The Challenges

Question 1

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment- one of the most important documents so far this century.

Answer 1

Protect soil. Increase rates of soil formation by adding Ca- silicate rock dust and maintaining vegetation cover.

Question 2

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment- evaluating the human impacts on the ecosystem services that sustain us

Answer 2

social gain at environmental cost
many options exist to conserve of enhance ecosystem services that reduce negative trade-offs or that provide positive synergies with other ecosystem services

Question 3

Need to provide financial rewards to farmers for ecosystem service benefits- subsidies linked to effective agri-environment schemes improved on the previous implementation of EU farm payments.

Answer 3

Parallels to agroecology and permaculture

Question 4

Relationships under strain- are we approaching the ‘great divorce?’

Answer 4

Soil-Plant-Human Relationships

- human action ratcheted up rates of soil erosion

Question 5

Soil: ‘Mother Earth’
Our most important natural resource
- but we treat it as dirt

How can we have lost 33% of the world’s productive topsoils in the past 40 years?

Why do most people not know about this?

Like the rest of the terrestrial biosphere, we are intimately connected to and wholly dependent upon soil.

Answer 5

“The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all,” Wendell Berry (1977) The Unsettling of America.

Question 6

‘Civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints.’
‘Civilised man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent. He thought of himself as “master of the world”, while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.’
(Carter and Dale 1974)

Answer 6

‘A century of intensive farming in the Great Plains of America has reduced top soil depth by up to 90%.
We are not farming the soil, we are mining it.“
(Albert Bates, The Farm community, Tennessee)

Question 7

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way.
Picture a pasture open to all. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. And asks, “What is the value to me of adding one more animal to my herd?”
This value has one negative and one positive component. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of an additional animal, the positive value is nearly +1. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative value is only a fraction of –1.

Answer 7

The lesson of the “tragedy of the commons”

Short-term financial goals can erode the sustainability of production.

The problem is persuading everyone to change their behaviour to sustainability.

Without incentivising the common good we risk bringing ruin to all.

If our economic system does not value sustainability over short-term profit It will destroy itself.
Some problems need behaviour-change including changing human values and ideas of morality (as well as technical solutions).
.

Question 8

Hardin (1968) argued that human population growth has no technical solution. His views are debatable.

Empirical evidence suggests that people provided with access to contraception and having good education and a reasonable quality of life tend to choose to have fewer children.

Answer 8

The technical solution may be greater equality of wealth and access to healthcare and education if global population growth is to stabilize.

The fact that the latest projections for world population growth indicate that Africa will contribute most to the global rise in population to 2100 is consistent with this.

The tragedy of the commons requires both technical and behavioural changes to achieve optimum solutions.

Question 9

Agricultural economics based on profit without consideration of environmental or human costs or benefits

‘The farmer is considered simply as a producer who must cut his costs and raise his efficiency by every possible device, even if he thereby destroys the health of the soil and beauty of the landscape’. (Schumacher 1973)

Answer 9

Direct consequences : Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE – “mad cow disease” and human Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease- has killed 177 people in the UK and cost the farming industry up to £980,000,000. The most recent case was in a cow in Scotland in October 2018 - the first reported case in Scotland for 10 years.
Similarly soil degradation leading to flooding and biodiversity loss have had serious environmental and economic consequences.

‘An irreligious age looks with amused contempt upon the hallowed statements by which religion helped our forebears to appreciate
metaphysical truths’. (Schumacher 1973) ‘Small is Beautiful’.
‘And the Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden’ – not to be idle, but to ‘to do work in it and take care of it.’ Genesis 2:15

Question 10

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals agreed by 193 countries in 2015- seeking to achieve the majority of these goals by 2030. Achieving sustainability of agro-ecosystems lies at the heart of sustainable development.

Answer 10

There is increasing evidence that we have the technical means to care for the soil, produce food sustainably and look after the rest of the living world. People increasingly understand the problems and want to change the system that has treated people and the planet unfairly and irresponsibly.

“The problems are solvable. What is stopping us is ourselves- our economics and values. It is a values debate”.

“We need to grow empathy not GDP”

Mike-Berners Lee (2019) speaking at Greenbelt Festival

Question 11

“For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. A far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.”

Answer 11

Kate Raworth (2017)
Doughnut economics

Question 12

If the world is to move towards an environmentally sustainable way of life, it means acting on the basis of the common good as never before, indeed acting for the good of humanity as a whole.

Answer 12

Greater equality is not only consistent with moving towards sustainability, but a precondition for doing so. It is the key to moving society from the pursuit of false, and environmentally damaging sources of well-being based in selfish consumerism, to genuine social ones.

Moving towards sustainability requires that we improve the real quality of modern life in ways that higher incomes and consumerism cannot.

Question 13

The UK per household carbon dioxide footprint

tonnes per year

Answer 13

Food, clothes, house, personal goods, travel, power, heat

Question 14

Knowledge and Responsibility

We are the first generation to grow up in a world in which we recognize that our actions, choices, consumption and waste have global and persistent effects that impact on our neighbours, other countries, and will affect future generations.

Answer 14

We are the first generation to be able to quantify our ‘ecological footprint’ and to realise that our use of natural resources is unsustainable.

How should we respond to this- personally and how do we communicate to others the need for change to deliver sustainability-to the benefit of all?

Question 15

The moral, ethical, theological, political and economic dimensions

Answer 15

Margaret Thatcher:
“No generation has a freehold on this Earth. All we have is a life tenancy- with full repairing lease….we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come”.

Question 16

The moral dimension

Human impacts on the environment and consumption of non-renewable resources raise profound moral questions:

What gives us the right to squander the Earth’s resources?

What gives us the right to pollute the Earth and pass on to future generations a damaged, degraded, devastated planet?

Answer 16

Now we increasingly know what we are doing does that knowledge carry some moral obligations?

Question 17

Religion and Ecology
Swearer DK (2006) 
An assessment of Buddhist eco-philosophy. Harvard Theological Review 99: 123-137

Answer 17

Irrespective of our religious views what are our attitudes to the environment and on what are these based?

Do we have clear set of well justified ethical and moral standards or principles that we can explain to others?

We need this to form the basis of altruistic actions, seeking the common good, to free us from the tragedy of the commons.

Question 18

How do religions address the unsustainable impacts of humans on their environment?

Is there a greater need for dialogue between scientists and theologians to guide eco-ethics to enable individuals and societies to make choices to become sustainable?

Answer 18

81 percent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump

Question 19

Religion and human-environment interactions
e.g. The Biblical perspective-

Genesis 1:28
‘God blessed them [men and women] and said to them “be fruitful and increase in number: fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living creature that moves on the ground”’.

Answer 19

Genesis 2:15
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it”.

Revelation 21:1
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away”.

Question 20

To care for our world is to care for a system of which we are a part and upon which we, all our neighbours, and future generations, are utterly dependent.

Answer 20

As scientists it is important that we don’t let our concerns lead to us drawing conclusions that are factually wrong.

Conservation of biodiversity – particularly of rare species is unlikely to be justifiable on the basis lost ecosystem services- but can be justified on ethical, moral and religious grounds- that scientists often want to distance themselves from.

Question 21

Agriculture is the largest single contributor to global terrestrial biodiversity loss. Is this loss directly affecting humans?

Answer 21

Key concepts for sustainability

Agro-ecology eco-’systems’ thinking and approaches

Ecosystem services essential support systems and other benefits we recieve
from nature including intangible benefits.
Lifecycle analysis wholistic understanding of inputs, outputs, costs, resources,
waste and knock-on environmental impacts.
‘Footprinting’ (as in carbon footprinting, and ecological footprints)
P/R ratios- Production to Reserves ratios for finite non-renewable resources such
as phosphate-rich rock or oil – how long until we run out?
Closed-loop nutrient cycles Not entirely feasible but need progress in this direction

Question 22

Agroecology presents an alternative paradigm of production based on ecological principles such as recycling wastes, minimizing energy and water use, maximizing genetic diversity,

Answer 22

regenerating soil and increasing its carbon content, integrating livestock and crops into a holistic
system, and promoting other beneficial biological synergies.

Hathaway (2016) J Environ Stud Sci 6:239–250

Question 23

Only 7% of agricultural land in the UK is used for cultivation of fruits and vegetables, but we are 60% self-suficient in vegetables

Answer 23

Own-growing- often strongly dependent on nutrient and chemical / organic matter inputs / subsidy but highly productive (typically 26 tonnes per ha) and could adapt permaculture principles

Question 24

People and Policy- need more research funding to improve a more diverse range of crops, especially protein rich legumes and pulses

Answer 24

Permaculture: building increasingly self-sufficient human settlements to create permanent high-yielding agricultural ecosystems, thrive on as little land as possible, leaving as much to wilderness as possible

Question 25

Monocultures
One the central tenets of ‘efficient’ modern intensive agriculture is a fundamental weakness in terms of nutrient, water and solar energy-use efficiency, susceptibility to weeds, pests diseases and pathogens.

Answer 25

Effect of monoculture vs mixed genotype cultures of rice on the extent of rice blast (Magnaporthe
grisea) of shoots in China
(Zhu et al., 2000)

Question 26

Only 47% of the reactive nitrogen added globally to crops is converted into harvested products, compared to 68% in the early 1960s, with N fertilizer input increased 9-fold in this time. Symbiotic nitrogen fixation is currently largely underexploited despite it giving major benefits in nutrient use efficiency, reduced energy demand less pollution and GHG emissions.

Answer 26

Less than 2% of EU crop land used to grow legumes (see Lecture 9)

Question 27

Reinventing old ways of increasing farm incomes and sustainable local economies and production.
Cutting out the middle-man who has squeezed farmer’s incomes and marketed “junk food” to the world.

Answer 27

Example in the UK
50 ha farm a farmer might get:

8% of retail price selling to supermarkets = £33,000
21% of retail price selling to local shops = £87,000
53% of retail price selling to Farmers Market = £218,000

Question 28

Farms can play a significant role in sustainable energy supplies

Answer 28

Anaerobic digestion and biogasification of slurry and wastes

Solar photovoltaics on large livestock sheds etc.

Question 29

Farmland contributing to low carbon energy- negligible impacts on food production from onshore wind farms- but can disrupt upland peatland carbon stores.

Norfolk has >1 million solar panels, with the potential to produce 265MW of renewable energy. At full capacity that’s enough to power over 80,000 homes – 20% of households in the county.

Answer 29

Farmland contributing to low carbon energy but at the expense of food production and soil quality?
There are over 500 solar farms operating in Britain, more than 184 of these sprung up in 2018. Total Capacity including in construction = 8446 MW
Disused RAF airfield solar PV
Sheep grazing on solar farms- but what is there to eat under the panels?

Question 30

What does it do to farmland soil, vegetation and ecosystem services? Remember soil organic carbon is controlled by C inputs- and delivers multiple ecosystem services related to water storage, flood mitigation and soil fertility. If we don’t feed the soil it will structurally and functionally degrade.

Answer 30

Sustainable and efficient food production-

Dietary choices, low meat consumption, low waste, local produce, short supply chains.

Question 31

The personal dimension

Can we make a difference or are our efforts pointless?

Where can we make a difference?

Footprints in the Earth……

What is our carbon footprint?
What is our ecological footprint?
What is our resource use-footprint?

Answer 31

We can make informed dietary choices that improve our health, well-being and are good for the planet and protect soil and ecosystem services.

We might then justify being called Homo sapiens sapiens!

https://www.glopan.org/foresight (deaths avoided by applying dietary guidelines for fruits and vegetables, red meat and energy intake to food availability data)

Question 32

Foley et al., (2011) Solutions for a cultivated planet. Nature

Answer 32

a system for certifying foods based on how well each one delivers nutrition and food security and limits environmental and social costs. Help the public to push agriculture more sustainably

Question 33

Central to informed consumer choice is the increasing opportunity to be aware of the environmental costs of products, conviction that the environment is important to protect, and belief that choices and actions by individuals can transform the world for the better. There are many examples where this has been successful as a philosophy building ‘ethical’ consumer choice- organic agriculture, fair trade, green electricity etc.

Answer 33

We need a valid ‘sustainable’ food brand

Question 34

The final challenges to us-

Understanding risk- the uncertainties in science- and the need to act to effect change before we fully understand all the consequences of not changing what we are doing.

Unprecedented responsibilities on scientists to play a leading role in communicating their knowledge to the public and policymakers- living by our convictions and setting an example for others.

Answer 34

If we don’t take the problems and evidence seriously in terms of changing our actions- and we are amongst the best informed and best educated - what message does that convey to others less well informed?

The Information Age:
Denial or despair- or communication and action