We only have one environment. It’s where we live. It’s beautiful, it’s fragile, and it’s finite. That first adjective may be subjective, but the others are fact.
Let’s start with finite. Have you ever sat in a large passenger aircraft and looked down on the Swiss Alps or the Himalaya? (The Australian “Alps” hardly even register as a bump from up there) You may be cruising at 10,000 – 12,000 metres. Step outside, if that were possible, and you’re dead.
Everest is 8,800m, and the trials of getting to its summit are well known, as are the regular deaths among those who make the attempt. Base camp is below 5,400m. Climbers will generally spend a few days there acclimatising even to that altitude, before venturing further up.
The highest permanent outposts of civilisation are a bit over 5,000m, in Peru and Tibet. That’s about as much altitude as the human body can take long-term. Indeed, most mammals struggle. Himalayan yaks and pika, and Andean guinea pigs can manage at over 4,000m, but that’s about it. Even plants can’t survive. There’s a moss species on Everest at about 6,500m that probably holds the record until some mountaineer with spare time finds something higher.
Some species of birds – 12,000m !! – and spiders cope better, but they are exceptions even to their own order’s rules. And they are not the creatures that interfere with the fragility aspect – more on that later.
So the greatest distance in the vertical dimension that our human environment extends is effectively 5,000m. Five kilometres. Three miles, give or take. I can walk that far in an hour. Let that sink in for a moment. Walk. In an hour!
As for the other two dimensions (interesting concept for a sphere), the total surface area is about 510 million square kilometres. Of that, though, about 70% is water, and I am unaware of any permanent human habitats under water. That leaves about 30% land. Discount Antarctica as a practical place to live. Discount anything at an altitude higher than that discussed above. Discount deserts. Suddenly the human habitable space is not that large. Here’s a nice pie chart that gives an idea of how little room we have to move. Bear in mind the green slice, “Good land that can be farmed”. Can be farmed. Much of it is not yet farmed, and would need to be cleared or somehow transformed, with greenhouse and many, many other impacts.
Now, having said to discount Antarctic, alpine and desert regions – we must not. They may not be fit for human habitation, but are home to plenty of other species which deserve their place in the universe. And each of those species’ own habitable range of the planet’s surface is effectively only a tiny fraction of ours. As humankind we have the capacity to transform the environment to suit ourselves, or to move elsewhere across continents and/or oceans.
Too often we do the former – change and block watercourses, clear land for agriculture, create comfortable places to live without the elements killing us, and so on. And if all that doesn’t work, or we exhaust the resources that we came to exploit, we do the latter – bugger off to somewhere else, leaving a landscape totally unsuitable for the original ecosystem. And then we do it all again, leaving vast areas unsuitable for the original inhabitants. They inevitably die out, reducing the DNA pool required for evolution and adaptation. The need for biodiversity had slowly been realised over the last decade or two, but little has been done to slow its destruction.
We’re starting to meander into the realm of “fragile” here, so a few more words on “finite”… As the world’s population growth continues apace (and there are a few factors driving that), there is more and more pressure on available land space. Firstly, people simply have to live somewhere. Secondly, that somewhere needs to be made habitable, and that’s usually energy-intensive. Thirdly, they need to be fed.
The trend for new cities to become more dense than twentieth-century suburban sprawl helps with the first part, although established cities still have a tendency to spread into cheaper perimeter land. Energy and resource consumption in building and running a habitable modern metropolis such as those in China and the Middle East can be huge, and goes largely unconsidered by the occupants. Again, a move to greener cities, potentially with more renewable-energy electric systems, may help. Food production is another thing altogether. Agriculture requires land, lots of it, and that will always impinge on the natural environment. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in theory can address this issue, too, but that’s a whole other topic.
(I hope you can see where this little project is going. There are spin-off articles to come all over the place)
Unless the whole world regresses to hunter-gatherer status, and that may be politically unpopular, agriculture is plainly a necessity. And, ironically, it can create some very beautiful landscapes. Agricultural regions become environments of their own, where people work and live. Their quality of life needs to be safeguarded as much as the people in the city who they feed and, in turn, their produce needs to be safe for their city customers to consume.
And cities are environments in their own right. Many of them are very beautiful, whether for their history, charm, modernity, architecture, liveability, or any combination of these. But we need to be mindful of the effects that a city has on its citizens. Even without going into the economics and politics (areas skilfully avoided so far), physical and mental well-being is impacted by air, food and water quality, space, aesthetics, leisure, recreation, connection, culture, diversity, community, security, and so on.
We seem to be becoming more mindful of these issues, with urban regeneration projects taking these factors into account. For a classic example on a huge scale, see this South Korean story. While not perfect, it’s a vast improvement:
http://tinyurl.com/hnhe9cn
Food quality and food security will become big issues in the future as population grows, agriculture becomes the realm of corporations, and climate change makes itself felt. Aquaculture may relieve some pressure on land-based protein production, but has its own environmental and quality problems if mis-managed, just as wild fisheries have been devastated in many parts of the world.
This is a good place to move on to “fragile”. We don’t have a great understanding of just how fragile ecosystems and their environments can be. Those devastated fisheries only take into account the commercially desirable species that suddenly is on the brink of extinction. Very little is known of the ramifications up and down the food chain. As a fictitious example, take the delicious brush-tail lizard groper. The species has been fished so hard that it’s now hard to find. The price is so high that fishers continue to take it where possible, despite the recent rules, regulations and quotas introduced to save it. Meanwhile, the purple-spotted wallaby prawn (so tough and ugly that nobody will buy it) has reached plague proportions, and displaced all those other prawns that people actually like to eat. That’s because the purple-spotted wallaby prawn is the only food of the brush-tail lizard groper. And the three-legged goanna shark, the only shark with stomach enzymes able to digest brush-tails and neoprene, has become so food-deprived that it resorts to eating surfers and divers. But who knew? Who cared?
To go back to our comfortable seat in a trans-continental aircraft… Next time you’re on your way from takeoff to cruise altitude, take note of the cloud layer, if there is one, as you pass through. (In Australia you may be hard-pressed at times to find a cloud, but bear with me, okay?) The point is, it’s only a layer. And it you look at the edges, you’ll see little bits forming, and other little bits disappearing. The same can be seen while lying romantically in the long grass and looking skyward, but it’s not quite so close-up. That’s water changing state from vapour to tiny liquid droplets, and back again. It happens as combinations of airborne dust, temperature, pressure and humidity change, and just goes to show the narrow tolerances that dictate our world. The tiniest change in one of those factors causes water to evaporate or condense – or not – in the space of a centimetre. Large-scale atmospheric changes like global warming will have a vast impact on weather patterns and rainfall distribution.
For another animal-based example, real this time, have a look at this story about Yellowstone National Park wolves. A simple example with profound, complex, and unexpected outcomes:
As for beauty, as mentioned, it’s very subjective. City, countryside, remote wilderness, desert, rainforest, alpine…take your pick. Or pick them all, but be mindful of the fact that it’s an environment for someone, or something. It needs looking after. This is where economics and politics come in, but we’ll meander there soon enough.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with these…. from the Bue Mountains in New South Wales, Grassland in far northern Western Australia, and Eastern Turkey.
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Good job Pete.
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