Analysis, by Jeremy Hance, Mongabay Series: Saving Life on Earth: Words on the Wild, Menlo Park, 18 February 2019<\/p>\n
As an environmental journalist I\u2019m bombarded every day with headlines like \u201cThe Insect Apocalypse is Here<\/a>\u201d or \u201cHalf of Global Wildlife Lost<\/a>.\u201d The end of nature, at least as previous generations knew it, appears well-freaking-nigh.<\/p>\n But what if what we\u2019re really witnessing is not the wholesale collapse of global biodiversity, but rather a short, albeit bleak, moment in geological time \u2014 a moment when the ecological health of the world appears in shambles, but also one in which, if you\u2019re brave enough to see it, the shimmer of a newer, better world starts to emerge? A few scientists now say there are macro patterns that point to a world changing in ways almost impossible for us, in 2019, to wrap our heads around. These patterns show that if we just hold on, if conservationists just stand their ground and hold tight, nature might just make its biggest comeback in human history.According to a recent study in Bioscience<\/em> by three scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), history is in the neck of a bottle right now \u2014 everything feels cramped, tight and claustrophobic \u2014 but there\u2019s a light at the end of this tunnel.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s green.<\/p>\n The Bottleneck-to-Breakthrough Theory<\/strong><\/p>\n Last year, Eric Sanderson, WCS\u2019s senior conservation ecologist; Joseph Walston, its vice president of field conservation; and John Robinson, executive vice president of conservation and science, published an open-access paper<\/a> titled \u201cFrom Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Urbanization and the Future of Biodiversity Conservation.\u201d The paper didn\u2019t get a lot of attention in the press<\/a> and has only been cited three times since, according to Google Scholar. But the time-bending story it tells is radically different from most tales told by conservation scientists today \u2014 believe me, because I\u2019ve heard enough of them over beers.<\/p>\n The scientists\u2019 \u201cbottleneck to breakthrough\u201d theory posits that if global society continues to become increasingly urbanized, fertility rates decline (and eventually fall below replacement levels) and extreme poverty vanishes, then nature will have a chance to make a comeback. Not on a global scale in any of our lifetimes (those of us around today will likely be left in the bottleneck), but certainly our children\u2019s children could inherit a much more promising world than we have today.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not inconceivable that two centuries from now, the population could be half what it is today and the long-cherished goals of a world where people respect and care for nature may be realized,\u201d the researchers write. \u201cEspe cially if we act now to foster this eventuality.\u201d<\/p>\n The trinity here is population, poverty and urbanization.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see how population decline benefits nature: fewer humans means a smaller overall human footprint. Forests and other ecosystems will return; species will rebound. Such occurrences have already been seen in areas where human populations have stabilized or fallen.<\/p>\n Urbanization amplifies this trend. According to the researchers, urbanization not only clumps people into smaller, more efficient areas, but urban residents also tend to have fewer children. This is due to the fact that women in cities generally have more autonomy, education and opportunity, leading to fewer children. Better health care in cities also means lower infant mortality rates, resulting in couples deciding to have fewer children because they do not fear for a child\u2019s survival.<\/p>\n The increasing agglomeration of humanity into cities won\u2019t necessarily mean higher environmental impacts either, the researchers say. City dwellers tend to spend significantly more of their wealth on housing, transport and investing. They also tend to live in a more efficient system, consuming less energy and water and producing less waste per capita compared to rural communities. Today, more than half the world\u2019s population lives in urban areas.<\/p>\n At the same time, the percentage of those living in extreme poverty continues to decline. While the elimination of poverty is, of course, a noble endeavor, it also arguably benefits nature as those living in extreme poverty often depend directly on exploiting nature to survive. At the same time, the researchers argue that \u201ceducation, regulation, economic policy, or social norms\u201d can help decouple rising wealth from natural resource extraction and environmental impacts.<\/p>\n \u201cThis piece of work is not in order to raise people\u2019s spirits,\u201d Walston says, \u201cit\u2019s because we think there is a massively underestimated or lack of awareness over these macro drivers.\u201d<\/p>\n He adds that the same forces that are \u201cdriving down nature\u201d today are \u201c<\/strong>forming the foundations of the ultimate circumstances [where] nature can rebound and recover.\u201d<\/p>\n The scientists are by no means denying the current dire reports about wildlife and biodiversity today, but they see a potential different future ahead if we support these macro patterns, some of which are connected, ironically, to development, globalization and market forces.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the fundamental \u2026 reason why people can\u2019t get their head around it, because, at the same time, it\u2019s getting towards its darkest point,\u201d Walston says.<\/p>\n From Japan to Sub-Saharan Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n In May, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that fertility rates in the country had dropped to their lowest rates ever: 1.76 babies per woman. This is well below the 2.1 births per woman that is considered replacement level, i.e. the rate at which the population holds steady. Of course, the U.S. is not going to see its actual population decline anytime soon for two reasons: built-in momentum of past birth booms, and immigration.<\/p>\n But the news shows that even the U.S. can\u2019t escape the inevitability of fertility decline. As nations emerge into advanced economies, poverty declines, populations urbanize and the rate of fertility drops until eventually populations will stabilize.<\/p>\n The final part of this transition, actual population decline coupled with low (even non-existent) extreme poverty and high urbanization, has been observed in a number of nations, like Japan and Portugal. With fewer people, ecosystems can make a comeback.<\/p>\n But the political response to these demographic changes has often been negative. Concerned with short-term economic growth, politicians and economists appear to have hissy fits whenever there\u2019s a whiff of population decline: in Japan, politicians have a history of stepping in it by blaming women<\/a>for not having more kids or imploring them to become \u201cbirth-giving machines<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The media follow the economists and politicians, though, covering population decline as some sort of natural disaster (see here<\/a> and here<\/a>). Such journalism decries falling fertility rates with nary a mention of climate change, the environment, mass extinction, or overpopulation. In 2017, Paul Ryan, the then-speaker of the House, implored Americans to have more children, with the father of three adding, \u201cI did my part.\u201d<\/p>\n But Walston says that so far politicians and economists, for all their hand-wringing, have been unable to find a way to reverse fertility declines: \u201cGovernments have tried everything from paying people to forcing people, and it hasn\u2019t worked.\u201d<\/p>\n The only way to really boost population, according to Walston and Sanderson, is to go to war again. It turns out peace is very good for stabilizing global population (security means you\u2019re less fearful of losing a child), while war tends to produce baby booms.<\/p>\n Walston says economists \u201ctend to go right to\u201d the age transition in a society where demographic slowdown means more elderly than young people.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is a short-term \u2014 short-term meaning a couple of decades \u2014 problem for the economy. But in the long term, eventually, those old people will pass like we all do, and then the population will be smaller and the age structure will come back into more of an alignment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n There is one region that has so far bucked the global trend: sub-Saharan Africa still suffers from widespread poverty (Nigeria has more people living in extreme poverty than anywhere else) and, perhaps as importantly, a stubbornly high fertility rate. Currently, women in sub-Saharan Africa have just under five children each \u2014 twice the global average.<\/p>\n \u201cI think African cities are the most important place to work on conservation or [any] other humanitarian issues because they hold the secret to stabilization,\u201d Sanderson says.<\/p>\n Ongoing growth in sub-Saharan Africa makes current projections for the global population frightening, potentially as high as 11.2 billion by 2100, though Sanderson says these \u201cbigger\u201d numbers \u201ctake the historical rates and just project them into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n He says he believes Africa will actually go through its \u201cdemographic transition a lot faster\u201d than other regions.<\/p>\n For one thing, we already have the knowledge of how to improve health, welfare and education, and provide access to family planning. Second, Sanderson says he believes the region will soon see a flood of capital from outside countries, especially China, looking for new investment opportunities.<\/p>\n \u201cThe really critical piece is the African governments. Get those governments to work and to be trusted by their people,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n Both Sanderson and Walston point to Rwanda, where fertility rates have halved in the last 30 years, as an example of an African nation arguably coming to the edge of its bottleneck.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have a government that actually works,\u201d Sanderson says. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to make its cities work, and they\u2019re attracting all kinds of investment, and it\u2019s really manifesting in amazing social trends that are, again, unthought of 30 years ago.<\/p>\n \u201cRwanda is the poster child,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n Conservation in the bottle<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s assume that Sanderson, Robinson and Walston have hit on a correct theory: that we\u2019re in a transitional state and that the future Earth may look far greener and smaller than the current one. What do we do with that knowledge? How do conservationists and policymakers help sustain this transition, and make sure there\u2019s still wildlife left once we\u2019ve all emerged from the bottleneck?<\/p>\n \u201cWe have this amazing challenge,\u201d Walston says, \u201cwe have an opportunity to, over the [next] few decades, to get as much of nature through that bottleneck as possible, because whatever we do to succeed is going to be the precursor to an amazing renaissance for nature, and we\u2019re seeing that already across the world in various places.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the paper, there are five actions conservationists should focus on for nations in the midst of the ecological bottleneck: create protected areas, safeguard threatened biodiversity, support better cities, push rural-to-urban migration, and regulate destructive industries to minimize damage.<\/p>\n Even though different countries will experience the bottleneck at different times, the primary responses can be the same.<\/p>\n The number one thing is to \u201cmake sure some parts of nature do get through the bottleneck,\u201d Walston says.<\/p>\n This points to an old-fashioned kind of conservation<\/a>, focused on creating parks and protecting species.<\/p>\n \u201c[Fortress conservation] is a highly effective, highly cost-efficient, and long-term strategy even though it\u2019s been exactly exemplified as being the opposite,\u201d says Walston, who describes conservation\u2019s aim during the bottleneck as \u201cto literally just hold on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHolding on has been one of the most effective long-term strategies of conservation,\u201d he goes on, \u201cwhen you read back about those people who \u2026 established Yellowstone National Park.<\/p>\n \u201cThey thought that was it<\/em>. They thought the West was lost.\u201d<\/p>\n Walston believes if those past conservation champions saw the American West today \u2014 the return of the wolves, the rebounding of grizzlies, the reconnecting of parks across the Rockies \u2014 \u201cthey would cry with happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n A focus on protected areas aligns well with another bold idea circulating in conservation circles today: Half Earth<\/a>. First developed by renowned scientist E.O. Wilson, Half Earth posits that humans should set aside half of the planet for nature, both on land and water, to avoid mass extinction.<\/p>\n Walston says he loves the \u201cbold statement of ambition\u201d in Half Earth, but says he thinks the conversation has become too bogged down in minutiae and pessimism.<\/p>\n \u201c[Bottleneck to breakthrough] offers us a better mechanism of achieving Half Earth than any sort of [map]-based analytical prioritization process that is coming out at the moment,\u201d he says, adding. \u201cEveryone at the moment is talking about the unachievability of Half Earth \u2014 and we actually think it could be way<\/em> more than half.\u201d<\/p>\n Walston, who began his career as a conservationist in Thailand, points to that country as informing his views and theory. \u201cThailand was the laughing stock. Thailand was the bogeyman in Southeast Asian conservation when I was cutting my teeth. We hit the bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n But with declining poverty and fertility, increased urbanization and better governance, Thailand is \u201cstarting to come back\u201d in nature terms, according to Walston. Now the needs of conservation in Thailand should turn to connecting the burgeoning middle class with their natural heritage, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got to connect them back to these places [to] which they feel ownership,\u201d Walston says. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones now who are ensuring their government pays more for these sites, does more to protect them, connects them up, allows for innovative new conservation like conservancies to work around them and to actually expand.\u201d<\/p>\n Walston points out that even the tiger<\/a> may be starting to make a slow rebound in Thailand, with a second population discovered in 2017.<\/p>\n Countries emerging from the bottleneck don\u2019t suddenly go from losing nature to gaining it; the process is slow, taking decades, and isn\u2019t a straight shot. But it can mean that natural landscapes get some breathing room, achieve more public support, and are less imperiled.<\/p>\n Walston says post-bottleneck levels of ambition should rise to making \u201cbold commitments,\u201d including toward establishing transnational parks, community conservation areas and interconnecting parks, and looking forward to potential rewilding.<\/p>\n Walston and Sanderson say their organization, WCS, is already incorporating the bottleneck-to-breakthrough theory in its daily work. There is an increased focus on urban areas at WCS, while at the same time the organization is very focused on the places where the bottleneck is the most cramped: sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.<\/p>\n Most recently, the researchers used their theory to analyze the potential future<\/a> for tigers in Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n Walston again points to Rwanda and how the \u201cholding on\u201d of gorillas there has achieved unimaginable success.<\/p>\n \u201cGoodness, what Rwanda went through over the last 30 years,\u201d he says. But \u201csomeone \u2026 held on to those mountain gorillas through all of that. Now it\u2019s the most phenomenally successful conservation program, run by Rwandans, supported by the Rwandan government and \u2026 providing a strong financial spine to the local and national economy.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Rwanda\u2019s mountain gorilla population is on the rise.<\/p>\n \u201cAt its worst moments, [conservationists] still held on. That\u2019s the primary strategy in [the bottleneck],\u201d Walston says.<\/p>\n \u201cIf anything, we see our paper as exactly the reason to work in conservation and urban planning, because our work now could have such enormous long-term payoff,\u201d Sanderson says.<\/p>\n Eucatastrophe<\/strong><\/p>\n J.R.R. Tolkien invented the word eucatastrophe. It refers to the sudden, happy U-turn so common in myths and literature: the protagonist comes to the edge of total ruin and then, by some means, turns things around. Near destruction becomes happily ever after.<\/p>\n Tolkien employed this idea to great effect in his seminal work, \u201cThe Lord of the Rings,\u201d but, as a Christian, he also believed in its real-life power: that even as we reach the edge of peril, humanity has the agency to reverse course.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are getting closer to the greatest inflection point,\u201d Walston says of the bottleneck-to-breakthrough theory, \u201cit\u2019s the point where things may look the most dire.\u201d<\/p>\n Walston and his colleagues\u2019 theory is based on reams of evidence and data, but it also requires coming to particular conclusions about what they all mean. Ultimately, the theory leads to a possible prediction about our future.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not destiny. It\u2019s an idea. A tantalizing one, but it may turn out not to be true at all.<\/p>\n \u201cSuccess is by no means inevitable,\u201d the researchers write. \u201cBut \u2026 acting to accelerate these dynamics now offers the best opportunity humanity will ever have to recover nature on a global scale\u201d \u2014 to, in a word, complete a eucatastrophe.<\/p>\n Still, the researchers acknowledge that one of the threats that could throw a wrench into everything is global warming.<\/p>\n Sanderson calls it a \u201cwild card\u201d due to arguments over \u201ctipping points and setting up positive feedbacks that will take the Earth system a really long time to recover from.\u201d<\/p>\n If we allow our climate to go over the edge, mass extinction may become inevitable.<\/p>\n But Sanderson also stresses that action on their theory would produce a cooler world. One of the best \u2014 and least talked about ways \u2014 to combat climate change is for societies to transition more quickly to smaller families.<\/p>\n Cities are also key.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the underappreciated aspects of tackling climate change is urbanization,\u201d Walston says, citing the C40 Cities climate initiative<\/a>. \u201cForget states, forget, in many ways, federal governments, it\u2019s the cities of the world [that] are coming together, both because they are feeling the brunt of [climate change] but also because they are feeling power.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, any prediction comes up against a lot of ifs. What if the population trend in sub-Saharan Africa doesn\u2019t follow the slowdown in the rest of the world? What if we blow past 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming? What if consumption and materialism overwhelm our ability to safeguard ecosystems? What if insects vanish<\/a>, because we choose to do nothing?<\/p>\n The researchers want to make it clear that they are not advocating doing business as usual. Far from it. Nor are they saying current trends are just going to save us without anyone lifting a finger.<\/p>\n \u201cOne could imagine the bottleneck closing either because population grows too fast and poverty overtakes it, or because we turn our back on nature through some idea that only technology and progress will do all the work,\u201d Sanderson says.<\/p>\n But he bucks against what he calls the \u201cTwitter version\u201d of environmental pessimism.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything is going to hell in a hand-basket suggests there is no reason at all to do anything, because anything we do will inevitably fail. I think both [Walston] and I believe that creating the prospects for the future we want will be enormously difficult, but our paper suggests how it might actually happen, rather than \u2014 as so much of the conservation literature does \u2014 pointing out how things can\u2019t or won\u2019t work out.\u201d<\/p>\n This January, a state-sponsored think tank in China announced that it expected the country\u2019s population, the world\u2019s biggest, to plateau within a decade. The report<\/a> predicts that China will hit a peak of 1.44 billion in 2029 and then fall. Media outlets largely responded with the usual freakouts<\/a>.<\/p>\n But make no mistake: this is good news, great news, in fact, for the climate, biodiversity and the sustainability not only of humanity at present, but for the future welfare of generations to come.<\/p>\n Walston and Sanderson point to one recent demographic projection that says the global population could fall to 2.3 billion by 2300 \u2014 less than a third of the current population.<\/p>\n \u201cTwo-point-three billion where nobody is poor and everybody has access to all the technology we already have now, plus whatever we\u2019re going to invent between now and then: a completely different world in terms of conservation,\u201d Walston says. \u201cConservation is not even the right word at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n Humpback whale and calf. At the end of the whaling industry humpback whales were down to a few thousand. Today the population stands at around 80,000. Photo via NOAA<\/p>\n What would be the word, then? Maybe abundance. Maybe eucatastrophe.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been an environmental journalist too long to be wholly na\u00efve about the various ecological or social theories that rise to the top. But I have a hard time disagreeing with many of Sanderson and Walston\u2019s points.<\/p>\n So I find myself imagining another world from the one I inherited, one I\u2019ll never see, but one my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren may awaken to: where orangutans are moving into abandoned plantations in Borneo, where lions are inhabiting new territory and people are saying \u201cWell, what do we do about this now?\u201d, where Sumatran rhinos are being transported back to mainland Asia, where scientists have lost track of how many North Atlantic right whale babies are born every year because there are simply too many.<\/p>\n A world where global temperatures are 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than now, where people are planting rainforests on long-fallow ground, and where wolves are howling in nearly all of the 50 U.S. states (I don\u2019t advocate bringing them to Hawaii). This is a place where indigenous people are hunting monkeys on their legal lands in the Amazon, while someone in Cuba is breeding captive solenodons for re-release, and insects still rule the world.<\/p>\n There are 2.3 billion humans in this world. No one would imagine burning coal or oil for energy anymore (how primitive!). Extreme poverty is a thing of the past. Cities are towers of green, rural areas are flush with forests and fields, and wildernesses are just an hour away from almost anywhere.<\/p>\n I know this world is a dream, an illusion. But I also know it\u2019s not<\/em> impossible. And not only does our generation have the power to begin the eucatastrophe, but there are already forces at work we can harness. We just have to choose to do so.<\/p>\n CITATIONS:<\/p>\n E. W. Sanderson, J. Walston, J. G. Robinson, <\/em>From bottleneck to breakthrough: Urbanization and the future of biodiversity conservation. Bioscience<\/em> 68, 412\u2013426 (2018). 10.1093\/biosci\/biy039pmid:29867252<\/p>\n Eric W. Sanderson, Jesse Moy, Courtney Rose, Kim Fisher, Bryan Jones, Deborah Balk, Peter Clyne, Dale Miquelle, Joseph Walston. Implications of the shared socioeconomic pathways for tiger (Panthera tigris) conservation. Biological Conservation<\/em>, 2019; 231: 13 DOI: 10.1016\/j.biocon.2018.12.017<\/p>\n