A narwhal turns up in a Dutch estuary. A bizarre beaked whale, the likes of which have never been seen before, is found on an Australian beach. A bowhead whale in Cornwall, 1,000 "miles and an ocean away from its designated domain" (Philip Hoare). Are these signs of warming, more acidic, seas? (Not to mention the bleaching of the coral reef).
pH levels are down from 8.1 (1800) to 8.0 now (doesn't sound much but this is a log scale so that translates into roughly 30% more acidic). If current rates continue ("business-as-usual") we could see mean pH levels of 7.8 by the end of the century (which represents a 150% increase on 1800 levels). The thing to note here is not that the sea hasn't been more acidic in the history of the earth; it's the rate of change that is important.
E. Kolbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, was chosen by the Guardian as one of the 100 most important non-fiction books and I am beginning to see why. The journalist's eye for detail and the ability to weave them into a story makes for compelling reading.
What strikes you is nature's amazing systems. Of course, we like to think of nature as wild, chaotic, random, unanalysable (a good part of the Romantic and counter-Enlightenment tendencies draw on such roots). But if you think of the coral relief as a key player in the exchange of nutrients as well as a stage in which those exchanges take place then you begin to think of it in social terms (i.e the market). So, there's a whole ecosystem that makes us think about balance and equilibrium, but also dynamics and evolution: structure and freedom.
And then if you think of the trees, plants, the flora and fauna in a forest. Of the 130 million km of non-ice land about 70 m has been modified/altered by humans (think of agriculture, deforestation, mining, urban development, etc.) Of the remaining 60 m about 36 m is forest (1/4 of all forest land is in Canada and there are only 20 species of trees there). The remaining 24 m is desert and mountain area. Now, get this: in a small area of Peru (less than the size of Manhattan) there are over 1,500 species of trees! As you move south from the ice-regions biodiversity (not just of trees) increases. Why?
A number of theories. This part of the book was absolutely fascinating and made we want to pull out Deakin's Wildwood which has been languishing on my bookshelf for some time now.
Couldn't but help marvel at the empirical approach to knowledge/reality as well as the commitment of the scientists to trying to make sense of it all (in sharp contrast to the dull and ideological economists whose intelligence is really second-rate at the end of the day).
And what gets you is that if the forests make up an ecosystem as do the seas, then so, surely, does the atmosphere? And how do they all hang together like that? And within that greater order is the human order. Except that now the balance has shifted so far that humans have disrupted-perhaps irrevocably-the very sustainability of those other systems.
At the heart of it is surely something before Descartes and the mechanical idea of nature as mere matter-in-motion; perhaps it all started with out shifting attitudes to (and therefore practices on) the land? Once we started to think of ourselves as exclusively land based creatures and the land as a resource, something to be tamed, trapped, cultivated, exploited, managed and controlled was it only a matter of time before we ended up with this crazed desire for possession? (It is difficult not to see this as an expression of war-a war against the land and war against women who must also be tamed, possessed and controlled). The fertility of the land? Sow your oats?
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