This post is an 13 080-word extract from an unpublished, incomplete blog post written in 2018/19, Biodiversity in the Age of Apocalypse. It is reproduced here in the hope that it may be of interest or use to those holding that the State’s Forestry Exit Policy and its consequences equate to “deforestation” at Tokai Park and Cecilia.
Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity?
Currently, simplistic notions of afforestation and reforestation enjoy immense public and private-sector support. Their inordinate popularity, predominantly driven by media and market forces as tools for climate-change mitigation are used, increasingly, to argue for the afforestation of areas not suited to trees of any type – including areas falling within Table Mountain National Park (TMNP). Such arguments not only fly in the face of ecological sensibilities; they are wrong – and dangerously so.
Our history as a species argues against our continued imposition of anthropogenic “order” on a world made increasingly fragile by its natural tendency towards complexity. The explosion of media and the contraction of its ownership through the 20th and 21st Centuries, used and abused by power elites, tells us that by continuing to behave exactly as we have done for thousands of years – but particularly since the Industrial Revolution – we can spend our way out of an existential crisis.
Through unparalleled resource consumption, habitat degradation, species destruction and a blind faith in economic abstractions, we have brought ourselves – in less than the blink of a geological eye – to a time of contradiction and crisis for all species; species which, without us, would have been infinitely better off and far more capable of facing times of uncertainty.
What is the Climate Crisis?
It is a crisis rapidly changing the Earth’s biosphere, the environment making up and sustaining all life.
Is it a problem?
No, it’s not a problem. It’s an existential crisis brought about by humans effecting long-term change to the biosphere for short-term, oft-manufactured and invariably self-serving “benefits”.
We are the problem causing the climate crisis. To mitigate it, all we need do is discontinue business as usual. We know this. We also know that the reward of discontinuing humanity’s current actions far outweighs the benefit of doing something else. And yet, by continuing to speak of doing something else – and of profiting by doing things differently – we lose sight of our continuing failure to do anything at all.
Planting trees – and profiting from them – is not an answer to anything. Dramatically slowing resource use and restoring our environment and its biodiversity – in other words, acting in a manner contrary to that which has been our norm for millennia – are the only viable answers or solutions to the problem, i.e. our behaviour. It is also the only option open to us if we are to successfully mitigate the Climate Crisis and avoid ending life as we know it.
We know this to be true. Reason, physics and the most elementary knowledge of what is in our and other species’ long-term interests tell us so. The answer to the problem is unbelievably simple. But, because it does not cater to our innate greed, we opt for simplistic distractions – such as planting billions of trees in the face of biospheric ruination – and damn future generations to cataclysm.
It is up to us to do the only sensible thing. We will not profit from restoring our environment and its biodiversity. But we may well see life continue rather than come to an end.
Change a complex constant
I have nothing against trees. They and other forms of groundcover have been around for 40 million years and, to most of our formative species, they were home.
And, although our hominid ancestors started forsaking their habitat in the trees anywhere between 11.5 and 3.5 million years ago, trees remain fundamentally rooted in our ability to survive today. It’s not surprising. We haven’t been around very long. Our Universe came into being some 12-14 billion years ago and our solar system, including Earth, only some 4.5 billion years ago. Life (prokaryotes) was evident some 4 billion years ago and, with Earth’s oxygenation through photosynthesis more than a billion years, eukaryotes saw biodiversity taking off with multicellular life gaining a foothold some 1.5 billion years ago.
Animals arrived to a boisterous welcome during the Snowball Earth phase (760-635 million years ago (mya)) and the Cambrian explosion (530 mya), the second seeing Earth move from the Proterozoic to Palaeozoic era. Plants and land animals have been around for 380-400 million years and mammals some 250 million years. Our good friends the dinosaurs hung about “forevah!” (about 35 million years) before departing with a bang some 230 mya and our species ancestors completed their transition to bipedal hominid status some 2 mya. Homo sapiens? We’re Johnny-come-latelys. We’ve only been around a couple of hundred thousand years and have only really had a chance to catch our breath and contemplate our role in the natural order for about 100-65 000 years.
To survive, we needed to. As As C.G. Jung noted, “Adam and Eve would indeed have been inadequate people if they had not noticed which tree the right apples grew on.”
Nevertheless, it’s all been rather sudden for us. So sudden, in fact, that we don’t even register on this wonderfully graphic geological clock from Wikimedia. We may have only recently fallen from our trees, but we feel we’ve been around a while. Yet, as a species, we’ve only been around sine 23:59:59 or a second to midnight. If this clock should make anything obvious, it’s that – gaps in our knowledge aside – time, from our perspective, is accelerating.
Looking back on the past decade, it seems that change has accelerated exponentially and the anxiety it imparts has become increasingly dominant in our lives.
We resist natural change and, where we can, we try to slow or stop it. It’s an equally natural reaction. In as much as our Palaeolithic and Mesolithic forbears accepted their status in the hierarchy of species and, as hunter-gathers, knew no fixed abode, they were acquisitive to an unprecedented degree. Whether they acquired goods for food, clothing, tools, weapons or shelter, they did so like no other species before them.
Even so, until the Neolithic period approximately 10 000 years ago, the 1-15 million people making up the global population of modern humans consumed and transported only that which they could use to sustain their nomadic lifestyles.
If we take it that our history as a species goes back some 200 000 years, it would seem that very little of our time on Earth has known remarkable change. However, we’ve certainly made up for our being late starters. Over nine millennia, we experienced a boom in human population that saw our number rocket from a miniscule 4-5 million to a stratospheric 190 million people by 1700.
The short story is that, for the human species, the wheels appear to have fallen off some 12-9 000 years ago with a decision to go into the agricultural sector and build the occasional civilisation, of which the Mesopotamian Sumer civilisation of some 6 500 years ago was perhaps the first.
The natural order, i.e. getting by and adapting to natural change, was swiftly replaced by the unnatural. The clearing of land, agriculture, irrigation, property ownership, politics, economics, war and the acquisition of more than we need as individuals and societies became our stock in trade for the next 9 000 years.
Our specialty? Deforestation. Although our relationship with trees remained close, it changed from one of being dependent on them to a hearty utilitarianism that proved downright adversarial. Our historians tell us that the Sumers weren’t the only civilisation into asset stripping. From Mesopotamians to Cretans and Ottomans to Hellenistic Greeks and Romans in Europe, through Asia, Meso America and the New World to the Mayan, Incan and Aztec Empires of South America, we axe-wielding humans looked to trees as either fuel or obstacles to agriculture. Trees gave us everything we needed. Leaving plows, houses, ships and bridges in our wake, we slashed and burned our way through our global forests, leaving devastation and a greatly reduced biodiversity in our wake.
Following a 2009 study of European deforestation between 1000 BCE and AD 1850 published in Quaternary Science Reviews, The prehistoric and preindustrial deforestation of Europe, Kaplan et al conclude that “our model would support Ruddiman’s hypothesis that humans have had a substantial influence on the climate system since the mid-Holocene.” What Ruddiman tells us is that we have measurably and materially altered the structure of Earth’s atmosphere throughout our 7,000-year slash-and-burn phase.
Change is us. And we went into overdrive as we saw our population soar to a billion by 1800 and, over 220 years that saw us add fossil, nuclear and other fuels to wood, “bewildering change” might best describe a period during which our population exploded from 1 to 7.8 billion and the Co2 content of the air change from a tolerable 280 parts per million (ppm) to an unsustainable and practically devastating 415 ppm today.
An Age of Angst
Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
Alvin Toffler
Hence both our resistance to change and our reluctance to rein ourselves in as we immerse ourselves in the wonders of our ever-fleeting but proliferating new technologies. We feel we have lost agency over change and, therefore, our future. We no longer control it and succumb to its sweep. Overwhelmed by and drowning in its complexity, we experience what popular futurist Alvin Toffler described in his 1970 book, Future Shock, as its accelerative thrust.
Social scientists studying Big History have, like the rest of us, only recently given up swinging from the branches of trees to sit before supercomputers but, unlike us, they draw a direct link between time, change and complexity. From the Big Bang through the origins of life 4 billion years ago to now, they see a continuum of accelerating thresholds of complexity – and they understand that we, much like our forbears, form only a small part of this accelerative thrust towards an increasingly complex diversity in everything.
Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans?
John Gray Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
And what of trees? They form part of a human threshold long since passed. If they are not the mastes of their destinies, we reason, we are – and, as with whales or gorillas, that is an article of faith. There is that within each of us that leads us to believe that we are the lords and masters of all we survey. And why should it not be so? It is not in our nature to bow before any life form (other than God; and God has seen his currency fall dramatically during our recent secularist, supposedly enlightened past).
Why? It’s a matter of survival.
I used to joke to my kids that, to write a psychology textbook, all one need do is surround a diagram of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with text, slap it between two covers and send it off to the publishers. But it’s no joke. Maslow’s assumption, “What a man can be, he must be”, evinces – for most today – a creature most unlike our early Neolithic ancestor, a person capable of seeing herself subject to the whims and appetites of larger animals, a tragic player strutting and fretting a Shakespearean stage peopled by characters from Gerald Durrell‘s My Family and Other Animals.
Believing, on behalf of billions, our basic needs met, a narcissistic and hubristic self-esteem, epitomised today by self-esteem and wellness industries riding the crest of illogical and unsustainable waves of capitalist exploitation, has devastated our planet as we have plundered its resources and reconfigured the biosphere in a psychotic, profit-seeking rampage to become a horribly skewed version of all that we feel “we owe it to ourselves to be”. Had we humans a healthy self-esteem or, more importantly, self-respect, we would not have supplanted long-term survival, modest economies and sustainable living with hedonistic indulgence over the past five or six centuries.
Increasingly, billions must pay the price of a hubris demanding that we sate our insatiable appetite for “more” and we can count ourselves among them.
Ecobusiness, Green Capitalism and the environmental-industrial complex will not avert or lessen the severity of this crisis. As NGOs and supranational organisations have become corporatised, philanthropy has become a search for profit from “patient” social investment and environmental initiatives have become highly profitable marketing campaigns fronting vested interests, how have these economic models fared over the past 50 years?
“Every year, we plant trees,” one popular saying goes. “But we never see a forest.”
Exactly. They have changed nothing. If anything…
In so many ways, it’s a case of “Out with the old; in with the new.” And, having lost sight of our dependence on all that is about us, i.e. our world and its trees; having as, we assume, adapted to a new world and an exploitative and adversarial relationship with the very ecologies that sustain us, we might well consider ourselves that which is old and awaiting the broom that sweeps us clean into the dustbin of Big History.
While change might, in greater part, mean renewal, at the human level it also means ending, loss or the death of the known. If two is company, change is a rapidly growing crowd jostling for room at every level on our increasingly small planet. Do we grieve for that which we have lost or for that which is dying? Ostensibly, no. Today, death is not something about which we, especially those of us raised in the Western idiom, speak. But, as science constantly reminds us, we grieve nonetheless. Obscurely, increasingly so and even as we grapple with the unrelenting bombardment of all that is new. And that leads to a literal host of ills.
You’d need to be 60 years or older to remember the anxiety spread by the development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s. The world lived in a state of existential angst until the 1970s when the peaceful use of nuclear power stations turned dark dread to a free-floating anxiety. 1945 saw the foundation of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and, two years later, the now famous Doomsday Clock made its debut. We are now at two minutes to twelve.
We are as likely see the world plunged into a nuclear winter today as we were back in the 1940s but, a mere three score and ten years later, we are able to imagine ourselves immune to such disasters.
And today we, as humans, face a new threshold. We confront the consequences of our own actions, going back as far as the Neolithic period, in the Climate Crisis and an ungodly, cataclysmic world beyond imagination by 2100. We stand to lose ourselves and approximately 300 000 years of being.
We have, in many ways, already lost our future.
Facing possible nuclear winters and the visions of Hell promised by the Climate Crisis, we know this to be so. But do we grieve for it?
Yes. Again, obscurely. And increasingly.
How do we grieve?
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief traverse denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Whether the science says the Climate Crisis threatens to end the world as we know it by 2100 or 2500, it is ghastly news. Incomprehensible. And yet, unconsciously, subconsciously or consciously, we know this to be inevitable absent fundamental change. Little wonder the first four stages of grief dominate an overwhelmed majority.
Life is precious to us – a statement to which we will return. We do not wish to see its end so, despite its imminence, we deny its inevitability. It gets us in the end though.
Good grief and bad news
How, you might well be asking if you have stayed with me this long, does the above amount to any argument for the clear felling of 25 ha of pine at Lower Tokai Park?
Bear with me. Please. There is a point to all this and, as far as going off at a seeming tangent is concerned, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The severity of the climate crisis has driven us to madness. I’m not surprised. Evolution did not select for us to deal with crises of such magnitude. From the time of our forebears in the Palaeolithic era 2.5 million years ago to today, we have not had to deal with the notion of scarcity. Over millions of years, the Earth has always catered to our acquisitive nature – from ensuring enough food, water, resources and space. We might well have lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short and our species might have undergone periods of near-extinction, but there was always enough for us to recover. And for millions of years, and latterly, as Homo sapiens, our population remained pretty stable.
And now scientists are telling us that if we are to survive the immediate future we need to discard everything that defines us as a civilisation? From our fuels, modes of transport and resources to our lifestyles and economic and governance models? Or face the end of the world as we know it? Little wonder that we deny our grief and take out our anger on those bearing such bad tidings. Little wonder that we engage in bargaining – be it by way of carbon taxes or Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. Do you remember BECCS? It was all the rage until a couple of years ago. As in “We’ll engineer ourselves out of this mess and carry on as before”?
Depression? Witness the opiate, obesity and mental health pandemics springing up in developed and developing countries. Witness the remarkable proliferation and prevalence of previously unheard of autoimmune diseases that have very real and deadly consequences for millions.
Kübler-Ross’s model of grief is not linear. And there is, at some level, acceptance of the reality we face.
In many ways, much like the American kids who would endure nuclear drills during which they ducked under their school desks to protect themselves from nuclear blasts, we are today paying a peculiar form of lip service to the Climate Crisis. We will recycle our waste, eschew plastic straws and shopping bags and, well, carry on as normal. Much like our governments, which declare climate emergencies before acting in ways that belie their declarations.
This has been going on since the 1970s. The Keeling curve is as relevant today as it was back then and Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph is as ubiquitous in climate-change literature as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is in PSY101 textbooks but we are hoping, much as we did when we first faced the prospect of a nuclear winter, that our perception of the threat will change – and all we’ll be left with is additional free-floating anxiety and a return to business as usual.
Despite reading articles such as those readily available at the time of writing this article. Too hot for humans? First Nations people fear becoming Australia’s first climate refugees shouts the Guardian, delivering fact:
In the year to July 2019, Alice Springs had 129 days over 35C, and 55 days over 40C.
It wasn’t meant to be like this – at least, not yet. The national science agency, the CSIRO, predicted that these temperatures would not arrive until 2030.
And Australia experiences hottest day on record and its worst ever spring bushfire danger:
Australia has just experienced its hottest day on record and its worst spring on record for dangerous bushfire weather, according to data released by the Bureau of Meteorology.
Preliminary analysis suggested that Tuesday was the hottest day on record for Australia, with an average maximum across the country of 40.9C. The temperature beat the previous 40.3C set on 7 January 2013, in a record going back to 1910.
Confirming the unprecedented nature of the current devastating fire season, the bureau has also found that 95% of Australia experienced fire danger weather that was well above average.
The following day, Australia’s average temperature soared to a new record average, 41.9 °C or 107.4 °F with Nullarbor in South Australia set the record for the hottest December day on record, recording 49.9 °C or 121.8 °F.
Ho hum. Same as last year. Move on, there’s nothing to see here.
Some are taking it on the chin. Guardian book reviewer Charlotte Wood writes from a smoke-shrouded Sydney:
Internet fights break out over whether it’s obscene to complain about the smoke. Of course it is; we’re lucky, we of the middle-class inner city. I can afford to buy a new Ventolin once a week, for example. I have time to do each load of laundry thrice before it smells clean. My work doesn’t force me to remain outside, breathing in this shit all day long. And of course, no fires have visited inner Sydney. None of ours are among the 600-plus homes burnt to the ground. None of us are among the dead.
But also: it isn’t obscene to find this intolerable. It is intolerable.
After our petulance comes a stoic, patient reasoning. It’s good for us to get this wake-up call. And it’ll be over soon. But that was weeks ago, and the patience has been replaced by a grim, creeping dread. A fear that it won’t be over soon, or ever. It feels like karma. This is what the scientists have warned us about, begged us to think of, all these years. It’s here. And it’s going to get worse.
But still. Perhaps they got it wrong.
Environmental profits
For business, of course, the business of business is business. And it is good.
I first became aware of this when reading an entry posted to Facebook by a PBO ostensibly dedicated to conservation but which, in its fight against biodiversity, shows itself to care very little for the restoration or conservation of our extraordinarily biodiverse Cape Flats Sand Fynbos (CFSF).
The post reads:
The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change? Trees. In 2015 Oxford University researchers recommended afforestation – planting trees where there were none before – as a one of the fundamental means of climate change mitigation.
As is usually the case with those who keep their heads in the shade, no 2015 paper was cited, so I set off in search of it. The casing used in the first sentence provided an obvious clue. It led me, naturally, to a February 2015 article in The Atlantic, The Best Technology for Fighting Climate Change? Trees. You can accuse Parkscape of many things, but originating its own text is not one of them. The research had also been covered by Bloomberg and cited by the London School of Business’s Grantham Institute, about which we’ll read more later.
What intrigued me was the report itself. I found the following:
‘[N]o-regrets’ [Negative Emissions Technologies] NETs (NR NETs), which are characterised by low upfront capital costs, co-benefits (such as enhanced soil fertility), no CCS dependence, economic and environmental co-benefits, and fewer uncertainties, include afforestation, soil carbon improvements, and biochar. Even considering the potential for limited release of stored carbon in the future, they are the most promising NETs between now and 2050.
Ben Caldecott, Guy Lomax & Mark Workman Stranded Carbon Assets and Negative Emissions Technologies Working Paper Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Stranded Assets Programme, Oxford University, February 2015 page 32
“Stranded assets?” you might well ask. Well, Ben Caldecott is Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme. It is counted on to give financial advice to the likes of Lloyds, the Inter-American Development Bank, Chatham House and nation states. See Directors’ Liability and Climate Risk: South Africa – Country Paper – April 2018.
I assume that when our investment classes source their conservation philosophies from upmarket business schools (particularly their stranded asset management programmes), it’s not the “done thing” to advertise it. So, rather than provide a link, we’re treated to a pretty picture of trees proclaiming the following:
Here is a tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Africa. Come and sit under its shade and become, with us, leaves of the same branches and branches of the same tree.
Robert Mangiliso (sic) Sobukwe, 1959
Quite what struggle icon Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s Inaugural Address to the Pan Africanist Congress has to do with company directors’ liability and climate risk troubling the minds of Southern Suburbs’ libertarians is beyond me, but there you go…I’m open to being educated. A coded message from the past perhaps?
The Oxford report? I sighed. It has its origins in 2008’s The Root of the matter: Carbon Sequestration in Forests and Peatlands where we read of its editor, Ben Caldecott:
Ben Caldecott is currently a Research Director and Head of the Environment Unit at Policy Exchange. He was previously Director of the East Asia Section at The Henry Jackson Society. Ben read economics and specialised in China at the universities of Cambridge, Peking and London. He has worked in Parliament and for a number of different UK government departments and international organisations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO).
Just your average environmentalist?
Of Policy Exchange, Wikipedia tells us:
Policy Exchange is a British right-wing/centre-right think tank, created in 2002 and based in London. It has been variously described as “the largest, but also the most influential think tank on the right”, in The Daily Telegraph. The Washington Post said Policy Exchange’s reports “often inform government policy in Britain.” At an event in November 2018, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, described Policy Exchange as “multidisciplinary, highly influential, a productive force at the heart of Westminster and our political system.”
By the time the Governor of the Bank of England made that last observation, Policy Exchange’s Research Director and Head of the Environment Unit was firmly ensconced as the Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme and Associate Professor at The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University.
So even should Ben Caldecott publish a paper in a reputable journal published by Elsevier, such as High-level techno-economic assessment of negative emissions technologies (2012), I would suspect a conflict of interest. Especially given that, in this particular paper, his affiliation is listed as Climate Change Capital, United Kingdom, described here as “an environmental asset management group that advises and invests in companies driven by financial rewards”.
Having piqued my interest by not linking to this private-public nexus between business and government posing as environmental concern, FoTP’s fellow PBO reminded me of my many long hours reading public intellectual Henry A Giroux’s extensive critique of the global financialisation and corporatisation of higher education. If our universities and academic journals are funded or run by corporate interests, you can bet your bottom dollar that industries related in any way to the Climate Crisis – such as forestry – are of immeasurably greater interest to them.
And yes, of course I research the authors of academic papers. It’s second nature. I mean, would you apply for a grant to do research into conservation from The Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund? Of course not. Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces played, with the U.S., its NATO allies and Saudi Arabia, a key role in the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century.
Besides, he might ask you to return the favour. The business of business is, after all, business.
Then came this, i.e. Modeled PM2.5 removal by trees in ten U.S. cities and associated health effects, published in Environmental Pollution in 2013.
Beneath the headline Urban trees save at least one life per year in cities, Treehugger.com advises us that “urban trees and forests are saving an average of one life every year per city. In New York City, trees save an average of eight lives every year.”
Later on in the article, this translates to:
“So literally, if trees die, we die.”
Literally?
The authors? Two are from the US Forestry Service and two are from the Davey Institute. The Davey Institute? Yes, the Davey Institute. What is The Davey Institute? It’s the classroom for these guys. Their website offers you everything from lawn and landscaping services to the ability to locate your local office or pay your utility bill online.
Of course, their core for-profit business does not devalue any science they might do, but a mass media touting dust settling on trees as a means of saving inner-city lives?
“So literally, if trees die, we die.”
Literally?
Elusive truths
Having spent a decade doing the groundwork (the papers cited above are samples), the financialised afforestation lobby’s breakout year proved to be 2019. Primed by publicity in, among other publications, Yale e360 in May (and replicated by those seeking the retention of the last pines at Tokai Park), the tree lobby found its cause célèbre in The global tree forestation potential, published by Science on 5 July 2019. The paper received extraordinarily wide media coverage.
Urging action on tree restoration, touted by the authors as being among the most effective climate change strategies, Bastin et al used satellite measurements and large datasets to calculate that the reforestation of 900 000 ha of historical forest land outside of existing forests, agricultural and urban land with 1 trillion trees would increase global forest coverage by 25% and, at maturity, sequester 205 additional gigatons of carbon. This amounts to about two-thirds of the carbon dioxide we’ve pumped into the atmosphere since the 1800s.
As easily as that? Not really, but the global media machine promoting forestry went into overdrive nonetheless.
Scientists, as is their wont and discipline, proved more sceptical.
The Scientist, which – in its article Earth has Room For 1 Trillion More Trees, had given great publicity, based on an AP report, to Bastin et al’s paper on 5 July – signalled something of a walk back by Science in its article, Researchers Find Flaws in High-Profile Study on Trees and Climate, published on 17 October 2019.
On 18 October, 2019, Science published criticism of the paper by a a swarm of close on 60 scientists from around the world. Eike Luedeling et al pointed to significant overestimation in Russia, Scandinavia, North America, Australia, Africa and Asia. They also noted the paper’s inclusion for potential restoration of urban area housing some 2.5 billion people. Friedlingstein et al found the “estimate and its implications for climate mitigation are inconsistent with the dynamics of the global carbon cycle and its response to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions”.
Lewis et al categorised as “incorrect” a) the statement that “that the restoration potential of new forests globally is 205 gigatons of carbon”, b) the conclusion that “global tree restoration is our most effective climate change solution to date” and c) the statement that “climate change will drive the loss of 450 million hectares of existing tropical forest by 2050”. And a group of 46 scientists argued that:
Bastin et al.’s estimate that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon is approximately five times too large. Their analysis inflated soil organic carbon gains, failed to safeguard against warming from trees at high latitudes and elevations, and considered afforestation of savannas, grasslands, and shrublands to be restoration.
As laypeople, we should bear in mind that scientists publish so that they may, in pursuit of rigorous accuracy, be criticised by their peers. In an extensive post, climate scientist and University of Potsdam physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, who is Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and no stranger to criticism himself, points out “a few basic facts” pertaining to the carbon cycle that see Bastin et al’s projected sequestration of two thirds of emitted carbon over 50-100 years being reduced to 2-4 GtC of our current annual emissions of 11 GtC. In short, sequestration – before any flaws in the study are taken into consideration – would amount to only some 20-30% of emitted carbon (rather than the claimed two thirds).
Sharply critical but far from dismissive of the paper, Rahmstorf’s closing paragraph says much:
The massive planting of trees worldwide is therefore a project that we should tackle quickly. We should not do that with monocultures but carefully, close to nature and sustainably, in order to reap various additional benefits of forests on local climate, biodiversity, water cycle and even as a food source. But we must not fall for illusions about how many billions of tons of CO2 this will take out of the atmosphere. And certainly not for the illusion that this will buy us time before abandoning fossil fuel use. On the contrary, we need a rapid end to fossil energy use precisely because we want to preserve the world’s existing forests.
Overall, criticism of Bastin et al might best be summed up by Professor Martin Lukac, Professor of Ecosystem Science at the University of Reading who observes:
Planting trees to soak up two thirds of the entire anthropogenic carbon burden to date sounds too good to be true. Probably because it is.
This entry implies that, while science – like truth – “will out”, the symbiosis of international, national, political, financial and other interests skew scientific findings and their publication at a time when our reduction of global CO₂ emissions remains paramount. Ultimately, through distraction, distortion and misrepresentation, such interests endanger our future. Using big data, Bastin et al could not but work in tandem with these interests and The global tree forestation potential was a collaborative effort with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
In an August 2019 FAO interview with two of the paper’s authors, we meet the paper’s principal lab investigator, Tom Crowther who, we might with some justification, come to view as the Elon Musk of Ecology. Born in Namibia in 1986 and raised in South Africa, Science tells us that Crowther’s family moved to England. He completed his PhD at Cardiff University in Wales in 2012 and, from there, went on to do postdoctoral work in soil ecology at Yale. It was at Yale that the 26-year-old Crowther found his passion for trees. As Science would have it, his roommate, Daniel Maynard, was emailed a question by 15-year-old German high-schooler Felix Finkbeiner asking how many trees grew on Earth.
Maynard wasn’t interested in answering the question. Crowther, however, was. As another account published by Nature has it, following an informal game of football, he embarked (pun not intended) on a mission to answer Finkbeiner’s question. Using ground data, satellite imagery, machine learning, correlation and some 400 000 data points, Crowther and his colleague, data scientist Henry Glick, published (with Daniel Maynard and others) their answer to Finkbeiner in 2015. Mapping tree density at a global scale, published by Nature in 2015, delivered the following:
[T]he global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.30 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.66 trillion in temperate regions. … Based on our projected tree densities, we estimate that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.
By the time the paper was published, Crowther had moved from Yale to the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO). In 2016, Nature‘s publication of yet another paper, Quantifying global soil carbon losses, saw Crowther concluding:
A 1°C rise in global temperature could cause microbes to release about 55 billion tons of soil carbon by 2050, accelerating global warming by up to 17%. The result would be, he said, like adding emissions from an additional United States to the atmosphere.
Response to Crowther’s headline-grabbing findings in both papers was far-reaching and mixed. It is here that we might start to reflect on our earlier characterisation of the young scientist as an ecological Elon Musk. Biographies of Crowther in Science and Nature use terms such as “troublemaker”, “preening for the press”, “flashy but flawed science”, “shockingly bad”, “white male privilege in science”, and “a huge waste of money”. Nature quotes his mentor at Yale, Mark Bradford. “He’s a bit of a disrupter. He’s the Uber of the field.”
Money from trees
The layperson should not lend much weight to the views of a science community faced with a brilliant and ground-breaking maverick scientist – debate within that community can be brutal. However, they are worth bearing in mind as Crowther, at the age of 31, had taken up a tenure-track professorship at ETH Zürich in 2017. More, in the same year, he secured “a $2.7 million grant from DOB Ecology, with a promise of an additional $15 million if he meets certain targets.”
From its website, we learn that DOB Ecology is a foundation and non-profit with ANBI status founded by a Dutch entrepreneurial family whose philanthropy enables it to support its selected partners and programmes. Among its partners we find the Gouritz Cluster Biosphere Reserve, as worthy a partner as one could imagine. DOB Ecology’s staff are extremely highly qualified and its programmes are chiefly centered in Africa and South America and, no doubt, do an enormous amount of good for myriad communities – both people and other species.
“Yes, but…?” I hear you ask. Well, for starters, to run offices and programmes spanning countless countries on four continents, there must an awful lot of money sloshing about. Thomas Crowther certainly needed access to some of it to set up the Crowther Lab at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities. It seems that, much like Capetonians averse to publicising their acquisition of whatever environmental knowledge they might have from Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, our good Dutch philanthropists funding DOB Ecology are as averse to providing a link to the organisation from whence the money needed to do science flows.
This is inexplicable. I mean, if you want to meet the family, you need to follow the money.
At the outset of this article exploring the implications of Jeremy Gilmore’s leading essay, we noted that our Palaeolithic forebears’ propensity to take what they needed from nature before moving on changed, during the Neolithic period, to taking more than they needed after adopting a settled lifestyle. While not much has changed over the past few thousand years, our ability to acquire wealth, which we have equated to power since a time where possessions had tangible material value, has been greatly enhanced by practice, human nature and conception or abstraction. Financialisation is one such abstraction and, as intangible as derivative wealth might be, we still equate it to power.
It’s the way we do business around here.
In short, to locate the power behind the Crowther Lab, we need to visit DOB Equity. For, despite a lack of links at DOB Ecology, we seek a broader perspective.
Ah, yes. Here it is: “innovative”, “scalable”, “companies”, “businesses”, “long-term profitability”, “entrepreneurs”, “risks”, “value”, “fund”, “investments”, “long-term growth” and the like. All in the first block of text. That’s more like it. Scanning the site, one might discern from DOB Equity’s portfolio that its business interests lie in many of the same countries as the environmental interests of DOB Ecology – in Africa.
I’d like you to meet Frank.
Frank Tobé is a third generation member of DOB Equity’s founding family. In addition to his membership of the advisory board, he works as a communications consultant for multi-generational business families and runs his own design and media agency. Frank is based in London.
Unlike his father Theo Tobé, who founded DOB Equity in 1997 and served as its founding MD before becoming a mere member of the board in 2009, Frank’s task is to preserve the multi-generational wealth (and, therefore, power) of families making up what we might call the 0.01%.
Why not? Frank’s quite open about his role and, as we noted a short while ago, it’s the way we do business around here:
Showcasing your investments through high quality content, from inspiring videos to spot-on websites, will raise your public profile, engage your current and future stakeholders and help you stand out from the crowd.
In the world of the Family Business (FB), DOB Ecology’s investment in tree-counting ecologist Thomas Crowther, by way of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zürich, represents “the latest social investment of patient capital by the entrepreneurial investors of a Dutch family of wealth.”
Think Succession. With a more pleasant cast of characters.
Marketing a myth
In a very real sense, the Crowther Lab is now a part of the DOB family incorporated, with its scientists, into a nexus of economic, political and academic wealth. With marketing nous.
For what is a family?
The Crowther Lab is a family – or, if it is not, marketing will make it appear to be so.
Do you remember 15-year-old German high-schooler Felix Finkbeiner asking Daniel Maynard and Thomas Crowther how many trees grew on Earth? The son of Frithjof Finkbeiner, a member of the Club of Rome and a founding member of the Global Marshall Plan Foundation, the 9-year-old Felix, inspired by Professor Wangari Maathai’s 2006 Billion Tree Campain, launched the Stop talking. Start planting campaign in 2007. Its goal was to plant a million trees in each country around the world. A year later he addressed the European Parliament and, when he was 13-years-old in 2011, the United Nations General Assembly.
The West has had no qualms about using its children to promote vested interests. During the 19th Century, we sent them down the mines. During the 20th Century, we used them, knowingly and duplicitously, to sell war resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. In the 21st Century, we use them to market our investment portfolios.
Felix Finkbeiner’s 2007 Stop talking. Start planting campaign was the first undertaken by his Plant-for-the-Planet initiative. By 2008, he was a United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) Junior Board Member and, in March 2018, the 21-year-old Plant-for-the-Planet Board Member, armed with knowledge gained from science, was on hand to launch the organisation’s campaign to plant a trillion trees. Today, as a 22-year-old PhD student in 2019, he is – with Prof Dr Thomas Crowther, Dr Daniel Maynard and Dr Jean-Francois Bastin – a member of the Crowther Lab research group funded by DOB Equity.
Might science be negatively influenced by social, economic, political and other forces? Or, to put it differently, might these forces be negatively influenced by science? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
But, as you do so, bear this much in mind. If you do a Google search on “trillion trees”, you will be rewarded with close on 7 million results. Of the first one hundred listed results, only three contain the word Crowther in the introductory text beneath the page title. By the same token, a search on “Plant-for-the-Planet” will yield 346 million results and a search on Crowther Lab will yield 1.7 million. It is immediately apparent to us where the general public is obtaining its information of active reforestation – from well-funded foundations rather than the scientists mining results from data.
Open Plant-for-the-Planet’s Trillion Tree Campaign page and select Explore in the World section of the side panel. The World Tree Map displays. There are three checkboxes above the map; Planted Trees, Current Forests, and Restoration Opportunities. The Planted Trees checkbox is selected by default and all trees planted in Europe since 2006 display.
Drag and zoom the map until the Western Cape fills The World Tree Map frame and select the Current Forests and Restoration Opportunities checkboxes.
Your map should display as follows:
Current forests display in green and Restoration Opportunities display in yellow. You’ll note beneath the map that the green Tree Density bar references Crowther T. W. et al. (2015) Mapping tree density at a global scale Nature 525, 201-205 and the yellow Restoration Opportunities box references Crowther T. W. et al. (2017) Predicting Global Forest Reforestation Potential bioRxiv 210062.
If you click Full-screen on the map, it should display as below.
Of Restoration Opportunities (yellow on the World Tree Map), we are told:
Half a billion hectares are suitable for wide-scale restoration of closed forests. Further one and a half billion hectares are best sited (sic) for mosaic restoration, which combines forests with other land uses like agroforestry, smallholder agriculture, and settlements.
Should you be muttering, “Is this our globally renowned Fynbos Biome I see before me?” we share your bewilderment. Especially so in light of Plant-for-the-Planet sharing a graphic echoing a call beloved of FoTP, The right trees in the right places.
Scroll through South and Southern Africa and monitor your feelings. “What’s going on?”, “Is this the right map?” “Was SANBI data used?” and “This is laughable” are not inappropriate reactions.
Should this World Tree Map, apparently the result of years of scientific research, be accurate?
Yes, by any definition of “tree” given in papers produced by members of the team at the Crowther Lab.
And yes again, given that Felix Finkbeiner, a PhD student at the Crowther Lab, is listed as a Member of the Board (voluntary) of the Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation.
Doubly so, given that Dr. Tom Crowther of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich and Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Franz-Josef Radermacher are listed as the Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation’s Scientific Advisors. Like Frithjof Finkbeiner, Radermacher, an intensely private German economist, mathematician, AI expert and computer scientist allegedly worth some $87 million, is a member of the Club of Rome and a member of the Global Marshall Plan Foundation.
It seems, in some areas of scientific endeavour at least, that climate-change mitigation strategies are being driven only tangentially by ecologists and more overtly by governments, economists, financiers, tech, business schools, corporations, industry lobbyists, the media and a coterie of high-net-worth individuals. What is any self-respecting ecologically attuned layperson to think?
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical. Of everybody but the scientists and their papers. And, as far as the last group is concerned, renowned international journalist and war correspondent Robert Fisk does us a service in reminding us that, in any situation, it is essential that we hold to the old Russian maxim, “Trust but verify”.
I’ll show you why.
Seeing the wood for the trees
A natural-born Capetonian without any formal qualification in matters of an ecological nature, I suppose it’s natural that I source my primary information from South African science-based institutions. And that is why, after looking – startled – at the World Tree Map ostensibly derived from the work of the Crowther Lab, I should find myself gazing, with some pleasure I might add, at SANBI’s 2014 land cover map.
Believe it or not, I feel better now. This is my turf and I have a legend to boot. What, contrary to the foreign land portrayed by the World Tree Map, do we have here? Indigenous Forest. Great stuff. There we see what remains of it along the eastern coastal belt of the Western Cape. A dark green streak surrounded and spattered by orange. What is that? Mm…the legend tells me Plantations / Woodlots mature. Well, yeah, that’s why Knysna burned in 2017 and 2018. Those damned monocultural plantations.
As Kraaij et al tell us of the 2017 fire in An assessment of climate, weather, and fuel factors influencing a large, destructive wildfire in the Knysna region, South Africa, Fire Ecology volume 14, Article number: 4 (2018):
[W]ildfires burned 15 000 ha around the town of Knysna in the Western Cape, destroying > 800 buildings, > 5000 ha of forest plantations, and claiming the lives of seven people. … One third of the area that burned was in natural vegetation (mainly fynbos shrublands), and more than half was in plantations of invasive alien (non-native) pine trees, or in natural vegetation invaded by alien trees.
On investigating the source of the fire, which was as close as we’re likely to get to showing solidarity with our cousins in Australia, California, Greece, Portugal and the myriad other countries (including those in the Arctic Circle) that have suffered unprecedented wildfire over the past three or four years, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) identified its source as a neglected lightning strike in scrub woodland at Elandskraal. According to the CSIR report:
Scrub woodland is an indigenous forest type which is a transition between fynbos and thicket or forest and has developed as a successional stage from fynbos in the absence of fire.
The fynbos in the area had not been subjected to a substantial burn for 15 years, an unfortunate result of the blanket fire suppression policies in areas adjacent to plantations which, it must be pointed out, can burn up to 10 times hotter than fynbos.
Well, it needn’t be pointed out, dear reader, but I hope you will, 7,000 words into this entry, indulge me here. This “ten times hotter” thing is something of a sore point for me. I may be a layperson, but I will use any platform to defend my research. In 2015, I stated the following in a book on the Muizenberg Fire that tore through the pine plantations at Tokai:
Pines – a particularly pernicious form of fire-adapted alien vegetation – when burnt, immediately and dramatically raise the intensity of a wildfire. The increase in intensity, by up to ten times that of fynbos, is so rapid that liquids and gases in the bark-covered trunk of individual trees start to boil or are vaporised. The tree immediately becomes a pressure cooker lacking a release valve – and explodes.
My assertion greatly exercised a Dr Patricia Thompson, who wrote me a long and somewhat nasty letter in 2016 asking:
Please provide the evidence on which you base your claim that pine trees burn 10 times hotter than fynbos: I would be interested to read it. Pine trees may burn violently once they have been set alight by prolonged burning of ladder fuels, but they are in fact a lot harder to ignite than fynbos.
Given the umbrage expressed throughout the good doctor’s letter, I felt it better not to further fan her flames and left her to simmer. But I will now happily inform Dr Thompson that while I believe my source was Louise Stafford, director of the Nature Conservancy‘s South Africa Water Funds programme, I have, in private correspondence, the further backing of three of our most eminent scientists and fire ecologists, who state:
[I]nvasive alien plants can burn at an intensity of ten times or more that of…displaced indigenous plants.
In short, the houses gutted or razed in Knysna (in 2017) and Tokai (in 2015) did not stand a chance.
Returning to our map, we see that the eastern part of the Western Cape remains home to our beloved Afromontane Forest. The rest of the natural vegetation, i.e. Thicket /Dense bush, Woodland /Open bush, Grassland, Shrubland fynbos and Low shrubland (none of which is forest) is dominated by Fynbos. As you can see from the map legend, any area tinged by red is Cultivated this, that and the next thing. Unfortunately, it’s all over the place.
Unlike the undoubted experts at the Crowther Lab, I see little room for reforestation here.
Then again, what is forest?
Chazdon et al, in When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration, outline the problem of definition:
Forests are viewed, defined, assessed, and valued through different lenses. From different vantage points, forests can be seen as a source of timber products, an ecosystem composed of trees along with myriad forms of biological diversity, a home for indigenous people, a repository for carbon storage, a source of multiple ecosystem services, and as social-ecological systems, or as all of the above. In addition, a fundamental and commonly misunderstood distinction exists between the actual features of land and its legal designation. From the “land cover” perspective, forests are viewed as ecosystems or vegetation types supporting unique assemblages of plants and animals. But from the “land use” perspective, forests are landholdings that are legally designated as forest, regardless of their current vegetation. Within this construct, a legally designated “forest” can actually be devoid of trees, at least temporarily. No single operational forest definition can, or should, embody all of these dimensions.
From among the definitions they proffer, we’ll select the narrowest, that of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC 2002)
A minimum area of land of 0.05–1.0 ha with tree crown cover (or equivalent stocking level) of more than 10–30 % with trees with the potential to reach a minimum height of 2–5 m at maturity in situ. A forest may consist either of closed forest formations where trees of various storeys and undergrowth cover a high proportion of the ground or open forest. Young natural stands and all plantations which have yet to reach a crown cover of 10–30 % or tree height of 2–5 m are included under forest, as are areas normally forming part of the forest area which are temporarily unstocked as a result of human intervention such as harvesting or natural causes but which are expected to revert to forest.
With such a definition, you’d be hard pressed to find any Fynbos in there.
And, if anything, Crowther et al are more specific. In Mapping tree density at a global scale, a tree is defined as:
[A] plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH).
Precious few fynbos species there either. Sorry. So what’s going on?
Selling – or sullying – science?
Through a fellow PBO hell bent on forcing SANParks to compromise its restoration and conservation of Cape Flats Sand Fynbos in Table Mountain National Park’s Tokai Park precinct, we’ve been introduced to Ben Caldecott, Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme and Associate Professor at The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. Subject to limited research and correction, Caldecott assists finance and insurance houses, wealthy individuals, corporations and countries in securing the future profitability of their investments by ensuring they do not become what are termed stranded assets.
Because climate-change mitigation is dependent on capital from these countries, corporations and individuals, it is likely that renewable technologies and low-cost mitigation strategies have a long-term future and, because they are developed or carried out in a market-based system, they have become commodities in which those with capital can safely invest their money for the long term (it’s not called “patient capital” for nothing). To marry money to mitigation and vice versa, those doing duty as marriage officer must make each attractive to the other and, being an arch conservative who had immersed himself in the large bureaucracies of business and government over many years, Caldecott was, in 2015, acting as a matchmaker between capital and ‘No-Regrets’ Negative Emissions Technologies (NR-NETs) or geoengineering – also known as climate engineering, the highly dangerous precursor to BECCS.
By the time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reached Paris in 2015, the intergovernmental community had effectively done nothing to mitigate the effects of climate change for close on 30 years and it could not possibly, even should the international community reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2050, hope to avoid breaking the 1.5 ºC global warming threshold the IPCC had set for itself without the aid of yet to be invented scalable NETs.
Elsewhere, ecologists and scientists (such as Thomas Crowther, his Yale roomy Daniel Maynard, Jean-François Bastin and countless others) were exploring softer, less risky mitigation alternatives, including reforestation and afforestation at scale – all the while warning that such mitigation strategies did not and could not replace the need to reduce carbon emissions and, most importantly, stop continuing deforestation (which many argue is needed to feed a fast-growing global consumer market).
The global public, formerly a sleeping giant, now demanded 24/7 news coverage on the Climate Crisis from media companies adapting to digital platforms, and these companies (notably, for English-speaking readers, the Guardian) delivered. “Eco friendly”, “greenwashing” and “climate capitalism” were outré and no climate-conscious commercial entity, be it in the business of public relations, marketing, advertising, media, the law, business, finance, government or what we now refer to as philanthropy wanted to be associated or labeled with such terms. Nor, by climbing on what they might have seen to be the reforestation bandwagon, were they likely to be. Trees are tangible, countable, measurable and investments by countries or companies can be traded for carbon offsets. Also, nothing beats investing in new and developing markets unencumbered by legacy infrastructure. You can build and profit from your own. Beneath the trees.
And that is where we met DOB Equity, the family firm which (to my mind) epitomises the wealthy but self-entitled and arrogant uber elite who profit from but go a long way to discrediting the valid science of the likes of Crowther and his colleagues. You’ve met environmentalist Frank Tobé, the third-generation scion of the Dutch family heading up DOB Equity. To Frank, all I would say, with reference to his self-referential site, is:
Your stories need to be told. Better. Frankly.
Salvaging science from the marketing department
Science is a discipline. All the rest is noise. If Thomas Crowther and Felix Finkbeiner are doing science, they should not be fronting for the Club of Rome or Global Marshall Plan or allowing Finkbeiner’s Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation to soft-soap a gullible public with a World Tree Map that renders sober science meaningless.
For that is what it does.
Step back a minute and view this enlarged illustration from Crowther et al’s Mapping tree density at a global scale.
It should be quite clear what is going on here. When compared to the image of the World Tree Map, an egregiously misleading marketing tool of no value to anybody but apparently derived from these data, the above map and chart tell a very different story. Because the data should speak for themselves, we use images taken from the Crowther Lab Mapping Portal to accurately display its findings. Please click the Zoom button to view in Full Screen mode.
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What the above Crowther Lab-rendered images tell us in no uncertain terms is that, beside what little remains of the lush splendour of our amazingly biodiverse Southern Afrotemperate Forest (most of it having been sacrificed at the altar of alien monocultures planted for profit), we are very much Fynbos country.
Perhaps no other organisation better describes the part we play in nature better than the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). Introducing the Western Cape as “A plant paradise”, the WWF states:
South Africa’s Western Cape is more botanically diverse than the richest tropical rainforest in South America, including the Amazon. Protecting this strikingly unique and beautiful plant kingdom is a WWF conservation priority.
And, over centuries, perhaps no other industry has done more damage to that plant paradise than forestry – leaving in its wake, as it has, vast swathes of alien-infested land. In 2015, and having largely withdrawn from the province, some 50 000 ha of land remained under plantation, most of it in the now largely destroyed Eden District. In a remarkable pamphlet befitting Orwellian doublespeak, Getting to Know South Africa’s Timber Plantations, Forestry South Africa’s subheading reads “Forestry Explained: Our Conservation Legacy”. It goes on to tell us that, in the Western Cape, 47 300 ha of plantation land remain under pine, 1 600 ha under eucalypt, 21 ha under wattle and 337 under other species. It seems the future looks bright for forestry in the Western Cape and nobody puts it better than MTO Forestry‘s Stakeholder Relations Manager, Ntuthu Ponoyi:
“We always do our best to attend to all social matters for the benefit of our stakeholders and sustainability of our business through ongoing consultations aimed at creating good neighbourly relations.”
Yes, well, we’ve all heard that one before. Boilerplate. I recommend you try The Corporate B.S. Generator.
What Bastin said
Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action. …. However, restoration initiatives must not lead to the loss of existing natural ecosystems, such as native grasslands, that can support huge amounts of natural biodiversity and carbon.
Bastin J-F et al The global tree forestation potential Science Vol. 365, Issue 6448, pp. 76-79
The first sentence, from the introdcution, is qualified by the second, from the conclusion. That scientists writing in one of the world’s most reputable journals deem such qualification necessary is extraordinary but, as we have seen how the work of these scientists is distorted by market forces and media consumers, it is not surprising.
We have been here before. And we have been here before, in a big way, in Africa.
Mother Nature plants trees differently than people do. We buy a very big plant and then we dig a hole for it. Mother Nature starts with a seed.
The Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGWSSI), more commonly referred to as the Great Green Wall (GGW), was formally proposed in 2005 to combat desertification, resources degradation and climate change south of the Sahara by way of a tree-planting initiative stretching across Africa from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east. Endorsed by the African Union (AU) in 2007, a “green wall” some 50 km wide was mooted and the intiative was taken up as a Rio+20 initiative and launched as the Action Against Desertification programme by the UN and African governments in 2014. 15% of planned planting was completed and 21 countries were running GGW-linked projects by 2016.
Just as Bastin’s first sentence quoted above delivers a simple soundbites and an upbeat message to a passive Internet generation devoid of memory, the Great Green Wall of Africa has a history, a memory, if you will, of a time before the restrictive agricultural and forestry practices of nation states dominated by rapacious colonial powers disrupted the free flow of peoples and cultures moving in tandem with a fitful climate. It is a memory of sustainable lifestyles not blighted by overpopulation and appreciative of the complexities of life on Earth.
Westerners attribute almost supernatural powers of insight into ecological processes among the last tribes of the Amazon, arguing (rightly) that they retain stewardship of their lands. We have no such sensibilities when it comes to Africa, where the old European ethos of imposed control dominates. States, embodied by their governments, international treaties, supranational organisations and NGOs backed by global capital, dictate narratives of the present and future.
The We Are Water Foundation, founded by a household name in bathroom design and partnering all the appropriate organisations, goes a long way to outlining the difficulties presented by reforestation in the Sahel and elsewhere:
The Great Green Wall aims to become a 15 km wide and 8,000 km long plant barrier along the Sahel. The realization of climate change and the last famine of 2010 have provided strength to this initiative that aims to repair the endemic governance errors in the area and the erroneous approach often taken when facing the desertification problem. Based on its dimensions, it surpasses any collective work carried out by mankind and some define it as the eighth world wonder: nothing less than covering 100 million hectares of semi-desert with a green mantle.
The project met with some criticism from ecologists, who considered that the solution was not to “plant trees”, as the project had mainly focused on, but rather to opt for the natural regeneration of the land and identify the flora of each area to protect it. This work necessarily requires the participation of the inhabitants who need to be trained for the process to be sustainable and for the restored areas to be maintained.
There was also criticism from different economists who pointed out that the implementation pace was not realistic and that the attainment of the high investment needed had not been taken into consideration. The achievement of the project was linked to the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which implied a regeneration pace of 5 million hectares per year.
In view of this reality, the African Union proposed a less ambitious but more realistic date: the one set out in the 2063 Agenda. But many point out that it is still necessary to work at a rate of two million hectares per year, much higher than the estimated, which will probably be less than 200,000 hectares per year.
We Are Water Foundation | The Sahel, desertification beyond drought
This article, among the thousands extolling the virtues of reforestation, at least tips its cap to history and on-the-ground realities. Like anywhere, particularly the tropics, history and human nature loom large, bedevilling the quick fixes shouted from slick, templated organisational and media websites to an audience lacking any sense of the passing of time and the increasing complexity of life on Earth.
If we examine the second paragraph and accept the veracity of the first sentence, we must ask of the second, do African farmers in the Sahel need to be “trained” to engage in regenerative farming when poor governance has, for a couple of centuries, disrupted their farming practices of millennia?
Chun Lai and Asmeen Khans’s 1986 paper for the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Mali as a case study of forest policy in the Sahel: Institutional constraints on social forestry, introduces the long history of social and governance conflicts which, compounded by climatic extremes, hobble, cripple or see off the most well-intended science-based regional reforestation initiatives. The authors highlight how, over the past century and in the face of a burgeoning population trapped by borders, flawed, corrupt and /or ineffective governance models led societies living at relative ease with nature (and dependent on wood for 80-90% of their fuel) to an adversarial relationship, through misguided one-size-fits-all forestry policies, with their closest ally – trees.
As the above-cited article notes, following widespread humanitarian suffering and land-degradation resulting from drought in the early 1980s, “The short-term vision of governments and communities, seeking to maximize economic returns in the shortest possible time, had led to a severe degradation of the soil.”
A growing appreciation of natural regeneration shows immense promise, but examples of difficulty encountered in implementing such tree-planting programmes span the Sahel, from Mali to Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger and Ethiopia.
Reviewing data gathered over 150 years, Hannelore Kusserow, in her 2017 paper, Desertification, resilience, and re-greening in the African Sahel – a matter of the observation period? echoes the second sentence quoted from Bastin et al in her abstract and sketches findings of immense practical significance we ignore at our peril.
The key findings summarised at the end show the following:
(i) vegetation recovery predominantly depends on soil types;
(ii) when discussing Sahel greening vs. Sahel browning, the majority of research papers only focus on post-drought conditions. Taking pre-drought conditions (before the 1980s) into account, however, is essential to fully understand the situation. Botanical investigations and remote-sensing-based time series clearly show a substantial decline in woody species diversity and cover density compared to pre-drought conditions;
iii) the self-organised patchiness of vegetation is considered to be an important indicator of ecosystem changes.
This holds true worldwide. In a succinct United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) blog entry, Tim Christophersen, the Branch Coordinator of Freshwater, Land and Climate at UN Environment and Chair of the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration gives a broad overview of problems besetting reforestation initiatives.
“Tree planting is capturing the minds of those who look for fast climate action. … The growing enthusiasm for forests and trees is a good thing. Ecosystem restoration will be critical in turning the tide against climate change, and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals,” he writes.
“But,” he continues, “we need to be mindful of some pitfalls lurking along the way. We have learned valuable lessons over the past decades in afforestation and other restoration projects across dozens of countries.”
In much the same way Kusserow distils her findings to an abstract, Christophersen highlights key points always to be borne in mind when ingesting the necessarily glib PR of the many hundreds of what we politely term “public-private partnerships” promoting popular reforestation intitiatives worldwide.
“The first rule for ecosystem restoration is to stop the further destruction of forests, wetlands, and other critical ‘green infrastructure’. … Most ecosystems in the world have remnant seeds in the soil and natural regrowth can be cheaper and more successful than tree planting. The most cost-effective type of restoration is to work with the forces of nature. … There is already an impressive body of knowledge on which trees to plant, when and where. … Forest and landscape restoration is mostly about social transformation, rather than technological solutions. However, this transformation is hard work and requires patience. It is tempting to just stick a few tree seedlings in the ground and hope for the best, but real restoration across an entire landscape is the work of years or even decades.”
Scientists in disciplines as divergent as climate science, biodiversity, anthropology and agroforestry have descended on the Sahel in increasing numbers since the 1940s and, as profit and rent-seeking campaigns promoting afforestation have gripped the Western imagination, they see – with consensual clarity – how benefits we can derive from initiatives such as the Crowther Lab’s mapping tool – are being abused by global capital.
Chris Reij, an agroforester and Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI), and Tony Rinaudo, an Australian agronomist with World Vision, have been advocating and promoting farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) in the Sahel for decades, even as tree-planting has become “all the rage” among Western investors and media consumers.
In Chapter 7 of Spielman & Pandya-Lorch (Eds), Millions Fed: Proven successes in agricultural development, published in 2009 by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), they introduce FMNR in the Sahel:
Sahelian farmers achieved their success by ingeniously modifying traditional agroforestry, water, and soil-management practices. To improve water availability and soil fertility in Burkina Faso’s Central Plateau, farmers have sown crops in planting pits and built stone contour bunds, which are stones piled up in long narrow rows that follow the contours of the land in order to capture rainwater runoff and soil. These practices have helped rehabilitate between 200,000 and 300,000 hectares of land and produce an additional 80,000 tons of food per year. In southern Niger, farmers have developed innovative ways of regenerating and multiplying valuable trees whose roots already lay underneath their land, thus improving about 5 million hectares of land and producing more than 500,000 additional tons of food per year. While the specific calculations of farm-level benefits are subject to various methodological and data limitations, the order of magnitude of these benefits is high, as evidenced by the wide-scale adoption of the improved practices by large numbers of farmers. Today, the agricultural landscapes of southern Niger have considerably more tree cover than they did 30 years ago. These findings suggest a human and environmental success story at a scale not seen anywhere else in Africa.
The re-greening of the Sahel began when local farmers’ practices were rediscovered and enhanced in simple, low-cost ways by innovative farmers and nongovernmental organizations. An evolving coalition of local, national, and international actors then enabled large-scale diffusion and continued use of these improved practices where they benefited farmers.
Farmer-led innovation in Burkina Faso and Niger | Chris Reij, Gray Tappan, and Melinda Smale
This regreening of the drought-prone Sahel is not new. Back in 2007, however, it was seen as not being newsworthy. And yet, as the AU sought to capture the international imagination by endorsing a mammoth tree-planting exercise, The Great Green Wall of Africa, local farmers had largely achieved what the AU was setting out to do. And it shows. By paying heed to past research, naturally variable climate patterns, the appropriate use of technology, local practices and an overriding need to maintain and restore biodiversity in the face of “one size fits all” popular solutions, the AU’s industrial-scale tree-planting exercise has become a worthwhile and very different project.
In short, what Bastin said.
The good capitalist
At the start of this entry, I referred to our age as a “time of contradiction and crisis”. Well, here’s the contradiction. Chris Reij, one of many scientists to have dedicated decades of their lives searching for an answer a most “wicked problem“, i.e. a natural, sustinable means for man to coexist with nature in the Sahel, is a senior fellow at the WRI. Much like its infinitely smaller cousin, DOB Ecology, the WRI is a gold-card neoliberal-backed project designed to ensure the future of predatory global capitalism in a world that, as physics tells us, cannot sustain an economic model dependent on infinite growth and cycles of boom and bust.
What’s a good scientist like Chris Reij or any other of the myriad eminently qualified professionals working for the WRI to do? Toss their jobs? As we’ll discover shortly, not likely. Scientific research needs money and, for now, no other economic model enjoys the support of that under which we live. Does that let organisations such as the WRI off the hook? No. consider this.
The WRI’s African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) , aligned with the Bonn Challenge, seeks to restore 350 million hectares of deforested and degraded African land by 2030 and a large part of the solution, as it sees it, is by planting trees in Africa, South America and Asia – as a profit-seeking venture.
Opportunities have never been greater. The task has never been more urgent. An ancient Chinese proverb says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.” We hope that, after reading this report, investors and entrepreneurs will agree and be inspired to make money by taking up the business of growing trees.
Word Resources Institute | The Business of Planting Trees
Well, the above-quoted “Chinese proverb” reminds me of the other, equally appropriate quotation relevant to reforesting the Gobi Desert: “Every year, we plant trees,” one popular saying goes. “But we never see a forest.”
The 2011 German/IUCN-backed Bonn Challenge might itself, from the blurb accompanying it, be seen as nothing more than a money and market-making venture:
Investing in restoration also makes good economic sense. It is estimated that USD 75.6 trillion can be gained, on an annual basis, from transforming global policies by adopting environments that enable sustainable land management. When soil and water conservation, forest management and farmer-to-farmer extension projects in Niger, Mali, Tanzania, Ethiopia and northern Nigeria and Niger were assessed, they showed an economic rate of return of 12 to 40 per cent. A study across 42 African countries showed that while erosion-induced soil nutrient depletion cost 280 million tons of cereal per year, valued at USD 127 billion; taking action against erosion could generate USD 62.4 billion per year with an annual growth rate of 5.31 per cent.
Not only is the global business community targeted – you are too. We see that Global Forest Watch, a 1997 project of the WRI Forest Frontiers Initiative, continues – by way of what amounts to a distractive online marketing campaign – to keep us updated on land in dire need of reforestation.
While the average citizen of Europe might rightly be sceptical that business interests are capable of an ecological restoration project more than twice the size of South Africa (yes, the whole of it – times two and a bit), the most hard nosed of the global business community should expect some pushback from countries all too familiar with plans hatched in Europe or North America being visited on them as Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) in the interests of “a sustainable life for all”. It could well be argued that putting the money these NGOs and public-private partnerships spend promoting business as usual while assuaging the guilty minds of donors would be far better spent lobbying governments and corporate institutions to stop sustaining those who continue to degrade our terrestrial, marine and atmospheric resources.
We see far too few high-end websites promoting such activities.
Be that as it may, the WRI certainly offers a far better map of global tree cover than does Plant-for-the-Planet’s Trillion Tree Campaign.
Global Forest Watch, a 1997 project of the WRI Forest Frontiers Initiative, does remind us of the extent of our indigenous forests, which it locates only in the Tsitsikamma region. Allowing for a canopy density of 50%, tree cover in the Western Cape looks fairly prolific, but at a canopy density of 75%, it falls away. SANBI does a far better job and reflects all the Western Cape Afrotemperate forest we have available to us, including the fully protected 350 ha present in Table Mountain National Park. Either way, the work of the Crowther Lab, should it include SANBI datasets, will enable both Global Forest Watch and Plant-for-the-Planet to improve the accuracy and timeliness of their maps.
While the WRI and Bonn Challenge seek to persuade us of the power of trees to make us fat, famous and obscenely rich, their backers, ensconced in bought-and-paid-for Institutes at universities worldwide and raking in the moola from the understorey of financialisation, urge us to follow their example – despite this writer’s and far more qualified authorities’ fact-based arguements that the willy-nilly planting of trees is self-defeating, a distraction from real and immediate issues (e.g. halting deforestation, reducing carbon emissions, etc.) and injurious to biodiversity.
Some proponents of the forestry lobby argue for this insane policy far better than others. Parkscape’s unreferenced post saw me tracking down Ben Caldecott, who had bought the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, from where he multiplied his millions through the University of Oxford’s Sustainable Finance Programme – it specialises in stranded-asset management. I then targeted Tom Crowther because, well, Bastin (his coauthor and employee) and his links to business interests in Africa by way of his ETH Zurich funder, DOB Equity, a family-run outfit. One of its scions, Frank Tobé, has/had a website promoting his side interest, the preservation of intergenerational wealth. He bought ETH Zürich for $13 million and set Ecology’s Elon Musk up to tout afforestation worldwide.
These guys are as nothing compared to person I most admire in the greenwashing game, Jeremy Grantham CBE, co-founder and chief investment strategist of GMO (Grantham, Mayo, & van Otterloo), an asset-management company which had $115bn dollars under management in 2015. The irony inherent in GMO’s name cannot pass unremarked.
Grantham, a disarming and charming man, also founded the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, buying into Imperial College, London, to tout trees. Jeremy then expanded into the London School of Economics, setting up the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment before moving on to establish the Divecha Centre for Climate Change at the Indian Institute of Science and the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield.
Naturally, he partners with benign environmentalists such as The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Rocky Mountain Institute and Environmental Defense Fund and doles out grants to:
- 350.org
- the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
- Carbon Brief
- Carbon Tracker
- ClientEarth
- the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Columbia University Earth Institute
- Global Witness
- InsideClimate News
- the League of Conservation Voters
- the Post Carbon Institute
- the Rodale Institute
- the Savanna Institute
- the Union of Concerned Scientists
- WildAid, and …
- the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
Jeremy Grantham really is a whizz-bang entrepreneur in the Bill Gates mold (Gates sought “to buy the world’s largest private jet services company just as he prepare[d] to publish his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster“). Unlike Gates, you’ve probably never heard of Jeremy Grantham yet visit his Grantham Foundation website and see if it doesn’t inspire you to go out and plant trees or apply for a grant to become an environmental / financial journalist or perhaps even a Grantham Scholar and PhD.
Of course, all this passes as “philanthropy” or “sustainable development” that allows the likes of Grantham, Gates, Bezos and Musk and their bankers to ensure that the world and its economy continues to run as normal, albeit under the guise of “environmentalism”.
But let’s not forget Jeremy’s core business. From the above, you’d think he’s the one guy able to grow money on trees. He isn’t. The above graphic, from Seeking Alpha, gives a 2021 Q3 Update of Jeremy Grantham’s GMO Capital Portfolio. It seems he makes his money in all the usual places. All the guff preceding the above? It’s greenwashing. And, in the context of the money he makes in the equally unreal world of finance, it costs nothing.
Academics like William Bond know this:
[I]t’s ridiculous to pretend that the world should be all forested. This is what concerns me in the last minute of this talk; why worry about wrongly identifying open vegetation as deforested or degraded?
Well, it has policy implications.
The Bonn Challenge is one of the many plans to plant forests and to turn fire off. It’s supported by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (can you believe it?), the German Government and others. The science is provided by the World Resources Institute in Washington DC and the goal is to reforest three-and-a-half-million square kilometres of degraded forest worldwide by 2030, the next decade.
There’s funding; one billion dollars from the World Bank (spread over the next 10 years) and various other private donors to the tune of half-a-billion dollars – mostly forestry companies. In COP in Paris, 30-million dollars was pledged to 10 African countries for forest restoration.
The incentive for developed countries is to plant trees to sequester carbon to reduce global warming. It’s also a way of trying to direct funds from rich countries to less-developed countries and, of course, it’s in the interest of the rich countries. It means they can continue to use fossil fuel to keep themselves warm and to run their economies a bit longer.
Professor William Bond | Royal Society of South Africa [at 56:36]
The “corporatisation” of universities as seen in the examples listed above is not new. If universities, their academics and their students wish to continue receiving grants, they would do well to remember the old maxim; “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” But statements such as Bond’s above, while not radical, are needed if the fundamental lie of greenwashing and capitalism, i.e. infinite growth on a finite planet, is to be exposed for what it is; the deadly Ponzi scheme that brought us to this sorry pass.
In the 2020s, our need to reduce CO2 emissions to as near net zero as we can by 2050 appears to be a bridge too far for the very same global players touting trees as a cure-all for our planetary ills. Year after year, carbon emissions continue to increase (at 0.4% for the period 2013-18) rather than decrease. Land degradation is at the root of our emissions’ problems so why not, for starters, start there? Put a stop to the ongoing degradation of the environment on which we rely to sustain life?
Overcoming these challenges requires major systemic change in how we conduct and communicate interdisciplinary research, and how we organize and run our institutions. More fundamentally, fully integrating Nature-based Solutions as solutions to both the climate and biodiversity crises requires a new approach in economic thinking, shifting from a focus on infinite economic growth to a recognition that the energy and material flows needed for human wellbeing must remain within safe biophysical limits.
Seddon N, Chausson A, Berry P, Girardin CAJ, Smith A & Turner B Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges 375 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2020
[Extract ends]
