Damian Carrington Environment editor for the Guardian reports (Thu 20 Aug 2020):
The Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice in 2019, equivalent to a million tonnes per minute across the year, satellite data shows.
The climate crisis is heating the Arctic at double the rate in lower latitudes, and the ice cap is the biggest single contributor to sea level rise, which already imperils coasts around the world. The ice sheet shrank by 532bn tonnes last year as its surface melted and glaciers fell into the ocean and would have filled seven Olympic-sized swimming pools per second.
The satellite data has been collected since 2003. The 2019 loss was double the annual average since then of 255bn tonnes. Almost that amount was lost in July 2019 alone.
Scientists knew that ice loss from Greenland had been accelerating fast in recent decades and that there had been high rates of melting in 2019. But the satellite data accounts for new snowfall and allows the net loss to be calculated. The researchers said the scale of the 2019 loss was shocking and was likely to be the biggest in centuries or even millennia.
If the entire Greenland ice sheet melts, sea level would rise by six metres. But the researchers said it was not certain that the sheet had passed the point of no return and that cutting carbon emissions will slow the melting, which would take centuries to complete.
The scientists attributed the extreme ice loss in 2019 to “blocking patterns” of weather that kept warm air over Greenland for longer periods. These are becoming increasingly frequent as the world heats up. Almost 96% of the ice sheet underwent melting at some point in 2019, compared with an average of 64% between 1981 and 2010.
“[2019 was] really shocking and depressing in terms of the numbers,” said Ingo Sasgen, of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, who led the analysis. “But it’s also not very surprising, because we had other strong melt years in 2010 and 2012, and I expect we will see more and more.”
Snowfall in Greenland was low in 2019, also due to the blocking pattern, meaning relatively little new ice was added. “The real message is that the ice sheet is strongly out of balance,”Sasgen said.
Weather data and computer models allow for losses to be calculated back to 1948. “If we look at the record melt years, the top five occurred in the last 10 years, and that is a concern. But we know what to do about it: reduce CO2 emissions.”
Sasgen said a further worry was feedback mechanisms that increase ice loss, including meltwater weakening the ice sheet and speeding its fall into the ocean. Hotter weather also melts the white snow on top of the sheet, revealing darker ice below, which absorbs more of the sun’s heat.
“These results come at a crucial time,” said Yara Mohajerani, of the University of California Irvine in the US, who was not part of the study team. “2019 broke the previous record of 2012 by 15%, itself an unmatched record over the past several centuries to millennia.”
He said the heating of the Arctic was likely to increase further in coming years. “So it is crucial to closely monitor the changes in [ice] mass of the sheet, and Sasgen and his colleagues have taken an important step in that direction.”
The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, used data from the Nasa’s Grace satellites, which take gravity measurements and in effect weigh the mass of ice in Greenland.
The first Grace satellite ended its data collection in June 2017, and its replacement began in May 2018. Data from the second satellite was used to determine how much had been lost in the intervening period.
The researchers found 2017 and 2018 had unusually low ice loss, owing to a reversal of the blocking pattern that resulted in cold, snowy conditions fixed over Greenland. But even in these conditions the sheet still lost ice, meaning cold years do not compensate for the hot ones as in the past.
“It really shows that we have entered a completely different state,” with a trend of increasing ice losses and more variability each year, Sasgen said. “Greenland has become bipolar in a way.”
Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, of the University of Potsdam in Germany, said the new analysis was convincing and showed the transition from the old to the new satellite had worked smoothly.
“Since meltwater is freshwater, it dilutes the salt content of the surrounding ocean, which contributes to slowing the Gulf stream system,”Rahmstorf said. “If we wanted to make the 500bn tonnes of freshwater added in 2019 as salty as ocean water, about 200,000 Panamax-class cargo ships full of salt would need to dump their load into the Atlantic.”
Despite the rapid melting, the Greenland ice sheet is not necessarily doomed to melt entirely. Firstly, as glaciers retreat they lose contact with warmer ocean waters and therefore melt less. Secondly, the melting of the sheet with warm air takes centuries, during which time the rise in global temperatures might be reversed.
“If we reduce CO2, we will reduce Arctic warming and we will therefore also reduce the sea level rise contribution from the Greenland ice sheet,”Sasgen said. “So even though it might eventually disappear in large part, it happens much slower, which would be better as it would allow more time for the 600 million people living near coasts to move away.”
Q. What is to be done?
A. As quoted in this report: “. . . we know what to do about it: reduce
CO2 emissions.”
A temporary respite as a decline in the human consumption of Earth's resources is reported in the Guardian by Alex Mistlin (Fri 21 Aug 2020):
The rate at which humanity is consuming the Earth’s resources declined sharply this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to researchers.
Consequently, Earth Overshoot Day, the point at which human consumption exceeds the amount nature can regenerate in a year, has moved back by over three weeks from 29 July in 2019 to 22 August this year.
According to research conducted by Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation, coronavirus-induced lockdowns led to a 9.3% reduction in humanity’s ecological footprint compared with the same period last year. However, in order to keep consuming ecological resources at our current rate we would still need the equivalent of 1.6 Earths.
“Earth Overshoot Day is a way to illustrate the scale of the biological challenge we face,” said Mathis Wackernagel, president of Global Footprint Network. Although Wackernagel said this year’s data was encouraging, he called for further progress to be made “by design not by disaster”.
The three week shift between the dates of Earth Overshoot Day in 2019 and 2020 represents the greatest ever single-year shift since global overshoot began in the 1970s. Since then, rising populations and increasing levels of per capita consumption have seen Earth Overshoot Day move earlier into the year, with the date arriving in July for the first time in 2019.
“It’s a Ponzi scheme, we’re using up the future to pay for the present,” said Wackernagel. “Most countries have pretty strict laws about businesses running Ponzi schemes but somehow in the ecological domain we think it’s okay. We’ve only got one planet and that’s not going to change. We’ve got a very simple choice, one-planet prosperity or one-planet misery.” Previous economic crises have seen the date pushed back temporarily, such as the 2007-08 financial crisis which saw the date retreat five days further into the year.
David Lin, who leads the research team behind Earth Overshoot Day, explained: “This year it was particularly tricky because we wanted to give an indication of how Covid-19 affected 2020 results”.
Lin’s research found that there was a major drop in CO2 emissions (down 14.5% compared with the same period in the previous year), and in commercial forestry (down 8.4% on 2019).
Mike Childs, head of policy for Friends of the Earth, warned that “this year’s improvement in the way we use our natural resources is solely down to Covid-19 and subsequent lockdowns. Unless there is a significant change in the way we act the situation is likely to return to normal, or worse, in the following years.”
Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian on the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures (Sat 22 Aug 2020) under the subheading:
Experts to explain how pandemic offers chance to pull planet back from the brink
Nicola Davis writes:
Covid-19 has provided a crucial opportunity to make drastic changes to tackle climate change, experts behind this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures have said. The talks, Planet Earth: A User’s Guide, will take audiences on a deep dive into our planet’s workings, from rock formation and Earth’s ancient climate, to the fundamental role of the oceans and the makeup of the air we breathe. Each of the three lectures will be presented by a different scientist from a trio of experts: the oceanographer Dr Helen Czerski, environmental scientist Dr Tara Shine and geologist Prof Chris Jackson. “What gets the three of us really excited is that we’re not going to tell you about all these parts in isolation, we’re trying to paint for you a picture of how our planetary system works and where we are as one species within that,” said Shine, speaking over Zoom from Ireland. Joining the conversation with a large image of a bioluminescent bigfin squid behind her, Czerski said she hoped her lecture would encourage viewers to see oceans were more than just the “blue bit” of the planet but the heart of its engine. “The reservoir of water the Earth has, that’s its battery of energy from the sun – it shifts, it carries heat, it holds heat, it moves it around, it moves chemistry around. If you didn’t have that the Earth would be uninhabitable,” she said. While the Blue Planet series by David Attenborough in 2018 has been credited as fuelling a drive to reduce plastic waste, Czerski hopes this year’s lectures will trigger a bigger shift in how we view the oceans. “People were upset by the plastic. And that’s fine. But it’s not the point,” she said. For Jackson, the lectures bring the opportunity to set out how the climate has changed over the planet’s 4.5bn-year history. Understanding the Earth’s systems, and our impact on them, raises crucial questions. “Are we going to say the Anthropocene was the time that humans destroyed the planet,”Shine said. “Or are we going to say it was the time that humans nearly destroyed the planet and just pulled it back from the brink?” The team believe Covid-19 presents a new opportunity to take action on climate change, as countries make drastic changes to infrastructure, jobs and investment. “One of the excuses people give for not doing things about climate change is, ‘Oh, there’s this enormous system and it’s too hard or too expensive or too difficult to change it because that’s the way it is’,” Czerski said. “What’s happening now is that systems are having to change.” “Covid is a restart button,”Shine said. The pandemic provided an opportunity to build on developments such as the EU green deal, while opening conversations about risk and resilience. “To be resilient to the next pandemic we have to build some of the same core skills and capabilities that we need to be resilient to climate change,” she said, adding that such challenges were interconnected. A growing body of research has found destruction of ecosystems allows animals that carry potentially deadly diseases to proliferate, increasing the risk of another pandemic. But, Czerski stressed, Covid was far from welcome. “The scientists and the policymakers who are concerned about climate change are extremely sympathetic to the massive suffering a huge number of people have had through this pandemic,” she said. “The entire point is that this is what societal change looks like when something changes.”
The answer according to The Royal Institute is . . .
A. Long-term measurements of tide gauges and recent satellite data show that global sea level is rising, with the best estimate of the rate of global-average rise over the last decade being 3.6 mm per year (0.14 inches per year).
The rate of sea level rise has increased since measurements using altimetry from space were started in 1992; the dominant factor in global-average sea level rise since 1970 is human-caused warming. The overall observed rise since 1902 is about 16 cm (6 inches).
Observations show that the global average sea level has risen by about 16 cm (6 inches) since the late 19th century. Sea level is rising faster in recent decades; measurements from tide gauges (blue) and satellites (red) indicate that the best estimate for the average sea level rise over the last decade is centred on 3.6 mm per year (0.14 inches per year). The shaded area represents the sea level uncertainty, which has decreased as the number of gauge sites used in calculating the global averages and the number of data points have increased. Source: Shum and Kuo (2011).
This answer is expanded . . .
This sea level rise has been driven by expansion of water volume as the ocean warms, melting of mountain glaciers in all regions of the world, and mass losses from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. All of these result from a warming climate. Fluctuations in sea level also occur due to changes in the amounts of water stored on land. The amount of sea level change experienced at any given location also depends on a variety of other factors, including whether regional geological processes and rebound of the land weighted down by previous ice sheets are causing the land itself to rise or sink, and whether changes in winds and currents are piling ocean water against some coasts or moving water away.
The effects of rising sea level are felt most acutely in the increased frequency and intensity of occasional storm surges. If CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to increase on their current trajectories, it is projected that sea level may rise, at minimum, by a further 0.4 to 0.8 m (1.3 to 2.6 feet) by 2100, although future ice sheet melt could make these values considerably higher. Moreover, rising sea levels will not stop in 2100; sea levels will be much higher in the following centuries as the sea continues to take up heat and glaciers continue to retreat. It remains difficult to predict the details of how the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets will respond to continued warming, but it is thought that Greenland and perhaps West Antarctica will continue to lose mass, whereas the colder parts of Antarctica could gain mass as they receive more snowfall from warmer air that contains more moisture. Sea level in the last interglacial (warm) period around 125,000 years ago peaked at probably 5 to 10 m above the present level. During this period, the polar regions were warmer than they are today. This suggests that, over millennia, long periods of increased warmth will lead to very significant loss of parts of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and to consequent sea level rise.
Generations yet unborn will face rising oceans and coastal inundations into the 2300s even if governments meet climate commitments, researchers find
Oliver Milman in New York writing for the Guardian (Wed 6 Nov 2019) reports under the headline:
Sea level rise is set to challenge human civilization for centuries to come, even if internationally agreed climate goals are met and planet-warming emissions are then immediately eliminated, researchers have found.
The lag time between rising global temperatures and the knock-on impact of coastal inundation means that the world will be dealing with ever-rising sea levels into the 2300s, regardless of prompt action to address the climate crisis, according to the new study.
Even if governments meet their commitments from the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, the first 15-year period of the deal will still result in enough emissions that would cause sea levels to increase by around 20cm by the year 2300.
This scenario, modeled by researchers, assumes that all countries make their promised emissions reductions by 2030 and then abruptly eliminate all planet-warming gases from that point onwards. In reality, only a small number of countries are on track to meet the Paris target of limiting global heating to 2C above the pre-industrial era.
“Even with the Paris pledges there will be a large amount of sea level rise,” said Peter Clark, an Oregon State University climate scientist and co-author of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Sea level rise is going to be an ongoing problem for centuries to come, we will have to keep on adapting over and over again. It’s going to be a whole new expensive lifestyle, costing trillions of dollars.
“Sea level has a very long memory, so even if we start cooling temperatures the seas will continue to rise. It’s a bit like trying to turn the Titanic around, rather than a speedboat.”
Researchers used a computer model that simulates sea level rise in response to various emissions levels, looking both at historical emissions since 1750 and also what the emissions scenario would be from 2015 to 2030 if countries met their Paris agreement obligations.
About half of the 20cm sea level rise can be attributed to the world’s top five greenhouse gas polluters – the US, China, India, Russia and the European Union – according to the researchers. The US was a key architect of the Paris deal but this week Donald Trump formally triggered its exit from the agreement.
“Our results show that what we do today will have a huge effect in 2300. Twenty centimetres is very significant; it is basically as much sea-level rise as we’ve observed over the entire 20th century,” said Climate Analytics’Alexander Nauels, lead author of the study. “To cause that with only 15 years of emissions is quite staggering.”
The results reveal the daunting prospect of a near-endless advance of the seas, forcing countries to invest huge resources in defending key infrastructure or ceding certain areas to the tides. Many coastal cities around the world are already facing this challenge, with recent research finding that land currently home to 300 million people will flood at least once a year by 2050 unless carbon emissions are drastically slashed.
As the world heats up, ocean water is expanding while land-based glaciers and the two great polar ice caps are melting away, causing the oceans to swell.
According to the UN’s climate science panel, the global sea level rise could reach as much as 1.1 metres by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed. Clark pointed out the real situation could be even worse if the melting of the Antarctic turns out to be on the dire end of the spectrum of uncertainty.
“People are going to become less inclined to live by the coast and there are going to be sea level rise refugees,”Clark said. “More severe cuts in emissions are certainly going to be required but the current Paris pledges aren’t enough to prevent the seas from rising for a long, long time.”
Graham Readfearn reports for the Guardian (Thu 30 Jul 2020) on a recent study that warns that:
Human-caused sea level rise, storm surges and high tides will put trillions of dollars of assets at risk around the world by the end of the century
Graham Readfearn writes:
The combined impacts of human-caused sea level rise, storm surges and high tides could expose an extra 23 million people to coastal flooding within the next 30 years, even with relatively ambitious cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, a new global study has found.
In a worst-case scenario where emissions continue to rise and no efforts are made to adapt to the rising sea levels, coastal assets worth US$14.2tn – about 20% of global GDP – could be at risk by the end of the century.
Rising sea levels caused by global heating that expands the oceans and melts land-based ice could mean that one-in-100-year floods occurring now would become one-in-10-year floods by the end of the century. As much as 4% of the world’s population could be affected by flooding.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, identified “hotspot” regions at risk of extensive flooding.
South-eastern China, Australia’s north, Bangladesh, West Bengal and Gujarat in India were especially at risk. In the United States, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland were considered to be most exposed, as were the UK, northern France and northern Germany.
But the study also shows how the risk of damage from rising sea levels and storm surges will continue to rise even if emissions are kept to a level that would keep the global temperature rise to well below 2C by the end of this century.
The new study builds on findings published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2019 that predicted extreme sea level events could be near annual occurrences by the middle of this century on many coastlines.
Prof Ian Young, a co-author of the study at the University of Melbourne, said: “We certainly need to mitigate our greenhouse gases but that won’t solve this problem.
“The sea level rise is already baked in – even if we reduce emissions today the sea level will continue to rise because the glaciers will continue to melt for hundreds of years.”
According to the study, about 148 million people globally are exposed to flooding events today.
If greenhouse gas emissions rise moderately – the equivalent of 1.8C of global warming by the end of the century – a further 54 million people will be exposed. But if emissions are allowed to spiral in a worst-case scenario, then this number rises to 77 million.
About US$10.2tn of coastal assets are exposed to coastal flooding in 2100, even with emissions kept at moderate level, according to the study.
All the figures modelled in the study assume that no adaptive measures are taken, illustrating the benefits of taking early action to reduce the impact of flooding events.
Young said: “When most people think of sea level rise they think about 3 or 4mm per year, but when flooding occurs it happens it’s when you also have a storm.
“That happens today and we have seen that on the coast of New South Wales last week. Sea level rise exacerbates the magnitude – and increases the frequency – of these flooding events.“There are significantly larger areas of land flooded and that will have significant economic impacts on infrastructure.
“Even if we mitigate greenhouse gases it does not make much effect. We have to adapt to this – it is going to happen so we have to look at either hard engineering solutions, or do we look at planned retreat and move populations and that’s incredibly difficult, or there are nature-based coastal defence systems.”
Ebru Kirezci, the lead researcher, also of the University of Melbourne, said: “We need to adapt to sea level rise and climate change.
“Adaptation is the only way out and we need to adopt some risk mitigation strategies like sea walls and dykes and develop forecasting and warning systems, or coastal retreat, which means the relocation of coastal communities to safer places.”
Prof John Church, a leading expert on sea level rise at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were valuable.
He said the study had brought together several elements to estimate extreme impacts, but there was more work to be done to understand additional impacts from changes to the severity of storms and waves.
He said there was also likely to be significant impacts along estuaries and it was important to note that “sea level rise will not stop in 2100 under any scenario”.
He said: “With more emissions the higher the [sea level] rises, with commitments of metres of sea level rise over coming centuries with the higher scenarios. The impacts to 2100 are the introduction to the future.”
While coastal flooding could impact 20% of global GDP this, he said, was a reflection of a society that “love the coast”.
“We need more thoughtful and forward-looking planning.”
Another study recently reported on by the Guardian last month under the headline:
Kate Ravilious reports (Fri 24 Jul 2020) under the subheading:
Meltwater from Greenland creates freshwater pond at the ocean surface that whips ups storms in northern Europe
Kate Ravilious writes:
Last winter, it was Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis that brought misery to northern Europe. The previous winter it was Ali that caused damage in Ireland. Those with longer memories may recall the devastation caused by Desmond, Eva and Frank during the winter of 2015-16. Now scientists have managed to pin down the cause, showing that rapid melting in the Arctic has increased the likelihood of violent winter storms in the northern hemisphere.
Using the ocean temperature and salinity measurements recorded by the Argo floats, along with satellite records of sea surface temperature and meteorological data, Dr Marilena Oltmanns, from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, and colleagues analysed the impact that increased ice melt may be having.
Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that the unusually large discharges of meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic in the last few years created a lasting freshwater pond at the ocean surface. Because freshwater cools faster than saltwater this pond has increased the temperature difference from north to south and helped to trigger some of the extreme winter storms seen in northern Europe. Oltmanns and her colleagues anticipate that increased melting in future years is likely to whip up storms of even greater intensity and barrel them towards northern Europe.
In May this year a survey of a 100 specialists on the rise in sea level indicates that they consider that oceans sea levels are rising faster than previously thought. Jonathan Watts reports for the Guardian (Fri 8 May 2020) under the headline:
Sea-level rise is faster than previously believed and could exceed 1 metre by the end of the century unless global emissions are reduced, according to a survey of more than 100 specialists.
Based on new knowledge of climate sensitivity and polar ice melt, the experts say coastal cities should prepare for an impact that will hit sooner than predicted by the United Nations and could reach as high as 5 metres by 2300.
“A global sea-level rise by several metres would be detrimental for many coastal cities such as Miami, New York, Alexandria, Venice, Bangkok, just to name a few well-known examples. Some may have to be abandoned altogether as they cannot be defended,” said co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
In the worst-case scenario – with rising emissions and global heating of 4.5C above pre-industrial levels – the study estimates the surface of the world’s oceans in 2100 will be between 0.6 and 1.3 metres higher than today, which would potentially engulf areas home to hundreds of millions of people.
By contrast, if humanity succeeds in cutting carbon dioxide and holding the increase in temperature to 2C, the rise would be a more manageable 0.5 metre.
The figures for both pathways are more pessimistic than those outlined by the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), which predicts the worst possibility is a 1.1-metre rise by 2100.
The gap reflects advances in climate science and differences in approach. The IPCC works largely through consensus among scientific working groups, which tends to produce relatively conservative estimates.
By contrast, the new survey – published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science – aggregates the views of 106 specialists, who were chosen because they have published at least six peer-reviewed papers on the subject in major academic journals. As a result, the predictions are more representative of a range of views in the field.
The higher estimates highlight growing concern about the world’s two biggest ice sheets, in Antarctica and Greenland. Satellite data and on-the-ground measurements show these regions are melting faster than most computer models predicted. Many of the scientists said there was now greater understanding of the risks posed by marine ice-cliff instability, which can lead to the collapse of ice shelves.
The study was led by scientists at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore with support from seven research institutions across the world, including Durham University in the UK, Tufts University in the US and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
The lead author, Prof Benjamin Horton of the university’s Asian School of the Environment, said the research aimed to condense the growing mass of academic studies about sea-level projections into a simple overview. “It is useful to survey leading experts on the expected sea-level rise, which provides a broader picture of future scenarios and informs policymakers so they can prepare necessary measures,” he said.
The authors said the results showed how much warming – and sea-level rise – could be avoided if governments fulfilled their 2015 Paris climate agreement promises to cut emissions of the gases that are heating the planet. Most countries are far off reaching their goals.
“Like in the Covid pandemic, timing is critical to prevent devastation. If you wait until you already have a serious problem, then it is too late. Unlike with corona, sea-level rise cannot be stopped for many centuries or even millennia once ice sheets have been destabilised past their tipping points,”Rahmstorf said.
The coronavirus pandemic has temporarily slowed the discharge of carbon dioxide and methane because there are fewer cars on the road and industrial activity is lower. The International Energy Agency projects global fossil fuel emissions will decrease by 8% this year.
But, without deeper structural changes, the reduction is likely to be temporary and will make little difference to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Met Office predicted on Thursday carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa measuring station would rise 2.5 parts per million this year.
“Although emissions are reducing this year, this does not mean the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere will reverse – it will just be slightly slower” the Met Office’s chief CO2 forecaster, Richard Betts, said in a blogpost.
“An analogy is filling a bath from a tap – it’s like we are turning down the tap, but because we are not turning off the tap completely, the water level is still rising.”
While sea levels rise so do the levels of absurdity in stock market share prices in a world governed by global capitalism!
Nils Pratley of the Guardian Financial section looks at the US economy and asks the question:
This Business View appeared in the Guardian print edition of Thursday 20 Aug 2020. The on-line Guardian published the analysis (Wed 19 Aug 2020) under the subheading:
One can get Apple’s boom but we’re seeing notions of risk being replaced by an overdose of optimism
Nils Pratley on finance writes:
Apple’s rise to a valuation of $2tn, only five months after it was worth half that sum, is astonishing but one can, at a push, suggest half an explanation. Against original expectations, the pandemic has been good for flogging expensive iPhones, dinky headphones and smartwatches. Homeworking has helped.
Yet Apple is only one company and the bigger conundrum is baffling. What explains the rip-roaring recovery in wider stock markets since March in the face of bleak economic news? How has the broadly based S&P 500 index in the US managed to hit a record high, as it did on Tuesday?
Even when one adds Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft to the list of index-boosters, the recovery is mystifying. The S&P has climbed more than 50% since its pandemic low, a performance that puts the bounce-back after the dramatic, but ultimately inconsequential, crash of 1987 in the shade.
Is it confidence that a V-shaped recovery is in progress if only we’d look beyond day-to-day headlines? Is it the wondrous work of the US Federal Reserve in forcing down bond yields via quantitative easing (QE) so that shares can appear to be relative bargains in a zero-rate financial world?
Here’s an alternative view, courtesy of James Montier of influential Boston-based fund manager GMO in an entertaining blast this week:
“The US stock market appears to be absurd.”
Montier’s arguments are worth noting, not least because he was in the bullish camp at the depth of the sell-off a few months ago. First, the “it’s QE, stupid” thesis looks fishy.
In each of three major rounds of QE in the US from 2009-15, yields on 10-year US Treasury paper ended the period higher than when the Fed went into action. So investors are placing a lot of trust in the power of the Fed’s financial medicine on the basis of little supporting evidence. “Fed-based explanations are at best ex-post justifications for the performance of the stock market,” reckons Montier.
Second, he is surely right that a V-shaped recovery, while impossible to dismiss entirely, is one of the least likely outcomes. The paths of unemployment, business investment, lockdowns, second waves of infection and consumer spending are all gloriously unclear. A sensible long-term investor, argues Montier, would want “a margin of safety” before plunging into a market that is one of the most expensive of all time when judged by traditional price-to-earnings yardsticks.
As he puts it, the US market in particular (because valuations elsewhere are less extreme) has “priced in a truly Panglossian future where everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. The outside chance of good news is being priced as a certainty.
One can make a case for excepting a few stocks if one wishes (and perhaps Apple is an example) but old-fashioned notions of risk seem to have been widely abandoned amid the overdose of optimism.
Absurd is the right description.
Re:LODE Radio considers the reference to Pangloss, the Professor Pangloss, "the greatest philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire" apposite. Pangloss features as a major character in Voltaire's satire Candide. The novellaCandide, ou l'Optimisme was first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a key philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment, and has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: Optimism (1947).
It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.
A number of historical events inspired Voltaire to write Candide, most notably the publication of Leibniz's "Monadology", a short metaphysical treatise, the Seven Years' War, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.
Both of the latter catastrophes are frequently referred to in Candide and are cited by scholars as reasons for its composition. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami, and resulting fires of All Saints' Day, had a strong influence on theologians of the day and on Voltaire, who was himself disillusioned by them. The earthquake had an especially large effect on the contemporary doctrine of optimism, a philosophical system which implies that such events should not occur.
The doctrine of optimism
Optimism is founded on the theodicy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and says "all is for the best" because God is a benevolent deity. This concept is often put into the form, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" (French: Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles). Philosophers had trouble fitting the horrors of this earthquake into their optimistic world view.
Candide describes the abrupt cessation of this young man's lifestyle, followed by his slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world.
Frontispiece
and first page of chapter one of an early English translation by T.
Smollett (et al.) of Voltaire's Candide, London, printed for J. Newbery
(et al.), 1762.
Voltaire concludes Candide with, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".
Misplaced optimism in a time of crisis?
In the current "bubble" of the US stock market the inventor Elon Musk is now estimated to be worth $90bn. As Elon Musk becomes:
Musk represents “ a truly Panglossian future where everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”
Gwyn Topham reports for the Guardian (Wed 19 Aug 2020) and published in the print edition Thursday 20 August 2020:
Elon Musk has soared through the global wealth league this year and become the world’s fourth richest person, after a boom in the share price of the Tesla car company he co-founded and part-owns increased his wealth by more than $13.3bn (£10bn) in two days of trading.
The Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur is now worth more than $90bn and has overtaken France’s richest person, the luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, chairman of Louis Vuitton, cementing the place of American tech plutocrats at the top of the world’s rich list.
Still ahead of Musk are Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, and Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who is some distance ahead with an estimated net wealth of $195bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.
Musk’s fortune has shot up this year as the share price of Tesla has soared. Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and owner of 21% of the stock, himself tweeted in May that the share price was too high, as the market value of his company far outstripped that of the automotive giants.
Despite that, Tesla’s price continued to climb to the point where it overtook Toyota as the world’s most valuable car company in July. Analysts from Morgan Stanley warned earlier this year that Tesla is “grossly overvalued” and that the share price would plunge, but it has continued to defy predictions.
Tesla occupies a market-leading position in the electric car industry and is pioneering much of the road towards self-driving vehicles – and with many politicians ostensibly backing a green recovery after the coronavirus pandemic, the value of cleaner technology looks ever greater. The company also reported an unprecedented fourth consecutive quarter of profit last month, after years of losses.
However, much of the 2020 share price rise has also been ascribed to a scramble by non-professional investors betting on the Tesla name. More than 450,000 small investors have bought Tesla shares through the commission-free Robinhood trading platform in the US. On one single day in July there were 50,000 new Tesla investors.
Their interest was further fuelled by the announcement last week of a move to split the stock into five – which technically should not affect the company valuation but makes the price of each individual share more attainable for small investors.
Should the company’s valuation continue to rise at such astonishing rates, it could supercharge Musk’s fortune, with a $55bn bonus, agreed in 2018 and payable on the achievement of a series of targets. The most outlandish of those targets, at the time, appeared to be increasing the firm’s market capitalisation to $650bn – 12 times what both Tesla and General Motors were worth. Today, Tesla is worth more than eight times General Motors.
Musk’s wealth has boomed despite the backdrop of a series of controversies he has sparked personally, often through Twitter. Musk was sued – unsuccessfully – for $190m in defamation damages after making derogatory tweets about a British caver who helped to rescue a football team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand.
In 2018 Tesla and Musk were fined $20m by the US Securities and Exchange Commission after he tweeted plans to take the firm private, driving up the share price.
Musk has also been an outspoken critic of lockdown policies during the Covid-19 crisis.
In a diatribe during a call outlining quarterly results in April, Musk described public health measures to reduce transmission as fascist, and erroneously suggested that anyone leaving their house could be arrested. “This is not democratic,” he said. “This is not freedom – give people back their goddamn freedom.”
The phenomenon of space tourism - a bucket-list aspiration for the super-rich?
On July 20 2019 CBS NEWS marked the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. Among the CBS NEWS programming was an item headlined:
Millions of people watched in wonder as man first set foot upon the moon 50 years ago. But in the era of space travel now dawning, far more of us are destined to join them. In America's new space age, NASA's monopoly is over. The leaders are companies, not countries. And anyone with enough money can become an astronaut.
"People want to go to space, people should go to space, because they come back changed," said Richard Branson, the Virgin-brand billionaire who launched his space tourism business in 2004. From Virgin Galactic's spaceport in New Mexico, six passengers per flight will rocket more than 62 miles above Earth for the ultimate selfie.
Six hundred people have pre-paid $250,000 dollars for the chance to fly, including 58-year-old Floridian Maryann Barry.
"It's my turn and I'm going," Barry said. "I do want to see what the Earth looks like from space. I want to have that overview effect experience."
But Virgin Galactic has yet to launch a single paying customer, and will only say that it will happen soon. "It's taken us fourteen years,"Branson said. "Space definitely is hard. We've had our tears. We've had out joys. But I'll tell you what, the joys have been fantastic."
Another billionaire with his eyes on the stars is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His space company, Blue Origin, hopes to launch tourists in a reusable vehicle by year's end — but the company has yet to start selling tickets. Bezos also want to build the infrastructure to colonize space one day, starting with a presence on the moon.
"I think that's entirely believable,"Bezos said. "If you went back in time one hundred years and told people today that you would be able to buy a ticket and fly across the world on a jetliner, they would have thought you were crazy."
When the NASA's Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, astronauts had only one way to get to the international space station: hitch a ride on the Russian Soyuz. But NASA wants American space taxis – so it hired two companies, SpaceX and Boeing.
Astronaut Chris Ferguson commanded NASA's final shuttle mission. He hopes to ride a spaceship again – specifically, the Boeing Starliner, which he helped design.
"I am a corporate astronaut,"Ferguson said. "Now what the heck is does a corporate astronaut mean? We don't know."
SpaceX, the vision of Tesla founder Elon Musk, has built reusable rockets and a sleek space capsule called Crew Dragon. But like Boeing, SpaceX is two years behind schedule, offering only vague promises about when it will fly astronauts.
"We still haven't launched anyone yet," Musk said. "But hopefully we will later this year, and that would definitely be the culmination of a long dream for a lot of people."
SpaceX's first crew, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, are competitive. Hurley said there's no question that his team will make it before Boeing's Ferguson.
"I played a lot of sports competitively. And I have no problem with a little healthy competition," he said. "And I think it's better. It makes you better and it makes him better and it makes both companies better — and in the end, who benefits? The country. You know, we get redundant access to space."
Redundant space access and rockets flying tourists is a giant leap from the footprints Apollo 11 left behind fifty years ago.
"The only reason we can do the things we can do today is because we are, in fact, standing on the shoulders of giants,"Bezos said. "So all of those things that came before are what make it possible for a small team… to go do these amazing things."
Q. What is the underlying psychology of this fad for billionaires?
A. To build the infrastructure to colonize space?
Q. Misplaced optimism?
A. Or misplaced hubris?
SpaceX makes history . . .
Re:LODE Radio considers that another question may be more useful, a question found on many of the Re:LODE Cargo QuestionsInformation Wrap pages:
Q. Does capitalism function through the expansion of frontiers?
A. Yes it does . . .
. . . and don't believe the sign!
It's the bears who shit in the woods!
The frontiers of capitalism
According to the authors of this book, capitalism not onlyhas frontiers, it exists only through frontiers.
How has capitalism devastated the planet—and what can we do about it?
Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated the Earth.
In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analysing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.
At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.
In the Introduction to their book Patel and Moore have a section headed FRONTIERS AND CHEAPNESS. Here are some of the salient points they make.
Often in visualizations of the spread of capitalism, the image that offers itself is an asteroid impact or the spread of a disease, which starts at ground or patient zero and metastasizes across the planet. Capitalist frontiers require a more sophisticated science fiction. If capitalism is a disease, then it's one that eats your flesh - and then profits from selling your bones for fertilizer, and then invests that profit to reap the cane harvest, and then sells that harvest to tourists who pay to visit your headstone. But even this description isn't adequate, The frontier works only through connection, fixing its failures by siphoning life from elsewhere. A frontier is a site where crises encourage new strategies for profit. Frontiers are frontiers because they are the encounter zones between capital and all kinds of nature - humans included. They are always, then, about reducing the costs of doing business. Capitalism not onlyhas frontiers, it exists onlythroughfrontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges. But more important, frontiers are sites where power is exercised - and not just economic power. Through frontiers, states and empires use violence, culture, and knowledge to mobilize natures at low cost. It's this cheapening that makes frontiers so central to modern history and that makes possible capitalism's expansive markets.
Raj Patel and Jason W Moore illustrate a ruinous economic system that benefits a minority class
Mark O'Connell reviewed this book in the Guardian (Thu 14 Jun2018), and pertinent to this particular post, speculates:
It’s
not something the book goes into, but while reading it I found myself
thinking about how the notion of colonising Mars, as advanced by
entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, represents the most
extreme operation of this logic in our time. Capitalism is running out
of frontiers, and the legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap
resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unliveable for vast
numbers of its inhabitants. Mars exists as the possibility of a new
frontier, a means of keeping capitalism alive after its current
host-organism, Earth, has been drained of the ability to support life.
If
Patel and Moore don’t quite make it to Mars, their book still covers an
awful lot of ground. They move rapidly between economic analysis,
history and political polemic, all in service of the premise that all
the cheapness has in fact been catastrophically expensive.
Star Trek - "Wagon Train to the Stars"
American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west.
The video mash up presented here, is conceived as an illustration to these ideas, ideas immanent in western European popular culture. The video begins with re-worked titles to the TV series Star Trek, with its memorable voice-over of William Shatner, and now a classic: "Space. The final frontier", and for Musk, Bezos and others, this remains a powerful, and negative, fallacy.
Space Western . . .
As early as 1964, Gene Roddenberry drafted a proposal for the science fiction series that would become Star Trek. Although he publicly marketed it as a Western in outer space - a so-called "Wagon Train to the Stars" - he privately told friends that he was inspired by Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, intending each episode to act on two levels: as a suspenseful adventure story and as a morality tale.
Most Star Trek stories depict the adventures of humans and aliens who serve in Starfleet, the space-borne humanitarian and peacekeeping armada of the United Federation of Planets. The protagonists have altruistic values, and must apply these ideals to difficult dilemmas.
Many of the conflicts and political dimensions of Star Trek are allegories of contemporary cultural realities. The Original Series addressed issues of the 1960s, just as later spin-offs have tackled issues of their respective decades. Issues depicted in the various series include war and peace, the value of personal loyalty, authoritarianism, imperialism, class warfare, economics, racism, religion, human rights, sexism, feminism, and the role of technology. Roddenberry stated:
"[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network."
"If you talked about purple people on a far off planet, they (the television network) never really caught on. They were more concerned about cleavage. They actually would send a censor down to the set to measure a woman's cleavage to make sure too much of her breast wasn't showing"
The video cuts to an interview with Elon Musk talking about civilization and a multi-planetary human species, in the same breath as addressing, and solving, the sustainable use of energy problem. The assumption is that the frontier is out there, that there are worlds to colonize, seems strangely removed, or escapist, far from where we actually are on our "home" planet.
This interview with Musk is followed by Stephen Hawking speaking on the need for humanity to prepare the way for the colonisation of space because of the threats to humanity from a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, global warming, or other dangers humans have not yet thought of.Hawking said:"I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years", and considered an "asteroid collision" to be the biggest threat to the planet. Such a planet-wide disaster need not result in human extinction if the human race were to be able to colonise additional planets before the disaster. Hawking viewed spaceflight and the colonisation of space as necessary for the future of humanity.
Back in 2001 Hawking was warning that the human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus, but, however perilous these possible futures may be, tackling the present climate crisis came second to promulgating the colonisation of space as an escape strategy.
The last scene is a fake interposition of Elon Musk into an imagined episode of the film Interstellar, a film useful to analyse in the context of understanding something of a contemporary mindset, and an ideology that is hell bent on postponing dealing with the present climate crisis. Perhaps this postponement is about strategies of avoidance, ways of keeping the status quo, of trusting capitalism to solve the problem somehow. Is it reasonable to trust in the hope of a "technological" solution, coupled with the underlying, complex and contradictory "migration meme" we find in all these examples, all part of the continuing expansion of the human race/capitalist system?
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film directed, co-written and produced by Christopher Nolan. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive on a planet Earth ravaged by a global blight, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for mankind.
The first part of the film is set on a resource depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s.
After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for inspiration, Christopher contacted director Ken Burns and producer Dayton Duncan, requesting permission to use some of their featured interviews in Interstellar, which was granted. The video below includes a clip from Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl miniseries including personal testimony from people who experienced this man-made ecological disaster, and the"hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair" are celebrated, but wrapped in a fictional and, to some extent, a nostalgic view of a distant past. In the fictional science fiction "present", the challenge to the characters in Interstellar, is to survive and technology is part of the necessary process of adaptation to these environmental conditions.
Widowed engineer and former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper is now a farmer. Living with him are his father-in-law, Donald; his 15-year-old son, Tom Cooper, and 10-year-old daughter, Murphy "Murph" Cooper.
In the clips assembled below, the state sponsored strategies of adaptation include the promulgation of a post-truth society where younger generations are taught false history, including the faking of the Apollo moon missions.
In the middle of a nightmarish dust storm a strange dust patterns inexplicably appear on Murphy's bedroom floor; she attributes the anomaly to a ghost. Cooper eventually deduces the patterns were caused by gravity variations and that they represent geographic coordinates in binary code.
Cooper follows the coordinates to a secret NASA facility headed by Professor John Brand, Cooper's former supervisor.
Professor Brand says gravitational anomalies have happened elsewhere. Forty-eight years earlier, unknown beings positioned a wormhole near Saturn, opening a path to a distant galaxy with twelve potentially habitable worlds located near a black hole named Gargantua. Twelve volunteers traveled through the wormhole to individually survey the planets. Astronauts Miller, Edmunds, and Mann reported positive results. Based on their data, Professor Brand conceived two plans to ensure humanity's survival. Plan A involves developing a gravitational propulsion theory to propel colonies into space, while Plan B involves launching the Endurance spacecraft carrying 5,000 frozen human embryos to colonize a habitable planet.
Slipping through the event horizon of a black hole named Gargantua, Cooper and Amelia Brand eject from their respective craft and Cooper finds himself inside a massive tesseract, constructed by future humans.
Across different time periods, Cooper can see through the bookcases of Murphy's old room on Earth and weakly interact with its gravity. Cooper realizes he was Murphy's "ghost" and manipulates the second hand of the wristwatch he gave her, using Morse code to transmit the quantum data that the robot TARS collected from inside the event horizon.
Cooper and TARS are ejected from the tesseract. Cooper is picked up and awakens on a space habitat orbiting Saturn, where he reunites with an elderly Murphy. Using the quantum data sent by Cooper, the younger Murphy had solved the gravitational propulsion theory for Plan A, enabling humanity's exodus and survival. Nearing death and with her own family, Murphy urges Cooper to return to Amelia. Cooper and TARS take a spacecraft to rejoin Amelia and CASE on Edmunds' habitable planet.
Is Interstellar another Western in outer space - a "Wagon Train to the Stars", similar in it's scope to Star Trek, an exploration of contemporary sociopolitical and ecological issues? If the answer to this question is "Yes", it is also a version that posits a solution to the survival of capitalism but not the habitability of planet Earth. Just as the Wagon Train and the electric telegraph extended the frontiers and territories of the United States westward to the Pacific Ocean, it also provided capitalism with the exact conditions for "expanding
from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations,
producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate
through an expanding series of exchanges."
Re:LODE Radio considers this type of scenario as an ideological phenomenon, an aspect of western European exceptionalism, and the American notion of Manifest Destiny. This is an ideological phenomenon ideally suited to allowing avoidance and denial of climate change to register politically, and thus maintaining the capitalist system and the social status quo. This is a billionaires fantasy universe which provides further impediments and stumbling blocks, as well as false hopes, in addressing the urgent need for radical action and structural sociopolitical and ecological change when it comes to mitigating the dire effects of global heating.
While Elon Musk makes profits from providing "solutions" to sustainable energy use, and benefits from a Wall Street bubble that's likely to melt into air, the notion of colonizing other worlds represents a highly functional distraction from the urgent necessity of addressing the present climate crisis.
A detail from American Progress (1872) by John Gast shows a stagecoach carrying passengers and the overland mail across the expanded territory of the United States and the expanded frontiers of capitalism.
In the classicJohn FordWesternof 1939, Stagecoach, the attack and chase by the "Red Indians" on the stagecoach party is a dramatic highlight of the film that "naturally", in those days, glosses over the reality of a genocide of Native Americans, so necessary to the expansion of the American and capitalist frontier.
A stagecoach is to be found represented in a double page spread of The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, where it forms an image in the rear-view mirror of an automobile being driven through tunnel on the highway.
The rear-view mirror
The past went that-a-way.
When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
"Capitalism is running out
of frontiers, and the legacy of its monomaniacal pursuit of cheap
resources is a devastated planet that may soon be unliveable for vast
numbers of its inhabitants."
When it comes to space and the final frontier there is a version of recent culturally produced spatial understandings where, even before the first moon landing occurred in 1969.Space exploration had produced a spectacular reversal in shared perceptions of our planet, and its place in our shared understandings of the universe.
We can't put it together . . .
. . . it is together.
The title WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
came from a previous project by Stewart Brand. In 1966, he initiated a
public campaign to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite photo of
the sphere of Earth as seen from space, the first image of the "Whole
Earth." He thought the image might be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense
of shared destiny and adaptive strategies from people. The
Stanford-educated Brand, a biologist with strong artistic and social
interests, believed that there was a groundswell of commitment to
thoroughly renovating American industrial society along ecologically and
socially just lines, whatever they might prove to be. J. Baldwin
was a young designer and instructor of design at colleges around the
San Francisco Bay (San Francisco State University [then San Francisco
State College], the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California
College of the Arts [then California College of Arts and Crafts]). As he
recalled in the film Ecological Design (1994):
"Stewart
Brand came to me because he heard that I read catalogs. He said, 'I
want to make this thing called a "whole Earth" catalog so that anyone on
Earth can pick up a telephone and find out the complete information on
anything. ... That's my goal.'"
Baldwin
served as the chief editor of subjects in the areas of technology and
design, both in the catalog itself and in other publications which arose
from it.
True to his 1966 vision, Brand's publishing efforts
were suffused with an awareness of the importance of ecology, both as a
field of study and as an influence upon the future of humankind and
emerging human awareness.
Applications
Technology Satellite 3, or ATS-3, was a long-lived American
experimental geostationary weather and communications satellite,
operated by NASA from 1967 to 2001. It was at one time reputed to be the
oldest satellite still in operation; As of 1995, NASA referred to the
ATS-3 as "The oldest active communications satellite by a wide
margin." On November 10, 1967, ATS-3 took the first colour photo of the
Earth, which was subsequently used on the cover of the first Whole Earth
Catalog.
The 1968 catalog divided itself into seven broad sections:
Understanding Whole Systems Shelter and Land Use
Industry and Craft
Communications
Community
Nomadics
Learning Within
each section, the best tools and books the editors could find were
collected and listed, along with images, reviews and uses, prices, and
suppliers. The reader was also able to order some items directly through
the catalog.
Later editions changed a few of the headings, but generally kept the
same overall framework.
From the opening page of the 1969 Catalog:
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should
know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.
An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:
Useful as a tool, Relevant to independent education, High quality or low cost, Not already common knowledge, Easily available by mail. CATALOG listings are continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff.
The Spring 1969 CATALOG Cover
Earthrise
is a photograph of Earth and parts of the Moon's surface that was taken
from lunar orbit by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968, during the Apollo 8
mission and selected as an iconic image for the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
This
image presented inhabitants of the planet Earth with a view of the
world from space, a blue planet rising over a new horizon, only seen
before in the crude 1966 black-and-white raster image taken by the Lunar
Orbiter 1 robotic probe.
Nature photographer Galen Rowell declared it:
"the most influential environmental photograph ever taken".
When LIFE
determined that "a collection of pictures that 'changed the world' is a
thing worth contemplating, if only to arrive at some resolution about
the influential nature of photography and whether it is limited, vast or
in between," it was the Earthrise photograph that was used on the front
cover.
The
Catalog's publication coincided with a great wave of
convention-challenging experimentalism and a do-it-yourself attitude
associated with "the counterculture," and tended to appeal not only to
the intelligentsia of the movement, but to creative, hands-on, and
outdoorsy people of many stripes. Some of the ideas in the Catalog were
developed during Brand's visits to Drop City.
With the Catalog
opened flat, the reader might find the large page on the left full of
text and intriguing illustrations from a volume of Joseph Needham'sScience and Civilization in China,
showing and explaining an astronomical clock tower or a chain-pump
windmill, while on the right-hand page are a review of a beginners'
guide to modern technology (The Way Things Work) and a review of The Engineers' Illustrated Thesaurus.
On another spread, the verso reviews books on accounting and
moonlighting jobs, while the recto bears an article in which people tell
the story of a community credit union they founded. Another pair of
pages depict and discuss different kayaks, inflatable dinghies, and
houseboats.
Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Google
in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. "When I was
young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation ... It was sort of like
Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was
idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."Steve Jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on
the back cover of the 1974 edition of the Catalog:
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
James Tennant Baldwin,
who was editing the CATALOG from the beginning (May 6, 1933 – March 2,
2018) was an American industrial designer and writer. Significantly,
Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller;
Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and (in the case of
some of Baldwin's published writing) he popularized and interpreted
Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure
in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other
renewable sources of energy. In his career, being a fabricator has been
as important as being a designer. Baldwin is noted as the inventor of
the "Pillow Dome," a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.
An archive of publications of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG 1968 - 1974
environment and anti-environment
Essentially,
the situation is like this: The planet Earth is enveloped by an
information environment. This envelope functions in a similar way to the
frame of an artwork. So the planet itself becomes an artwork.
The planet is not a readymade. It is being made, and re-made, all of the time . . .
Immersed
as we are in the environment, if, and when, we enter into an
anti-environment, or counter-environment, it affords us the experience
of "seeing" (and maybe for the first time) where we are coming from.
In Sensory Modes . . .
Electronic Man approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.
This presents no solution to the previous problem of decorating the environment. Quite the contrary.
The new possibility demands total understanding of the artistic function in society. It will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment.
The situation that Marshall McLuhan identifies, with co-author Harley Parker back in 1968 in their book THROUGH THE VANISHING POINT - SPACE IN POETRY AND PAINTING
on Page 7, referring to our past and present conditions; i.e. going
back to the electric telegraph and forward to the computer screen as an
extension of the human nervous system, and that relates directly to the
contemporary fact of the information environment that surrounds the
planet.
The planet becomes an object of augmented reality?
But to what purposes?
Advertisements? Fake
news? The generation of revenue? It may be that:
"There is no such thing as a free lunch!"
But, is this a useful idea, is it true?
For McLuhan the instance of the electric light proves illuminating
The
electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message,
as it were, unless it is used to spell out a verbal ad or name. This
fact, characteristic of all media, means that the "content" of any
medium is always another medium.
The "content" of the envelope of information environment, that exists on a planetary scale, is;
"our world"!
Re:LODE Radio considers that the vision of a billionaires space club is delusional, an example of looking to the future in the rear-view mirror and thus ending up marching backwards into a dangerous future, and interested primarily in the generation of profit, regardless of the impact and consequences involved. While interplanetary colonialism is a capitalist driven fantasy, societies across the planet have the capability to address and mitigate climate change. This includes global heating, ice cap melting, and adapt to the effects of the emission of greenhouse gases over the last couple of centuries and the present century too, the result of the capitalist enterprise of the pursuit of profit. Politically, and economically the controls for operating spaceship earth need to be wrested from those who are in control of the system. The coronavirus epidemic has revealed just how addressing a crisis by a process of "cheapening" does not work.
Buy cheap? Pay twice!
Climate change adaptation controls and the operating manual for spaceship earth
Climate change adaptation (CCA) is a response to global warming defined by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as:
'the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. In human systems, adaptation seeks to moderate or avoid harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In some natural systems, human intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects'.
This adjustment includes many areas such as infrastructure, agriculture and education.
Even if emissions are stabilized relatively soon, global warming and its effects will last many years due to the delay times caused by past global warming, and adaptation would be necessary to the resulting changes in climate.
Adaptation actions can be considered as either incremental adaptation (actions where the central aim is to maintain the essence and integrity of a system) or transformational adaptation (actions that change the fundamental attributes of a system in response to climate change and its impacts).
The need for adaptation varies from place to place, depending on the sensitivity and vulnerability to environmental impacts. Adaptation is especially important in developing countries since those countries are bearing the brunt of the effects of global warming. Human adaptive capacity is unevenly distributed across different regions and populations, and developing countries generally have less capacity to adapt.
Adaptive capacity is closely linked to social and economic development. The economic costs of adaptation to climate change are likely to cost billions of dollars annually for the next several decades, though the exact amount of money needed is unknown.
The adaptation challenge grows with the magnitude and the rate of climate change. Even the most effective climate change mitigation through reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or enhanced removal of these gases from the atmosphere (through carbon sinks) would not prevent further climate change impacts, making the need for adaptation unavoidable. However climate change may be too much for some natural ecosystems, such as coral reefs, to be able to adapt. Others are concerned that climate adaptation programs might interfere with the existing development programs and thus lead to unintended consequences for vulnerable groups. The economic and social costs of unmitigated climate change would be very high.
Lessons to learn . . .
In the filmInterstellara need for adaptation was replaced by a need to escape. Migration became a solution. A source of inspiration for the creation of this science fiction epic was the historical and factual example of the Dust Bowl phenomenon that occurred in the United States and coinciding with the Great Depression era. This was onecrisis laid upon another crisis for all those affected, and, as usual, it was the poor and the dispossessed who paid the price for this man-made disaster, while others continued to accumulate property and resources at knock down prices. This was capitalism at work.
The economic, social and cultural practices of the Indigenous People of the High Plains, their "way of life", was sustainable in an ecology shaped by long periods of drought interspersed with periods of heavy rain. The wiping away of theIndigenous People, and their way of life, opened up the lands to a new kind of agriculture, a system of European techniques and assumptions concerning cultivation that were applied, and in the end, destroyed these lands.
"reinterprets the Dust Bowl on the US Southern Plains as one dramatic regional manifestation of a global socio-ecological crisis generated by the realities of settler colonialism and imperialism. In so doing, it seeks to deepen historical-theoretical understandings of the racialized division of nature and humanity making possible the global problem of soil erosion by the 1930s and forming the heart of the ecological rift of capitalism. The framework developed here challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice."
Ken Burns, director of THE DUST BOWL, a documentary film that explores what the film considers the largest manmade ecological disaster in History, is quoted by pbs publicity (April 11, 2012):
“The Dust Bowl was a heartbreaking tragedy in the enormous scale of human suffering it caused. But perhaps the biggest tragedy is that it was preventable,” said Burns. “This was an ecosystem—a grassland—that had evolved over millions of years to adjust to the droughts, high winds and violent weather extremes so common to that part of the country. In the space of a few decades at the start of the 20th century, that grassland was uprooted in the middle of a frenzied wheat boom. When a drought returned, all that exposed soil took to the skies, and people worried that the breadbasket of the nation would become the next Sahara desert. If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again.”
Dayton Duncan, writer and co-producer of THE DUST BOWL, and a longtime collaborator with Burns, said, “While the rest of the country was suffering through the financial disaster of the Great Depression, the farmers of the southern plains were not only dealing with that, but also with something much more ominous and overpowering. Dust storms were taking their land and food, killing their children and turning the day into night. Plagues of grasshoppers and rabbits ravaged what little vegetation remained. It was as if nature itself had turned against them. But in fact it was the other way around: We had tried to impose our will on nature and the results were catastrophic.”
Until the arrival of European and American settlers in the late 19th century, the southern plains of the United States were predominantly grasslands, seldom used for farming. Bitterly cold winters, hot summers, high winds and, especially, low, unreliable precipitation made it unsuitable for standard agriculture. But at the start of the 1900s, offers of cheap public land attracted farmers to the region, and in World War I, in the midst of a relatively wet period, a lucrative new wheat market opened up. Advances in gasoline-powered farm machinery made production faster and easier than ever. During the 1920s, millions of acres of grassland across the plains were converted into wheat fields at an unprecedented rate.
In 1930, with the Great Depression underway, wheat prices collapsed. Rather than follow the government’s urging to cut back on production, desperate farmers harvested even more wheat in an effort to make up for their losses. Fields were left exposed and vulnerable to a drought, which hit in 1932.
Once the winds began picking up dust from the open fields, they grew into dust storms of biblical proportions. Each year the storms grew more ferocious and more frequent, sweeping up millions of tons of earth, covering farms and homes across the plains with sand and spreading the dust across the country. Children developed fatal “dust pneumonia,” business owners unable to cope with the financial ruin committed suicide and thousands of desperate Americans were torn from their homes and forced on the road in an exodus unlike anything the United States had ever seen,
The Wikipedia article on the Dust Bowlgoes to the causes of this disaster straight away:
With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.
During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky. These choking billows of dust – named "black blizzards" or "black rollers" – traveled cross country, reaching as far as the East Coast and striking such cities as New York City and Washington, D.C.
On the plains, they often reduced visibility to 3 feet (1 m) or less. Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger happened to be in Boise City, Oklahoma, to witness the "Black Sunday" black blizzards of April 14, 1935; Edward Stanley, the Kansas City news editor of the Associated Press, coined the term "Dust Bowl" while rewriting Geiger's news story.
While the term "the Dust Bowl" was originally a reference to the geographical area affected by the dust, today it usually refers to the event itself (the term "Dirty Thirties" is also sometimes used). The drought and erosion of the Dust Bowl affected 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) that centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.
The Dust Bowl forced tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families to abandon their farms, unable to pay mortgages or grow crops, and losses reached $25 million per day by 1936 (equivalent to $460,000,000 in 2019).
Many of these families, who were often known as "Okies" because so many of them came from Oklahoma, migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left.
A new deal . . .
In the United States presidential election year of 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt clinched the nomination on the fourth ballot of the Democratic Party Convention. Roosevelt flew in from New York after learning that he had won the nomination, becoming the first major-party presidential nominee to accept the nomination in person.
In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt declared:
"I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms."
Roosevelt promised securities regulation, tariff reduction, farm relief, government-funded public works, and other government actions to address the Great Depression.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself . . .
. . . and this is a warning that stands to this day!
During President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933, his administration quickly initiated programs to conserve soil and restore the ecological balance of the nation. Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes established the Soil Erosion Service in August 1933 under Hugh Hammond Bennett. In 1935, it was transferred and reorganized under the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Soil Conservation Service. It is now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
As part of New Deal programs, Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act in 1936, requiring landowners to share the allocated government subsidies with the laborers who worked on their farms. Under the law, "benefit payments were continued as measures for production control and income support, but they were now financed by direct Congressional appropriations and justified as soil conservation measures. The Act shifted the parity goal from price equality of agricultural commodities and the articles that farmers buy to income equality of farm and non-farm population." Thus, the parity goal was to re-create the ratio between the purchasing power of the net income per person on farms from agriculture and that of the income of persons not on farms that prevailed during 1909–1914.
To stabilize prices, the government paid farmers and ordered more than six million pigs to be slaughtered. It paid to have the meat packed and distributed to the poor and hungry. The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) was established to regulate crop and other surpluses.
The FSRC diverted agricultural commodities to relief organizations. Apples, beans, canned beef, flour and pork products were distributed through local relief channels. Cotton goods were later included, to clothe the needy.
In 1935, the federal government formed a Drought Relief Service (DRS) to coordinate relief activities. The DRS bought cattle in counties which were designated emergency areas, for $14 to $20 a head. Animals determined unfit for human consumption were killed; at the beginning of the program, more than 50 percent were so designated in emergency areas. The DRS assigned the remaining cattle to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC) to be used in food distribution to families nationwide. Although it was difficult for farmers to give up their herds, the cattle slaughter program helped many of them avoid bankruptcy. "The government cattle buying program was a blessing to many farmers, as they could not afford to keep their cattle, and the government paid a better price than they could obtain in local markets."
Plains Farms need Trees
President Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps to plant the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a huge belt of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Abilene, Texas to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil itself in place.
The administration also began to educate farmers on soil conservation and anti-erosion techniques, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing, and other improved farming practices.
In 1937, the federal government began an aggressive campaign to encourage farmers in the Dust Bowl to adopt planting and plowing methods that conserved the soil. The government paid reluctant farmers a dollar an acre to practice the new methods. By 1938, the massive conservation effort had reduced the amount of blowing soil by 65%. The land still failed to yield a decent living. In the fall of 1939, after nearly a decade of dirt and dust, the drought ended when regular rainfall finally returned to the region. The government still encouraged continuing the use of conservation methods to protect the soil and ecology of the Plains.
At the end of the drought, the programs which were implemented during these tough times helped to sustain a positive relationship between America's farmers and the federal government.
In many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 1930s. Land degradation varied widely. Aside from the short-term economic consequences caused by erosion, there were severe long-term economic consequences caused by the Dust Bowl.
By 1940, counties that had experienced the most significant levels of erosion had a greater decline in agricultural land values. The per-acre value of farmland declined by 28% in high-erosion counties and 17% in medium-erosion counties, relative to land value changes in low-erosion counties. Even over the long-term, the agricultural value of the land often failed to recover to pre-Dust Bowl levels. In highly eroded areas, less than 25% of the original agricultural losses were recovered. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more-eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s.
The economic effects persisted, in part, because of farmers' failure to switch to more appropriate crops for highly eroded areas. Because the amount of topsoil had been reduced, it would have been more productive to shift from crops and wheat to animals and hay. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became less productive in more-eroded counties.
Some of the failure to shift to more productive agricultural products may be related to ignorance about the benefits of changing land use. A second explanation is a lack of availability of credit, caused by the high rate of failure of banks in the Plains states. Because banks failed in the Dust Bowl region at a higher rate than elsewhere, farmers could not get the credit they needed to buy capital to shift crop production. In addition, profit margins in either animals or hay were still minimal, and farmers had little incentive in the beginning to change their crops.
The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, notably the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and photographs depicting the conditions of migrants by Dorothea Lange.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:His truth is marching on.
These lyrics refer, in turn, to the biblical passage Revelation 14:19–20, an apocalyptic appeal to divine justice and deliverance from oppression in the final judgment. This and other biblical passages had inspired a long tradition of imagery of Christ in the winepress, in various media. The passage reads:
And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.
Folio 12 recto of the Escorial Beatus, "the great winepress of God".
The phrase also appears at the end of chapter 25 in Steinbeck's book, which describes the purposeful destruction of food to keep the price high:
[A]nd in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
The image invoked by the title serves as a crucial symbol in the development of both the plot and the novel's greater thematic concerns: from the terrible winepress of Dust Bowl oppression will come terrible wrath but also the deliverance of workers through their cooperation. This is suggested but not realized within the novel.
The Grapes of Wrath focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future.
John Steinbeck, borrowing closely from field notes taken by Farm Security Administration worker and author Sanora Babb. Babb's own novel about the lives of the migrant workers, Whose Names Are Unknown, was written in 1939 but was eclipsed and shelved in response to the success of Steinbeck's work, but was finally published in 2004. Following the publication of Sanora Babb's novel some scholars noted strong parallels between her workand The Grapes of Wrath.
A celebrated Hollywood film version of the Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was released in 1940. The video clip includes a scene from John Ford's film of a confrontation between sharecroppers and the agent for the corporate landowner.
In Chapter 14 of Steinbeck's novel he writes:
This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
The second scene includes part of a powerful moment in the film where Tom Joad takes his leave from Ma Joad. Tom is moved to work for change by what he has witnessed in the various camps. He tells Ma Joad that he plans to carry on the labour activism of the character Casy's, by fighting for social reform. He leaves to seek a new world and to join the movement committed to social justice.
Tom Joad says:
I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.
Some of these words and phrases are echoed in the 1995 song The Ghost of Tom Joad, composed and performed by Bruce Springsteen, in the third part of this video compilation. Besides The Grapes of Wrath, the song also takes inspiration from "The Ballad of Tom Joad" by Woody Guthrie, which in turn was inspired by John Ford's film adaptation of Steinbeck's novel.
Springsteen had in fact read the book, watched the film, and listened to the song, before writing "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and the result was viewed as being true to Guthrie's tradition. Springsteen identified with 1930s-style social activism, and sought to give voice to the invisible and unheard, the destitute and the disenfranchised, and connecting all of these past troubles to a troubled present:
Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there!
This compilation ends with the final scene in John Ford's film version of the novel. As the family moves on again, they discuss the fear and difficulties they have had. Ma Joad concludes the film, saying:
I ain't never gonna be scared no more. I was, though. For a while it looked as though we was beat. Good and beat. Looked like we didn't have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kinda bad and scared too, like we was lost and nobody cared.... Rich fellas come up and they die, and their kids ain't no good and they die out, but we keep a-coming. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us.
Along the LODE Zone Line in Indonesia it is the same old story, capitalism continues to fail everyone, including farmers and agricultural workers.
A land without farmers?
Indonesia's agricultural conundrum
The Jakarta Post published this article (Tue 26 Aug 2020), along with this video, addressing a crisis unfolding on the land, as the economic system fails to support and encourage young farmers, while their comparative income plummets.
The rate at which the country is losing farmers is a cause for concern. If it continues, Indonesia is likely to have no farmers left in 50 years. What will we eat? “Well, we will be hungry,” said Adang Parman, 58, a farmer from Ciburial village in West Java. Every day, the father of three heads out to the field at the break of dawn to pull out weeds, water his plants or pluck vegetables from his rows of plants. His sons, meanwhile, plow the land with a handheld walking tractor. Adang has been working in the fields for more than 40 years. The work is demanding and laborious. This probably explains why fewer and fewer people are taking up the profession. The country lost 5.1 million farmers between 2003 and 2013, with their numbers falling to 26 million, according to Statistics Indonesia (BPS). The trend is expected to continue in the next few years. At this rate, Indonesia would lose all its farmers by 2063. Indonesia - Employment in agriculture, services and industry (% of total employment) The data below is according to the World Bank compilation of development indicators, collected from official sources.
“A large proportion of young people view agricultural work as low-wage, manual labor that is more suited to those from poor backgrounds who have limited education,” a 2016 SMERU Research Institute report reads.
Agriculture is a huge contributor to Indonesia’s economy. Around 29 percent of the Indonesian workforce works in the agriculture, fisheries and livestock sector, which contributes nearly 13 percent to the country’s GDP. It is the third-biggest contributor to the economy after manufacturing and trade, according to Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data.
Fewer young people are pursuing farming as a profession compared with previous generations. Only 23 percent of the country’s 14.2 million people aged between 15 and 24 worked in the agriculture, forestry and fishery sectors in 2019, data from the National Labor Force Survey showed.
Asep, Tisna, Dika – Adang’s three sons – represent the minority of young people venturing into agriculture, following in their father’s footsteps.
With a population of just 12,000 — less than a quarter the capacity of a major football stadium — Ciburial offers vast expanses of lush, fertile land, perfect for farming. This is not the case elsewhere in Indonesia.
Between 2013 and 2019, Indonesia’s agricultural land decreased to 7.46 million hectares from 7.75 million ha, according to data collected by the Agrarian and Spatial Planning Ministry, BPS and several other government institutions.
Problems like increasing production costs, changes in weather and pest attacks have also pushed farmers to change professions, with land owners either converting land to other uses or selling it, the SMERU report states.
So, what went wrong? How can we support more farmers like Adang and his family? The Jakarta Post spoke to farmers, agriculture and food companies, policymakers and experts on the challenges and opportunities for Indonesia’s farmers and the agriculture sector.
Rp 55,503 (US$3.81). That is how much farmers earned on average per day as of June, according to nationwide data compiled by Statistics Indonesia (BPS). Compare that with Rp 89,737 per day for construction workers. In the concrete jungle of Jakarta, the official minimum wage is Rp 3.9 million per month, roughly Rp 160,000 per day, three times what farmers earn. “Most young people are image-conscious. Most of them are afraid of getting dirty,” said Tisna Rohmat, a 33-year-old farmer. “They want to work in offices instead”. Cahyono Kurnia, a farmer from Ciwidey, West Java, said price uncertainties that lead to losses had discouraged young people from joining the sector and had forced some farmers to stop farming until they could raise enough capital to start again. “Farmers must deal with harvest cycles. Some get their capital back, some do not,” said Cahyono, who now sells his tomatoes directly to consumers with the assistance of agritech start-up TaniHub Group.
Harvest time: Adang Parman (front) picks bok choy alongside his son Tisna Rohmat at their farm in Ciburial, West Java.
Without access to a distribution chain, most farmers rely on middlemen to market their crops. Indonesians call them tengkulak, a word that carries negative connotations. Middlemen buy from farmers in bulk at very low prices, sometimes locking in orders long before harvest — a practice called ijon. Farmers entrust their produce to these middlemen, as they don’t have the networks to market their products. In a 2016 special report, the Post spoke with shallot farmers in Brebes, Central Java, the biggest shallot producing region in the country. They said they “are on the foolish side” and only knew how to farm and sell shallots to middlemen. “The ups and downs of farming impact people’s level of interest in working in the sector, especially among younger generations,”SMERU researchers wrote. They studied farmers and farmlands in Cianjur and Bekasi in West Java and the Banjar regency in South Kalimantan for the 2016 study. “Most of us have been lied to by tengkulak in the past [...] We didn’t have any price certainty when we sold our vegetables,” said Cuandi Yusuf, a farmer from Ciwidey, West Java, who produces red chili, carrots and cabbage. Cuandi, who farms his own 800 square meter field and 1,400 sqm he rents from a nearby pesantren (Islamic boarding school), now sells his produce directly to modern markets. He is one of the beneficiaries of the Indonesia Japan Horticulture Public-Private Partnership Project (IJHOP4), organized by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
Farmer Tisna Rohmat, 33, strikes a pose in his vegetable farm in Ciburial, West Java. He manages the farm with his father, Adang Parman, and his two brothers.
From frozen vegetables to wheat breads, breakfast cereals and instant noodles, cheaper and more convenient processed foods are rising in popularity, posing a threat to those who sell fresh agricultural produce.
Sales of ultra-processed food have increased 10 percent per year in middle-income countries, according to studies cited in a 2019 report from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Agency (FAO). This contrasts with declining growth in agricultural production and crop yields in recent years. The FAO estimates that growth in global demand for agricultural products will fall from an average of 2.2 percent per year over the past 30 years to 1.5 percent a year for the next 30 years. This slowdown will be more dramatic in developing countries. Ciwidey tomato farmer Cahyono also raised concerns about people’s health. “[Without farmers], there may not be healthy food because most healthy food comes from vegetables,” he said. “If we don’t farm, what will city people eat?” Making matters worse is the flock of imported agricultural and processed food products. Farmers for some commodities have to also worry about flooding imports threatening their existence. Take soybeans as an example. University of Lampung (Unila) agricultural economics professor Bustanul Arifin said local soybeans had fulfilled about 90 percent of national consumption in 1992. But the sector soon faltered due to waves of droughts, economic crisis and cheap soybean imports from the United States in the next decade. Now, local soybeans can only fulfill 30 percent of national needs. United Nations Comtrade data show that Indonesia imported 2.44 billion kilograms of soybeans worth US$1.06 billion last year, three times the volume and five times the value in 1992. Several other local commodities also struggle to compete with imported products for industrial consumption due to their lackluster quality and high prices, with inefficiency in the production cost and logistics system contributing to such high prices. "I'm worried that our own products will not be the 'host' in our own country," said Bustanul. "Regarding the impact on farmers, it will be hard to fix if it is already broken."
Farmer Cahyono Kurnia (center) and fellow farmers pose with their harvested tomatoes in their fields in Ciwidey, West Java. They expanded their farms and improved their yield through a partnership with peer-to-peer lending platform TaniFund.
Extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, such as prolonged droughts and severe floods, have led to crop failures across the country. Agricultural production could fall 15 to 40 percent due to extreme weather patterns that cause “negative shocks” throughout the agricultural sector, said Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) economic and agriculture expert Hermanto Siregar. For farmers, losing a harvest season can have serious repercussions on future production, as farmers survive on thin cash flow, meaning a crop failure could leave them without the capital to start anew. “When the general public see farmers, they only see their products but they don’t understand the process that goes into producing crops. For me, the process is quite challenging,” said Cahyono. At 110 of 113 countries, Indonesia ranks among the lowest in the natural resources and resilience category of the 2019 Global Food Security Index. The category highlights global food security vulnerability as a result of depleting resources and climate change. Droughts during the long dry season of 2019 caused the production of rice, a staple food in Indonesia, to drop 8 percent, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) professor and agricultural expert Dwi Andreas Santosa said. Around 22 million people in Indonesia endured hunger from 2016 to 2018, showing that the country’s food availability remains low, according to a 2019 report by the Asian Development Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the National Planning Agency(Bappenas).
A farmer uses his smartphone to control the water sprinklers of his shallot farm in Cimenyan, Bandung regency, West Java. The smart irrigation system was developed by agricultural technology start-up Habibi Garden.
Investments in agriculture have largely been channeled into palm oil plantations, with only a fraction going to other forms of farming. Three-fourths of the Rp 313 trillion in investment pledges in 2019 went to the palm oil sector, according to data from the Agriculture Ministry. Yet the Bappenas study states that the country could end hunger by 2030 through investment in agricultural research and development, irrigation expansion and improving water use efficiency, among other areas. But attracting such investment has not been easy. “If you are talking about investments by foreigners, I think the challenge is the regulation of foreign investment […] it is very challenging, especially for small and medium enterprises,”Hiroshi Bingo from JICA said.
He said the minimum investment requirement of Rp 10 billion (US$692,501) was a deterrent to foreign investment in agriculture.
Indonesian farmers are facing even more hurdles to stay afloat today with the pandemic weakening consumer purchasing power, while supply chains have been severely disrupted by limited business activities. The farmers exchange value (NTP), the ratio of farmers’ incomes to their household expenses, has gradually fallen since January and hit rock bottom in May at 99.47, the lowest rate since July last year. The rate was recorded at 99.6 in June. A value below 100 indicates that farmers’ expenses are higher than their incomes. Galuh Octania, a researcher at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS), said the pandemic had aggravated farmers’ losses because the yields from the current harvest season could exceed demand as people spend less. The spending power of most farmers has also taken a hit, as about two thirds of Indonesian farmers are net consumers, she added. This will make it even more difficult for farmers to bounce back. Farmers also struggle with limited land, limited access to financial services and having to sell their produce via middlemen who elongate the supply chain. They also face weather risks, pest attacks and plant diseases, making returns on their initial investments uncertain, said Bingo from JICA. “It’s hard for farmers to have the right prices for each market, and also for the market stakeholders. It’s also difficult to determine which farmers have the most potential and capacity to produce good products,” he said.
Going back to the fields . . .
Febriana Firdaus in Ubud, reporting for the Guardian (Sat 1 Aug 2020), with tourism in Bali devastated by the pandemic, many Balinese have returned to work the fields. Some believe they will never go back.
Ni Kadek Erawati, 40, used to work in a villa in her village, Tegallalang, a Balinese district famous for its Instagram-able rice terraces.
But in March, her employer asked her to take a break until further notice. Her husband is unemployed and she needs to pay school fees for three children, but the only job she could find was working on a farm.
When the Guardian visited Era, she was harvesting in a rice field with a group of farmers. Her payment each day is one bucket of unhulled rice. During the harvest she stops and complains about the heat: “I have never worked in the rice field like this before. It’s sweltering.”
Like many of Balinese women, Era has no land. Bali’s patrilineal kinship system means only men inherit property.
The custom has made it easier for some of the men who have also had to return to rural areas. I Gede Tinaya, 36, was left 1.5 ha of land in Kintamani, North Bali, by his parents, so when his 15-year tour guide business collapsed due to the pandemic, he moved back to the village and started farming. He now grows red onions and has earned 60m rupiah ($US4,135) after three months.
In common with a growing number of Balinese, the pandemic has made him think more about whether he wants to return to working in the tourism industry and its reliance on foreign visitors. Some Balinese think the island would be better off developing other sectors of its economy instead.
“In the past, we thought that tourism is our basic income. But I have learned that Bali is not only about tourism. The agricultural business also can provide life support only if we want to work hard and explore the real potential in our island,” he says.
Many Balinese people lost their livelihoods when the island was closed to outsiders at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March.
Home to four million people, Bali is Indonesia’s tourist centre, contributing 50% of the country’s income from the tourism industry or US$10bn annually. About six million travellers visited the island in 2019. The vast growth of the tourism industry has transformed it from an agricultural province to a prime holiday destination popular with travellers from the UK to Australia.
The island has been hit by intractable economic crises before, from the Bali bombings that killed 202 people in 2oo2, to the eruption of Mount Agung in 2017. But the coronavirus pandemic has rocked the tourism industry more profoundly.
The island had recorded 3,249 confirmed cases of Covid-19 with 48 fatalities. Dr I Gusti Agung Ngurah Anom, chairman of Indonesia Doctors Association in Denpasar, Bali’s capital, has warned that the city’s isolation beds are fully occupied.
According to Indonesia’s central bank, almost all parts of the Balinese economy have deteriorated this year, with the exception of agriculture. The sector’s performance was predicted to show another improvement in the June quarter as Bali entered the harvest period.
‘Bali returns to zero’
Dwitra J Ariana, a young Balinese farmer and filmmaker, noticed that many of his neighbours who work in the city were heading back to his village in Bangli to work the land.
“My wife, who recruits workers for our farm, used to find it difficult to get workers. But now, we can find many,” said Dwitra, who owns Mupubati farm. He has recruited five former villa and hotel workers since the pandemic began.
He says that many Balinese had seen their home in a new light. “Bali returns to zero. We have never experienced this before, and it prompted a new realisation that the island is not as fragile as people think. Even though the tourism sector has collapsed, Balinese are not going to starve.”
One village that has helped people find work is Tembok. Headed by Dewa Komang Yuda Astara, Tembok developed a collective farming industry to provide a social safety net for its residents.
The village has a population of more than 7,000, and almost half of its residents used to work in the city – mostly in the tourism sector. But the village has managed to re-employ many of them in jobs such as cleaning the beach, monitoring the garbage, farming, food production, health and delivery work.
“The pandemic likely will not end in a short time. So, therefore, we plan to manage another two hectares to open a collective farm,”Dewa said.
The provincial government has announced that Bali will reopen to international tourists in September. The island will become Jakarta’s pilot project to relaunch tourism with a “new normal” health protocol. “Bali’s recovery is important for the national and regional tourism industry,” Bali’s governor Wayan Koster told the media.
Many Balinese are optimistic that the island is ready to reopen. But others such as Gede questioned the plan.
“In my opinion, we need to solve the Covid-19 problem first, so that we can feel secure. In the meantime, we can explore the other potential sectors,” he said. He plans to have two jobs after the pandemic. “I am not going to go back to work in tourism full time. Maybe 50/50. I will keep the farming job.”
Era, in common with many lower-income women on the island, doesn’t have much choice. She is hoping that the region will reopen soon. “If I don’t have money in September, I am not going to be able to celebrate [the Balinese holiday of] Galungan day. But also I am afraid of being exposed to coronavirus,” she said while touching her forehead. “I have a headache now.”
When it comes to climate change adaptation . . .
. . . a significant effect of global climate change is the altering of global rainfall patterns, with certain effects on agriculture. Rainfed agriculture constitutes 80% of global agriculture. Many of the 852 million poor people in the world live in parts of Asia and Africa that depend on rainfall to cultivate food crops. Climate change will modify rainfall, evaporation, runoff, and soil moisture storage. Extended drought can cause the failure of small and marginal farms with resultant economic, political and social disruption, more so than this currently occurs. Agriculture of any kind is strongly influenced by the availability of water. Changes in total seasonal precipitation or in its pattern of variability are both important. The occurrence of moisture stress during flowering, pollination, and grain-filling is harmful to most crops and particularly so to corn, soybeans, and wheat. Increased evaporation from the soil and accelerated transpiration in the plants themselves will cause moisture stress.
Adaptive ideas include:
Taking advantage of global transportation systems to delivering surplus food to where it is needed (though this does not help subsistence farmers unless aid is given).
Developing crop varieties with greater drought tolerance.
Rainwater storage. For example, according to the International Water Management Institute, using small planting basins to 'harvest' water in Zimbabwe has been shown to boost maize yields, whether rainfall is abundant or scarce. And in Niger, they have led to three or fourfold increases in millet yields.
Falling back from crops to wild edible fruits, roots and leaves. Promoting the growth of forests can provide these backup food supplies, and also provide watershed conservation, carbon sequestration, and aesthetic value.
Reforestation
Reforestation is one of the ways to stop desertification fueled by anthropogenic climate change and non sustainable land use. One of the most important projects is the Great Green Wall that should stop the expansion of Sahara desert to the south.
"Over 12 million acres (5 million hectares) of degraded land has been restored in Nigeria; roughly 30 million acres of drought-resistant trees have been planted across Senegal; and a whopping 37 million acres of land has been restored in Ethiopia – just to name a few of the states involved."
"many groundwater wells refilled with drinking water, rural towns with additional food supplies, and new sources of work and income for villagers, thanks to the need for tree maintenance"
This article byMikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Dow Goldman - June 02, 2020 - on the World Resources Institute website reports that: The tropics lost 11.9 million hectares of tree cover in 2019, according to data from the University of Maryland, released today on Global Forest Watch.
Nearly a third of that loss, 3.8 million hectares, occurred within humid tropical primary forests, areas of mature rainforest that are especially important for biodiversity and carbon storage. That’s the equivalent of losing a football pitch of primary forest every 6 seconds for the entire year. Mikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Dow Goldman report that while fires in Bolivia are burning out of control, and that:"Brazil single-handedly accounted for over a third of all loss of humid tropical primary forests worldwide, with more primary forest lost than any other tropical country in 2019"; they were also able to report that:
Indonesia Maintained Lower Losses for Third Year in a Row
In positive news, primary forest loss in Indonesia decreased by 5% in 2019 compared to the year before, marking the third year in a row of lower levels of loss. Indonesia hasn’t seen such low levels of primary forest loss since the beginning of the century.
