeating the destruction--subsidized again by public policies that never solve their
problems. Even alternative fuels, such as biodiesel come at the expense of
deforestation. And as forests denude hillsides, erosion of topsoil and vast flooding
inevitably follow. The feedbacks between ecological destruction and human culture
intensify the perverse downward spirals.

Brown frequently points to model programs that reverse these trends, but that appears
absent in this section. He also does not comment on the relationship of deforestation,
the diminishment of the lungs of the planet, on CO2 increases and on global
warming. The interconnections throughout this chapter, and the whole book, must be
kept in mind: One Earth.

Losing Soil
We are all familiar with the story of the Dust Bowl of the U.S. Great Plains in the
1930s depicted in John Steinbeck's classic, The Grapes of Wrath. With that in mind,
ponder the contemporary Dust Bowls of China, Africa, and recently Russia. Ethiopia,
perpetually at the brink of starvation, loses an estimated one billion tons of topsoil per
year due mainly to erosion.

How important is soil? Brown begins this section noting "The thin layer of topsoil
that covers the planet's land surface is the foundation of civilization." In the following
paragraph he concludes: "Today the foundation of civilization is crumbling." Brown
does note some major regional policies in China, which has recognized that economic
growth and population pressure often destroys essential environmental services. The
U.S. has made great progress in reversing soil conservation. Experience shows that
remedial policies are feasible and affordable. Yet, the problem of soil erosion
intensifies--and agricultural capacity with it. Note again the perverse feedback loops.

Deteriorating Rangelands
Rangelands, 20% of the earth's surface, shift over time, often due to the degradation
of human habitation, human population growth, and the increasing population of
ruminants such as cattle, sheep, and goats, now numbering 3.2 billion. The overlap of
rangeland with farmland shifts, and human cultures collide. Consider the excerpt
below from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology study Environmental
Degradation and Interethnic Disputes in Darfur. As you read this, note the complex
relations between land use and human culture. I have highlighted text that illustrates
the underlying social ecology:

Drought is one common feature of environmental change that has been associated
with conflicts in many African countries. The severe drought of the early 1970s that
hit African Sahel countries instigated a series of changes that affected seriously the
lives of millions of people in that belt for ever. The western part of the Republic of
Sudan was among those areas deeply affected by that drought which culminated in
the 1984 infamous famine. Almost exactly two decades after Darfur hits the news
again as experiencing the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. This time
the crisis resulted from the on-going civil war that has polarized Darfurian people into
two non-distinctive ethnic groups: Africans and Arabs. Since most African
Darfurians are settled cultivators and most Arab Darfurians are nomadic pastoralists,
a legitimate question arises in this case regarding the extent to which the current

conflict is somehow related to competition over natural resources; notably land. A

further question to be asked is how much of the competition over natural resources is
directly linked to environmental degradation? As time goes by, there is growing
demand for more productivity in order to feed an ever increasing population. Keeping
the delicate balance in issues of land use becomes more difficult because customary
land tenure systems have less elasticity to enable them to cope with changing
conditions. On the other hand, new changes can play an important role in turning an
otherwise peaceful coexistence between groups into a hostile confrontation or even a
full-scale war. For that matter, some researchers tend to consider ecology as an
important factor that explains many conflicts in Africa today (chiefly Suliman, 1999).
When there is a change in the environment the capacity of land to sustain peoples
livelihoods shrinks; but when this is combined with a population increase a conflict is
already under way. In the case of Darfur, the combined effects of a multitude of
factors culminated in a chronic land degradation. Overgrazing and deterioration of
range land resulted from the fact that much of the land in the semi-desert and goz
zones lost their capacity to grow grazing grasses, forage, and trees. Combined with
drought the human factor (in the form of tree-felling, excessive cultivation and
overgrazing) contributed greatly in speeding up the desertification process to the
extent that vast areas lost their capacity to sustain traditional livelihoods for its
inhabitants. Some experts assert that millet cultivation in the semi-arid zone has
dangerous implications for the environment and have even advocated the prohibition
of millet cultivation beyond certain boundaries (Ibrahim, 1980).

Those not faint of heart might view this gruesome BBC photo that depicts a similar
situation.

This phenomenon is familiar throughout Africa and Asia. Brown speaks to several
case studies. China seems to have mounted effective remedial policies. Few others
have.

Advancing Deserts
China is the main front in the battle over the spread of deserts, typically into
rangeland:

China is now at war. It is not invading armies that are claiming its territory, but
expanding deserts. ... WangTao reports that over the last half-century, some 24,000
villages in northern and western China have been entirely or partly abandoned as a
result of being overrun by drifting sand.

Desertification has been concentrated in Asia and Africa, where 4.8 billion of the
earth's 6.5 billion people live. As the case study of Darfur, above, demonstrates, for
many subsistence cultures, the rapid spread of deserts is a holocaust like no other.
Brown this time offers no simple solution other than to recommend that the
population growth of humans and their domesticated ruminants decelerates.

Collapsing Fisheries
I generally consume fish twice each week, always have. Maybe you do, too. Our
children probably will not, unless fish farming expands enormously, despite the
ecological havoc it brings. The oceans have been dramatically overfished, with the
accompanying economic dislocation and ecological decline.

Consider some chilling anecdotes:

The 500-year old Canadian cod fishery, has collapsed in the 1990s, throwing
40,000 workers out of their jobs.

Estimates claim that 90% of the large ocean fish has disappeared in the last
fifty years.

A Japanese sushi restaurant will pay $50,000 for a large bluefish tuna, a
species that has declined by 94%.

The harvest of Caspian sea sturgeon, a prized delicacy, has declined from
27,700 tons in 1977 to 461 tons in 2000, a huge regional economic loss.

Brown presents issues for a global agenda and saves policy prescription for later. The
only remedy he sites is fish farming, which requires land-based fish-food production
and creates environmental problems. I suspect that our children will eat less fish and
pay more for their catch.

Disappearing Plants and Animals

We are well into the sixth great wave of extinction, although this is the first induced
by humanity, an evolutionary setback. If you are, like me, fond of habitat, plants, and
animals, you should be disturbed. If you take any of the thousands of pharmaceuticals
derived from nature, you should also be concerned about the loss of knowledge and
potential. You get the point.

When charismatic birds or mammals are threatened, that gets people's attention. One
mammal humans warm to, the polar bear, has now been joined with another huge
environmental challenge: climate change. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is to rule
any day on whether to propose listing the polar bear as endangered. Environmental
groups such as the Center for Biological Diversity say global warming is melting the
ice on which the bears live. Climate change is likely to raise awareness about species
extinction.

For a more scientific treatment of extinction, check out the entry in Wikipedia. For a
less anthropocentric (human based) discussion of extinction, use Wikipedia's entry on
deep ecology See also a treatment from an environmental ethics position

Protecting the diversity of life on earth requires protection of habitat. The discussion
above reveals the pressures that will make that problematic. Add to that the impact of
climate change on existing habitat and species, and diversity is further threatened.
Then consider the invasion of exotic species, that for example constantly threaten my
lake in New Hampshire. Worse still is the effect on rich ecosystems within the
tropics, such as the vast Amazon. Brown notes that we are entering a new world. His
only optimistic gesture is that our knowledge base has increased, or rather that our
ignorance has diminished a bit.