Is the world being destroyed?

Union Pacific train tracks in downtown LA littered with thousands of shredded boxes and packages stolen from cargo containers.

Newly released photos and videos showing train tracks littered with discarded boxes have cast fresh attention on the theft of packages from cargo containers crossing through Los Angeles in recent months.

On tracks near downtown Los Angeles, a team from Agence-France Presse on Friday found packages with labels of most major US mail order and courier companies. Reporters from CBSLA on Thursday found boxes from retailers including Amazon, REI and others. CBSLA reported that Union Pacific, the railroad company operating the cargo trains, had cleaned up the area of tracks where the boxes were found three months ago and again about 30 days ago.

A Union Pacific freight train navigates tracks littered with shredded boxes and packages stolen from cargo containers that stop to unload in LA.

In a December letter to Los Angeles county district attorney George Gascon, Union Pacific said it had experienced an over 160% increase in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles county since December 2020 and that on average, more than 90 containers were compromised each day. In several months during that period, the increase from the previous year surpassed 200%, according to the company. For the month of October 2021, it estimated the increase to be over 356% compared to the year before.

In the letter, Union Pacific said it has stepped up the number of Union Pacific special agents on patrol, and was exploring the use of tools like drones, specialized fencing and trespass detection systems.

Shredded boxes, packages and debris are strewn along a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles.

Luis Rosas, who makes about $20 an hour working for a company subcontracted by Union Pacific to salvage items from the tracks in the Los Angeles area, said thieves use bolt cutters to break the locks on the containers and load up vans or trucks with the stolen merchandise.

Los Angeles has been the site of major shipping woes in recent months as the global supply chain crisis hit the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The ports, which together form America’s busiest shipping complex and serve as a key gateway for imported goods from Asia, have struggled with a significant backlog that’s left dockyards crowded with towering containers and dozens of ships at anchor waiting to unload.

The thieves target trains nearing downtown LA, leaving behind packages and boxes.

Thousands of workers have been laboring around the clock for months to move goods into trucks – long lines of which stretch into nearby residential neighborhoods – and trains. The surging volume of merchandise at the ports, which process 40% of container imports in the US, shows no signs of slowing, placing pressure on workers and the residents who live nearby.

Firefighters take part in an emergency drill against winter chemical hazards and accidents in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said.

Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread.

The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a “planetary boundary”, the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

Chemical pollution threatens Earth’s systems by damaging the biological and physical processes that underpin all life. For example, pesticides wipe out many non-target insects, which are fundamental to all ecosystems and, therefore, to the provision of clean air, water and food.

“There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,” said Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) who was part of the study team. “The pace that societies are producing and releasing new chemicals into the environment is not consistent with staying within a safe operating space for humanity.”

Dr Sarah Cornell, an associate professor and principal researcher at SRC, said: “For a long time, people have known that chemical pollution is a bad thing. But they haven’t been thinking about it at the global level. This work brings chemical pollution, especially plastics, into the story of how people are changing the planet.”

Some threats have been tackled to a larger extent, the scientists said, such as the CFC chemicals that destroy the ozone layer and its protection from damaging ultraviolet rays.

Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use – about 350,000 – and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety.

So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts.

The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary.

“There’s evidence that things are pointing in the wrong direction every step of the way,” said Prof Bethanie Carney Almroth at the University of Gothenburg who was part of the team. “For example, the total mass of plastics now exceeds the total mass of all living mammals. That to me is a pretty clear indication that we’ve crossed a boundary. We’re in trouble, but there are things we can do to reverse some of this.”

Villarrubia-Gómez said: “Shifting to a circular economy is really important. That means changing materials and products so they can be reused, not wasted.”

The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology

There are growing calls for international action on chemicals and plastics, including the establishment of a global scientific body for chemical pollution akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews, who was not part of the study, said: “The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious. Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant.

“Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment.”

Boyd, a former UK government chief scientific adviser, warned in 2017 that assumption by regulators around the world that it was safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes was false.

The chemical pollution planetary boundary is the fifth of nine that scientists say have been crossed, with the others being global heating, the destruction of wild habitats, loss of biodiversity and excessive nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.

PICTURE A GUNSLINGER and Annette Evans probably does not spring to mind. She is Chinese-American, lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia and identifies herself as socially liberal—not the archetypal conservative, rural white man. Yet she owns over a dozen rifles, pistols and shotguns (“one for every occasion, like purses or shoes”) and teaches self-defence courses to women. Her race and gender put her at risk, she says. “It may be a low chance that I’ll run into someone who will kill me, but without a gun, I’ll die.”

More gun-owners, especially new ones, look like Ms Evans. Of the 7.5m Americans who bought firearms for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021—as gun-buying surged nationwide—half were female, a fifth black and a fifth Hispanic, according to a recent study by Matthew Miller of Northeastern University and his co-authors. The share of black adults who joined the gun-owning ranks, 5.3%, was more than twice that of white adults. That is new: in a previous survey, in 2015, new buyers skewed white and male, though they were more politically liberal than long-standing ones. Overall, today’s gun-owners are still largely white (73%) and male (63%). But they are diversifying.

Gun culture has broadened its appeal. Decades ago most people bought guns for hunting and recreational shooting. Now they mostly do so for self-defence, which is a universal concern. People who feel vulnerable to crime or hold less faith in the police are more likely to arm themselves.

Rising murder rates in 2020 and 2021 heightened those anxieties (blacks are the likeliest victims). Membership of the National African American Gun Association grew in 2020 by more than 25%, to 40,000. Blacks have a long history of owning guns: Harriet Tubman toted them, Martin Luther King kept them at home. But this tradition was long “surreptitious”, says Aqil Qadir, a third-generation shooter who runs a firearms-training centre in Tennessee.

Many of the newer gun-owners see firearms as an equaliser—a remedy for the vulnerability they feel. The Pink Pistols, an LGBT group, proclaims “armed queers don’t get bashed”. “God made man and woman, but Sam Colt made them equal,” goes a markswoman’s maxim. Women’s gun-ownership has always trailed that among men: women tended to shoot because men in the family did. But Robyn Sandoval, boss of A Girl and a Gun, a shooting group, increasingly sees women buying guns on their own initiative: a third of new joiners to her organisation in 2021 said they were the only shooter in their family.

The broadening tent is good for manufacturers and bad for gun-control advocates. Owners are more politically active around gun issues than non-owners. Already it may have had an effect. According to polling by Gallup, in 2021 support for stricter laws dropped by five percentage points, to its lowest in seven years. ■

Millions of drinking wells around the world may soon be at risk of running dry. Overpumping, drought and the steady influence of climate change are depleting groundwater resources all over the globe, according to new research.

As much as 20% of the world’s groundwater wells may be facing imminent failure, potentially depriving billions of people of fresh water.

“We found that this undesirable result is happening across the world, from the western United States to India,” said Debra Perrone, a water resources expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-author of the study.

The research, published yesterday in the journal Science, pulled together construction records from 39 million wells scattered across 40 countries.

Perrone and co-author Scott Jasechko, a fellow water expert at UC Santa Barbara, first recorded the depths of all the wells. They then compared the wells with the groundwater levels, assisted by data from previous studies.

They found that millions of the wells extended less than 5 meters (about 16 feet) below the water table, putting them at risk of running dry. At least 6% of them, and potentially as much as 20%, appear to be in jeopardy.

Those last few meters can dry up quickly, especially in places already stricken by drought.

“In areas where we see extreme rates of groundwater depletion, groundwater levels can decline on the order of a meter or more a year," Jasechko said.

In some places, including parts of the drought-stricken western United States, it’s already happening.

Residents of California’s Central Valley are preparing for another arid summer and the rising risk of dry wells, The Fresno Bee reported yesterday. It’s a recurring pattern there. Studies suggest that thousands of wells in interior California have run dry over the last decade or so, under long-lasting drought conditions.

In fact, Jasechko and Perrone published a separate study in the journal Earth’s Future last year suggesting that thousands of wells across the Central Valley ran dry between 2013 and 2018 alone.

That’s a big threat to rural California communities, where at least 1.5 million people rely on groundwater wells.

Digging deeper wells can help address the problem, when it’s possible. But it’s a solution that may be out of reach for many, the researchers point out. Deeper wells are more expensive to construct and maintain.

“This could raise a number of equity and adaptation concerns over the long term, really highlighting the haves and have-nots of water,” Perrone said.

These concerns are only growing as climate change worsens the risk of severe drought in California and other arid regions around the world.

The new study has helped highlight an invisible crisis, according to James Famiglietti and Grant Ferguson, water experts at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who wrote a commentary on the new research also published in Science yesterday.

“As groundwater levels decline around the world, only the relatively wealthy will be able to afford the cost of drilling deeper wells and paying for the additional power required to pump groundwater from greater depths,” they wrote. “Lower-income families, poorer communities, and smaller businesses, including smaller farms, will experience progressively more limited access in the many regions around the world where groundwater levels are in decline.”

As a result, governments around the world should be pouring more resources into monitoring groundwater levels and conserving water resources in places that are at risk, they argued.

Otherwise, they said, “the consequences of millions of wells running dry, and perhaps millions more in the decades to come, would be severe and unparalleled at such a scale in human history.”

Hoof it through the national parks of the western United States—Joshua Tree, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon—and breathe deep the pristine air. These are unspoiled lands, collectively a great American conservation story. Yet an invisible menace is actually blowing through the air and falling via raindrops: Microplastic particles, tiny chunks (by definition, less than 5 millimeters long) of fragmented plastic bottles and microfibers that fray from clothes, all pollutants that get caught up in Earth’s atmospheric systems and deposited in the wilderness.

Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it's shocking.”

It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

Plastic rain could prove to be a more insidious problem than acid rain, which is a consequence of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions. By deploying scrubbers in power plants to control the former, and catalytic converters in cars to control the latter, the US and other countries have over the last several decades cut down on the acidification problem. But microplastic has already corrupted even the most remote environments, and there’s no way to scrub water or land or air of the particles—the stuff is absolutely everywhere, and it’s not like there’s a plastic magnet we can drag through the oceans. What makes plastic so useful—its hardiness—is what also makes it an alarming pollutant: Plastic never really goes away, instead breaking into ever smaller bits that infiltrate ever smaller corners of the planet. Even worse, plastic waste is expected to skyrocket from 260 million tons a year to 460 million tons by 2030, according to the consultancy McKinsey. More people joining the middle class in economically-developing countries means more consumerism and more plastic packaging.


Exceedingly small bits of plastic collected in remote areas of the western US.

To quantify just how bad the problem has become across the American West, the researchers used collectors in 11 national parks and protected areas, sampling both rain and air. Each had a “wet” bucket to collect rainwater, and a “dry” bucket to collect air. A sensor would detect rainfall and open up the “wet” bucket while closing the dry one. And vice versa when it’s sunny out, so the dry bucket would collect microplastic particles carried on the wind while the wet bucket stayed shut. The researchers also modeled where each particular storm they collected rain from had originated, looking at the size of the cities it traveled through before dumping water, and microplastics, into the wet bucket.

Overall, they found that a stunning 98 percent of samples collected over a year contained microplastic particles. On average, 4 percent of captured atmospheric particulates were actually synthetic polymers. The particles that fell in rain were larger than those deposited by wind—lighter particles are more easily caught up in air currents. Microfibers, from sources like polyester clothing, made up 66 percent of the synthetic material in wet samples and 70 percent in dry samples. “I was just completely floored to see little brightly-colored pieces of plastic in nearly every single sample,” says Brahney. Plus, the team wasn't able to count clear or white particles and fibers with their equipment, so their tally is likely conservative.

Looking at the path of the storms that deposited the wet microplastic samples, Brahney and her colleagues were able to map how weather systems transport the particles. Winds, for instance, might kick up microplastic particles off the ground in an urban area and carry them downwind before forcing them to the surface once more. “Rain is very effective at scrubbing the atmosphere of everything that's in it,” says Brahney. “And so there could be a fair amount of dust and plastics in the atmosphere and a rainstorm will wash those out.” Microplastic particles could even be acting as condensation nuclei, bits of debris that attract water vapor to form a cloud.

The dry fallout, on the other hand, appears to be traveling longer distances. These particles’ smaller size indicates they’re more easily carried on winds for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles—consider that dust from the Sahara readily blows across the Atlantic and falls in the Amazon rainforest—instead of getting caught up in storms, a more regional phenomenon. And microplastics are probably traveling even farther than soil particles because they're far less dense.

“We saw relationships to the location of the jet stream, which implies that the air masses that are controlling deposition are really high in the atmosphere,” says Brahney. (In the US, the fast-moving jet stream runs from west to east across the continent.) This jibes with what other scientists are starting to see elsewhere around the world: Tiny pieces of plastic—largely synthetic fibers from clothes—are getting caught in the wind and spread far and wide, tainting formerly pristine habitats. For example, the cities of Europe seem to be seeding the Arctic with microplastic.

This new research comes with another troubling surprise: 30 percent of the sample particles were microbeads, tiny synthetic spheres that the United States banned from beauty products in 2015. The microbeads in the samples, though, were generally smaller than the ones you’d find in those products. “We did see a lot of brightly-colored microbeads, in all colors of the rainbow, and some of those we identified as acrylic,” says Brahney.

That leads the researchers to speculate that the microbeads are coming from industrial paints and coatings. If these are sprayed, they could easily spew the microbeads into the atmosphere, where they’d be picked up by winds and carried afar. If that’s indeed the case, the paint industry may be in for the same kind of microbead reckoning that sullied the beauty industry. Still, if one country bans microbeads in paints, the stuff could well blow in from a neighboring country.


A tiny microbead collected in the western US. The scale here is in micrometers, or a millionth of a meter.

More troubling still, microplastics eventually break into nanoplastics, bits so small that researchers may not be able to detect them without the right equipment. “I couldn't see anything smaller than four microns, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there,” says Brahney. “Just because we can't see them in front of us, doesn't mean we're not breathing them in.”

Scientists don't yet know what inhaling microbeads might mean for human health, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s not beneficial. Bits of plastic tend to leach their component chemicals over time, and have been known to transport microbes like viruses and bacteria. Researchers are just beginning to explore what this means for other organisms: One study published earlier this year found that hermit crabs exposed to microplastics have difficulties choosing new shells as they grow, a particular problem since they need those shells to survive.

In the soils of America’s national parks, the arrival of plastics could have cascading effects. “These can not just block up the digestive tract of small animals, like worms,” says University of Strathclyde microplastic researcher Steve Allen, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “But it's also the chemicals that are on these plastics and in these plastics that can have an effect on the soil. A lot of that is still theoretical—we're still trying to work it out.”

Brahney and her colleagues note that microplastics may be changing the thermal properties of soil, for instance, altering how it absorbs and stores heat. They may also lead to the growth of more or less of the microbes that normally live there, rearranging communities and altering the way the dirt cycles nutrients. Microplastics may also change how water moves through these soils.

But setting these many remaining unknowns aside, this research puts in place a critical piece of the puzzle regarding the microplastic life cycle, which grows increasingly complex with each new study. Scientists have been trying to figure out what happens to the world’s plastic pollution, nearly all of which seems to “disappear” in the environment. But studies like this one are showing that the stuff never truly goes away, it just gets shredded into smaller bits that disperse all over the world, perhaps spending many years cycling through different systems—air, land, and sea.

Scientists have discovered, for instance, that currents are carrying microplastic particles into deep-sea ecosystems—when the currents slow, the suspended particles fall out and settle on the seafloor. “Deep sea currents basically behave in the same way as atmospheric currents do,” says University of Manchester earth scientist Ian Kane, who was lead author on that study, but wasn’t involved in this new work. “They're part of a global recirculation pattern, and the particles are transported according to the shape and the density. And so it's the same process. What these authors found is that the heavier particles tended to fall out in the wet conditions.”

Other research published last month by Steve Allen and his spouse Deonie Allen, also a microplastic researcher University of Strathclyde, found that the oceans are burping up microplastic particles, which then float onshore on sea breezes. Previously, it was believed that when microplastics flowed into the sea via wastewater, they’d stay there. So it may also turn out that microplastics landing on soil are also not staying put. “It may not be static,” says Deonie Allen. “It's not going to just sit. Some of it ends up going down through our water table, some of it moves because of erosion, or gets rereleased back into the atmosphere.”

There’s still much that science has to learn about this microplastic cycle, but this much is clear: There’ll be no putting the plastic back in the bottle.

Chemical companies have produced more chemicals — including plastics — than the planet can safely sustain without potentially causing irreversible harm to the environment or human health, says a team of international researchers.

Canada and most other countries do not have the capacity to monitor how chemicals like plastics, pesticides and fertilizers are impacting people and ecosystems faster than they can heal. With industry projecting skyrocketing demand, the scientists warn that governments must immediately curb the production of new chemicals until adequate monitoring and regulatory systems are in place.

It's a new approach to research the global environmental and health impacts of chemicals, which typically examines a single type of chemical, like neonicotinoid pesticides, at a time. But with hundreds of thousands of chemicals in circulation and new ones going on the market daily, countries can't keep up, explained co-author Miriam Diamond, a professor at the University of Toronto.

"There's no way we can actually figure out a planetary boundary for each (chemical)," she explained. Instead, the team looked at the pace of chemical production and development and whether governments' environmental and health regulations and monitoring can keep up.

"The answer is a resounding no. We are so far behind on our ability to assess and understand these entities, we can't keep up."

For instance, plastic output increased by almost 80 per cent between 2000 and 2015 alone and production is expected to triple by 2050. Because about 99 per cent of plastics are made from fossil fuels and their production is tied into a complex web of fossil fuel derivatives like solvents and fertilizers, the output data are useful tools to track the production of a suite of other harmful chemicals. Most plastics also contain added, often toxic, chemicals that give plastic products flexibility, flame resistance, and other desirable traits

This boom has come at a cost, with plastic waste infiltrating most ecosystems, killing animals, and even ending up in women's breast milk. Globally, only about 10 per cent of plastics are recycled, while leakage into the environment and disposal techniques like incineration have negative health and environmental consequences.

Despite the threat, no countries have imposed limits on the production of new plastic, and few have assessed the cumulative health and environmental impacts of exposure to plastics and other chemicals. Even Canada — a leader globally after the federal government last year listed plastic as legally toxic — hasn't completed an in-depth assessment of the materials' cumulative health and environmental risk.

Cumulative impacts are the total effects of exposure to several chemicals, in different forms over longer time periods. For example, someone briefly exposed to a harmful pesticide likely won't suffer health consequences, but if they are exposed to that pesticide repeatedly and other chemicals (like cleaning products, solvents or flame retardants), they could suffer consequences of the cumulative impacts.

Plastics aren't the only problem. Canada's current environmental laws only require the government to assess the cumulative impact of pesticides — a requirement that is "routinely" overlooked, said Elaine MacDonald, program director for healthy communities at Ecojustice. The situation is even worse for other chemicals, she said, with no requirements for Canadian regulators to assess cumulative impacts.

Companies have produced more chemicals — including plastics — than the planet can safely sustain without potentially crossing a planetary boundary and causing irreversible harm to the environment or human health, a new study says.

A bill introduced last April would have required the federal government to look at the cumulative impacts of chemicals, but it died with the September election. While MacDonald and other environmentalists expect it will be reintroduced by the Liberal government, she "suspects" they will have to "push hard for the government to be thorough."

That includes developing a more rigorous process to assess and regulate new chemicals, nanomaterials, and biotech material, added Fe de Leon, a researcher and paralegal for the Canadian Environmental Law Association. She would also like to see Canada push for stronger global regulations of chemicals — including production limits — a call echoed in the recent study.

"I anticipate there will be a lot of pushback with people saying, 'It's impossible to implement limits on production,'" Diamond said. "(But) we need sufficiency instead of growth."

Before I finished this article I was stressed. It was the end of the winter holidays, but I still decided to take up a freelance job. I could have chosen to sit on a beach by the Oslo Fjord, go to the cinema or simply sit by the tomato plants on my balcony. Still, I took on an assignment that required many hours of work. The stress I felt as the deadline approached created a familiar drill in my stomach. I slept less, became more impatient and less present around others. The sun was shining outside, my bank account had enough money, but there I was anyway, labouring in the light of a computer.

Like most people, I feel a curious pull towards this activity we call ‘work’. When I am not sleeping, showering, cooking or eating, I spend most of my time working. I like to have free hours but not too many. In jail, prisoners who are put in solitary confinement beg to get out for work. They would rather do laundry and mop floors with convicted robbers and killers than twiddle their thumbs.

Most lottery winners do not stop working when they get rich. According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, the more money people make, the more they work. In the US, 62% of those with the highest incomes work more than 50 hours a week. Over a third of those work more than 60 hours, and one in ten works 80 hours a week. Meanwhile, their plush gardens and swimming pools lie empty, and their luxury cars gather dust in the garages.
Evolutionary laziness

Is it in our very nature to want to work as much as we can? Perhaps evolution has made us automatically appreciate those who work hard and look down on those who put their feet up. Perhaps we are predisposed to being diligent.

In a new book, ‘Work: A History of How We Spend our Time’, social anthropologist James Suzman arrives at a different answer to why we work as much as we do, and often far more than needed.

Suzman reviews humanity’s long work history, from when the first groups of Homo sapiens began hunting and foraging on the savannas of Africa, to today’s automated society. He concludes that it is not natural for people to work all the time.

Humans have inhabited the earth for a little over 300,000 years, and for the vast majority of it we have lived in a completely different way than we do today. Until about 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution laid the foundations for urban society, most people lived as hunters and gatherers in small groups.

It was long believed that hunters and gatherers lived short and miserable lives. When the first Europeans went to the Kalahari Desert, they concluded that it must have been a bloody struggle to subsist on animals and plants. But when social anthropologists began to study and live among these groups in the 1960s – among nomads in the Arctic, Aborigines in Australia, Hadza tribes in Tanzania – they discovered something surprising. Life for hunters and gatherers was not a struggle. Surveys showed that hunters and gatherers ate varied and nutritious food. In fact, in many cases they ate 10% more calories than what an average person requires today.

Because hunters and gatherers did not have access to modern hospitals, infant mortality was high by today’s standards. But those who survived their 15th birthday could still expect to live until they were well over 60 years old. In other words, hunters and gatherers likely lived longer than most people in agricultural societies.

The most striking thing, however, was not life expectancy but the quality of life. Field studies showed that hunters and gatherers obtained all the food they needed with very limited effort, and enjoyed more ‘leisure’ than most people at the start of the industrial age. The Jo/’hoansi, who lived in the Kalahari Desert until the middle of last century, spent only about 15 hours a week acquiring the resources they needed to live, and roughly the same time caring for relatives at home. Fifteen hours a week, that’s hardly more than a worker during the industrial revolution worked in a day. While children and adults worked until their lungs collapsed in coal mines in Europe, the Jo/’hoansi sat around the fire and told stories, danced, sang and played games.

Through the majority of our history as a species, we have prioritised our lives differently than we do today. Even today’s accepted standard – around 40 work hours a week, in addition to childcare and housework – appears unnecessarily tedious from a historical perspective.
The consumerist hunt

If it is not natural to work as much as we do today, perhaps it is still necessary in today’s modern society?

The warehouse workers in Amazon’s department store, the garbage collectors in the landfills in Rio and the textile workers in Bangladesh have little choice but to work long hours. Because workers’ incomes are low, while the factory owners reap most of the profit, the world’s poor have to struggle all day long to support their families.

But the higher up the ladder we get, the harder it becomes to explain why we work so hard. In a famous article from 1930, the leading economist of the time, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that in a hundred years modern society would have solved the problem of economic scarcity. Keynes therefore estimated that by 2030, his grandchildren would not have to work more than 15 hours a week, like the Jo/’hoansi, thanks to growth in capital, productivity and technological advancement. The future would be an age of “leisure and abundance”.

Keynes was right about one thing: the modern world became more productive. If anything, Keynes underestimated how much richer and more productive the world would become. However, Keynes was wrong when he claimed that these advances would also lead to everyone working less. Even though it takes fewer and fewer human hands to produce what our populations need, today most of us work just as much as we did in the 1970s. Why?

Even if our bank accounts are in the black right now, most of us keep working because we fear that if we stop, our needs or our families’ needs will not be covered in the future. Particularly in societies with little or no welfare state protection, everyday life is precarious, even for those not at the very bottom of the economic ladder. People work to stay afloat.

Yet many members of the middle class do not work just to get what they need. They also work to acquire everything they want. The middle class desire for more stuff is ingrained in the very structure of capitalism. For our economies to keep growing, consumers must always want more. We now live in a hunter and gatherer society where needs are covered, but where the hunt continues. Another holiday home, another transatlantic flight, an apartment with a view.
‘Bullshit jobs’

Yet the expectation of increased growth and consumption is only part of the explanation for why the most privileged of us go to work in the morning. Work provides more than just a paycheck – it also gives us a sense of being a valuable human being. This ideology of work is prevalent across the political spectrum. The constitution of the Soviet Union literally declared that “He who does not work, shall not eat”.

Keynes was unable to predict how the job would become the very axis around which life rotates in the twenty-first century. When we meet a stranger at a party, we automatically ask, ‘what do you do?’ By this, we actually mean: ‘where do you stay between nine and five?’ We pity those who do not have a good answer because the job has become our foremost identity.

It does not matter if you have one of the “bullshit jobs”, as described by the anthropologist David Graeber, where you attend meetings that no one pays attention to and write reports that no one reads. The sole aim is to participate in the ritual of work, even though it can be hell from nine to five. In my part of the world, one must have a job to have a dignified life. It ought to be a job that sounds cool, where you work on ‘projects’ and are terribly busy. Ideally, one should have a ‘career’. For the middle classes, it is no longer enough to work, we have to really love our jobs, and be busy all the time.

Part of this modern ‘hunt’ is good. We rush to create new medicines and technology that make life easier to live. But a lot of the stress is unnecessary. In my home country Norway, private consumption has doubled since the year 2000. We buy more things, eat more meat and fly more. In order to continue these lifestyles, our politicians claim that we must also work more. Their goal is to get as many people as possible into waged work, for as long as possible.
Rethinking work

Yet something is shifting about how we think about work in modern society.

In the trade union movement, it has become common to discuss the possibilities of reducing working hours to share the jobs that exist. Moreover, the fact that people work a little less does not necessarily mean that we produce less. Iceland has experimented with a shorter working week for 1% of the country’s employees. The results, which came in last summer, are surprising: not only do people become healthier and happier when they work less, but they produce as much as before. In some cases, productivity goes up when working hours go down. People work less, but use their time better.

The new conversation about work is about more than just working less. The COVID pandemic has forced us to rethink what valuable work really is. Many have noticed that it was precisely the occupational groups with the lowest wages and lowest status – cleaners, transport and care workers – who prevented society from collapsing when the pandemic ravaged the worst, while the rest of us had to be at home.

Unfortunately, the rule of thumb is that the less ‘bullshit’ your job is, the more likely you are to be paid poorly and treated poorly at work. Underpaid nurses run from house to house to help the elderly while marketing consultants sit on the porch and attend Microsoft Teams meetings. Why should it be like this?

The time has come to rethink how we organise our work.

What should be the characteristics of valuable work in the 21st century, both the type that happens in an office and outside it? How should we work in an age where corporate fossil fuel extraction and private consumption is ruining the planet?

Policy developers and centrist politicians are discussing solutions to these problems that seemed utopian only a few years ago, from the four-day working week to Universal Basic Income and public ownership of technology.

Depending on the outcome of these debates, the future could be less like the hell that our most vulnerable workers endure, and more like the paradise Keynes dreamt of for his grandchildren.

The fact that someone might still choose to sit indoors and write online articles while the sun is shining – well, that would be their own choice.

Abstract

Management of the land–sea interface is essential for global conservation and sustainability objectives because coastal regions maintain natural processes that support biodiversity and the livelihood of billions of people. However, assessments of coastal regions have focused strictly on either the terrestrial or marine realm. Consequently, understanding of the overall state of Earth's coastal regions is poor. We integrated the terrestrial human footprint and marine cumulative human impact maps in a global assessment of the anthropogenic pressures affecting coastal regions. Of coastal regions globally, 15.5% had low anthropogenic pressure, mostly in Canada, Russia, and Greenland. Conversely, 47.9% of coastal regions were heavily affected by humanity, and in most countries (84.1%) >50% of their coastal regions were degraded. Nearly half (43.3%) of protected areas across coastal regions were exposed to high human pressures. To meet global sustainability objectives, all nations must undertake greater actions to preserve and restore the coastal regions within their borders.

Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and WWF evaluated 2,592 studies on plastic and plastic pollution to provide a comprehensive look at the current state of knowledge on the impacts of plastic pollution on marine species, biodiversity, and ecosystems with the aim of making such information easily accessible to decision-makers and the public.

Some of the key findings include:

• A total of 2,144 species have so far been found to encounter plastic pollution in their natural environments, according to a conservative assessment of current research.
• There is a clear trend that shows 88% of marine species studied were found to be negatively impacted by plastic. For instance, it is estimated that up to 90% of all seabirds and 52% of all sea turtles ingest plastic.
• The extent of plastic pollution and its impact on marine species and ecosystems varies widely: from pieces of plastic in the stomach, deadly snares around the neck to chemical plasticizers in the blood, the dangers to marine life are immense. Plastic debris causes internal and external injury or death to marine animals and it can restrict locomotion or growth of creatures, reduce food intake, immune response or reproductive capacity of organisms.
• The complex root systems of mangroves, which are essential for maintaining marine biodiversity, have been measured to have some of the highest plastic densities in the world, and we know plastic pollution inhibits plant growth. In places with high pollution, such as Indonesia, mangrove forests, already declining from threats such as logging and land conversion, are under further threat from being covered in plastic waste.
• Coral reefs worldwide are in severe crisis due to climate change, and the additional threat to corals from plastic pollution has reached alarming levels. Where plastic trash gets caught between corals, the incidence of coral disease increases significantly. Plastic tarps or fishing gear often remain on the reef for decades, causing covered polyps to die or coral structures to break or abrade. And corals ingest microplastic particles with negative effects on symbiotic algae and their chances of survival enhancing coral bleaching.

After a longer than usual intro — telling the story of my personal journey — let me show you the reasons why I came to believe that our civilization is approaching its final descent. As you will see, it is a familiar pattern, one that has been experienced by many civilizations before, and I’m sure will be experienced by many following this one — for all too common reasons. Although the “end of times” were forecast many times before, remember that the “end” did come eventually for the Romans, Mayans, and all the others before. What is different this time, is that now we have developed a scientific understanding why those previous civilizations collapsed. Unlike vague prophecies in prior times, we now have solid proofs for trends clearly pointing in the wrong direction (if upholding this way of life were the goal). I’ve collected some of these in this article and added my observations linking them into one more-or-less coherent picture.

I will be adding useful links, scientific research, book recommendations etc. to these topics and keep this post on the top of my page, so it can serve you as a useful guide in understanding what is really going on behind the scenes of this great unraveling. In the meantime, while you are waiting for all the links to appear, feel free to research any of these topics. (Just highlight a phrase and hit ‘define’ or ‘search’ depending on the platform you use.)

While doing so, you might be lured into thinking that many of these issues can be ‘tackled’ (oh God, how I hate this word… sorry). Keep in mind however, that a number of these things have ended civilizations almost single-handedly before… and now they’ve got company. Quite a big one, for that matter. If you still think that this civilization can survive the coming storm after reading (and processing) the list below, then I you might want to read the list again…

This time without the pink glasses though.

What’s important to note here is that these topics are the net results of many positive and negative trends. None of them are news-bites about single events, which we could dismiss as pessimistic then move on by reading some good news. Biodiversity loss is a good example: I read dire warnings almost every week, and while there were huge steps made in protecting a few fragile habitats or endangered species, the overall picture still remains a strong downward trend, with no signs of turning.

The problem is, that we are not addressing the root cause to these issues. We are just fiddling around the edges, achieving quick wins here and there, while business as usual (aka overshoot) continues to roar full speed ahead…

Some topics are recurring, affecting most civilizations before, some are unique to ours. Some are overarching our species entire history. So, while you are reading the list, do not miss to observe the interconnection between them, and notice how they will not disappear even after our current civilization stops worsening them.

Resource depletion: attempting infinite growth on a finite planet is not a winning strategy. Yet every civilization gives it a shot, using finite resources (be it renewable or non-renewable) at an ever increasing and ever more unsustainable rate. A forest has a certain area, and a certain number of trees which can be harvested. Topsoil in a given country has a certain thickness and a certain amount of plant nutrients to it. Mines have a certain amount of metals that can be “produced”. Eventually every civilization uses up all of its cheap, easy to extract resources available to them, then perishes. Some natural resources replenish over time allowing multiple successive waves of civilizations, while some get permanently destroyed or depleted. This is a prime reason behind the limited shelf-life of every civilization and explains why all of them who are using non-renewable resources are destined to disappear. (1)(2)(3)

Overshoot: advancement in technology never saved any civilization from its demise before, and will certainly won’t save this one either. Technology keeps pushing out the boundaries — but only up to a certain point (see below). Population size and consumption are (and always were) oblivious to this trend and kept increasing well beyond the limits set by resources (both natural and mineral) available to them. This is overshoot. Once reached, there is no safe return: civilizations have to keep doing what they are doing to avoid collapse, but by doing so they’re just hastening their demise. (4)

Diminishing returns: Each technological advancement in acquiring resources requires ever greater investments in energy, complexity and material use, while providing ever smaller returns (see: enhanced oil recovery). Eventually all technologies end up hitting an economic limitation well before coming close to physical resource limits. Increasing complexity thus eventually reaches a point (beyond diminishing returns (1)) where further advancements come at higher costs than benefits (the two are usually realized elsewhere). This not only causes more harm than good, but also starts to inflate an unserviceable debt bubble... And not only in financial terms.

Peak technology: Due to diminishing returns in acquiring new technologies, advancement in science and technology in a given field slows down to a point where progress is barely noticeable. The next step requires so much more energy, material resources and time what is simply not available to the given civilization… (Which, in the meantime, often finds itself fighting battles at all fronts.) It may not be obvious today, but mining in space or hydrogen fusion will remain a pie in the sky for the same reason: these technologies would require more energy, resource and time to scale than we can spare. Why? Read on…

Fragility: in its frenzy to fight off increasing costs of complexity civilizations (and this one especially) remove(s) all buffers: safety stocks, excess capacities not producing profits etc. This, combined with depletion, inevitably translates into supply chain disruptions, transportation delays and shortages, making a return to “normal” ever harder to achieve.

Climate change: makes agriculture and life on Earth harder and harder to maintain. It has a profound effect on biodiversity and crop yields (here and here) as well as causing damages to, and loss of, infrastructure due to intensified rainstorms, hurricanes, sea level rise, wildfires etc. Climate change alone has ended civilizations before, and at its current rate it has a pretty good chance against our current society as well. At the worst case: it can wipe us out.

Pollution: of all sorts from plastics to everlasting chemicals and radioactive waste. Toxins released to the environment has been causing sperm-counts to fall (5) (not only in humans, but in other mammal species as well), increased rates of cancer, birth defects etc. Pollution is a side-effect to overshoot: putting a natural break on population growth and ensuring a decline in the future.

Peak soil fertility / productivity: we have most probably passed the first, resulting in a falling micro-nutrient content of food, and without artificial fertilizers (made from non-renewable mineral resources), we would have already experienced a permanent drop in agricultural production too. Resource depletion will put an end this holiday from reality however… We will soon be reaching peak phosphorus and slowly run out of cheap natural gas too (both being key ingredients to fertilizers) in the decades ahead. Expect food prices to rise and stay elevated — out-pricing the poor from the market and leading to mass starvation.

Ecological collapse, mass extinction: as a consequence of the above processes, species are disappearing a hundred times faster than anytime before during human history, or the past 65 million years for that matter. Fisheries are collapsing one after another. Bees and insects are disappearing together with forest dwelling creatures. Coral reefs are bleaching. Oceans are becoming anoxic and acidic, developing wast dead zones. If this isn’t the time of the Great Dying, then nothing is. If you think any civilization can survive on a dead planet with rapidly depleting natural resources… think again. Obviously there is a point where society breaks, and finally gives way to Nature regenerating herself, on her on terms.

Water scarcity: corporations (in mining, beverages and others) are increasingly getting into conflict with local people and agriculture over freshwater supplies. Not only because of an increasing frequency of droughts (due to climate change), but also because they are all using underground aquifers at an unsustainable rate. Another sign of overshoot.

Mass migration: rising sea levels, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes etc. will make more and more lands uninhabitable (yes, there are already once inhabited regions under water, or have become otherwise uninhabitable). This will force millions (if not billions) to leave their homes and look for shelter in another country… Add resource/water-wars, political instability, economic hardships due to resource depletion and you can pretty safely bet that the 21st century will see the biggest migration in human history. Sudden inflows of people were already causing civilizations to fall in the past, so this unprecedented migration will surely cause many states to fail in the future.

Inequality and greedy elites: again, this one alone has caused the fall of many civilizations before. As all of the wealth gets siphoned out of the lower classes they first loose their incentive to work (this is exactly where we are at today in the US, a.k.a. the great resignation), then starve… or choose to overthrow the existing elite class (often with the help of competing power groups — see below).

Overproduction of elites: as wealth gets ever more concentrated at the top, while the middle-class slowly slides down the social ladder, ever more people want to become part of the elite, increasing competition, political infighting, and creating entrenched factions ready to go to war with each other.

We can’t agree on anything: just go and watch “Don’t look up”, or go on social media and try to uphold a belief that a pivotal change is possible. We see people at each others throat even in such a low-risk, low-effort, simple issues as having oneself vaccinated. Just imagine how would people react if they were told to reduce their consumption to third world levels in order to save the planet. Humans have developed an astonishing level of diversity in thinking, cultures and personality types. Genetically we might be 99.9% the same, but cultural programming wise we are the most diverse species on the planet. Thus chances of humanity uniting in the face of troubles ahead is getting closer to zero each passing day.

Declining social cohesion: as a result of the previous points above, members of societies lose faith in a common goal and a uniting power. Societies within countries will continue to fracture into ever smaller factions, gradually becoming incapable to cooperate in any matter.

Blindness to our predicament: combined with a massive tendency towards denial. If you believe that we don’t have to give up this luxurious lifestyle in order to save the planet for future generations then you are in deep denial. Just take a look at the first 8 elements on this list: none of them could be mitigated without giving up this level of consumption — an action almost equal to experiencing the otherwise inevitable collapse of society. No wonder people choose denial and apply magical thinking instead.

Capitalism self-terminating itself: turning finite resources into wealth starting with the cheapest, easiest to extract ones then moving on to ever more complex and costlier alternatives is a self-terminating process. There is a natural as well as an economic limit to wealth extraction too. Once it is reached the system starts to live up its future and stops investing in expansion, as well as cutting corners in maintaining current production levels. The reason: ever larger amounts of debt would be needed to finance ever more costlier approaches to wealth creation, while returns are not at all guaranteed due to wildly fluctuating prices. hence the rush into the casino: where people are gambling with bonds, stocks and crypto. Governments are trying to postpone failure by keeping interest rates artificially low and printing money — but this approach has a limited shelf-life too. Re-adjusting our financial expectations to a rapidly deteriorating reality however has now become inevitable.

Civilizations are growth machines: they need to expand into new territories, occupying other lands for their cheap resources (the takeover method (4)). Once growth stops however maintenance costs quickly overwhelm dwindling incomes and the system topples over. In a globalized economy on a finite planet reaching this point was only a question of time. There is no stable equilibrium for complex civilizations predicated on growth — only bio-regional and truly sustainable cultures have a chance on the long run.

Exponentially failing infrastructure: an exponential boom in infrastructure building (roads, bridges, dams, transmission lines, pipelines etc.) in the 20th century has brought about an exponential need in maintenance / replacement in the 21st as equipment ages. Expansion at this scale was Ponzi scheme: with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities. Combined with disasters caused by climate change, we are facing a hyper-exponential increase in infrastructure repair costs in the decades ahead, tying up ever larger amounts of our dwindling resources.

Disappearing net energy (or the EROEI double whammy): it follows from the nature of resource depletion that more and more energy is needed to extract the same amount of resources (be it oil, or metals for renewables). Combined with an ever increasing need to repair infrastructure elements (most of it being essential to deliver energy, like pipelines, roads and transmission lines) we will face very though decisions in a few decades: should we allow a factory to continue to operate, or new housing to be built? Or should we spend the resources on repairing the bridge and the roads washed away by the latest atmospheric river instead?

Humanity is acting like a mindless complex adaptive system — and unable to give up an iota of its energy use. In fact we are just simple cells of a giant superorganism, responding to the threats and opportunities around us, motivated by dopamine hits and automated by decades of cultural conditioning. Everyone wants to be rich and successful in life — saving the planet comes only thereafter. Should the 1% give up their consumption, the remaining 99% would happily jump on the bandwagon and use up the newly freed up resources.

Unsustainable behavior trumps sustainability. Humans, along with every other creature, act unsustainably in an abundant world. Once left to its own devices (i.e. without proper checks and balances from predators) humans follow the ancient genetic programming and multiply into oblivion without giving a single thought whether this is sustainable or not. Evolution does not skip steps or plans ahead: it selects for the most successful features on the short term. So guess what happens if you have 10 sustainable (sort of) cultures on a continent, then suddenly an unsustainable one appears among them? Which one survives…? Well, none of them. The later, in its frenzy for resources, kills or outcompetes all other cultures then drives itself extinct. It doesn’t matter if this culture happens to be a bacteria, a new strain of a virus or white colonists with huge beards.

Inadequate governance: short term thinking (focusing only on winning the next election), combined with greed and a lust for power. Corporations are having a firm grip on decision makers. But let’s face it: no single person is in control. There is no secret organization controlling the minds of people. It is just plain old human nature “blessed” with an illusion of a separate self, a false sense of agency and free will. We are all in this together, without anyone holding the steering wheel.

Technological lock-in: our technologies have co-evolved with one another. Evolution of technologies are very slow in real life, and even with planned obsolescence it takes many generation of products to get better in a certain respect. When viewed from way above, these technologies form a complex web, a suite of technologies, which is very hard to change: think oil wells, refineries, pipelines, petrol stations, asphalt roads, plastics… What matters the most though, is the huge financial incentive to use the existing system as long as possible. Since these systems wasn’t built in a year, but in decades and centuries it would take a similar timeframe to replace them with something else. A timeframe we simply doesn’t have.

False solutions, or not seeing the forest for the trees. Our biggest problem to “solve” is not climate change. It is overshoot: the consumption of Nature together with its finite resources, and polluting beyond any acceptable means. Renewables and electrification simply replace the consumption of one finite resource and its related pollution (fossil fuels and CO2) with another set of finite resources and their related pollution (metals and ecological destruction caused by mining, plus the CO2 released during the process). The same goes for carbon sequestration, geoengineering, the hydrogen economy, bio-fuels, fusion, mining in space, colonizing other planets and all the rest — as none of these address excess consumption, just prolongs it shelf-life.

Placing all our eggs in one basket. That basket is: fossil fuels. We are still getting 86% of our energy from these dirty resources — just like fifty years ago. The reasons are complex, but the main takeaway is simple: complex high tech civilizations require dense, portable and cheap fuels. Like oil, the master resource, the key to all other resources. So far, we have failed to find a scalable replacement, thus chances are that with the long slow demise of oil production our entire civilization will see its final sunset. This is Leibig’s law of the minimum in effect. If all other problems would disappear overnight, this single “issue” (of slowly disappearing oil extraction) alone would end our current way of life within the next two to five of decades.

Not addressing overshoot (population/consumption) — coming from all of the above: denying the root cause of the problem and pretending that we can play along just fine is a sure recipe for civilizational failure… and an ideal breeding ground for fascism and civil war.

+1: But it’s different this time!!! No. It’s not. Overshoot is overshoot. Once your civilization starts to consume more than what naturally gets regenerated, in its folly to pursue infinite growth on a finite planet, collapse is only a matter of time. It usually happens shortly after the resource base (fisheries, forests, topsoil, or in our case oil) supporting the said civilization starts its permanent decline due to over-consumption, pollution and a loss of a livable habitat.

Knowing what I know today, I became comfortable with the thought of collapse. I’ve also made peace with the fact, that the main issue of overshoot won’t be addressed — and no one is to blame. Humanity had a long history spanning tens of thousands of years, all leading up this point in an immensely complex web of causes and effects. Thus the rise and fall of this fossil fuel based civilization was and is as inevitable as the rise and fall of many older civilizations.

This is a perfectly normal, natural cycle of boom and bust. No leader, be it a dictator or an elected official can turn this around. This is too much to handle to any person: there are too many things set into motion all at once. I’m sure that there will be fascists and communists rising to power insisting the opposite — but remember what happened, when these two parties got what they wanted the last time…

Knowing how much of Earth we have consumed in the past 150 years, how far we have depleted every resource from forests to fisheries, from coal mines to sand during our rapacious growth mania, it is not hard to imagine what comes next. Not Star Trek, for sure. Not even a return to “normal”.

In theory it would be quite possible to devise a sustainable culture — once this one is gone for good — lasting many millennia to come. Using permaculture practices, living in earth berm homes made from locally available, truly renewable materials, like wood, stones, clay, hemp etc. we could build a civilization lasting many millennia, albeit a rather primitive one measured with today’s standards. However, all it takes to drive this experiment to the ground is one spoiled generation, or one unsustainable culture, not giving a rat’s hind leg to sustainability — heck, you only live once! — and there goes your utopia. It has happened many times in the past, and there is absolutely no guarantee that it won’t happen again.

Such is life. Birth, growth, maturing then death. The same cycle repeats itself at all scales: from bacteria, to human societies, solar systems and galaxies. This is the world we live in. Temporal. Ever changing.

Never the same, yet always the same.

Be grateful. You have seen the peak of human civilization. You have made it! It’s time to make peace with how it ends and start imagining what comes after. A quote from Antonio Gramsci sums this up neatly:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of monsters are born.”

Fresh U.S. government data spotlighting the rapid growth of atmospheric methane concentrations in recent years has scientists increasingly concerned that the human-caused climate crisis has triggered a vicious feedback loop, potentially resulting in unstoppable planetary warming.

"Is warming feeding the warming? It's an incredibly important question. As yet, no answer, but it very much looks that way."

Research published in January by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed that atmospheric concentrations of methane—a greenhouse gas that's 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period—soared past 1,900 parts per billion in 2021, which ranked as the fourth-warmest year on record.

As Nature reported Tuesday, "The growth of methane emissions slowed around the turn of the millennium, but began a rapid and mysterious uptick around 2007."

"The spike has caused many researchers to worry that global warming is creating a feedback mechanism that will cause ever more methane to be released, making it even harder to rein in rising temperatures," the outlet noted. "Potential explanations [for the methane surge] range from the expanding exploitation of oil and natural gas and rising emissions from landfill to growing livestock herds and increasing activity by microbes in wetlands."

Euan Nisbet, an Earth scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Nature that "methane levels are growing dangerously fast" as powerful countries around the world refuse to end the extraction of coal, natural gas, and other sources of the pollutant.

"Is warming feeding the warming? It's an incredibly important question," said Nisbet. "As yet, no answer, but it very much looks that way."

Scientists have long feared that the continued burning of fossil fuels risks setting in motion a chain reaction whose consequences—particularly ever-more global warming—are irreversible.

While researchers are still working to discern the extent to which human activity is responsible for the alarming spike in atmospheric methane levels in recent years, scientists have previously warned against categorizing certain causes of methane emissions—such as thawing permafrost—as "natural," given that they are typically a result of human-driven warming.

"Regardless of how this mystery plays out, humans are not off the hook," Nature stressed Tuesday. "Based on their latest analysis of the isotopic trends, [NOAA scientist Xin Lan's] team estimates that anthropogenic sources such as livestock, agricultural waste, landfill, and fossil-fuel extraction accounted for about 62% of total methane emissions since from 2007 to 2016."

NOAA's latest figures were released months after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in its 2021 landmark report that atmospheric methane levels are currently higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years.

Despite such a dire finding, global policymakers took few steps to substantively address methane emissions at the COP26 climate summit in November. While dozens of additional countries signed on to a pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by the end of the decade, climate groups argued that "pledges are just words on a page without concrete action to make them real."

Amid the COP26 talks, the Biden administration unveiled rules aimed at cutting U.S. methane emissions, but critics said they do not go nearly far enough. The U.S. is the second-largest emitter of methane in the world.

"For too long, we've known the damaging impacts of this potent heat-trapping pollutant, known that oil and gas operations continue to be a major source of it, and known that solutions to drive rapid reductions across the sector already exist—yet still, oil and gas operations continue to release untenably high and entirely preventable methane emissions," Julie McNamara, deputy policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement at the time.

"Swiftly reducing methane emissions," said McNamara, "will result in significant and much-needed near-term climate progress."

Some parts of the planet are approaching the limits of their ability to adapt to climate change, scientists warned yesterday ahead of a major U.N. report being released later this month.

Extreme drought and heat could prevent trees from absorbing carbon dioxide, thrusting some ecosystems past the point from which they can recover, the researchers said. Some systems, like tropical coral reefs, have already surpassed those limits and are headed toward decline.

That grim assessment comes about two weeks before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost scientific body on global warming, releases a report that focuses on the limits of Earth’s ability to respond to damaging temperature increases, and what can be done about it.

It’s the second of four reports being written by the IPCC over a seven-year cycle, and it will examine, in part, what the impacts of climate change mean for people’s lives, now and in the future, said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group II.

The first report came out in August with dire warnings for how the physical climate is changing (Climatewire, Aug. 9, 2021). U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres dubbed it a “code red for humanity.”

The upcoming report will look at how those changes affect humans and ecosystems and will assess what types of responses are needed.

“I think people are waiting for the ‘So what?’” Roberts said in a briefing with reporters yesterday. They’ll find it in a report that she said will “lift the curtain” on how people interact with one another and with nature.

As the physical climate is experiencing unprecedented impacts—heat waves, droughts and rising seas—poor development choices are making societies more vulnerable, Roberts said.

For the first time, the report will emphasize potential solutions for addressing climate challenges and assess which ones are most feasible given social and political conditions.

It will also highlight how tightly human systems are intertwined with nature. And it will look at where people and ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of rising temperatures and how adaptation can help reduce the risks they face. It will have a strong regional focus, since people tend to respond to stories that come from places they know, said Roberts.

The challenge will be closing the gap between global emissions targets and the action needed to achieve them.

“This is a major hurdle, and it has to do with how we approach these questions,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a co-chair of the report. “The science is clear. How actually this is being transferred into action and policy in society, this is not so clear.”

Providing the motivation for action is an important part of the report, he added.

“Hesitation and waiting are no longer options for the future,” Pörtner said.

Despite growing evidence of the deleterious effects on ecological and human health, little is known regarding the global occurrence of pharmaceuticals in rivers. Studies assessing their occurrence are available for 75 of 196 countries, with most research conducted in North America and Western Europe. This leaves large geographical regions relatively unstudied. Here, we present the findings of a global reconnaissance of pharmaceutical pollution in rivers. The study monitored 1,052 sampling sites along 258 rivers in 104 countries of all continents, thus representing the pharmaceutical fingerprint of 471.4 million people. We show that the presence of these contaminants in surface water poses a threat to environmental and/or human health in more than a quarter of the studied locations globally.

Environmental exposure to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) can have negative effects on the health of ecosystems and humans. While numerous studies have monitored APIs in rivers, these employ different analytical methods, measure different APIs, and have ignored many of the countries of the world. This makes it difficult to quantify the scale of the problem from a global perspective. Furthermore, comparison of the existing data, generated for different studies/regions/continents, is challenging due to the vast differences between the analytical methodologies employed. Here, we present a global-scale study of API pollution in 258 of the world’s rivers, representing the environmental influence of 471.4 million people across 137 geographic regions. Samples were obtained from 1,052 locations in 104 countries (representing all continents and 36 countries not previously studied for API contamination) and analyzed for 61 APIs. Highest cumulative API concentrations were observed in sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and South America. The most contaminated sites were in low- to middle-income countries and were associated with areas with poor wastewater and waste management infrastructure and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The most frequently detected APIs were carbamazepine, metformin, and caffeine (a compound also arising from lifestyle use), which were detected at over half of the sites monitored. Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, pharmaceutical pollution poses a global threat to environmental and human health, as well as to delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are emitted to the natural environment during their manufacture, use, and disposal. There is evidence that environmental exposure to APIs has deleterious effects on the health of ecosystems and humans (e.g., by selecting for antibiotic resistant bacteria, feminizing fish, and increasing the susceptibility of fish to predation) (1⇓⇓–4). To fully understand the likely effects of these pharmaceutical exposures, it is essential to understand the concentrations that occur in riverine environments.

(...)