(This is Part 23 of a series. Go back to Part 22.)
The third major secondary effect, which is now increasing at an exponential rate, is ecological pollution.
Modern industrialism vastly increased agricultural yields by supplying the soaring energy of fossil fuels to farming. Tractors, trucks and harvesting machines more and more replaced human and animal muscles.
In addition, fossil-fuel-based artificial fertilizers added unprecedented amounts of nitrogen to the soil, increasing yields. Monoculture agriculture also increased yields—but attracted more virulent insects, which were then countered with pesticides and herbicides from fossil fuels.
From 1950 to 1989 artificial nitrogen fertilizer use rose almost 1000%. Pesticide use in the same period rose over 3100%. Forests totaling the size of Portugal were clearcut each year to provide land for farming. These are a few of the statistics behind the "Green Revolution".
But now the costs are beginning to catch up. Nitrogen and pesticide runoff from farms into streams, rivers and lakes has become has become a huge source of water pollution. And so much water is being used, as detailed previously, that water tables are falling around the globe.
The increasing disappearance of our forests presents a different kind of problem. Land that is clearcut is subject to flooding as water runs off with little impediment. And because the land can't hold water it becomes vulnerable to desertification. Indeed, flooding and desertification are often two sides of the same coin.
Forests play another vital role in that they are the major process by which rainfall is brought to the interior of continents. Farmlands evaporate 25% of the water they receive. Forests are just the opposite, evaporating 75% of the water they receive.
This evaporated water then travels farther inland as storm clouds, eventually descending as rain. And this process repeats over and over. As the world's forests diminish, however, continental interiors—the breadbaskets of the world, as in the Great Plains of the U.S. and the Northern Plains of China—are receiving less and less rainfall.
Industrialism also allowed the rise of dense urbanization through the creation of an oil-fueled transportation system that rapidly ferries people and cargo across cities, states, nations and continents.
Two centuries ago most humans lived in small villages and towns; today half of the human population lives in densely populated urban areas. In 1900, for example, there was only one city of a million people. Today there are 326. And there are now 20 mega-cities of 10 million people or more.
Cities only exist by sucking huge amounts of energy from the surrounding environment. A typical city of 1 million needs four million pounds of food, 600,000 tons of water and 9,000 tons of fuel every 24 hours in order to continue to function. Only an extremely high-energy transportation network based on fossil fuels makes this possible.
But an increasing secondary effect of this situation is air pollution. Gargantuan amounts (in the billions of tons) of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and other pollutants are pumped into the atmosphere each year from the half a billion cars that exist on planet earth.
Also contributing to this carbon saturation is a complex electrical grid (the "blood supply" of the Industrial Age) which powers all sorts of home and business necessities in modern life, including a vast telecommunications network (the "central nervous system").
This dense and critical electrical network is made possible only by the intense burning of fossil fuels 24 hours a day by thousands of power plants worldwide. Autos, trucks and power plants taken together are responsible for three-fourths of the world's rising CO2 levels and have rightly been called the "engines of CO2 pollution".
Let's look at some statistics: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in 1760, at the start of the industrial era, were 280 parts per million (ppm)—the level where they had been for millions of years. By 1960 this level had risen to 316 ppm, an increase of 13%.
But the increase didn't stop there. Today atmospheric CO2 is at 373 ppm and rising rapidly. To put it another way, atmospheric levels of CO2 rose at 0.2 ppm annually in the two centuries to 1960; but since then they have risen at a rate of 1.3 ppm annually, a rate over six times as fast.
As Kenneth Boulding put it: "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
(This is the end of Part 23. Go to Part 24.)
—jim sloman, 10.20.04 for Aug 13
|
