A Discussion Paper for the Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam Ecological Democracy Working Group
First Draft, July 2003
At the beginning of the 21st century the various environmental problems have become perhaps the greatest challenge of the humanity and the most serious threat for the long-term well-being of the human population living on our planet.
The ancient problems related to soil fertility, erosion, desertification, salinization and loss of nutrients, are still with us and damaging the food production in different parts of the world. The air in many cities is more polluted than perhaps ever before. Millions of people are still drinking water that has been polluted by human wastes and industrial pollutants.
Besides these age-old problems there is a truly frightening array of new environmental threats that have been produced by modern industrial development within a very short period of time, in less than a century.
One hundred years ago we did not even know that there is something which is called the ozone layer. Now we know that it is threatened by destruction by various chemicals produced by the human civilization.
We started to use deep groundwater in a larger scale only a couple of decades ago. At that time we thought that this would be a solution to all our water needs, replacing the traditional water harvesting and storing technologies that had been in use for thousands of years. After fifty years of groundwater overuse we are faced with declining water-tables and with a huge problem of groundwater pollution, the most striking example of which is the vast arsenic poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh and in the states of West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in India. While this is happening, the hundreds of thousands of traditional water harvesting systems are lying in ruins in South Asia, North Africa, Middle East, China, Latin America and elsewhere. In some cases the "answers" to the acute water problems dreamed by our governments, like the overly ambitious river-linking schemes, are almost as frightening as the actual problems the projects are supposed to solve.
The strenghtening of the greenhouse effect is threatening to destabilize the whole climate of our planet. This would make weather conditions very unpredictable and cause major problems for agricultural production. The melting of Himalayan glaciers could lead to the drying of some of the most important rivers in Asia. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic glaciers could raise sea levels and drown most of the world's fertile farmlands, and also produce very large and dangerous tsunami waves.
While the worries related to global warming and its possible consequences are increasing, the US government has bluntly stated that it plans to increase the US carbon dioxide emissions by 40 per cent.
Many observers have claimed that the market mechanisms can take care of global warming and other environmental issues. However, in reality it seems that the present emphasis on market mechanisms is leading to a renewal of nuclear power and to the production of natural gas with a technology called underground coal gasification. In other words: instead of solving the problems the market mechanisms are leading the world towards a massive use of the two most dangerous and harmful ways of producing energy anybody has ever been able to conceive.
Most of the people living on Earth do not want all this. They would like to have clean air and clean water, they do not support the destruction of the forests. They would like to use energy whose production is not stabilizing the global climate. And they would like to leave a beautiful Earth which has not been contaminated with radioactive waste for their children, grandchildren and for the innumerable generations which should have the right to be born on Earth after them.
However, a very complex web of economic and political power relations often forces the people to support policies which they would not like to support and to use the most polluting forms of energy. Therefore we cannot save ourselves and the future generations from an environmental disaster without tackling the issues of democracy and equality. Ecological democracy is an important dimension of democracy, and a prerequisite for sustainable human societies.
Ecological democracy is a very complex concept, with numerous different aspects and dimensions at different levels of the society.
Some of the present practises and technologies can, during the lifetime of only a few generations, cause serious harm for thousands if not millions of future generations. However, the future generations cannot vote. How do we take such issues into account?
There are usually many different ways of solving the same environmental problems. Different solutions have different social, economic, cultural and political consequences.
Who should decide what type of solutions will be adopted? Who will, for instance, decide how much nature will be protected and how? How much decision-making power should be delegated to the global or regional level and how much to the national level? How much should remain on the municipal or local (village) level? What is the best way of linking these different levels of decision-making together? How can the conflicts between local, national and global level be negotiated?
The control of local natural resources is one issue that has divided opinions among the environmentalists in the South and in the North.
In this respect, the two most important streams of thinking could be called the sustainable use approach and the protectionist approach.
In the North the protectionist approach has been stronger than in the South, and it has dominated the thinking among the environmental organizations and the Green parties that started to emerge on the political map of Europe at the end of 1970's and early 1980's. In the North it has been the former peasant parties, now known as Center parties, that have based their environmental thinking on the sustainable utilization and local control of natural resources. In the North it has usually been very difficult for the peasant parties and the new Green parties to speak to each other, and they have often drifted into seriously conflicting positions. The dynamics of such conflicts have hardened the attitudes on both sides and led to increasing polarization, which has been extremely harmful from the viewpoint of environmental protection. As a result many Green parties in Europe have adopted a very top-down approach in conservation and environmental protection, which has seriously alienated them from the rural populations. On the other hand rural people have become so frustrated and angry for the Green parties and environmentalists that many peasant organizations and Center parties of Europe have become much less Green than what they used to be. While the peasant movements in the South have gradually become the backbone of most important environmental movements a similar trend has not yet emerged in the North. On the contrary, many peasant organizations have, venting their anger towards the top-down approach of the new Green parties, sometimes taken vehemently anti-environmentalist stands.
In the South the balance of power has been very different. Issues that have to do with everyday survival, acquiring an adequate supply of food, water, building materials and monetary income are so acute for the majority of the people, that an environmental approach that would not pay any attention to such issues could not attract many followers.
In the South the main stream of the environmental movements has been speaking about sustainable development, sustainable use of forests and farmland, sustainable utilization of fish stocks and wildlife, multiple land use looking for an optimal balance between agriculture, forestry, cattle raising, tourism and nature protection.
All the international environmental organizations were originally dominated by the Northern, protectionist approach. However, while the participation of the Southern member organizations has become stronger, the emphasis has been shifting towards the sustainability approach. This happened first inside IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and FOEI (Friends of the Earth International) and slightly later in other organizations like the Greenpeace International and WWF International (World Wide Fund for Nature International).
If there will be more Green parties in Asian, African and Latin American countries, their participation inside the Global Greens is likely to induce a similar shift into the approach of the Green parties, or at least into their international cooperation organizations. This would also bring the Green Parties and the European peasant parties (Centrist parties) ideologically closer to each other, and perhaps lead to the re-greening of the Centrist parties.
The shift in the thinking of the international envrionmental organizations has been accelerated by the United Nations Conference for Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the Republic of South Africa, in 2002. It was also accelerated by the "sustainability assessments" that IUCN, WWF and the other international environmental organizations produced during the 1990's. The environmental organizations thought that such assessments would provide new and powerful ammunition for their demands of new, green policies by showing that the existing policies of most governments were unsustainable because they destroyed basic natural resources. It was no great surprise that the assessments supported such conclusions. However, what came as a shock to many Northern environmentalists was that the same assessments were almost as critical also towards the conventional approaches promoted by many environmental organizations.
The weight of the evidence was overwhelming and it was almost everywhere. The same points were repeated over and over again. The assesments emphasized that natural parks and other protected areas would be overrun by people's needs, sooner or later, unless the parks would also serve the needs of the local people.
"There is no point in creating protected areas if they fail to recognise the requirements of the people who live in or around them. That can only lead to conflict and reduce the chances of success", says Claude Martin, the zoologist who is currently the director-general of the WWF International.
According to most environmentalists and scientists the strenghtening of the Earth's greenhouse effect is rapidly becoming the most serious single threat for the future of humanity.
Global warming is also a complex democracy and equality issue. On a long run the strenghtening of the greenhouse effect is a serious threat to everybody. The problem, however, is mostly caused by the rich minority of the world's population. On a per capita basis some countries are producing a hundred times more climate warming emissions than the world's poorest countries. And inside each country the more well-off people are always producing more greenhouse gas emissions than the middle- or low-income segments of the population. The rich have large cars and they tend to use them more, they tend to travel more with jet planes that produce several times more greenhouse gases per kilometre per passanger than private cars, they have larger houses that are either heated or cooled down with fossil fuels and they buy more consumer goods the manufacturing of which is causing large greenhouse gas emissions.
If we can only produce a certain, clearly limited amount of greenhouse gases without destabilizing the climate, the only fair way to divide the rights to produce greenhouse gas emissions should be to divide them on a per capita basis. How to achieve such an arrangement, however, is far from easy. Many observers have remarked, that the political negotiations about sharing the rights to pollute greenhouse gases could become something like the New International Economic Order of the 21st century.
In the UNCED conference in 1992 the industrialized countries committed themselves to cutting their carbon dioxide emissions back to the 1990 level before the year 2000. This was a modest step, but it was hoped that it would gradually lead to more meaningful moves towards the same direction.
In the Kyoto meeting, at the end of 1997, the industrialized countries finally promised to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent from the 1990 level before the year 2012. This was a far cry from the level IPCC had deemed necessary, but in spite of such reservations the Kyoto Protocol was hailed as a historical first step towards significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
The convention was somewhat watered down in Bonn, in July 2001.
According to decisions made in Bonn the industrialized countries that will ratify the Kyoto Protocol can implement most of the agreed reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing carbon dioxide emission quotas from other countries, by financing greenhouse gas cuts in the Third World or in the former Soviet Union or by absorbing carbon dioxide into forests or the soils of farmlands.
In reality the industrialized countries - with the significant exception of the USA who produces one third of their greenhouse gas emissions - committed themselves to reducing their real greenhouse gas emissions by 1.8 per cent of the 1990 level by the year 2012.
The next steps will be more difficult. In order to achieve the necessary 60-80 per cent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions much more needs to be done in the North, and the Southern countries must also agree to limit the growth of their emissions.
Some Southern countries have said that the Western countries, with only about 20 per cent of the world's population, are producing 60 per cent of all the greenhouse gas emissions. If the USA is producing, on a per capita basis, roughly one hundred times more carbon dioxide than Bangladesh, it can't possibly be fair to ask both countries to cut their emissions by 60 per cent, or by 80 per cent.
Many Third World countries would like to appropriate the rights to produce greenhouse gas emissions between the different nations on a per capita basis, so that a country with one hundred million people would get ten times more emission permits than a country with a population of ten million. If there is an agreement on this, most Third World countries could still continue increasing their greenhouse gas emissions for some time, or alternatively sell their unused quotas to the industrialized countries. The industrialized countries, on the other hand, would have to make very major cuts into their own emissions, or to buy some more emission rights from the Third World countries.
The OECD has estimated, that the price of the emission permits might be somewhere between USD 100 and USD 350 per one ton of carbon already when we would be talking about a cut of 20 per cent in the global emissions. According to the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment this might earn at least USD 100 billion a year in foreign currency for the Third World countries. When the world would move towards a 60 or 80 per cent cut in the emissions, the prices of the emission quotas and the worth of their international trade might multiply.
Besides emission permits, also the managing of carbon sinks - forests absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - could become a tradeable commodity. If this happens and the governments will be paid for carbon sequestration, perhaps peasants and village communities should also get their share of the income?
In the climate convention negotiations many environmentalists were against the inclusion of carbon sinks in the treaty. According to many environmental organizations the sequestration of carbon into forests can only be a temporary relief to the problem, because there is a clear limit for how much carbon the forests can absorb. When the trees start to die the carbon is again released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. On a long run the only way to halt the build-up of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is to limit the use of oil, coal and natural gas. And what if the forests that have been grown to store atmospheric carbon dioxide will burn in giant forest fires?
Other environmental organizations, however, emphasized the benefits of including carbon sinks into the convention. They pointed out that the principle would, among other things, provide a strong incentive for the governments to protect their remaining natural forest areas. Among the supporters of the idea were most of the indigenous peoples of Amazonas and the union of the rubber-tappers and nut-collectors of the Brazilian Amazonas (CNS).
In Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Equador and Peru huge tracts of rainforests have been protected from logging by agreements between the governments and the federations of indigenous peoples living in the forest areas. This has been one of the most important success stories in the history of nature protection, because roughly 30 per cent of all the living species of our planet's land ecosystems exist in the Amazonian rainforests. The most important ally of the Amazonian rainforest peoples have been the trade unions of people who earn their living by collecting natural rubber, brazil nuts or other products from the rainforests without cutting the trees. Especially the national rubber-tappers' and nut-gatherers' union of Brazil (CNS, Conseilho National de Seringueiros) has been very important. In Brazil between four and six million people earn at least a major part of their livelihood through such activities, while the number of rainforest Indians is very small. This has, in practise, made CNS the most important organization with a vested interest in the protection of the rainforests in Brazil.
In spite of all this CNS a lot of violent and angry criticism from the Northern environmental organizations when it supported the inclusion of carbon sinks into the climate convention.
The establishment of carbon storage forests doesn't have to be a temporary measure. It is possible to manage the forests so, that very high amounts of carbon can be stored in the tree biomass for an indefinite period of time. This can simply be done by lenghtening the rotation period used in forestry. Also, there is a surprisingly large number of tree species that can live one or several thousands of years and achieve a very big size - if left in peace.
Carbon storage forests would most probably be less vulnerable to forest fires than ordinary forests. Young and small trees burn much more easily than older and larger trees which are often surprisingly resistant to forest fires because of their thick bark. Some trees - like the baobab - cannot burn in any kind of forest fires, as long as they remain alive, because of their high moisture content.
Global warming will definitely increase the number and severity of forest fires in different parts of the world, but the higher the average age of the forests will be, the less damage the fires are likely to do. The trees in the ordinary commercial forests are hardly ever grown to an age that would enable them to survive even a relatively mild forest fire.
Many Southern organizations have pointed out other dangers. If the governments and private companies start to establish huge carbon storage forests in the South, this might lead to large-scale privatization of common lands and to large-scale displacement of a lot of people. When the government of Thailand announced that it was going to establish of 4.5 million hectares of eucalyptus plantations, the plan was violently opposed and finally brought down because it would have displaced 5-10 million rural people. For instance the US Ministry of Energy has proposed the establishment of 700 million hectares of new plantation forests in the Third World in order to halt the global warming. What would be the scale of displacement caused by such imaginative approaches?
However, there might be ways to modify the idea of carbon storage forests so, that it becomes truly useful. The most important thing is to ensure, that the arrangements related to carbon sequestration will appropriate more resources into the hands of the poor instead of further narrowing their already limited resource base.
This can be done by several different ways. Perhaps the best alternative would be to demand, that if there will be carbon storage forests, only trees producing food for human consumption should be planted in them. Also, the carbon storage forests should be open for the local people, so that they can collect edible fruits, nuts, pods, seeds and mushrooms from them, gather dry branches or cones that have dropped from the trees for fuel, and let their domestic animals graze and browse the undergrowth after the trees have attained a size after which cattle or goats can no longer harm them. The programmes could also emphasize the planting of food-producing trees that can easily survive bush and forest fires.
We should perhaps agree to and support such arrangements, on three important conditions. First, just like in the Bonn agreement, governments should also in the future be able to implement only a certain per cent of their emission reductions through joint ventures, by absorbing carbon dioxide into the forests or through purchasing carbon sinks or additional emission quotas from other countries. It is important that the governments have a strong enough incentive to develop energy saving technologies and renewable energies. Also, the possibilities to absorb carbon dioxide into forest biomass are limited, and some of these possibilities must be reserved for taking some of the already existing carbon dioxide out from the atmosphere. Second, carbon sinks should only be included if the income from establishing and maintaining carbon storage forests will be divided between the governments and the local people. Third, forests should only be counted as carbon storage forests if they contain food-producing trees and if they will be kept open for the local people.
This probably is the most important issue: whether the programmes are to be implemented in a way that would appropriate more resources into the hands of the poor, or whether they would lead to the further narrowing of the resource base the poor depend on.
The greenhouse effect refers to the ability of the Earth's atmosphere to trap the Sun's infared radiation (heat). Because of the existence of the present kind of atmosphere, the Earth is currently about 30 centigrades warmer than it should otherwise be. Without the greenhouse effect the average temperature on our planet would be about -16 degrees Celsius instead of the present +16 degrees Celsius.
Only some gases are efficient in trapping heat into the atmosphere. Ordinary oxygen and nitrogen molecules do not contribute to the greenhouse effect. Most of the natural greenhouse effect is caused by water vapour. Other substances that contribute to the natural greenhouse effect are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3).
The use of fossil fuels and the clearing of large forest areas to farmland and pasture are annually producing a lot of extra carbon dioxide. This has started to increase the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content. Also the production of concrete and the draining of peatlands have produced smaller carbon dioxide emissions. At the same time humans are also increasing the atmosphere's nitrous oxide and methane contents and the amount of ozone in the lower atmosphere. Besides this humans have invented a number of new greenhouse gases or climate warming substances, that do not exist in the nature. The most important group of such substances are the freons or chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that also destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere.
The relative significance of the various greenhouse gases depends on the the time frame that is used in the calculations. Different substances have different lifetimes. Methane breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere. Ten kilograms of methane will warm the climate during the next decade as much as a ton of carbon dioxide, but during the next century the impact will only be equivalent to 200 kilograms of carbon dioxide. At this very moment methane is causing approximately one half of the already observable, man-made strenghtening of the greenhouse effect. The calculations used in connection of the Kyoto Protocol, however, use a hundred-year rule: they are based on what will be the warming potential of the various substances over the next 100 years.
If the one hundred-year rule is used, carbon dioxide is most probably responsible for 55-60 per cent of the man-made global warming. Most of this is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and a smaller part (between one seventh to one third) by the destruction of the world's forest cover.
In the one hundred-year framework methane's contribution is between 15 and 20 per cent. The amount of methane in the atmosphere has already more than doubled since 1800. Natural wetlands annually produce about 170 million tons of methane. Rice paddies produce about 110 million, livestock about 80 million, carbage dumps about 40 million, the burning of forest and grasslands about 40 million and the gas-drilling and coal-mining about 80 million tons of methane.
The CFCs used to be make almost 25 per cent of the anthropogenic (human-made) greenhouse gas emissions, but since then their production has almost stopped. Nitrous oxide is responsible for 6 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions. Probably four-fifths of the man-made emissions are caused by nitrogen fertilizers. The best way to reduce nutrous oxide emissions would be to useorganic farming methods or to prefer less harmful types of nitrogen fertilizers. When anhydrous ammonia or aqua ammonia are used, up to 5 per cent of the nitrogen can be released into the atmosphere in the form of nitrous oxide. For instance nitrogen solutions and sodium nitrate seem to be much less harmful. According to the available studies, only about 0.05 per cent of them is converted to nitrous oxide.
The fourth major problem is ozone, which acts as a climate-warming substance in the lower atmosphere. Most of the tropospheric ozone is produced when the nitrogen oxide in the cars' exhaust fumes react with sunlight.
Climate scientists say that the man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases might increase the average global temperatures by 1.5-6 centigrades during the 21st century.
According to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative scientific body aiming to coordinate research on global warming, the higher temperatures could lead to a rise of 7 to 13 metres in the sea levels during the next 500 years. If sea levels were to become ten metres higher than now, about ten million square kilometres of land and most of the world's fertile farmlands would be inundated. About half of the world's people would lose their homes under the water. Most of our great cities would also be submerged.
The predicted rise is caused by two factors: heat expansion of the sea water and the partial melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic glaciers. According to the IPCC, the thermal expansion of the water "would continue to raise sea levels for many centuries after stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations". It will take about a thousand years before the warming will reach the bottom of the sea, but during this time the warming predicted for the next century could raise the oceans by four metres.
IPCC scientists predict, that a 2.7 centigrade rise in temperatures in Greenland would trigger an "irreversible" melting of its ice sheet. This would raise sea levels by 7 or 8 metres during the next one thousand years.
Some researchers claim that the West Antarctic ice sheet is also showing signs of becoming unstable. According to the latest satellite pictures the largest glacier of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the Pine Island Glacier, is already losing ice faster than snowfall can replenish it. If the glacier continues to melt at the current rate, it will disappear in 600 years, raising global sea level by five more metres. And this five metres would come on top of the rise caused by heat expansion and by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
If these scenarios will become true, the continuous rise in sea levels could become the most important single factor sustaining and deepening absolute poverty in the world - at least for a thousand years or so. A major part of the world's population would be pushed into the coastal areas threatened by the rising sea and by hurricanes, because no one else would like to live in these areas, and because the rich and powerful would appropriate for themselves all the good farmland in safer regions. When the sea levels would rise, little by little, the poorest people would have to escape and move, over and over again, losing their homes and a major part of their scarce properties one time after another.
In Bangladesh about ten million people are already living like this: the poorest families have been pushed on lands that will sooner or later be swallowed by the great rivers, that are continuously changing their courses. Many families have been forced to move more than ten times, and each time they have been forced to construct new huts for themselves - which has eaten away what little money they have been able to save.
Also the areas that are lying on somewhat higher ground would be likely to suffer. Various extreme weather conditions like floods and droughts would become more common. The incidence of devastating typhoons and hurricanes might increase by a factor of ten, if the world will become five centigrades warmer than now. At the same time the destructive power of the worst storms might increase by 50 or 60 percent because of the higher temperatures - and higher wind speeds caused by them. This would be very bad news for the countries that are suffering from typhoons or hurricanes. A major hurricane or typhoon can, already now, wreck the economy of a whole country for decades. Super-hurricanes created by global warming would do still much more damage.
Besides the rise in sea levels, the most serious consequence of the global warming could be the drying of the tropical and sub-tropical areas. Even though rainfall would be likely to increase, it is likely that evaporation would increase even more. According to one estimate a four-centigrade warming in global temperatures would increase, on average, rainfall by 12 per cent and evaporation by 30 per cent in the tropical and sub-tropical areas. This would most probably cause a disastrous decline in agricultural yields, unless the emphasis will be shifted to crops that do not require much water.
According to the second IPCC report the drying of the tropics might reduce the flow of Nile by 75 per cent, which would be a catastrophe for Egypt and its neighbours. Many other large rivers in India, Pakistan and China - including the Indus - could would also suffer because of the increased evaporation rates. According to IPCC up to five billion people might be faced with acute water scarcities by the year 2025, at least partly because of the global warming.
A further threat comes from the melting of the Himalayan glaciers. The quantity of water in the Himalayan glaciers is not large enough to raise the sea level in a significant way, but the issue is extremely serious because of other reasons.
If the snow and ice masses in the Himalayas continue to melt, the water supply of much of Asia will be affected. Indus, Ganga, Mekong, Yangtze, Huangho and many other major rivers get a major part of their dry season flows from the Himalayan glaciers.
It has been predicted, that the Himalayan glacial area alone will shrink by one-fifth within the next 35 years, to 100 000 square kilometres. In the last 50 years alone some 15 000 glaciers have already vanished in the Himalayas. In the Gangotri Glacier of Indian Himalayas - the source of the holy Ganga - is now retreating with an average speed of 30 metres a yera, compared with only 18 metres a year between 1935 and 1950 and only 7 metres a year between 1842 and 1935. The Pindari Glacier is now retreating at an average rate of 135 metres a year. Indian scientists have projected that by 2030 many of the rivers originating from the Himalayas, including the Ganges, Kali and Indus, to name a few, will all be dry during the dry season.
These are grave predictions, especially because the groundwater resources in South Asia, South-East Asia and China are also being depleted with a frightening speed.
Many tropical diseases that require high temperatures, would spread with the increasing temperatures. For instance, the global warming might greatly increase the number of people that are threatened by the deadliest form of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, and by schistosomiasis. Falciparum malaria is already killing three million people, every year, and the situation is getting worse because the malaria parasites are rapidly developing strains that are resistant to most of the known medicines. At the same time the mosquitoes that spread the parasites are becoming resistant to pesticides.
Schistosomiasis already affects 250 million people, and causes permanent damage and disability for many of the carriers. Large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America have this far been spared from the problem, because their winter temperatures have been too low for these parasites. But this could soon change because of the global warming.
According to the IPCC the world has probably already warmed by 0.6 centigrades because of the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and from the destruction of tropical forests. This might be only 50 per cent of the warming we have already committed ourselves by emitting a certain amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
According to IPCC a certain increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will, on a longer run, warm the global climate by a certain number of centigrades. But because the oceans warm only very slowly, at a much slower pace than the atmosphere itself, there is a long delay before the whole impact has actually been realized.
In other words, even if we would eliminate all our greenhouse gas emissions, today, it is possible that the climate would still go on warming by another 0.6 centigrades.
The most frightening possibility is the so called runaway greenhouse effect. This far the oceans, soils, peatlands and forests of the Earth have absorbed a significant part of all the greenhouse gas emissions. This has slowed down the warming process. But many scientists are afraid, that if the climate warms too much, the global warming starts to feed itself.
According to Peter Cox and other researchers of the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research plants should first absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, when it gets hotter, the level of carbon dioxide absorbed by the trees and other plants is likely to level out, while the amount produced by the micro‑organisms decomposing organic matter would increase exponentially. According to the models constructed by Cox and his co‑workers the biosphere will rapidly shift, around the year 2050, from absorbing a little carbon dioxide to belching huge amounts of the gas. This would accelerate the warming, and the more the climate would warm up, the more carbon dioxide would be released from the soils. Such a vicious circle could rapidly add at least two centrigrades to the expected global warming.
Methane clathrates are ice‑like solids in which methane molecules have been trapped inside cages that consist of ice. They were first discovered by Russian scientists from the permafrost, but it is now known that they also occur in the offshore areas, in the sediments of the continental slopes. Very little is known about these deposits. According to the lowest estimates there should be about 10 000 billion tons of methane in the offshore clathrate deposits and about 400 billion tons under the permafrost. This is 2000 times more than the current amount of methane in the atmosphere. Other studies have concluded that the clathrate deposits could be one thousand times larger and contain up to 10 000 000 billion tons of methane. Moreover, the up to two kilometres thick mud layers of the actual sea bottom have been estimated to contain a further 15 000 000 billion tons of organic carbon.
The clathrate deposits remain stable only in near‑freezing temperatures. If the waters along the continental slopes warm up, increasing amounts of methane should be released into the atmosphere, which could create another viscious circle with a nightmarish quality. It has not been possible to quantify the size of the potential emissions. However, Russian scientists have already reported about major methane eruptions in the Sea of Okhotsk, near the island of Sakhalin.
Other studies have linked the eight‑degree warming at the end of the late Paleocene, 55 million years ago, to offshore methane eruptions. Fossil evidence suggests that land and sea temperatures rose sharply during this period. Many species of single‑celled organisms dwelling in the seafloor sediment became extinct. At the same time there was a notable increase in the light carbon 12 isotope in the preserved shells of the creatures that survived the heat spell. According to many scientists, methane clathrates are the most likely source for the light carbon.
Researchers of the Tromsö University of Norway have found 700 metres wide and 30 metres deep craters created by violent methane eruptions from the bottom of the Barents Sea. Moreover, in 1998 Russian researchers from the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology found unstable hydrate fields off the West coast of Norway. It seems that they were the cause of the so called Storrega submarine landslide, in which 5600 cubic kilometres of sediments slid 800 kilometres down the continental slope, about 8000 years ago. If the oceans become much warmer, other clathrate deposits might become destabilized and create huge tsunamis, thus devastating coastal areas.
The floating ice around the North Pole currently covers about 15 square kilometres in the winter and 7‑8 million square kilometres during the summer. These vast expanses of drifting ice form an effective reflector that reflects up to 98 per cent of the Sun's radiation back towards the space. Open sea is much darker and absorbs more radiation. If the area covered by the ice starts to diminish, the warming of the northern areas will accelerate.
There is a number of other potentially serious feedback loops. If the climate heats by a few degrees, the methane production of the peat bogs might multiply. If the circulatory system of the oceans is disrupted, it will remove less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bring back less nutrients from the deeper layers of the ocean. The less nutrients there are, the less plankton is produced. This could affect the climate by several different ways. Certain forms of plankton produce large amounts of a substance called DMS (dimethylsulphide) as a by-product of their metabolism. DMS aerosols are often the most important source of cloud‑condensation nuclei over the ocean, so reduced production of DMS could reduce the cloud cover and accelerate the warming.
The runaway greenhouse effect might actually start as a local or regional phenomenon, quickly spreading to become a global disaster. Some regions are likely to experience much more than the average amount of warming, while others could actually cool by a few centigrades due to the shadowing impact of sulfur aerosols, soot particles and other pollutants. The vicious circle could be initiated for example by the rapid destabilization of a single large methane clathrate deposit. This could happen for instance in the northern sea of Japan, which may already have warmed by three centigrades.
The third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, in 2001, that methane emissions could increase by fifty per cent during the next fifty years, while the concentration of smog chemicals such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone could double or triple. IPCC said that this could be potentially dangerous, because future emissions of these pollutants might actually overwhelm the oxidative capacity of the whole atmosphere.
Even before, in 1993, Sasha Madronic of the US government's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had warned that the atmosphere's hydroxyl chemistry is potentially unstable and carries the seeds for runaway reactions that could create a collapse in the hydroxyl levels. If the amount of pollutants increases too much, the atmosphere will start losing hydroxyl. After the chemistry has been tipped off balance, the remaining hydroxyl ions will be able to clean out only a rapidly diminishing amount of the new emissions entering the atmosphere. In such a situation the amount of pollutants remaining in the air would increase with an almost exponential rate, and the whole Earth would quickly become engulfed in huge clouds of smog.
As far as we know, the depletion of the atmosphere's hydroxyl content could be a real possibility if the carbon monoxide, ozone and nitrogen oxide emissions from cars, factories and thermal power plants and the methane emissions from various different sources continue to increase with the present speed, and if the global warming will cause vast forest and peat fires on different continents.
The depletion of the ozone layer is a problem that has very similar implications from the viewpoint of ecological democracy than the issue of global warming: everybody will suffer from a problem to which some people - the world's rich minority - contribute much more than the others. Most of the emissions that are damaging the ozone layer are still produced by West Europe and North America, which only have about one eighth of the world's population.
Ozone, the three-atomic molecule of oxygen, has two very different roles. In the lower atmosphere (troposphere) it is a greenhouse gas that contributes to the global warming. It is also poisonous to people and harmful for plants. However, the thin layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) filters the most damaging forms of the Sun's ultraviolet radiation and prevents them from reaching the ground level. Without this protection we would be exposed to much more intensive and dangerous uv-radiation. This would increase the rate of skin cancers and cataracts and damage many food crops. Serious loss of ozone could also reduce fish catches by killing fish larvae that are vulnerable to strong ultraviolet radiation.
In the early 1970's scientist became worried about the possibility that nitrous oxides from fertilizers, supersonic aeroplanes and space shuttle flights might destroy stratospheric ozone. Somewhat later it was understood that also the so called freons or CFC compounds (chloro-fluoro-carbons) were harmful for the ozone layer. CFCs were first used in fridges and air conditioning systems and later as cleaning solvents, aerosol propellants and to puff up polystyrene foam for hamburger cartons and for other purposes. Their world production rose from 2200 tons in 1940 to 491 700 tons in 1970, and it was still growing by 20 per cent per year when it was discovered that the CFCs were both strong greenhouse gases and efficient ozone-depleting substances.
The issue was taken seriously only five years after the British scientists had discovered a vast "ozone hole" over the Antarctic in 1982. The delay was caused by an American satellite, whose computer had been programmed to ignore the impossible results. Thus the satellite did not see the ozone hole and could not confirm the results reported by the British ground stations. It took five years before the confusion was sorted out. At that time the Antarctic ozone hole had grown to cover an area of 14 million square kilometres. Under this area almost all stratospheric ozone vanished during the spring months.
After the existence of the Antarctic ozone hole had been confirmed, the governments started to move with a record speed. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was negotiated and signed in 1987. In the Montreal Protocol the signatory governments agreed to cut their CFC emissions. During the coming years further meetigs of the parties adopted more ambitious targets and finally agreed to phase-out the CFCs and most other ozone-depleting substances. According to the Environmental Protection Agency of the USA, these treaties are likely to prevent about 137 million cases of skin cancer and about 40 million cataracts before the year 2075, so they certainly were a major victory for the humans and for the environment.
However, we still have the problem of nitrous oxide from nitrogen fertilizers and from the burning of fossil fuels. According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the nitrous oxide concentrations in the atmosphere are likely to rise by 45 per cent by the year 2100. The Australian research agency CSIRO says that the ozone levels in the mid-latitudes are likely to recover a little because of the elimination of the CFC production. However, they should start falling again around the year 2040 because of the build-up of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. CSIRO predicts that the ozone layers above the mid-latitudes should be about 9 per cent lower at the end of the century, and they could keep on falling with an accelerating speed.
The new threat to the ozone layer could be even more serious than the CFCs, unless the problem will be prevented in advance. The ozone depletion caused by chlorine and bromine compounds mostly occurs in mid-winter, when there is less sunlight in the northern latitudes and when the people are usually well covered because of the temperatures are low. But most of the ozone loss caused by the nitrous oxide takes place in mid-summer when the ultraviolet radiation is the most intense and when people generally wear much less clothing. The damage caused by nitrous oxide is also likely to concentrate on the mid-latitudes where the majority of the world's population lives, and not on the unhabited polar regions.
It is likely that nitrous oxide will become a major topic in international environmental negotiations in the near future. The most important ways to tackle the problem are to promote organic farming, in which chemical fertilizers are not used, or to develop nitrogen fertilizers that do not cause significant nitrous oxide emissions.
Some types of chemical nitrogen fertilizers that are in use now, especially anhydrous ammonia and aqua ammonia, produce approximately one hundred times more nitrous oxide than the most benign alternatives like sodium nitrate and nitrogen solutions.
In order to solve the problem of global warming we have to move away from fossil fuels to renewable energies: biofuels, wind, solar, wave, geothermal and hydrothermal energy. Besides this we probably have to abandon, at least partially, the idea of a global marketplace and reduce the amount of goods that are transferred to us from other continents by freightships or by an aeroplane. We probably have to start again emphasizing the importance of local production. We have to renew our local economies so that a larger part of everything we need, including our food and clothes, can be produced as close to our home as possible. This would basicly mean taking Gandhiji's vision about strong but somewhat modernized local economies, Gram Swaraj, seriously.
According to the conventional breakdown the transport sector is responsible for about one third of the consumption of fossil fuels in the industrialized countries. However, a Spanish study concluded that when also the indirect energy use of the transportation sector is included, it is responsible for more than one half of the fossil fuel consumption. The study included in the transportation sector also the energy used to manufacture cars, planes, ships and trains; the energy used in building docks, airports, roads, multi-storey car parks and other infrastructure; as well as the energy required to produce the packing materials that become necessary because of the longer transportation distances.
The greenhouse gas emissions caused by the transportation sector in the industrialized countries have increased significantly over the last forty years, but this has not happened because more goods are being consumed but because roughly the same weight of goods is being moved over longer distances because of the increasing concentration of production (which is also causing large-scale structural unemployment). In Britain the number of freight-ton miles almost tripled between 1952 and 1992, even though the production of most bulk commodities fell.
The larger the economic units or "free trade areas" grow, the longer the average transportation distances of various goods become. The United States of America is the only continent-wide modern free trade area that has existed for a somewhat longer time. It might not be a coincidence, that the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the USA are almost three times higher than in Japan or in Western Europe. The USA is annually producing about six tons of carbon emissions for every inhabitant of the country.
If the whole world would truly become a global free trade area, so that all the goods would be produced where-ever they can be manufactured with the cheapest possible prize, and then transported to the other side of the world, the carbon dioxide emissions caused by the humanity would be multiplied, and there would be no hope of preventing the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the drying of the tropics.
On the other hand, if we can make our countries to abandon the madness of the present, neo-liberal free trade policies that are destroying both our environment and hundreds of millions of jobs, we can cut the world's carbon dioxide emissions in a very significant way by strengthening local economies and by protecting different national and local production structures in agriculture, forestry, fishing, handicrafts, village industries, and so on.
According to the latest estimates cement production is already responsible for seven per cent of the global carbon dioxide emissions. Cement production produces CO2 emissions by two different ways. The conversion of the raw material (limestone or calcium carbonate) to the final product (cement or calcium oxide) is a chemical reaction in which a lot of carbon dioxide is released. Besides this a lot of coal is needed in order to heat the kilns to the temperature of 1450 centigrades, which is necessary for roasting limestone.
The world currently produces 1.4 billion tons of cement, every year, and the production increases by 5 per cent, annually. The production of cement is increasing very rapidly in many Asian, African and Latin American countries while growing percentages of their populations are moving from the countryside to the cities. According to John Lanchberry of the Verification Technology Information Centre in London, cement industry will soon be responsible for about ten per cent of the global carbon dioxide emissions.
An alternative for these trends would be to increase the use of bamboo, wood and mud - and different composite materials partly based on them - to replace cement in the construction of houses. Gandhiji actively promoted the use of mud and bricks made of mud for such purposes. Houses build of mud are less hot in summer and warmer in winter, which reduces the need for heating and air conditioning. Mud is cheaper than concrete and mud bricks can be produced without causing carbon dioxide emissions, either by solar energy or by using firewood.
Traditional houses of India, however, were not made of only mud. They were based on a kind of composite structures that incorporated mud with tree branches and shoots. This kind of a structure is surprisingly strong. When the terrible Earthquake of 2001 killed one hundred thousand people and destroyed the homes of five million people in Gujarat, in many areas it was only the houses built by these traditional methods that were able to withstand the holocaust. For example in the village of Ludiya in Kutch all the other kind of buildings collapsed while every single one of the round traditional houses that had used the mud-wood composite structure remained standing. The round houses that had been built of mud and stones, only, and which had thus imitated the mere outlook but not the actual structure of the traditional building, did break down.
In other words, realizing Gandhiji's vision of village republics would go a long way towards solving the whole problem of global warming.
Many technologies that can be produced in the village level make it possible for the communities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while they would also increase the peole's economic and qualitative standards of living.
However, in some cases also Big can be Beautiful. What comes to energy production in the village level we should perhaps think in terms of hybrid technologies. By this we mean technologies some parts of which are best produced in very large series in big factories, but which can still strenghten local economies and lead to more decentralized production structures.
For instance it would be very expensive and very, very difficult to produce good-quality Stirling engines or modern windmills at the village level. It makes sense to produce such technologies in large factories where it is easy to produce millions or even billions of such devices with relatively low prices. Such centralized production of renewable energy technologies cannot employ many people. However, if the nature of the actual energy production based on these technologies is very decentralized, the overall result will be more employment.
Various renewable energies typically provide 5-10 times more employment per unit of energy produced than centralized energy production systems like large dams or big coal and nuclear power plants. Replacing such technologies with decentralized production of renewable energy could create hundreds of millions of full- and part-time jobs to millions of separate village economies.
The trade union chapters of Finland's state-owned companies proposed, in November 2000, that the programme of privatizing state-owned companies should be stopped and that the publicly owned companies should be developed as models for ecologically and sustainable development. Based on this initiative some of the Finnish environmental organizations and trade union activists that have been part of the Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam network in Finland produced a set of more detailed proposals.
The most important new idea was the establishment of international state-owned companies.
One of the arguments for privatizing publicly-owned enterprises has been that state-owned companies cannot compete succesfully in a global economy. Because private transnational corporations operate globally national state-owned companies are doomed to lose and disappear if they are not sold to private capital.
However, if the state-owned companies would start working together
and establish global networks and joint companies together with the publicly-owned enterprises in other countries, they would get all the benefits globalization has brought for the privately owned transnationals. This would take away the extra, unfair competitive edge globalization has given for the private transnational corporations in relation to state-owned enterprises.
In other words, the establishment of international, publicly owned companies might be a way to protect different kinds of mixed economies consisting of both private and publicly-owned companies and strong public service sectors from the onslaught of raw and barbaric North American capitalism. Most of the countries in the world are different kinds of mixed economies, and the mixed economies have generally done better than the extremist models aiming either to abolish all private entrepreneurship (Soviet Union and Pol Pot's Cambodia) or to privatize both public services and all state-owned companies (the model towards which the USA is now moving).
One of the most important areas for such cooperation might be modern biogas technology. From the viewpoint of halting global warming and preventing the global renewal of nuclear power, the development of biogas technologies could be the most important single thing to do. India and China have been clear world leaders in developing and distributing decentralized biogas technologies, but even they have utilized only a small part of all the interesting possibilities.
Methane (natural gas or biogas) will in any case be an important part of the energy system of the future.
The big vision of the car manufacturers and the big oil companies is hydrogen economy. At least Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Honda are developing their own fuel cell cars that would use hydrogen as their fuel. DaimlerChrysler predicts that there will be 250 million hydrogen-using cars already in 2020. Also BMW estimates that at least one third of the cars it will sell in 2020 will be using hydrogen.
Oil companies like Shell, Texaco and BP Amoco share these opinions. They say that the global warming is a real problem, and that the easily utilizable oil reserves will soon be finished if the world economy continues to grow with the present speed. According to one estimate, the oil companies are now finding only one barrel of oil for every four that is being consumed. This means that the prizes of oil and gasoline could soon rise to prohibitive heights.
However, hydrogen has to be manufactured from fossil fuels, biomas or methane (fossil natural gas or biogas) or produced by breaking water to hydrogen and oxygen with the help of electricity, in a process known as electrolysis. The electricity for electrolysis has to be produced somehow, for instance by burning some of the produced hydrogen in order to produce electricity. A further problem is that the storing of hydrogen also consumes a lot of energy.
For these reasons it is likely that the production and storing of methane will always be cheaper than the production and storing of hydrogen, which the transnational oil companies and car manufacturers are so interested in. Thus it is very likely that methane will be the main fuel of tomorrow's cars, lorries, buses, ships and aeroplanes. It is likely that methane will also play a role in the production of electricity and in the co-production of heat and electricity.
In many industrialized countries most of the production of heat and power is currently based on methane because it is very convenient to use. Unlike the burning of coal, oil or wood the burning of methane does not produce health-threatening small particle emissions.
It has sometimes been claimed that methane has no future as a source of energy because the natural gas deposits are going to be exhausted relatively soon. However, most of the existing fossil fuel reserves can only be utilized in a commercially viable way in the form of methane.
It is currently estimated that the world's oil reserves might amount to 200 billion tons. This, alone, is probably not enough to cause serious climatic destabilization. Unfortunately there is at least
1 000 billion tons of coal that could be utilized by conventional methods (by excavating the coal and brining it to surface as coal). This is five times more than the known oil deposits. However, through a method called underground coal gasification (UCG) even the coal deposits laying very deep under ground can be utilized in an economically feasible way. UCG techniques multiply the commercially available coal deposits to at least 7 000 billion tons. This is the most important threat to climatic stability and the glaciers.
UCG was originally developed in the Soviet Union, in Uzbekistan, in the 1930's. In the 1950's the USA tried to develop a method of UCG that would have used atomic bombs to gasify the coal deposits. It turned out that the gas produced this way would be too radioactive to be used, and the whole programme - known as the Ploughshare programme - was cancelled. However, at least the US, the British and the Australian governments are planning to start major UCG programmes with somewhat more rational technologies. In Australia there already is one company which is selling methane produced by UCG with an economically competitive price.
However, methane can also be produced with the help of bacteria from all kinds of organic waste matter. China and India already have millions of biogas reactors producing cooking energy and gas for lighting for individual households or whole villages. This kind of programmes should be expanded so that all cow dung, human waste, organic household waste, paper waste and crop residues would be used to produce biogas. It is much better to convert for instance the cow dung to biogas instead of burning the dung in the form of a dried cake, because the burning of biogas does not produce harmful particle emissions. Also, composting or burning of cowdung wastes valuable fertilizer by vaporizing the nitrogen into the atmosphere. In the production of biogas all the nutrients remain in the matter that is left at the bottom of the biogas reactor after the gas has been extracted for burning. In other words, biogas reactors should also be seen as small factories of organic fertilizers.
Among the nothern countries Sweden has the most ambitious biogas programme. Sweden is producing biogas from municipal waste to fuel cars and municipal heat and power production plants. The final aim is to produce enough biogas to fuel 700 000 cars. Sweden has about eight and a half million people, larger countries could produce much more biogas from their municipal waste.
Besides this biogas can be produced from almost any plant matter, including sea weed, water hyacinths and single-celled algae. Plants growing on water tend to grow with a much faster speed than plants growing on land. For example macrocystis seaweed can grow with the speed of 130 centimeters per day if they are harvested regularly. This means that they can produce enormous amounts of organic biomass per hectare. Some freshwater plants also grow very quickly. Tropical stands of water hyacinths can increase their weight by 25 wet tons or by 800 kilograms of dry matter per day per hectare. Water hyacinths are an excellent raw material for biogas production: each kilogram of dry weight produces about 370 litres of biogas, with an average methane content of 69 per cent and an energy value of 22 000 kJ per cubic metre.
In Jamaica experimental trials growing single-celled algae like chlorella have produced 2.5 megawatts of electricity on 7.5-10 hectares of water tanks. The biomas production of the single-celled algae (many of which can be grown in salty sea water) is 150-200 times more than what willow coppices can produce.
In Brazil fuel alcohol became 25-50 per cent cheaper than benzin after all subsidies for energy production had been removed. The production of fuel alcohol requires better raw materials, more expensive equipment, a more laborious production process and more external energy than the production of biogas. Therefore it should be possible to produce large amounts of biogas with economically competitive prices.
One very simple way to produce biogas would be to have complexes of tanks filled with either freshwater or salt water, and to cultivate single-celled algae, seaweed or freshwater plants like water hyacinths in them. The tanks could be constructed either on coastal areas or in riverine environment, like Amazon and its tributaries. After the plants have consumed the nutrients in the water and filled the tanks, the tanks could be closed so that no more air gets in. In such conditions the anaerobic bacteria which do not require any oxygen break down the plant matter and produce gas that contains roughly 70 per cent of methane. After this the gas can be collected and the tanks can be opened again. The water can be stirred a bit so that the nutrients that have sank into the bottom will be mixed more evenly in the water, and a new crop of plants can be grown. In tropical conditions each production cycle would not take a very long time.
Various Southern and Northern countries could establish a complex of joint enterprises, international state-owned companies, to develop these various biogas technologies and to mass-produce them with cheap prices in order to make them more widely available for even middle and low-income households.
Some of the companies could concentrate on mass-producing cheap biogas producing equipment for individual households. Some of them could concentrate on the production of biogas-producing plants for large cities and smaller municipalities. They could also produce long series of equipment that is needed for collecting biogas from individual biogas-producing households or farms and equipment that is needed for purifying the raw biogas so that it can be used to fuel cars and buses. Raw biogas can provide cooking energy and lighting, but if the biogas is to be used by cars the impurities - carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulfur - have to be removed.
Another interesting possibility would be an international, publicly-owned company mass-producing cheap Stirling engines. Stirling engine is a simple machine that can transform temperature differences into mechanical energy and further to electric power. First Stirling engines were invented already in 1839, but the technology has become truly attractive only recently, with the development of new materials that can tolerate higher temperatures and continuously changing temperature differences without breaking down relatively quickly.
Stirling engines can utilize any kind of heat source, from wood to solar energy. Solar electricity produced by Stirling engines is currently 10-12 times cheaper than the electricity produced by solar cells. The large-scale mass production of Stirling engines and parabolic reflectors that would heat them by sunlight would make solar electricity much cheaper than nuclear or coal power in the regions that receive large quantities of direct sunlight. Stirling engines can also produce cheap electricity by biogas, natural gas or by wood.
In England the first so called micro-CHP machines (CHP=combined heat and power) meant for individual households have already entered the markets. Even if they presently use the same fuel, fossil natural gas, than the larger plants they reduce the carbon dioxide emissions per household by more than one fifth by cutting the transmission losses in the power grid.
Third interesting area of cooperation could be the mass-production of vertical and horizontal windmills. Danish energy consultants have calculated, that it would be possible to mass-produce middle-sized, 150-300 kw windmills in Russia with approximately Euro 15 000 unit prize. Cutting the costs to this level might be possible because of the scale-benefits of mass-production and through the conversion of some of the unused production capacity of the Russian airplane factories to this purpose.
Another option is the mass-production of modern vertical-axis windmills. The first windmills were originally invented in Afghanistan and Iran during the 12th century. They were vertical-axis windmills that were mostly used for grinding the grain to flour. When the idea spread to Europe, Europeans changed the construction and shifted the axis into a horizontal position. After this the vertical windmill was, for centuries, known as the "Islamic" windmill and the horizontal windmill as the "European" windmill. In some European countries, most notably in Finland, the interest towards vertical windmills never really died, and the idea is about to make a big come-back.
Finnish companies have developed helix-shaped vertical windmills that are very efficient in collecting wind energy. They produce some electricity with very little wind and they can also utilize considerably higher wind velocities than the conventional windmills without breaking down. Above all, such vertical windmills are so silent and produce so little "visual pollution" that they could be erected, in very large numbers, on rooftops or on the sides of buildings, on top of poles, in electric pylons, on sides of mobile phone masts and even on the sides or tops of tall trees. This would enable millions of urban and rural households to produce much of their electricity by themselves, but the technology will be economically competitive only if such vertical windmills would be mass produced in relatively large numbers. Otherwise their unit costs will remain too high for most households.
Karl Yeager, president of the US Electric Power Research Institute, says that various kinds of small personal power stations using Stirling engines, windmills or other types of technologies could largely replace conventional centralised power stations by the mid-century. According to Yeager power grids will become more like the internet, networks for sharing electricity among millions of independent domestic and community generators.
Humanity currently produces about 2 per cent of its energy in nuclear power plants. Many people have recently proposed, that nuclear power could be a partial solution to the threat of global warming, because it does not produce greenhouse gas emissions. The lobbyists for the nuclear industries are talking about increasing the world's nuclear power capacity by 20-fold in order to halt the global warming. The only country in the North that has already decided to build a new nuclear power plant is Finland, but other Northern governments are playing with the same idea. The government of Russia is discussing a plan to construct up to 30 new nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power has several aspects related to democracy issues. The most important one is obvious. Large-scale production of nuclear power could, within a few generations, pollute the whole planet with various long-lived radioactive contaminants. The scientists estimate that the Earth should be habitable for humans and other living beings at least for a thousand million more years before the Sun becomes so hot that all life will be destroyed. Some of the radioactive contaminants produced by nuclear power plants would still be around when this happens. Plutonium 244 has a half-life of 70 million years and the amount of uranium-235 is halved once in 710 million years.
Do five generations of people inhabiting the planet have the right to contaminate the planet permanently, in a way that might harm fifty million future generations of humans and their descendants and other living beings sharing the same planet with us? Future generations do not have the right to vote in our elections so how do we ensure that their rights are taken into consideration?
Another problem are the large bribes that have been paid to government ministers and other politicians by the nuclear industries. The companies that are producing nuclear power plants have staked huge amounts of investment capital on the success of the technology. The performance record of the nuclear power plants, however, has not been very satisfactory. Nuclear power has been, for most countries, a very expensive option even though the costs of radioactive pollution, dismantling the used nuclear reactor and storing the nuclear waste have not been properly included in its present price tag. Also, nuclear power has not been a popular option because most people do not like to gamble with the lives of their families. This has forced the nuclear industries to use bribes much more often than other types of companies working in the energy sector have committed similar crimes. This has contributed to serious corruption, which is a big problem for democracy.
One of the most famous cases took place in the Philippines, when Westinghouse paid a bribe that may have amounted to 35 million US dollars to a government minister for securing a decision to buy a nuclear power plant from the company.
The third major problem is, that the large-scale use of nuclear power might lead to the deterioration and finally dismantling of human rights and civil liberties in the countries that invest in this technology.
The world is rapidly drifting towards a kind of asymmetrical world war in which numerous violent underground organizations are fighting the world's leading industrialized countries through the means of terrorism. Terrorist organizations will in any case be a major threat to democracy everywhere on Earth. The gradual dismantling of civil liberties and human rights can be legitimized and rationalized to people with the need to fight terrorism. This might finally, through a slow and creeping process of gradual deterioration in the situation, transform many democratically ruled countries first to some kind of police states and then to full-fledged military dictatorships.
In the fight against terrorism the important issue is to ensure that only a very few people are willing to commit serious acts of terrorism. This is the only way to win the struggle. Fighting terrorism with violence will only worsen the problem by multiplying the number of potential terrorists. It is not possible to prevent terrorist strikes if there are hundreds, thousands or millions of people willing to carry out such strikes - and who are even willing to sacrifice their own lives in the process.
This is the main point. However, we already are in the middle of a vicious cycle of strikes and counter-strikes, and halting the killing may be a very slow and demanding process.
In this kind of situation nuclear power is very dangerous both for general safety and for democracy. By hijacking jet planes and crash-landing them on skycrapers the terrorists can kill thousands of people. If they decide to attack nuclear power plants or nuclear fuel reprocessing plants they could kill millions or possibly even tens of millions of people.
Because nuclear power plants are the ultimate terrorist targets they might also - during the so called war against terrorism - provide the ultimate legitimation for the dismantling of democracy. Thus nuclear power may pave the way to police states and fascist regimes more effectively than any other factor.
One of the most serious problems related to nuclear power is the issue of nuclear waste.
One small part of the problem are the nuclear reactors themselves. Some of the companies that are currently operating nuclear power plants have reserved nominal amounts of money for dismantling the nuclear reactors after they are no longer in use. However, in the few instances in which old nuclear power plants have actually been dismantled the costs have been 15-20 times larger than the overly optimistic calculations produced by the nuclear industry. For instance in Britain it has now been estimated that the dismantling of the nuclear power plants and other radioactive clean-up will cost at least 63 billion pounds and possibly much more. It is now openly admitted that all this money has to come from publuc sources, from the tax-payers' pockets, there is no chance that the near-bankrupt nuclear industries would be able to contribute much.
The mildly radioactive waste produced by uranium mines is another serious problem. Uranium mining typically removes roughly 15 per cent of the radioactivity of the uranium ore deposits. This means that on average 85 per cent of the radioactivity is left behind in huge masses of slightly radioactive soil and rock. The amount of this low-active radioactive waste is so huge that nobody has been willing to consider what should actually be done for it: individual mining areas can contain billions of tons of such slightly radioactive material. For instance in India the waste from uranium mines has been stored in middle-sized earth dams. The dams leak and the rivers below them are becoming, little by little, more radioactive.
The production of nuclear fuel leaves behind seven tons of depleted uranium (DU) for each ton of enriched nuclear fuel. A 1000 megawatt nuclear power plants produces about two hundred tons of depleted uranium per year, and the manufacturers of nuclear fuel have already accumulated almost one million tons of DU. Also the reprocessing of used nuclear fuel produces smaller amounts of depleted uranium.
Depleted uranium is only half as radioactive as natural uranium because it only contains 0.3 per cent of the more radioactive uranium 235 isotope. In natural uranium there is, on average, 0.7 per cent of U235. However, DU is still a mildly radioactive toxic waste, the storing of which causes major additional expenses for the nuclear industries.
To reduce the costs of storing their waste materials the nuclear industries give depleted uranium to the armament industries for free. Because of this almost unlimited free supply depleted uranium has become extremely popular among the manufacturers of military ammunition. Uranium is 1.7 times denser than lead, and projectiles made of DU can pierce otherwise impenetrable armour.
Depleted uranium burns on impact, and produces small particles of uranium oxides, between 0.1 and 10 micrometers wide. These particles can be inhaled and they seem to be highly insoluble. The alpha radiation caused by natural uranium or by depleted uranium cannot penetrate any kind of clothing, human skin or even paper. However, the inhaled particles can expose vulnerable tissues to alpha radiation. This should increase the risk of cancer and other health problems. For instance a modern 30-millimetre Gatling gun used in battle helicopters and in fighter planes can fire 3900 rounds of ammunition in a minute. Every DU round that hits a hard target explodes into a mildly radioactive uranium oxide aerosol.
In the First Gulf War the US forces fired, in a very short period of time, almost one million rounds of ammunition that contained alltogether about 260 tons of depleted uranium.
According to Jawad Khudim al-Ali, director of the cancer ward of the teaching hospital of Basra, cancer rates in Basra are 11 times higher than before the First Gulf War. Also many other Iraqi doctors have reported about anomalous rates of cancer and birth defects. Even the US government has admitted that these claims seem to have something to do with the reality, but they say that the astonishingly high rates of cancer and birth defects have probably been caused by chemical weapons and not by depleted uranium. Most Iraqi people are blaming the Americans.
Also about four fifths of the soldiers fighting in the Allied troops were exposed to high doses of depleted uranium. The level of uranium in the urine of some of them was, three years after the war, still 4000 times higher than the US safety limit for adults. According to the studies of the German professor, biochemist Albrect Schott the British veterans of the First Gulf War have on average five and a half times more than the average number of chromosome abnormalities. Some of the veterans have 14 times the usual level of chromosome abnormalities in their genes. According to Schott this should increase the probability of cancer, deformed babies and other genetic conditions. According to professor Malcolm Hooper of England's Sunderland University, the exposure to depleted uranium may cause between 22 000 and 160 000 extra cancer deaths among the US and British troops that fought in the First Gulf War. The chemical toxicity of the substance is already causing serious health problems to many Gulf veterans. Of the 504 047 registered American veterans of the First Gulf War, 29 per cent have been officially classified as invalids.
In Kosovo and Bosnia much smaller amounts of depleted uranium were used, probably about ten tons. According to a recent study by an Italian team in the badly polluted areas of Kosovo there can be as many as a million tiny uranium particles in just a few milligrams of soil. The particles are so tiny that they "have a potential for resuspension and inhalation under arid conditions". The Italian team and the UN Environmental Programme have estimated, that a child inhaling 0.1 grams of the polluted soil would receive an additional radiation dose of 1.44 millisieverts - more than the recommended maximum annual level of radiation for adults.
The chemical toxicity of the uranium dust is especially dangerous for children. In Kosovo and Bosnia it has been found out, that children who happen to swallow a pinch of heavily contaminated soil can easily take in 120 milligrams of uranium, a big enough dose to seriously harm their kidneys. The normal average annual dose of uranium people get from air, water and food is only about 0.4 milligrams.
In the Second Gulf War much larger amounts of depleted uranium were used. Some estimates have spoken about 2200 tons of depleted uranium consisting of nine million rounds of ammunition containing DU. This is not official, yet, but it is known for sure that very large quantities of DU were used. The most worrying thing is that most of these nine million or so DU rounds were spread over the most densely populated areas of Iraq. If the currently existing information about the matter is true, the US and British armies have really behaved in an astonishingly barbaric way. 2200 tons means 2 200 000 000 000 milligrams, almost twenty billion doses sufficient to destroy the kidneys of a child.
In future wars most major battles will probably be fought in densely populated urban environment, because partly or totally demolished structures of major cities will create the kind of killing grounds that level the odds between troops armed with highly sophisticated weapons systems and their less well armed opponents. The psychological and symbolic turning point of the Second World War, the battle of Stalingrad, and the battle of Madrid during the Spanish civil war are the classical arch-types of such a situation. The idea of hundreds of millions of DU rounds fired in such battles in the future wars is highly uncomfortable. The present stores of depleted uranium which have already been produced by our existing nuclear power plants are sufficient to produce thousands of millions of uranium rounds, and the world's nuclear power plants are producing vast further quantities of depleted uranium, every year. The USA has sold ammunition containing depleted uranium to at least 16 countries, including Bahrain, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.
Nobody knows how dangerous depleted uranium really is. It may be that the fears have been exaggerated, but there is no doubt about the chemical toxicity of the material, and the way it can damage the kidneys of small children. Also the radioactivity is likely to do some damage. However, perhaps the most important aspect of the situation is that most people in Iraq believe that DU is very dangerous. In the future the US army will, in any case, be blamed about every cancer and every birth defect in Iraq. Thus the use of depleted uranium may also increase the probability of terrorist strikes using radiation weapons or "dirty bombs", or strikes against US nuclear power plants.
For instance used nuclear fuel which has just been taken out of a nuclear reactor can be more than 300 000 000 times more radioactive than depleted uranium but it has, otherwise, similar physical and chemical properties. Already now there are, on Earth, about 10 000 sites that store radioactive materials that could be used to make dirty bombs.
These possibilities have become much more real than before because of the worsening conflict between the USA and its allies and a number of extremist guerilla movements, especially the Al Qaida network. In an intereview given to the Al Jazeera television, two Al Qaida leaders who had been involved in planning the terrorist strikes to Washington and New York on 11.9.2001, said that their original plan had been to strike against US nuclear power plants. However, they had changed the plan because they had thought that a strike against nuclear power plants might have done too much damage and have too uncontrollable consequences.
In June 2003 the Thai police arrested a man who had smuggled 30 kilograms of radioactive cesium-137 from Russia. The arrested person was probably trying to sell the material to a terrorist organization.
When the US and British military forces occupied Iraq the official explanation was that this was done in order to prevent Iraq's possible weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of terrorist organizations. Due to an amazing blunder the Americans, however, left the most important and best known storage of various radioactive materials in Iraq unguarded for more than a week after the troops of the Iraqi government had withdrawn. The Tuwaitha nuclear complex contained at least 400 medical and industrial radiation sources, and it is now feared that some of them were stolen in the middle of the chaos caused by the war. Many local people seem to be suffering symptoms of radiation poisoning such as nosebleeds and diarrhoea. The most likely explanation is that they stole something from the complex and either hid the material or sold it forward to somebody.
When Michael Levy of the American Association of Scientists was describing the impact of a dirty bomb for the US congress, he was talking about a pea-sized bomb containing only 74 gigabecquerels or 2 curies of radioactivity in the form of cesium-137. The detonation of such a mini-bomb in the middle of New York or Washington DC would force, accoding to the existing legislation, the government to evict people from a stretch of land one and a half kilometre wide, in order to avoid about one thousand extra cancer deaths. The 30 kilograms of cesium-137 captured in Thailand would have been enough to make tens of thousands of such mini-bombs.
An attack that would cut the cooling pipes of a 1600 megawatt, water-cooled nuclear reactor might cause a release of 10 000 curies of radioactivity, five thousand million times more than the detonation of a 74 gigabecquerel dirty bomb. The cooling ponds - especially their water pipe systems - storing used nuclear fuel rods are even more vulnerable to terrorist strikes than the actual reactors.
The primary energy-producing reaction will stop immediately if a water-cooled nuclear reactor loses its cooling water. This is because the water is also acting as a moderator: it is slowing down the neutrons produced by the splitting of the atoms to speeds in which most of them will split other atoms. However, if the nuclear fuel has been in use for some time, it has accumulated a large amount of waste products. These nuclear ashes are a mixture of numerous different radioactive materials including plutonium, each decaying at a different rate. These radioactive waste products that have been accumulating in the nuclear fuel keep on decaying and producing heat even after the reactor has been shut down. If something happens to the nuclear reactor just before it would have been shut down so that the fuel rods can be exchanged, each ton of fuel can keep on producing 1.6 megawats of heat even after the primary reaction has stopped.
In other words: a large water-cooled nuclear reactor can keep on producing up to 80 megawatts of heat even after the reactor has been shut down. If the cooling pipes have been cut or seriously damaged this heat will not be transferred out of the reactor by the coolant. When you lift a kettle containing water off an electric stove, it does not take very long before the plate has been heated red hot by the current running through it. If a nuclear reactor goes through a loss of coolant accident (LOCA) at the wrong moment, the same thing will happen to it. The nuclear fuel will melt and sink into the ground through the containment shield. This phenomenon has been dubbed "the China syndrome".
The China syndrome has never happened in a nuclear power plant and the probability that it would happen by accident is not very large because the nuclear power plants now have multiple safety systems. However, if somebody wants to sabotage a nuclear power plant on purpose in order to cause a loss of coolant accident, this is very easy to do.
According to a study carried out by majors Scott M. Nichelson and Darren D. Medlin of the US Air Forces terrorists could also do a lot of damage if they were able to capture a single used nuclear fuel rod. If the fuel rod would be detonated with a mixture of diesel oil and nitrogen fertilizer, the radioactive fallout could kill 50-90 per cent of the unprotected population of Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. Besides this there would be a notable increase in cancer mortality on the whole Wastern Coast of the USA.
However, the most serious problem related to the safety of the nuclear power plants and nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities could still be something else than terrorism. It could be a phenomenon known as megatsunami.
Normal tsunamis are fast-travelling waves caused by volcanoes or earth-quakes. They are typically only a few centimetres or, at most, a few metres high. Even this kind of waves can cause enormous damage in coastal areas.
Geologists and geomorphologists at the University of Wollogong in New South Wales, Australia, have discovered traces of a number of very large but relatively recent tsunami waves around the coast of Australia. The traces include car-sized blocks of rock lifted over 100-metre high cliffs, and smaller debris deposited up to 35 kilometres inland. According to the Australian researchers there has been, an average, one megatsunami wave at intervals of 1000 to 500 years.
Most researchers first assumed, that the megatsunami waves on the Australian coast had been caused by comet fragments or asteroids hitting the Earth. This theory, however, has now fallen out of glory. The record of impact craters on land does not support the hypothesis, it is likely that cosmic collions on this kind of scale are very rare. Moreover, the researchers think that a collision with an asteroid would create a slightly different wave than the ones that have left their marks on the coast of Australia.
This leaves three likely candidates: the destabilization of methane clathrate deposits, the destabilization of Antarctic glaciers and the collapse of volcanoes.
For example a volcano named Cumbre Vieja, on the island of La Palma on the Canary Islands, is expected to collapse when the next major eruption of the volcano takes place. When this happens roughly half a trillion tons of rock will drop in the ocean and create a five hundred metre-high megatsunami wave raging over the Atlantic with the speed of a jet-plane. Earlier collapses of the Canary Island volcanoes have caused similar waves. For example on the Island of Eleuthera, Bahamas, these ancient megatsunamis have washed boulders weighing up to 2000 tons on younger rocks situated tens of metres above the sea level.
However, something like this should only happen once in every one hundred thousand years or so. This means that the most likely cause of the megatsunamis have been the destabilization of methane clathrate deposits or continental glaciers. The destabilization of clathrates can create megatsunamis by causing very large underwater landslides.
Also the melting of glaciers can cause huge tsunami waves. After the last ice age vast amounts of melt water often accumulated behind large ice dams. It seems that large melt-water lakes, the biggest of which may have contained up to one million cubic kilometres of water, have suddenly erupted and flooded to the sea when the ice dam has finally been broken.
According to professor John Shaw of Canada's Alberta University the breaking of the ice dams may have created a situation in which huge masses of melt water have started to run towards the sea under a continental glacier. In such situations a vast chunk of the whole continental glacier can suddenly lose its contact with the base rock. When the contact with bedrock is severed the glacier can slide towards the sea on top of the water. Such glacial surges have probably caused very large tsunamis at the end of the last ice age. They might be the most plausible explanation also for the old megatsunamis which have hit the coast of Australia. This is a very worrying possibility, because the predicted man-made warming of the climate could well trigger similar glacial surges also in the future.
Most nuclear power plants in the North have been built on coastal zones, because they require large quantities of cooling water and because most of the people in the USA and Europe live on coastal regions or relatively close to them.
If there would be a big megatsunami wave triggered by the collapse of glaciers or the destabilization of clathrate deposits, all these nuclear power plants would be destroyed. Even ordinary breaking waves can create pressures of up to 6 kilograms per square centimetre, equivalent to 60 tons per square metre, which is enough to crush very strong steel baulks and plates. Megatsunamis are much larger and much, much faster than ordinary waves and the forces created by them are at least one order of magnitude stronger. The pipelines and other vulnerable structures of the nuclear power plants and cooling ponds have no chance of withstanding such an impact. The radioactivity in the cooling ponds would be released into the environment. The complete melt-down of the actual nuclear reactors would also be likely to produce a very hot pond of molten metal, which might be hot enough to penetrate through the containment shell.
Loss-of-coolant accidents leading to the simultaneous melt-down of a hundred nuclear reactors and the related cooling ponds would be a disaster of almost unimaginable portions, perhaps even the end of the human kind. The amount of radioactive pollution released into the environment could be tens of thousands or one hundred thousand times larger than the radioactive fallout created by the Chernobyl accident.
If building nuclear power means taking big risks, the construction of nuclear power plants on coastal areas during a historical period when global warming is threatening the stability of glaciers and methane clathrate deposits is raving madness. There should perhaps be a huge global boycott against the countries that aim to construct new nuclear power plants on coastal areas.
We do not know exactly how harmful radiation is, but everybody now agrees that radiation does cause some damage. Estimates about the number of cancer deaths caused by man-made nuclear pollution, most of which consists of the fallout from the atmospheric nuclear tests, range from 1 173 600 (International Commission on Radiation Protection) to 61 600 000 (European Committee on Radiation Risk).
Cooking energy is one of the basic necessities of the people. According to recent studies people can better utilize the energy and nutrients of cooked than of uncooked food. Two times more vegetable food or 50 per cent more meat is required to provide the same amount of nutrition for humans if the food is consumed without softening it first through the process of cooking.
Cooking energy is an important equality and democracy issue. It is also an issue where it is easy to see that inequality and lack of democracy are hurting everybody, and not only the poor.
A growing percentage of people can cook their food with electricity, natural gas or kerosene. However, about three billion people in the world use wood, straw and cow dung as the source of their cooking energy. About one quarter of the people who use fuelwood in cooking live in India.
Most people that use biofuels can only afford very primitive and poorly designed cooking stoves. Hundreds of millions of them cook their energy with a stove consisting of only a few stones. Such stoves have a very low thermal efficiency: they often waste 90 per cent of the energy content of the wood, while the best available designs only waste between 10 and 20 per cent. Thus they are a factor contributing to the loss of forests, other vegetative cover and biodiversity.
Also, the cooking technologies that the poor are forced to use produce huge quantities of small particles and other substances that are dangerous to peoples health. The mothers and children of the poor families receive the highest exposures of these harmful substances, but in the densely populated urban or semi-urban areas also the more well-off families are affected. Thousands and millions of small stoves producing large amounts of pollution can make the air very toxic for everybody living in the cities and other densely populated areas. In Kolkata at least 60 per cent of the people are suffering from chronic respiratory illnesses like bronchitis because of the air pollution produced by traffic, factories and cooking stoves.
The soot particles, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides produced by the cooking stoves also contribute to the problem of global warming. Nitrogen oxides produce ozone, which is a strong greenhouse gas and the carbon monoxide emissions slow down the break-down of methane in the atmosphere.
Studies have linked woodfuel smoke to an impressive number of ailments. They include acute respiratory illnessess like bronchitis and pneumonia (both among children and elder people); lung cancer and a number of other cancers; chronic lung ailments like asthma, chronic obstructive lung disease and emphysema (and the heart problems that are often related to such lung diseases); tuberculosis; severe coronary heart disease; adverse pregnancy outcomes like an increased risk of low birth-weight, stillbirth or neonatal death; eye diseases and anemia.
A survey carried out in Jumla, a cold mountain district of Nepal, where the average indoor smoke levels are very high, reported an infant mortality rate of 490 per thousand, 335 of which were due to acute respiratory illnesses. The very high infant mortality rate in the area is most probably caused by woodfuel smoke. Studies made in western India have estimated that the exposure of pregnant women to fuelwood smoke increases the risk of stillbirths by 50 per cent. In Nepal 15 per cent of non-smoking women suffer from chronic bronchitis.
According to the World Health Organization the smoking of pregnant women doubles the chance of the children to be born under-weight. This, in turn, increases the babies' risk of dying during their first year of life by three or four times. There is no reason why the exposure to smoke from cooking would not cause similar damage to the unborn children as the smoking of cigarrettes.
According to one estimate particulate air pollution from the woodfuel smoke is, in India, at least partially responsible from 900 000 to 3 600 000 deaths, annually. Another study has estimated, that outdoor air pollution in the Indian cities is responsible for 40 000 to 50 000 deaths, annually, while the smoke from the cooking stoves kills 2,2 million people in a year. If the mortality rates among the other three-quarters of the people who use similar fuels in their cooking are somewhat similar, the impact of the fuelwood smoke is one of the most important health problems in the world.
In China, where much of the cooking is done by small, flueless stoves burning mineral coal instead of charcoal, mineral coal is probably causing similar adverse health effects than the cooking of biofuels in open stoves has been reported to do. In spite of all this, it has been estimated that more than 99 per cent of the world's air pollution research and control expenditures concentrate in reducing outdoor air pollution - which is responsible for less than 40 per cent of the total worldwide human exposure to particulates.
One solution to the problem is to spread smokeless chulhas: if the stoves are equipped with a flue (chimney) through which the smoke can escape, exposure to smoke is greatly reduced. Such cooking devices can be made of clay or mud to reduce the cost, so that even the poorest families can afford them. Another simple solution is to improve the ventilation of the kitchen. According to Indian scientists a roof hatch with a size of one square metre that can be opened when food is being prepared can reduce the exposure to smoke by almost 90 per cent.
To increase the production of good-quality fuelwood might also be one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve the situation. The worst alternative is to burn cow dung and very small branches and sticks. When the burning temperatures are low a lot of different toxic compounds are produced. Also the agricultural production suffers, because the cow dung would have a great value as fertilizer.
Proper firewood produces less smoke and less toxic compounds than cow dung or small sticks. Also, some trees are better suited for firewood than some other species. Their wood burns cleanly and produces only little smoke. Unfortunately, it is the poorest that are forced to use the worst firewood: the better fuelwood is often too expensive for them. The more extensive growing of high-quality firewood would be a partial solution to the problem.
In Finland studies have shown that it is very important to burn wood that has been properly dried. The dangerous particulate and carbon monoxide emissions from wood that has been drying in the sun over two summers are roughly one hundred times smaller than the emissions from burning wet wood. In the tropics the sun is much hotter than in North Europe, and the wood dries with a much faster speed. However, even in the tropics it takes some time before the fuelwood has lost most of its moisture content. Also the poor families should be given a chance to store, legally, larger amounts of woodfuel so that they can dry it properly before burning it. This will also reduce the amount of wood needed for cooking because a smaller percentage of the wood's energy content is wasted on evaporating the moisture. Nowadays the poor families often have to burn the wood almost immediately after cutting or collecting it.
Finnish researchers also recommend that the fire should be lit from the top and not from the bottom, which can only be done if the wood is very dry. This is a very effective way to reduce the dangerous particulate emissions and to get more heat energy out from the same amount of fuelwood. A large percentage of the energy content of the wood is in the form of volatile chemicals. When a smaller or larger pile of wood is lit from the bottom, the wood above the fire is heated so much that these volatile chemicals evaporate and escape from the wood. However, most of them escape without burning, which both wastes a large percentage of the wood's energy content and produces a lot of dangerous emissions. If the fire is lit from the top, or simultaneously from the top and from the bottom, also these volatile chemicals are burned in the process. The fire burns with a hotter and much cleaner flame, and produces only very small amounts of suspended particulate matter and other harmful substances.
Charcoal produces much less harmful emissions than fuelwood. Most of the harmful particulates and other toxic compounds are released during the charcoal-making process. Because of this charcoal burns quite cleanly, even though it can produce high carbon monoxide emissions if the burning is not complete enough.
However, charcoal is more expensive than fuelwood. Another problem is that it is often produced by simple earth kilns that waste up to 90 per cent of the energy value of the wood. Part of the loss is compensated by the fact that charcoal is more efficient to use than wood. Because it burns well it can be used in smaller quantities and in a more economic way than wood. This reduced the amount of wastage by a factor or two or three. Improved charcoal kilns can preserve up to 70 per cent of the wood's energy content, but they are in most cases too expensive for the poor charcoal makers. The development of improved earth kilns as an intermediary stage in the charcoal production technology could be a partial answer to the dilemma.
Charcoal retorts also make it possible to recover the various liquid chemicals that are extracted from the wood in the charcoal-making process. (In the traditional charcoal-producing methods these chemicals often seep into the soil and pollute the groundwater.) Such biochemicals can be used to protect houses and other wooden structures from termites, which could also save a lot of wood. Alternatively, they could be collected and sold as a raw material for chemical industries. If industrial end uses for these chemicals would be developed and the collection of them is organized in a proper way, their market value could actually become higher than the market value of the charcoal.
Still in the beginning of 1940's, plant-based materials dominated the chemical industries. Since then chemicals manufactured from oil and coal have largely replaced chemicals derived from wood and other plant materials. The output of petrochemicals in the USA was only 10 000 tons in 1921, but increased to 1.5 million tons in 1939 and 109 million tons in the mid-1990's, which is sixteen times more than the production of biochemicals. In 1945 petroleum-based synthetic fibres had only 0,5 per cent of the American clothing market, while the plant-based synthetic fibres had a 10 per cent market share. By 1980 the petroleum-based clothing materials already had a 64 per cent share of the market. First plastics were made from plant material, but since then it has been almost completely replaced by petrochemicals in the manufacturing of plastics.
This shift from plant-based raw materials to chemicals derived from coal and oil has not been environmentally benign: breaking down organic minerals like oil or coal requires high pressures, high temperatures and - in many cases - strong inorganic acids or alkalis. The manufacturing of petrochemicals consumes a lot of energy and produces very large emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
The main reason for this dramatic shift has been the development of the oil refining and automobile industries. The production of petrol for motor vehicles produces a lot of waste chemicals, and the oil companies wanted to find end uses for them. Because these chemicals were manufactured in very large quantities by the oil refineries as a waste-product, they became much cheaper than the plant-based chemicals and gradually replaced them.
However, the large-scale use of charcoal kilns that are capable of recovering the liquid chemicals of the wood, might again change the whole picture. Not unlike the oil refineries, the numerous charcoal kilns could together produce an impressive amount of liquid chemicals as a by-product. A charcoal retort can recover, on average, 50 litres of liquid biochemicals for each cubic metre of wood.
The state-owned chemical industries should start to develop different uses for the wood-based chemicals. If there is no demand for them, it will not necessarily be profitable for the charcoal-makers to invest in expensive charcoal retorts.
In other words, improved charcoal kilns could, at least partly, replace oil and coal with charcoal and also lead to a partial replacement of petrochemicals by plant-based raw materials in the chemical industries. Above all, the increased charcoal production would reduce the people's exposure to particulate pollution and to many other dangerous pollutants.
From the view-point of public health the use of biogas, fuel alcohol or solar cookers are still better alternatives than charcoal. For example nipa palm stands could annually produce about 11 000 litres of fuel alcohol per hectare, but it would probaly still be too expensive for the poorest families. In South Asia, the average cost of a biogas generator sufficient for the needs of one family has been about USD 200, which is also a bit too much for the low-income households. Some of the new models developed in Vietnam cost only USD 20, which is already much more affordable. Besides the cow dung and human waste the Vietnamese biogas generators - which are in practise large plastic bags - can also use food waste, crop residues and other plant matter.
Solar cookers are even cheaper. Many models cost USD 20-40, but it is also possible to construct a solar cooker from materials that only cost a few rupees. Such a solar-cooker can be made for instance by taking some mud, clay or cow dung and by molding it to a parabolic shape (into the shape of a satellite antenna). Besides this only some thin aluminium foil and some glue is needed. When the aluminium foil is glued on the parabolic-shaped base, it will act as an efficient reflector that concentrates the sun's rays on a pot that is hanged over the cooker.
The scarcity of water is rapidly becoming one of the world's most serious problems. Water problems also have numerous dimensions which are basicly issues of democracy.
Freshwater resources are often limited, especially during dry seasons. This thumb rule applies both to groundwater resources and to surface water, freshwater in the lakes, ponds and rivers. If the water resources are limited, who will decide how they will be shared? What kind of participatory and democratic decision-making structures for sharing the water resources should there be on the local and on the national level?
At present water resources are usually divided in a most unequal and undemocratic way. Different industries and power plants easily get more than their fair share of the national water resources. There is no eagerness to emphasize those forms of energy production that do not require large amounts of freshwater, like wind, solar and wave energy. The main emphasis is still in coal and nuclear power plants, both of which require large amounts of fresh cooling water.
People living in cities consume, on average, several times more water than people living in the countryside. Moreover, urban people often
waste a major part of the water they use by not bothering to mend leaks in water taps or pipes or to fix leaking water closets. A badly leaking water toilet in a city can use, in one day, more water than a poor rural household in dry areas is using during the whole year.
Agriculture is, in most countries, the largest consumer of freshwater. More emphasis should be paid in cultivating crops and breeding cultivars that do not require large amounts of water. Even water-hungry crops can be cultivated with methods that require less water. Various traditional and modern drip-irrigation methods and sub-surface irrigation methods delivering the irrigation water straight under the ground to the roots of the plants are especially recommendable. Such techniques can greatly reduce the need for irrigation water.
Besides this it would be important to divide the existing freshwater resources in a more equal way, and to develop local democratic institutions for this purpose.
The larger landowners that can afford to build deep tubewells and install strong water pumps typically appropriate a lion's share of the water resources for themselves. The poorer families can only afford to dig ordinary, much shallower wells, and extract lesser amounts of water from them. The big landowners with more efficient pumps often use so much water that the water-table on the whole area declines and the shallower wells of the poor families become totally dry. Larger landowners often appropriate also a disproportionate share of the river water for themselves through large-scale irrigation projects.
Various communal or cooperative rainwater harvesting and storing schemes based on different traditional technologies could be an important way to ensure a more democratic appropriation of local water resources.
Another issue is how to divide, in the international level, the water in rivers that are shared between more than one country. For example the sharing of the freshwater resources of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Jordan and Indus rivers is causing growing tensions between the nations competing of the water of these rivers.
The main reason for the world's present water crises has been the overuse of groundwater. The humanity started to dig wells at least
5 000 year ago, when the oldest known wells were constructed by the Indus Valley civilization, in areas that now lie within the borders of Pakistan and India. However, most of the dugwells were relatively shallow. They often dried during the dry season, which forced the ancient cultures to depend on rainwater harvesting and storing in their water supply systems. Numerous such systems are known from Asia, North Africa and Latin America, and they provided an important part of the basis of many civilizations for thousands of years.
It was only after the Second World War that the large-scale construction of tube-wells was introduced to the South. Before the Second World War there were only a few thousand tube-wells in India, now there are tens of millions of them. Tube-wells provide safe and clean water for hundreds of millions of people.
However, in many areas too many tube-wells were soon made, and too much water was taken from them. The wells were not used to provide safe drinking water and household water, only, but huge amounts of water were pumped to the ground for irrigation purposes. The utililization of groundwater resources was no longer on a sustainable basis. People started to mine groundwater resources and use them with a much quicklier pace than the reserves were able to replenish themselves.
The UN organizations have estimated, that Africa has already lost two thirds and Asia and Latin America about one half of their easily accessible groundwater resources during the last fifty years.
In large parts of the Middle East, South Asia, China, the United States of America and Africa the water tables are now receding by 1-4 metres per year. The situation may have serious implications for the world's food production. For example in China, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Pakistan more than one half of the food production is based on irrigation, by which two or even three crops can annually be produced on the same patch of land.
In India it has been estimated that the annual use of groundwater resources already exceeds the replenishment by about one hundred billion cubic metres. International Water Management Institute says, that the depletion of the groundwater resources is a threat for one quarter of India's grain yields. In China the situation is almost as serious.
The pressures on groundwater reserves are likely to increase because of the population growth and a number of other factors. Because of the economic globalization a growing percentage of the people in the South is abandoning ancient vegetarian traditions and increasing their consumption of meat. To provide an American diet (containing a lot of meat) for one people typically consumes two times more water than the provision of an average Asian diet (containing very little meat), in spite of the fact that the most important staple food of Asia is rice, which is a water-thirsty plant.
Another problem is that the different industries and urban areas are rapidly increasing their water consumption. When people move from a rural area to a city they tend to forget where the water comes from and increase their consumption of it. Mark Rosengrant and Claudia Ringler of the International Food Research Institute have estimated, that the urban households' and industry's share of the world's water consumption might incrase from 13 to 27 per cent by the year 2020. According to Rosengrant and Ringler the world's food production could be reduced by one sixth, if all this water is taken away from irrigation purposes.
According to the Population Action International 2800-3500 million people could suffer from acute lack of water in the year 2025. The GEO 2000 programme of the United Nations has presented even more pessimistic predictions. According to GEO 2000 it is possible, that two thirds of humanity will soon be faced with water shortages. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted, that five billion people will suffer from an acute scarcity of water after twenty years.
The expected warming of the Earth's climate due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is likely to aggravate these problems. While the climate change may increase rainfall, it will probably increase the evaporation of water even more. According to one estimate a four-centigrade warming in the tropics might increase the rainfall by 12 per cent but the evaporation by 30 per cent, thus making the tropical and sub-tropical areas considerably drier.
It is clear that the present trends will pretty soon lead to an impossible situation: there won't simply be enough water for all these purposes. This could leave to serious conflicts over the use of water within each country, and between different countries. The danger is that it is the poor that will, once again, suffer the most. The rich farmer can make a deeper well when the wells of the poor remain dry. The people living in the cities and the industries are usually more influential than the rural people, and a ton of water used in an industry can produce seventy times more in terms of dollars than if the same amount of water is used to irrigate the fields. On the other hand, food is usually more important for the people than various industrial products.
Another closely related set of problems has to do with the pollution or poisoning of the groundwater resources. The most horrible case is the vast arsenic poisoning epidemic in Bangladesh, and in the Indian states of West Bengla, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh where almost one hundred fifty million people are slowly being poisoned by the water they are drinking. Epidemiologists have warned that unless rapid measures are taken one death in ten in the badly affected areas of Bangladesh will soon be caused by arsenic poisoning. The situation in Bangladesh and the mentioned Indian states, however, is not an isolated case but an extreme example of a much trend.
According to Payal Sampat from the Worldwatch Institute the groundwater resources are slowly being poisoned by pesticides, by the nitrates from chemical fertilizers and carelessly designed pit latrines, by carbage dumps, by oil leaks from cars and service stations and by industrial waste. The main problem is that it usually takes several decades or more before these poisons have seeped their way through the soil into the groundwater. The problems that are currently detected in the groundwater have leaked to the ground long ago. Since then the amount of different chemicals and toxic waste that has just been dumped on the ground has increased by dozens of times. A vast amount of pollutants is already on its way towards the groundwater, and the present problems are only an iceberg's tip of what we can expect in the future.
A recent study near 22 industrial centers of India discovered, that the groundwater in the surrounding areas was no longer fit to be used as drinking or household water. According to the Worldwatch institute most of the approximately two billion people who are now drinking groundwater, could soon face serious problems related to the pollution of the groundwater.
The most important solution to these problems could be the revitalizing and further development of the various ancient rainwater harvesting and storing systems. Even in the world's driest areas proper water harvesting and storing methods can provide an adequate drinking, household and irrigation water supply for the people. Even as little as 100 millimeters of rain provides a thousand cubic metres or one million litres for each hectare of land. In India there are at least 500 000 large tanks that were built, long time ago, in order to store rainwater. The state of Tamil Nadu, for example, has 30 000 such water tanks called eris. They form, alltogether, a huge water collecting structure consisting of hundreds of thousands of brick-made dams and of 50 000 kilometres of other structures.
In many parts of India, in Pakistan, China, Afghanistan and Iran, in the Middle East and in North Africa people used to construct horizontal wells that collected water from the deep soil layers and transported it to the nearby population centers. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and in the Xinkiang province of China these horizontal wells are known with the name karez. On India's western coast they are surangams, in Marocco they are called foggaras. In Iran they are qanats. Iran has, alltogether about 40 000 qanats, the combined length of which is about 270 000 kilometres. The longest qanats are 40 or 50 kilometres in length.
Such horizontal wells have their darker side. Their construction has originally required huge amounts of labour. It is very likely that
many of them have been constructed by slave labour, and that many people have died in the process. However, in our own day we could build similar horizontal wells in ways that would not endanger the
lives of our construction workers.
It would probably be a good idea to revitalize the technology, because it is still working astonishingly well. Many horizontal wells have kept on producing good-quality drinking water for thousands of years. Xinkiang's one thousand karez structures are still providing the province with one third of its water. In Iran three quarters of water supply was based on qanats until the 1950's, and the system started to deteriorate only after that due to the exaggerated westernization drive of the Shah Reza Pahlavi.
In many countries people have also constructed sub-surface dams, ditches filled with stones and various types of earthen walls that increase the formation of groundwater. Tarun Bharat Singh, an organization working in the drylands of Rajasthan, in India, has been able to bring whole rivers back to life with the help of such traditional technologies. The thousands of village parliaments organized by Tarun Bharat Singh have been an important model experimenting with ecological democracy at the local level.
Genetic erosion means the loss of biological diversity, either whole spiecies or different races or varieties of them.
Biodiversity should also be seen as an issue of ecological democracy. How much biodiversity should we preserve for the future generations? Don't we have a duty to ensure that also the people living on Earth after a thousand years might have a chance to see a tiger or a whale?
Also, numerous disease causing bacteria are rapidly developing strains that are resistant to most or all known antibiotics. Our anti-bacterial medicines may become totally useless within a relatively short period of time. Where can the future generations find new anti-microbial medicines, so that their children do not have to die, unnecessarily, to pneumonia, tuberculosis or infected wounds?
Antibiotics are something that certain fungi use to defend themselves against bacteria. However, also the various plants and insects and marine creatures have their own defence mechanisms against bacteria, otherwise it would not be possible for them to survive. This means that the areas that are rich in biodiversity will be the treasure troves of future hunters of new anti-microbial medicines. For this reason, also, it is important to preserve the rainforests and coral reefs: it is a question of democracy between our generation and the future generations.
Another issue is who has the right to develop the cultivars of important food plants, and who controls the genetic reserves of them? At the moment we are rapidly moving towards a system in which the genetic basis of our most important food plants is controlled by a small number of giant transnational companies like Monsanto. This is a very dangerous situation, indeed. The more centralized the system becomes, the more vulnerable it will be.
A more democratic system in which hundreds of millions of farmers would breed and own their own varieties and in which the farmers' organizations would exchange interesting genetic material (seeds) between themselves would be a much safer system from the view-point of food security. This kind of improved traditional plant breeding system would ensure that the genetic diversity of our food plants remains so high that whole crops of the important plants cannot suddenly be wiped out by new bacterial, viral or fungal diseases or by insect pests resistant to all known pesticides. It would also maintain the control of the food production system in the hands of the farmers and their own organizations, and not leave them at the mercy of transnational corporations. Numerous seed-saver networks, ecologically oriented research institutions and peasant organizations in different parts of the world are already working in order to make this vision a reality.
Biologists have described a total of between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species, but estimates about the true number of living species usually range between 3.6 million and more than 100 million. One of the big uncertainties is the number of species living in marine ecosystems. The estimates of total number of marine species have increased from 160 000 in 1971 to 10-100 million at present. What comes to species in land ecosystems, a great majority of them live in the tropical rainforests. The huge rainforest of Amazonas might alone contain about one third of the species of the world's land ecosystems.
However, perhaps the most serious aspect of genetic erosion is the depletion of the genetic foundations of our main food crops.
There are between 250 000 and 300 000 of plant species in the world. Of these, 10 000 - 50 000 are edible in their wild forms, and most of the others could be made edible through selective breeding. Formerly, people used to utilize a very wide variety of edible plants as food. Indigenous peoples of North America - an area relatively poor in biological diversity - utilized at least 1 112 different plants for food.
Nowadays only 150 - 200 plant species are widely used as food, and more than one half of the calories and protein consumed by humans come from three species: rice, maize and wheat. Moreover, the genetic basis of the widely cultivated food plants has become frighteningly narrow.
According to one estimate there used to be something like five hundred thousand different varieties of rice in South Asia, alone, but most of them have already been wiped out by a small number of new, high-response rice cultivars. In the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam a single rice variety, IR-36, constituted 60 per cent of all rice production already in 1982. In Egypt, a country that had grown onions for at least 7 000 years, only one variety of winter onion, Giza 6 Improved, remained. More than 70 per cent of the genetic diversity of wheat in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon was destroyed within a short period of time by the introduction of a handful of new varieties. About two per cent or one in fifty of the remaining varieties of our important food plants are now lost, every year.
This frighteningly rapid destruction of the genetic basis of our main food crops is a very serious issue. In traditional farming systems people usually cultivated dozens of different plants in the same patch of land. This reduced, to a great extent, crop losses caused by insects and plant diseases. Because the fields grew a rich mixture of different plants it was more difficult for the diseases and pests to spread. Also, while one plant belonging to a certain species was not resistant to a certain disease or pest, the next individual perhaps was, because the genetic basis of the crops was not very uniform. The great diversity of different plants harboured large numbers of spiders and ants and other natural predators of the pests, which also helped in keeping their populations in check.
Modern monocultures are in direct contrast with this philosophy. They often grow only one genetically uniform variety of a single species at a time. This kind of fields can, at their worst, become real super-highways through which various plant diseases and pests can spread with astonishing speed, destroying whole crops while they proceed.
One of the most dramatic examples of what can happen was the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. Practically all the potatoes grown in Ireland at that time belonged to a few cultivars, none of which was resistant to a fungus called potato blight. When potato blight hit Ireland the whole crop was destroyed. One million people died in the famine and two million more had to emigrate to America. The population of the island was cut from six million to about three million in only a few years.
What if something similar would happen to the most widely spread rice cultivars that have replaced tens or hundreds of thousands of local varieties during the last decades? As Richard Douthwaite has observed: "...very few people also knoww that the (food) system is genetically unsustainable and might suddenly collapse, causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation and leading to political, social and military consequences comparable to those of a nuclear war."
In a monoculture damages caused by pests and plant diseases are fought by two different methods. First, whenever a new disease or pest becomes a truly major problem, plant breeders try to breed new varieties that are resistant to the disease or pest in question. However, this takes so much time that often a lot of damage is done before the new, resistant varieties are available. Also, the resistant plant varieties are usually not resistant for a very long time. Plant diseases and pests evolve and mutate all the time, and because their breeding populations are very large and genetically diversified, it won't usually take long before they have overcome the problem. In other words: the resistance bred to cultivated plants is not permanent but has to be replenished and renewed over and over again with new genes.
As Dr J.P. Kendrick from the University of California puts it:
"If we had only to rely on the genetic resources now available in the United States for the genes and gene recombinants needed to minimize genetic vulnerability of all crops into the future, we would soon experience losses equal to or greater than those caused by
southern corn leaf blight several years ago - at a rapidly accelerating rate across the entire crop spectrum."
The problem is, that when the genetic basis of the cultivated plants becomes more narrow, the plant breeders will have less material that they can use in order to renew the resistance of the plants against diseases and against the at least 15 000 known species of pests.
There has been a serious effort to save the various cultivars of important food plants by storing their seeds into international gene banks. However, seed can only be stored in a gene bank for a certain time before they lose their ability to germinate. This means that the stock have to be regenerated within a certain period of time by sowing the seed out and storing the new seed. However, the new seed will not be genetically identical with the original variety that had been stored into the gene bank. The original variety is a result of evolutionary adaptation into the conditions in a certain locality. When seeds collected from thousands or tens of thousands of different localities will be sown on the same locality, the process favours the varieties and traits that match the requirements and conditions of that particular site. Other kinds of characteristics - unfavorable for that particular site - and genetic material responsible for them will irrevocably be lost. Thus the gene bank approach will not be able to preserve genetic diversity for centuries. The only way to do this is to pay for individual farmers or village communities for maintaining small local seed collections on hundreds of thousands of dirrecent sites.
The other way to limit the damage is the use of pesticides and fungicides. This has proved to be a very problematic approach. Pesticides also kill the natural enemies of the pests, and sometimes the populations of the targeted pests recover much quicklier than those of their main predators. In field trials wrongly timed and measured applications of pesticides have sometimes increased pest populations by 1250 times.
Extensive use of insecticides has led to the resurgence of several insect pests of rice that were of only minor importance, before. One of them is the brown planthopper, which became Asia's most damaging rice pest in the 1980's, and started to consume rice crops in South and South-East Asia with an unprecedented rate.
In the USA it has been estimated, that crop losses due to pests would increase from 33 to 42 per cent, if the use of pesticides would be eliminated. It is interesting to note that the Americans currently lose - in spite of extremely heavy use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals - one third of their crops to pests. It would be interesting to compare these figures to the losses suffered in the traditional farming systems that do not use any pesticides or fungicides, but which cultivate dozens of different plants and trees in the same land area. It may be that they have suffered much smaller losses.
Still another problem is the development of resistance to chemicals. The ability of the pests, viruses and fungi to adapt to changing environmental conditions also includes an ability to develop resistance to human-made poisons. When some individuals in a pest population find a way to survive a pesticide, all further spraying favours the individuals with the genetic or behavioural characteristics which allow them to survive the chemical. Because the pesticide will kill most other insects, the resistant pest population soon starts to dominate the area.
Chemical industry has tried to develop new pesticides in order to replace the older ones which have become almost useless in many areas. This far the pests have been able to develop new resistant strains much more quickly than the scientists have been able to create new poisons. According to Dr Sawicki of the Rothamstead Experimental Station: "Estabished resistance can be dealt with only by switching to alternative pesticides to which there is no resistance. This, however, is a transient solution because with time resistance develops to the alternative, which must be replaced by yet another compound. Each new insecticide selects in turn one or more mechanisms of resistance, and each mechanism usually confers resistance to several insecticides."
The development of resistance has often forced farmers to use very heavy doses of several different pesticides. According to the latest estimate, up to 300 000 people may annually die of pesticide poisoning. Pesticides kill bees and other insects that have a great value as pollinators of fruit trees and of many other important crops. If there are too few pollinators, the crops of insect-pollinated crops are reduced.
In many countries fish and shrimp harvested from rice paddies have been an important source of animal protein for the people. In Indonesia, for example, fish farming in rice fields used to produce about a quarter of all fresh, closed-water output of fish. In 1969 about 600 000 tons of fish were harvested from three million hectares of rice fields. However, the use of chlorinated hydrocarbons and other pesticides practically eliminated fish and shrimp from large rice field areas - or made them too poisonous for human consumption. This was one of the reasons why Indonesian government became so interested in the development of integrated pest management (IPM) in the 1980's.
Adequate supply of food is the most basic human need, and democratic systems can never function very well before people can become free from hunger and from the fear of starvation: it is too easy to threaten people who are afraid of not having enough food for their families. For example in the Nordic countries the organizers of the workers' movement realized this very well. To acquire small patches of farmland and gardens for the urban factory workers in order to reduce their dependence on food and food relief became a very important project for the Nordic trade unions and workers' parties. It was thought that the workers will be too scared to demand better salaries for themselves unless they are certain that their families will, in any case, have enough food to eat during the next winter.
The analysis was, to some extent, correct, and the numerous patches of workers' own gardens and farmland around the cities helped the trade unions to become so strong a force promoting democracy and equality in the Nordic countries.
Most countries of the world still have a very unequal structure of land ownership. In Brazil 20 largest landowners control 17 million hectares of land, while at least seven million rural families do not own any land at all.
Land reforms are a very important way of reducing poverty and of increasing agricultural production. According to a study conducted by the US ministry of agriculture in fifteen Southern countries the farms which had a size of two hectares or less produced, on average, USD 3500 worth of food per hectare per year. The production of farms that were larger than 2000 hectares was only worth USD 30 per hectare per year. Such a 120-fold difference is very significant. The main explanation for this astonishing piece of statistics is that the small farmers use much of their land as a multi-storey home gardens: they grow various food-producing trees, shrubs and vines and different annual food plants on the same, small patches of land. The large landowners, on the other hand, keep much of their land as pasture for cattle.
Land reforms, however, have not always been good for the environment. In many cases governments and large landowners have promoted land reform programmes in which landless families have been resettled in rainforest areas. This has happened in a very large scale for instance in Indonesia and Brazil. In such resettlement schemes the land has usually been taken from the indigenous forest peoples by force.
Numerous indigenous peoples have cultivated rainforest lands on a sustainable basis for a very long time with different farming methods incorporating trees with annual plants, but the settlers have not usually been familiar with such methods. When they have tried to utilize the rainforest lands to conventional field farming or transformed them to pasture, the lands have often lost most of their nutrients in only a few years. After this the settlers have usually been forced to clear new fields into the middle of the forest, and this process of destruction has been repeated over and over again once in a few years. The settlers have also been plagued with malaria and other seriuous diseases thriving in the rainforest areas.
We should probably start thinking in terms of a concept known as the Ecological Land Reform. The concept was first developed by the Brazilian Rubber-Tappers Union (CNS), and it originally meant the establishment of the so called extractivist reserves in the Amazonian rainforest areas. In the extractivist reserves the trees are not felled but the forest will be reserved for collecting nuts, fruits and natural rubber.
Ecological land reform, however, can also mean many other things. If the families that are given land will transform much or all of their land to multi-storey home gardens they will effectively protect it from erosion and from other depletion of soil fertility.
Community forest programmes in Nepal, which have reforested badly degraded or barren hillslopes and created a system of much better village-based management of the forest lands, have also been an outstanding example of ecological land reforms. Nepal's community forest programmes have probably benefited millions of people, and they are an important model worth studying in other countries, as well.
It is most unfortunate that the World Bank and many other international aid agencies have started to lobby Nepal and many other Southern governments to dismantle their community forestry and land reform programmes, as well as all kinds of communal or village-based land ownership structures, and to move towards full privatization of all land properties. The counter-land reforms now aggressively promoted by the World Bank will, if they are implemented, will increase poverty and hunger, destroy large areas of forests now controlled and managed by indigenous forest peoples and worsen the problems related to erosion and depletion of soil fertility.
The loss of soil fertility is one of the most serious environmental problems in the world, in terms of the number of people affected. In spite of this the problem often receives much less attention in the media than many perhaps less important environmental issues. When the problem is covered, most of the attention is often reserved for the most dramatic aspects of it, like the creation of desert-like conditions (desertification) on the edges of actual deserts. This is not to say that desertification would not be a real and serious issue - it is. The point is that it would be important to cover also the the more mundane aspects of the problem and the various, often simple and non-dramatic, solutions to these problems.
Probably the most important mechanism causing widespread loss of soil fertility is erosion, or the loss of soil matter through the work of water and wind. For a long time, agricultural scientists practically equated soil degradation with erosion and soil conservation with the control of erosion. More recently they have started to approach the conservation of soil fertility through a somewhat broader framework. This makes sense because erosion is not the only mechanism that can lead to decreased productivity, even though it could be the most important one.
Besides the control of erosion, maintenance of soil fertility also requires the maintenance of organic matter and nutrients in the soil and the maintenance of the soil's physical properties. In some areas like in tropical rainforests the loss of nutrients through leaching, by being washed by water to lower soil levels in the ground, can be the most important mechanism of declining fertility. Moreover, fertility can also be lost through toxification (pollution of the soil) or through salinization caused by irrigation.
The United Nations Environmental Programme has estimated that 6-7 million hectares of cropland are being lost, every year, due to soil erosion. Besides this perhaps 1.5 million hectares are lost due to salinization or waterlogging of irrigated farmland. Between one third and one half of the world's 230 million hectares of irrigated farmland is suffering from salinization or waterlogging. According to the 1992 Global Assessment of Soil Degradation almost 20 million square kilometres of land became degraded between the years 1945 and 1990, of which 12.2 million square kilometres suffered serious loss of productivity. In India it has been estimated that one third of all arable land area is seriously threatened with complete loss of topsoil.
According to the Worldwatch Institute about 65 per cent of all agricultural land in Africa, 45 per cent in South Amerca and 38 per cent in Asia has already been degraded, at least to some extent.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization erosion might reduce the overall productivity of the world's rainfed farmlands by 30 per cent within a few decades. Even larger areas are suffering from declining fertility. Phosphorus deficiency affects 73 per cent of farmland in China and 80 per cent in Pakistan.
The scale of the problem is vast, but many of the solutions are simple and very cheap. Organic farming is one of them. According to a survey on 200 organic farming projects, conducted by Jules Pretty of England's Essex University, organic farming has increased the farmers' yields on average by 73 per cent. The 200 projects evaluated by Pretty had helped about four million farmer families to increase their yields and income in a very significant way.
When Soviet Union collapsed it cut its supplies of cheap grain and agrochemicals to Cuba. This forced Cuba to shift to organic farming in a very short period of time. The consequences of the change, however, have been different than what was expected: mixing maize, beans and cassava in order to replace chemical fertlizers with biological nitrogen fixation has actually doubled the yields.
Many farmers in different parts of the world have stopped ploughing their fields. This reduces their work load and costs. Ploughing does help in reducing the amount of weeds but it also damages soil fertility and increases erosion. If fields are left unploughed they can absorb up to one ton of carbon per year per hectare from the atmosphere, which could help in fighting the global warming. In Argentina fully one third of the farmers have abandoned the use of ploughs, and in other Latin American countries millions of other farmers have done the same.
It is now widely thought that a ground cover of mulch is one of the best and most cost-effective ways of controlling erosion and other forms of declining soil fertility. The mulch laid on the ground protects the soil from the eroding impact of the raindrops: when the rain drops hit the layer of mulch they explode into a fine mist that can no longer do much harm.
Mulch can also have a kind of double-effect in controlling erosion. For instance in oil palm plantations erosion can be reduced in a very dramatic way by placing pruned palm fronds on the ground, optimally with tips downslope to create inward flow towards the stems. When such method is used the mulch also checks the outflow of nutrients in the fine soil by creating countless of tiny micro-catchments that are very efficient in capturing small soil particles.
The organic matter used as mulch also acts as fertilizer, and reduces the need for more expensive, industrially produced fertilizers. One study in Northern Nigeria estimated, that the amount of nutrients in crop residues available in the area, alone, was almost 80 times more than the nutrient content of the mineral fertilizers that were being used. Besides this mulch can reduce soil temperatures and evaporation of water, and increase the amount of rainwater that filters into the soil. In the semi-arid zone of Niger millet grown with no fertilizer only produced about 0.2 tons of grain per hectare. The addition of four tons of mulch per hectare increased the yields four-fold.
The planting of trees is often promoted as an erosion-control measure. The litter produced by the trees can reduce erosion by a major extent (up to 95 per cent) and if the branches and leaves produced by the trees are used as mulch they can be most useful.
If the litter produced by the trees is burned or removed the planting of trees can actually increase erosion by reducing the amount of protective undergrowth (grasses and other herbaceous plants), besides which tall tree canopies can also increase the erosive potential of rain by concentrating the water to larger and heavier drops that can do major damage when they drop down from the high branches. However, the smallest rates of erosion are found from untouched natural forests and from multi-storey home gardens that imitate the structure of the natural forest.
Such multi-storey farming systems mixing tree crops with other kinds of plants deserve special attention because they can, in practically every conceivable ecosystem, produce more food per hectare - in terms of calories, proteins and other nutrients - than conventional farming.
The emergence of tree planting as a widespread custom seems to be a more or less spontaneous and automatic process that is taking place when the population densities reach certain levels and continue to grow beyond them. This can already be seen in many regions of the world. Wherever population densities have reached a certain level they have also led to the development of multi-storey, multi-species agroforestry systems known as tropical home gardens.
In Southeastern Nigeria, where population densities range as high as one thousand people per one square kilometre, the high population densities are usually linked with more trees.
Similar trends can be observed, for example, on densely populated slopes of Kilimanjaro and Meru in Tanzania and Kenya, on the island of Zanzibar, in Rwanda, in China and India and in Java - where tropical home gardens cover 75 per cent of all agricultural land.
In Kenya both the government and dozens of non-governmental organizations have actively encouraged people to plant their own trees. This has made Kenya the first country in Africa that has reversed the decline of living biomass. According to latest studies the biomass - the combined amount of trees and other vegetation - is now growing in 39 out of the 42 districts of Kenya. And in many districts the growth has been rather spectacular.
The reason for these trends is obvious: home gardens involving various tree crops are more productive. For example in the heavily populated areas of Nigeria the production of the multi-storey gardens is, in monetary terms, 5 to 10 times higher than that of conventional field farming.
It has been estimated that fruit trees only occupy 2-3 per cent of the world's agricultural land, but contribute 5-7 per cent of the gross food production and 10-35 per cent of national income from agricultural production.
When a tropical forest is cleared and transformed to a field or pasture, the amount of carbon stored in the vegetation is usually reduced between 90 and 99 per cent. This contributes to the problem of global warming. Transforming fields and pastures to multi-storey home gardens, on the other hand, removes large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Some types of multi-storey home gardens can store hundreds of tons of carbon per hectare.
According to John Sholto Douglas and A.J. de Hart only about 8-10 per cent of the world's land area is currently being cultivated, but this area already includes a very large majority of all existing good-quality farmlands. Tree crops, however, could theoretically be grown on at least 75 per cent of the world's land area. Trees can be grown also on lands that are not suitable for conventional field farming, including arid and semi-arid lands, steep hill-slopes and rainforest lands.
In arid ecosystems the land may become almost like a desert during the dry season, but the vegetation recovers quickly with the rains. Only if the soil has continuously been losing nutrients through erosion so that the natural recovery has been prevented, can we talk about actual desertification.
In areas that have a very uncertain rainfall the security of food production is the number one consideration of the poorer segments of the population. In such areas tree crops are especially important because trees are likely to provide a crop even during bad drought years, when all the (rainfed) annual crops will fail.
The world has alltogether 6.1 billion hectares of drylands if hyper-arid, arid, semi-arid and sub-humid lands are all included. Already about one billion people live on drylands and they will most probably have to feed a growing percentage of the world's population in the future. Because the trees and other plants growing on arid places have never received the attention of plant breeders, people moving to drylands usually attempt to cultivate familiar plants which require large or relatively large amounts of water to survive and produce crops. This results in very insecure food crops: in drought years there may be no crop at all. For this reason already 90 per cent of all international food aid is going to drylands.
The domestication of various wild fruit and nut trees growing on drylands might be the most important single answer to these problems.
Tree crops and multi-storey home gardens are likely to constitute the agricultural technologies best suited for very arid conditions. Food-producing trees can be grown also on lands that cannot be used to conventional field farming. Moreover, food-producing trees can probably produce much more protein, fat and carbohydrates per hectare than any other food crops that can be grown on dry lands.
Because their longer root systems the trees are able to utilize moisture and nutrients that lay far beyond the reach of the annual crops. Many of the trees that have evolved in the dry areas produce fruit crops even during the worst drought years. And properly managed tree plantations can provide good and permanent soil cover - both directly and through their litter production.
In the super-humid tropical rainforests the topsoil contains practically no nutrients: all the nutrients have been washed down to the deeper soil layers by the heavy rainfall. Most of the available nutrients are contained by the vegetation itself, and they are continuosly being recycled by the trees. If the trees are replaced by annual crops or by pasture, most of these nutrients will be lost in a very short period of time.
When the land is transformed to pasture, it is usually cleared by burning. This creates a transient fertility that will wear off in a year or two. After this the land is invaded by weeds, many of which are poisonous to cattle. The only practical way to fight the weeds is to burn the area again, but the repeated burnings further deplete the fertility of the soil.
After three or five more years the land has to be abandoned, and left for a fallow for a much longer period of time. And a substantial part of its fertility has been lost on a permanent basis: because all the trees have been cut down, most of the nutrients have been leached into the deeper soil layers, so that they can no longer be captured even by the trees that will grow on the land during the fallow period. Slash-and-burn agriculture can also produce a similar degradation of the land, if the burning and cultivation periods become prolonged or if they are repeated too often.
The answer, again, is to mix perennial crops with annual plants.
If there is, permanently, a large enough number of trees growing on each hectare of land, the nutrients will not be leached into the deeper soil layers. Instead, they will be captured by the innumerable small branches of the trees' root systems and recycled back to the farming system.
As long as the rapid recycling of nutrients, the actual basis of the whole rainforest ecosystem, is maintained crops can be grown on rainforest land on a permanent basis, for thousands and thousands of years. In theory it should be possible to continue this kind of cultivation even much longer than this: some rainforests have probably existed for a hundred million years or more.
If cultivated by conventional farming methods or turned to pasture, rainforests are among the world's poorest and most unproductive lands. However, when multi-storey home gardening in practised, and a permanent tree cover is maintained, they can be extremely productive, because of the combination of high temperature and extreme humidity. Tropical rainforests are situated in areas that would anyway receive a lot of rain, but in some cases the amount of rainfall is doubled or multiplied by the trees. Rainforest trees evaporate huge amounts of water. At the same time they produce aerosols (tiny particles) that contribute to repid cloud formation over the forest. The researchers have found out, that some rainforest areas have an ability to circulate up to 75 per cent of the rainwater back to the atmosphere. The super-efficient, super-fast recycling of nutrients (and water) leads to very high biological production.
In one study the natural rainforest of Panama was found to produce about 40 tons of fruit (with a net dry weight of eight tonnes) per hectare in a year. This is a lot, when we remember that not all the trees growing in the rainforest produce fruit.
At its height the Mayan civilization supported populations of 700-1150 people per square kilometre on rainforest land in the densely populated parts of their empire. According to Clive Ponting: "Excavations in the outer areas of Tikal suggests that, at its height, the population was at least 30 000 and possibly as high as 50 000 (of the same order as the great cities of Mesopotamia). Other cities, though not quite so large, would have followed the same pattern of dense urban settlements and so it seems likely that the total population in the Maya region at its peak might have been near to five million in an area that now supports only a few tens of thousands."
The descendants of the ancient maya, the lacandon maya indians living in the Chiapas rainforest, the home of the famous Mexican Zapatista rebellion, still practise simplified forms of the methods that made these rather impressive population densities possible.
Lacandons clear small plots inside the forest, the size of which is usually a little bit more or a little bit less than one hectare. The feled trees and branches are left on the ground in order to prevent erosion and to reduce leaching of the nutrients into deeper soil layers. Fast-growing tree-like perennials like banana and papaya are planted immediately after the clearing of the forest, in order to reduce the loss of nutrients. Other fruit trees like guavas, plums, custard apples, pineapples, cacao, avocados and citrus fruits are also planted. In an old plot that is just cleared again for farming, there is already a number of fruit trees. On the trunks of the trees climbers like yams are grown, and maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, rice, sugarcane and other crops are planted between the trees.
The lacandons do not concentrate certain plants to separate compartments in tidy and straight rows. On the contrary, they make a point of not planting clusters of the same plant species within three metres of the same variety. The idea of this practise is to minimize the spread of plant-spesific pests and diseases and to make the best use of the available nutrients.
In conventional, western-type gardening it takes a lot of work to keep the spaces between different crops clear of weeds. In the lacandon system there are no spaces between food crops because every square inch is covered by different crops that are grown on purpose. This does not eliminate the need for weeding, but reduces it in a very significant way.
The same plot is cultivated from three to seven years in a row. After this the weeds become a major problem, and the land is left for fallow for five years or more. After the fallow period it is again cleared for farming. But even during the fallow period the fruit trees growing on the plot continue producing food for human consumption.
A lacandon milpa with the size of 0,4 hectares can produce two and a half tons of maize and an equivalent amount of tree and root crops in a year. In the same area cattle-raising produces the maximum of 10-50 kilograms of meat per hectare, annually.
The lacandon system already gives us a vague idea of what could be done if the rainforest lands were cultivated with somewhat similar way.
However, the lacandon system is not the optimal system we should have in mind. It should be relatively easy to develop multistorey rainforest gardening systems that are still much more productive. The lacandon mayas only grow relatively small fruit trees in their milpas, and many very productive and promising food-producing trees like peach palms, ingas, breadfruits, jackfruits and plantains are unknown to them.
According to C.R. Clement and H. Villachica the Amazonian peach palm cultivations can yield up to 30 tons of fruit per hectare, annually. In other words, the peach palm cultivations can produce between 2500 and 500 times more protein and calories suitable for human consumption than cattle ranching. And this is a short term comparison: on the long run the difference is still much more dramatic, because cattle ranching can typically be continued for five or seven years, only, before the land has to be abandoned.
World's mountainous areas cover an area of about 30 million square kilometres and are a home to about six hundred million people. Mountains are very important places because all the world's major rivers come from the mountains, and because more than half of the humanity depends on mountains for their water supply.
In spite of their importance mountainous areas have often been seriously neglected by different governmental programmes and it has been estimated that 80 per cent of the world's mountain-dwellers live below the poverty line. Mountain people often feel left out and bitter, and it is no coincidence that of the 27 major armed conflicts that were fought in the world in 1999, 23 were in mountainous countries.
In steeply sloping hills and mountains topsoil is quickly lost if annual crops are planted without complex terracing systems. The fertile topsoil layer accumulated during tens of thousands of years may be washed away in a few years.
Besides terracing, the problem can be avoided by using suitable combination of trees and shrubs and annual crops. Trees thrive on steep hillslopes, even in places where hardly any soil can be seen. Their roots can penetrate deep in small cracks in the rock to acquire the necessary nutrients and moisture. Trees and bushes grown on densely planted rows along the contour lines can also capture soil and thus create, little by little, level terraces on which also other types of crops can be grown. Or, alternatively, the trees can be used to stabilize more conventional terraces in order to reduce the heavy maintenance work.
Ancient Greece lost, already thousands of years ago, almost all its topsoil due to intensive farming and grazing. After this the Greeks started to grow olive trees on eroded mountain slopes where other crops could no longer be grown. This saved the economy of the Greek civilization, which in those times included a large part of the whole Mediterranean region.
Tree crops could become as important for most other mountain ecosystems, as well. A few years ago the government of Pakistan started a very interesting programme, the purpose of which was to produce healthy cooking oil for the people.
Pakistan consumes about two million tons of food oil, every year. Of this only 0.8-0.9 million tons are produced in Pakistan, and 1.2-1.1 million tons have to be imported with an annual cost of about 40 billion rupies. The government of Pakistan decided that it should start promoting large-scale cultivation of olive trees in two mountainous provinces: North Western Frontier Province and Baluchistan. If a relatively small part of the wastelands in these two provinces would be transformed to olive plantations, Pakistan would become self-sufficient in food oils and might even be able to export olive oil to India and other countries.
The programme would have used indigenous olive varieties as rootstocks, and graft better-producing varieties brought from Afghanistan to them. The government of Pakistan also thought that the programme would be likely to have a positive impact on public health in Pakistan, India and other South Asian countries.
People in Pakistan, India and other South Asian countries have, on average, thinner blood veins than for instance Europeans, North Americans and Africans. This means that South Asians are extremely vulnerable to heart diseases if they consume a lot of unhealthy food oils that contribute to a disease called atherosclerosis, in which the blood veins are gradually blocked by fats accumulating into the walls of the veins. Indian cardiologists, doctors specializing in heart disease, who have worked both in India and in Europe have remarked, that in India the average age of their patients was 45 years while in Europe it was 65 years. People in South Asia have greatly increased their consumption of the most unhealthy fats, which may have very serious consequences for their health. The poorer people for whom the problem is too little fat and not too much of it may also suffer from the threatening epidemic of heart disease: if a larger part of the rseources of the public health care system will be devoted to treating the heart problems of the middle and upper classes, less resources will be available for treating and preventing other kinds of disease.
The production of olive oil for the South Asian markets would have improved the situation in a very important way, because olive oil seems to contribute to the prevention of heart disease. Up to 80 per cent of olive oil consists of "good" fatty acids that actually reduce the amount of "bad" fats (bad cholesterol) in the blood. Only 4-12 per consists of the harmful fats. This means that olive oil actually reduces the amount of the substances that contribute to the blocking of the arteries. Heart disease is four times more common in Great Britain and the USA than in Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy, where people consume vast quantities of olive oil.
Unfortunately the government of Pakistan was, at the end of the year 2002, forced to cut its funding for the olive growing programme from 40 million to 2 million rupies per year. We should hope that it will become soon possible to restart the programme, because it would be an important way of providing employment for millions of families living in the remote mountainous areas of Pakistan.