key: cord-0057876-2bjyrjpr
authors: Welford, Mark R; Yarbrough, Robert A
title: Resources
date: 2020-10-07
journal: Human-Environment Interactions
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-56032-4_5
sha: b5c20344084413ee734d0819d9e9c1117d40325f
doc_id: 57876
cord_uid: 2bjyrjpr

In 1972, The Limits to Growth predicted that by mid-twenty-first century, humans would face a critical resource and pollution crisis. Subsequent updates support the initial contention; however, when pushed to enact global environmental protections, we have only succeeded by decreasing CFC emissions, and thankfully, the ozone hole is now shrinking to its pre-1970s size. We are running out of oil, and when we do, what happens to medical necessary plastic tubes or petroleum for domestic travel and/or artificial fertilizers that allow us to feed the current human population? Are we facing the “Inconvenient Truth” or a “Long Emergency”?

After reading this chapter, you will be able to: 5 Evaluate our technological ability to continue to extract and utilize current resources and locate new resources to maintain global consumption levels. 5 Evaluate whether we will be able to avert the impending resource and pollution crises that The Limits to Growth first predicted in 1972? Or are we facing the "Inconvenient Truth" or a "Long Emergency"? 5 Appraise arguments that blame population growth for potential resource shortages. 5 Explain how a shift to a US-diet led to a more resource-intensive and higher GHG emissions scenario.

Although still highly debated today, Easter Island's collapse (see Extinctions chapter) appears to be a combination of isolation, destruction of their natural resource base (e.g., soils, forest, and birds), introduction of an alien species-the rat-and political misadventure. The collapse of Viking Iceland appears to somewhat mirror Easter Island, in that the Vikings cut all native forest, burned grass sod for fuel, and, during unfavorable climatic episodes, ceased to trade with Europe. In both cases, their consumption of natural resources, and the subsequent failure of their associated ecosystem services which were absolutely necessary for life, continued right up to their collapse. Yet these brutal Malthusian events in Easter Island and Iceland are likely to happen again if we continue to exploit and exhaust our natural resource bases. We must alter our trajectory! But before we can respond, we must identify what natural resources are, how we utilize them, and how their utility varies across time and space.

Resources have utility, and natural resources are those that are derived from the earth/biosphere/atmosphere and exist independently of human activity. A resource does not exist without someone to use it.

Different individuals or groups value resources differently. We describe this as "their environmental cognition" which can be defined as the mental process of making sense out of the environment that surrounds us. Several factors affect cognition, these include cultural background; view of nature; social change, gender, ethnicity, education, and income; scarcity; and technological and economic factors. For instance, the La Brea Tar pits were a nuisance to early pioneers, but today represent the second largest reservoir of oil in the lower contiguous 48 US states. We can classify natural resources into those that are perpetual such as the sun, wind, ocean waves, and tides, those that are renewable such as forest timber, and those that are nonrenewable such as oil or other minerals. In addition, there exist potential resources such as deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that will be critical to the future of fusion nuclear technology. These are potential resources that we know have utility, but we do not have the technological ability and/or economic incentive to utilize yet. Some natural resources are difficult to classify such as groundwater and soil, and although renewable, these are renewable on time scales that are beyond human use. Among the many factors that affect whether society exploits, conserves, or preserves natural resources is the conflict between a nature-centered view of resource use and a human-centered view of resource use. All individual organisms, species, and ecosystems have inherent value in a nature-centered view, and at its most extreme manifestation, all nonhuman entities have a right to exist and killing them is immoral. Some peoples and religions extend this to nonliving entities such as mountains and rivers; for instance, the river Ganges is sacred to all Hindus in India. In a more recent context, in a sense, designating a cultural or natural location as a UNESCO World Heritage site creates a location that has inherent value and should be preserved at all costs. This comes with a litany of problems-the creation of the Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks as a World Heritage site led to the exclusion of all people from these locations, including native local peoples who lost their land and sources of income including herding, mountain guiding and arable croplands, access to their spiritual heartland, and their identity. In contrast, in a human-and/or business-centered view, the quality of human life is the priority and all other nonhuman entities' needs are relegated to a secondary role. In other words, we concern ourselves with the economic value of a resource or species and not its inherent value. For instance, Japanese businessman, Kiyoshi Kimura, paid 1.38 million euros for a single bluefin tuna at the Tsukiji Fish Market in 2018. And then on Jan 4th, 2019, he reset the record at 2.7 million euros for a 278 kg fish caught off the northern coast of Japan.

Today, it is broadly accepted that economic activity must account for the environmental costs of production. This is frequently identified as having a sustainability consciousness (Cutter and Renwick 1999) . In the past, lumber supplies were easily identified with profits and numbers of employed peoples. In contrast, today, lumber production is discussed in terms of accelerated soil erosion, downstream water quality and dam and reservoir siltation, atmospheric pollutants released by lumber and pulp mills, and the value of intact forests to other industries, particularly recreation and tourism.

According to McMichael, four great periods characterize human-environmental relationships in the Anthropocene. Each has borne witness to the evolving nature of human-environmental resource consumption, threshold exceedance, and connectivity between fellow humans through trade and transportation that dictate such things as disease and cultural and industrial innovation transmission, trade goods flows, and migration of peoples. Human-environmental impacts have evolved from local to global effects, as technological innovations and population growth have provided humans with the ability to cultivate more land, cut more forest, extract more minerals, inhabit more areas, kill and consume more animals, and pollute more of the earth. To put our existence in context, according to Damian Carrington, 83% of all terrestrial wild animals, 80% of all marine mammals, 50% of all plants, and 15% of all fish have perished because of human activities.

The first epoch of the Anthropocene occurred 5000-11,000 years ago, depending on where and when humans first adopted sedentary living in permanent settlements, cultivating the land and domesticating plants and animals. In Eurasia, this transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer occurred, according to Lazaridis and coauthors in Asia, approximately 11,000 years ago in two distinct locations: one in the southern Levant that includes modern-day Israel and Jordan, and the other in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. These two populations mixed with early farmers from another slightly later hearth of agriculture in Anatolia, and thereafter, farming spread westward, from Anatolia into Europe, from the Levant into East Africa, and from the Zagros Mountains into the Eurasian Steppe; later still, Iranian farmers and Eurasian steppe pastoralists spread agricultural innovations into Southeast Asia. At this point, human impacts remain local, dispersed, and minimal. Humans still lived in a large world, where coupled human networks were limited. Although humans advanced as a wave across the Eurasian continent and on into Australia, connectivity amongst humans and the sharing of cultural facets and technological innovations in hunting, agriculture, and architecture progressed in a very on-again off-again and spatially haphazard manner.

Although the advent and spread of both pastoralism and farming can be identified in the geologic record, a necessary requirement that defines the Anthropocene, it should not be forgotten that pre-agricultural humans prior to 11,000 years ago had, through associated blitzkrieg overkill, wiped out much of the megafauna (those animals over a 100 kg in weight) from Eurasia and Australia as humans advanced across these regions. However, the Australian megafauna extinction does seem to have been delayed until 30,000 years after the first presence of humans in Australia. Only where humans coevolved with a megafauna in Africa does a mass megafauna overkill appear delayed until very recently.

The second epoch of the Anthropocene occurred, according to Watts and Strogatz, between 1000 and 3000 years ago when we began to trade across continents. First Alexander the Great and then the Silk Route united east and west Eurasia. The full integration of Eurasia was complete when, in the 1330s, plague erupted in Central Asia, and by 1347, it arrived in Europe carried by Genoese and Venetian traders. These same traders transshipped silks, ivory, and gun powder and gun technology from China to Europe.

But it was the Greeks and then the Romans who first broadly impacted the earth by radically altering the landscape and hydrology of Italy, southern France, Greece, and Spain. The Romans cut millions of hectares of Mediterranean forest, replacing it with large-scale farms of citrus fruits, olives, grapes, and millions of sheep and goats. Roman forest removal reduced evapotranspiration across the northern Mediterranean, warming, drying, and desiccating the region. The Romans also engineered many of the streams and rivers for agricultural and urban use, and here we see, for the first time, significant, near industrial-scale mining of surficial and near-surface mineral deposits that triggered severe local deforestation and consequently accelerated soil erosion. Roman road construction to facilitate commerce, trade, and mineral extraction and to provide rapid reinforcement of the Roman frontier with soldiers also opened up the landscape as forests adjacent to roads were cut to reduce the likelihood of traders and soldiers being ambushed. Roman deforestation restricted initially to the Mediterranean spread northward, with the Roman conquests of northern Europe. The opening up of the European forests resulted in an irreversible openness of the European landscape. As the forest was cut by Romans, we see the extinction of the aurochs-the ancestor of the modern cow-and the isolation of wolves, beaver, bison, and bear, among many other species, to the periphery and mountainous regions of Europe. We also saw the Celts squeezed into marginal, peripheral landscapes on northwestern shores of Europe in Brittany, Normandy, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Scotland.

The third epoch of the Anthropocene began in 1492, as humans became intercontinental travelers, with Europeans finding and colonizing the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. The commercial exploitation of these new lands by white colonial landowners and their convicts was substantial and detrimental; for instance, 50 million indigenous Americans died due to the introduction of flu, measles, and smallpox. The subsequent American slave trade from West Africa into Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America is a very sad legacy of this holocaust. However, widespread reforestation and associated CO2 sequestering and global cooling in the form of the Little Ice Age occurred in the immediate aftermath of this holocaust. However, the expansion of the Europeans around the world heralded the beginning of the sixth mass extinction, first observed across Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific islands, and then more recently transferred to the continents (see Extinction chapter for more details; . Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).

The third epoch also saw the advent of the Industrial Revolution in 1705 and the associated Agricultural Revolution that occurred between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Beginning in the West Midlands of England in 1705, and then diffusing south and eastward into Europe and reaching northern Italy by 1815, the Industrial Revolution radically altered the ability of humans to impact natural resources at local, regional, and global scales. Massive consumption of coal in Europe initiated global warming, and more recent exploitation of other coal deposits in Africa and Australia continues to contribute to GHG production and global climate change. The Industrial Revolution did not just contribute to early GHG emissions, it also launched widespread air pollution across Europe from sulfurous coal in the form of soot and acid rain. In 1705-1805, life expectancy in the UK dropped in the industrial midlands due in part to the coal-related pollution.

Today, we live in the fourth great epoch of the Anthropocene where our global transportation networks move goods, ideas, resources, technology, people, and diseases such as COVID-19 and SARS rapidly around the globe. But even within this fourth epoch, there are temporal variations in our exploitation of our environment and natural resources. Sipple and coauthors just recently showed that we can see the signature of anthropogenically induced climate change due to the emission of GHGs in everyday weather since 1992. In fact, the early 1990s were a tipping point. China, following political and particularly economic turmoil initiated by Deng Xiaoping, came to embrace globalization and foreign direct financial investment as a means to feed, clothe, and educate its people. Today, China is the largest producer of GHGs and the world's largest economy. In the 1980s, China was a minor peripheral player in the world's economy. But China's growth has fueled massive natural resource exploitation beyond its borders. In order to power this economic revolution, China imports enormous quantities of coal from Australia. Australia's economic attachment to coal probably explains why several of its past and its current (2020) prime ministers have been very reluctant to publicly acknowledge anthropogenically induced climate change. As an aside, China has encouraged enormous numbers of its citizens in the last 30 years to obtain graduate education abroad while it builds the infrastructure to do this at home. In 2020, we are starting to see their success, as fewer and fewer Chinese citizens are applying for graduate education in the West. Yet numbers are only half the story! There remains massive spatial variation in growth rates, consumption, economic development, and pollution, some or all of which have their legacy in colonialism.

The concept of overpopulation is a convenient ideology, but a fraud, as it ignores impact per capita (per person) consumption and focuses on simple numerics. In fact, the United States consumes 25% of the world's resources, yet its population of over 330 million is only 5% of the world's total population. Furthermore, the USA and Europe represent less than 15% of the world's population, but their combined consumption far outstrips most of the rest of the world. In actuality, the combined consumption of the USA, Europe, and Japan suck up 80% of the world's natural resources. What is more, France, which is five times smaller than the Democratic Republic of Congo, has about the same population. The UK is smaller in geographic size than Gabon, but has a population of 62 million compared to Gabon's population of just 1.5 million. As a whole, Africa has a population smaller than China and a total GDP which is half that of a small country such as France.

The reality is that our oil-based civilization will run out of its most precious resource, that is, crude oil, in the next few decades. If we do not change our oil usage, we will return to a large world, less technologically driven-one less connected as suggested by Kunstler. Intertwined with the dwindling availability of cheap energy and the exceedance in the Earth's carrying capacity is the specter of climate change. Without easy access to fossil fuels, adapting to these environmental changes will be much more difficult. Now when we say, "run out," we are indeed referring to the eventual day when no more oil is available to be pumped out of the geological innards of our planet, but for practical purposes, we henceforth define the impending oil/energy crisis in different terms. Here, in using the phrase "run out," we refer to the day in the nottoo-distant future when gaining a barrel of crude from tar sands, or shale deposits, or deepwater offshore drilling sites, or other difficult-to-access oil reserves will be so cost-prohibitive that, for all intents and purposes, there will be no more oil for the masses. When oil becomes too expensive, so will all of its distillates, such as gasoline, kerosene, diesel, avgas, heating oil, and the like. People will no longer be able to afford airplane tickets because the cost input (aviation fuel) would be so expensive that only the very wealthy could afford to buy a seat. Of course, the people who work on the airlines, including the pilots, crew, baggage handlers, ticketing agents, and the like, will not be able to easily get to work anyway as their cars sit idle in the suburbs many miles away from the airport which used to be a busy hub of activity and employment. Imagine the effect that this will have on the global economy: airplanes in hangers, cargo ships moored because the cost of fuel is too expensive to be afforded, empty highways, and empty shelves as the transportation costs of worldwide-produced goods exceeds any profit from the sale of the same. Imagine the cost of food at the grocery store (as well as the availability of items). In case you had been thinking that solar power, wind power, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel cells will solve the issue, rethink these ideas. Can you imagine airplanes running on solar energy or hydrogen fuel cells? Do you think biodiesel, heavy and noxious, will provide a solution to widespread transportation issues globally? Or perhaps that commercial ships or planes can be modified or allowed to operate somehow with onboard nuclear reactors? Even our nuclear-powered carriers have to dock occasionally to resupply and fuel-powered vehicles and vessels deliver those supplies.

Aside from the transportation disaster that awaits our globalized world in the future, there are a lot of items that humanity depends on for its daily existence that are made from crude oil. Plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and pesticides are just a few of the ubiquitous items of daily existence that are sourced from fossil fuels such as oil. In fact, much of the world's current standard of living depends on these items for survival. The loss of fertilizer supplies and pesticides could result in severe food shortages in the future, which in turn could greatly affect a larger world population base. A lack of pharmaceuticals could lead to misery and suffering, especially among developing countries. As with oil extraction, before the last oilbased pesticides and fertilizers are produced, prices will soar inexorably as availability of the raw resource material diminishes. This will preclude access to these items by the least wealthy. Many plastics and polymers that are oil-based will also become scarcer, in turn raising the prices of the myriad low-quality imported goods produced in far-away cheap-labor markets. Therefore, the energy crisis is ultimately linked with the exacerbation of an already precarious global food supply and a breakdown in medical care.

Knack and Keefer suggest that societal responses regarding environmental resource base use, whether exploitative or preservative, are extremely important and are in large part dependent upon a country's environmental economic policy. Political responses to these environmental issues are extremely vital to the lives of the citizens within the state and district, and with increasing interconnections among soci-eties over the last few centuries, it is clear that now, and maybe more than ever, economic policies of one country have an effect on other countries around the globe. These responses begin primarily at the top with district and country leaders who have been given the responsibility to make intelligent decisions for the future of our society, while keeping sound current economic growth policies and avoiding political suicide. Before analyzing specifics of societal responses, it is important to understand that not all decisions made by all have the same impact and power. Wallerstein asserts that a powerful set of core countries consisting of both former world hegemons and newly emerging societies have primary control and "exploit" periphery and semi-periphery countries politically, economically, and, most importantly within the scope of this text, environmentally. Three separate responses in terms of economic policy have been outlined within this section, two examples come from bona-fide core countries and another deals with a growing semi-periphery country looking to expand and become a global power. In cultivating an understanding of the current world-system and the relationship between countries, we can further assess future global policies and see how they might affect each country differently.

Data from the IPCC and U.S. EPA indicate that the total CO2 emissions from the USA have declined over the past ten years, but the nation is still among the top two in the world and the highest in terms of per capita production.

Much of the US and world decline in CO2 emissions can be explained by a sluggish economy since the global recession of 2008-2009. Lessening our dependence on oil will be critical to promote sustainability, conservation, and green economic development. While the USA is consistently lambasted for a lack of any green environmental policy and ranks in the low-to-no growth section of the Yale Environmental Performance Index ranking, there is a model that the USA could follow-either Germany or France. Both are rich, core countries with strong economies, solid environmental policies, and green public awareness. Germany, in particular, is renowned for its renewable energy production. In 2017, 36.1% of Germany's total electric output came from renewables, and according to Amelang, on January 1st, 2018, 100% of its electrical needs came from renewables. However, in the 1970s, environmental awareness in Germany, just like much of the rest of Europe, was poor. In the 1970s, Theil noted that Germany's Rhine river was described as a cesspool, and the West German government refused to cut sulfur dioxide emissions or cap ozone-depleting hydrochlorofluorocarbons. However, German environmental policy changed in the 1980s in response to the disasters of Chernobyl's numerous toxic spills into the Rhine, acid rain, and a growing environmental movement led in parliament by the world's first major Green Party. So, although not ranked at the top of the EPI rating (Switzerland), Germany is first among countries that is making itself green by design.

k Shifting diets, more domestic animals, and more GHG emissions Today, industrial-scale farming has evolved to provide us with a Western-style diet rich in calories, full of protein, and stuffed with animal by-products (meat, cheese, eggs, butter, milk). In fact, 96% of all animals living today are domestic livestock. As a result, we are consuming more resources and producing more GHGs per food 5.4 · Societal and Government Responses calorie obtained than ever before. This global transition to an American-style diet is not sustainable. In addition to the resources (oil, electricity, water, land) used, land use changes necessary to sustain this transition into the future, GHGs emissions, and groundwater pollution, human health will suffer through more cancer and more heart-related and circulatory problems. Although richer, humans may end up dying younger, with more quality-of-life impediments, while suffering greater medical costs.

We need to reduce the overconsumption of calories and reduce food waste. For instance, a third of all people worldwide are overweight (with a body mass index of 25-29.9), while a third of all US citizens are obese (where a BMI is in excess of 30). As for food waste, globally 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted each year or a third of total food production. This amounts to US$680 billion in the Global North and US$310 billion in the Global South. According to Gunders, the average US household throws away $2200 of food each year or 1250 calories per person per day, and 90% of this is thrown away too soon. As a result, we waste 2.6% of all US GHG emissions, 21% of all US agricultural water usage, 19% of all US croplands, 18% of all farming fertilizer, but contribute 21% of US landfill content and waste US$218 billion (see Agriculture chapter 7).

We need to reduce the production of GHGs associated with the production and transportation of food. We need to reduce the distance food is shipped-the US food is typically shipped over a 1600 km. We need to eat more locally produced foods and support more farmer's markets. We need to eat more organic food and more hydroponic produced food. We need to reduce the overconsumption of animal-based protein foods; in particular, we need to reduce the production and consumption of beef, which is two-and-half to three times more polluting and more resource-intensive than other means of food production (. Fig. 5 .3).

In 2009, Ranganathan and coauthors found that 75% of all agricultural land was used in the production of animal-based foods and in the process contributed 66% of all agricultural GHG emissions, yet contributed only 37% of all protein consumed; much of this is due to embracing the American-style meat-product-based diet. In fact, they suggest that in producing the average American diet, land use and GHG emissions are nearly twice the global norm. Nearly half of the US land use and GHG emissions are due to the production of beef. They also document that for each new person embracing an American diet, a one-time release of 300 tons of CO 2 occurs for each hectare of land converted to a resource-intensive predominately animal protein diet. If we could shift people from an American diet to a more plant-based diet typical of India, Ranganathan and coauthors argue we would observe agricultural GHG emissions decline between 15 and 35%, convert between 90 and 640 million hectares of resourceintensive agricultural land use back to low-resource input land use, feed 10 billion in 2050, and reduce GHG emission from land-use conversion by 168 billion tons. ◄

Recurrent crises are a fundamental phenomenon of biological existence. Whether those crises are organismally determined (as in economic or resource-based crises) or naturally determined (as in natural disasters or non-anthropogenic climate cycle shifts), living organisms have two choices: adapt and conquer, or acquiesce and die. The scales at which crises affect biological life range hierarchically from the individual-level (whether a particular organism will survive, or even thrive, in a crisis), to the cohesive (corporate) scale, to the community level, and finally to the civilization level. History has provided many examples where units at each of these scales survived or even prospered when faced with crises, while other units have failed and Animal-based foods are more resource-intensive than plant-based foods (7 wri. org/ shiftingdiets). (Ranganathan et al. 2016 CC) passed from this earth. Who survives crises, be they economic bubbles, wars, disease, or environmental catastrophes? Using these examples, we explore what they tell us today at the start of the twenty-first century about our potential to survive the coming food, oil, environmental, and climate crises. The problems we face today are not new. Beginning with the first Earth Day in 1970 and continuing with Al Gore's polarizing An Inconvenient Truth and Thomas Kunstler's The Long Emergency, the Western world is certainly aware of the energy/climate/food/environmental crisis that threatens our very existence (Gore 2006; Kunstler 2005) . Getting through this crisis, however, is going to take coordinated planning, be it at the household, business, community, or civilization level. At all levels, a shared vision and a series of coordinated actions will have to occur, more than likely stemming from the thoughts and actions of either individuals or small groups of likeminded individuals.

Mapping the effects of climate change, Maplecroft suggests that poor countries in the Global South, particularly in Central and Northwestern South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and East Asia, are most at risk from climate change. Yet many of these countries are the least able to cope with the environmental changes that will happen. Given the already precarious state of the world food production and safety network, a drought in a prime growing region (many of which are shrinking in size) or in an area in which drinking water is sourced at the surface from lakes and streams could result in serious food and safe water shortages. The area in which vectors of disease (insects, rodents, etc.) currently live may expand or change in size as the climate changes, resulting in disease outbreaks in formerly disease-free areas.

k Water Resources Typically forests and offshore mineral rights are owned by governments, but air and water are considered a common property; as a result, these are exploited by private individuals and corporations. Let us not forget that while the costs of exploitation are shared among all owners of the resources, the benefits accrue to the individual user, and as a result, it is in the individual's best interest to increase exploitation or pollution of a common property. In the USA, several classic examples of common property issues are functioning today. The draw-down of the Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains of the USA is a prime example: multiple private (i.e., rural homeowners with wells, farmers, oil companies) and public entities (towns and cities providing drinking water) tap this renewable resource, but at rates that are not sustainable. The use of the Colorado River flow by states, municipalities, and famers means that a dribble of water flows across the US-Mexican border into the Gulf of California; as a result, a once rich biodiverse delta is dead! Common property issues are especially common within seas and oceans. There are three fundamental issues with seas and oceans: (1) living and nonliving resources (within seas/oceans) are unseen, unmeasurable, and unaccountable; (2) oceans act as the ultimate diffuser and sink for nature products of erosion and human-made pollutants; and (3) ownership and control of these water bodies are very contentious. The EU had to step in to save the Mediterranean Sea and issue rules, penalties, and offer funds to clean up sewage disposal among coastal com-munities of France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and several Balkan countries. Today, the northern Mediterranean is quite clean, yet sadly the southern Mediterranean is still quite polluted as most of these adjacent countries lack the funds to modernize sewage disposal. In 1970, 9% of the world's protein was obtained from oceans; today, approximately 16% of protein is obtained from oceans, although Global South nations obtain greater than 20% of their protein from marine resources. Today, the leading fishery nations are China, Peru, Japan, Chile, and the USA, with Japan, China, and Russia obtaining most of their fish from outside their territorial waters.

The 1975 Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland illustrate the degree countries will go to protect "their water resources" (see Chap. 1). From an Icelandic point of view, this is completely understandable given that foreign fisheries destroyed cod, haddock, and flounder fishing off the east coast of Canada in the 1990s, with the loss of 40,000 jobs. Both mackerel and herring fishing survive only under strict fishing limits in the North Sea. While the anchovy, swordfish, and marlin fishery off the west coast of Peru and Chile collapsed in the 1970s due overfishing and the impact of warm-water El Niños. Rather surprisingly, according to the UN, many northwestern European countries, in addition to many North African and Central Asia countries, are even now suffering water stress and are vulnerable to many further climate change that negatively affects their access to renewable water resources.

Multiuse management of water resources is typically very complicated and difficult to arrange. For instance, Central Florida has some of the world's most famous lakes for sportfishing. In the 1960s, the state fish and wildlife agency (now the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) opened an office in the town of Kissimmee to manage this world-class fishery in the Upper Kissimmee River Chain of Lakes-notably Lake Tohopekaliga (Toho) and Lake Kissimmee further downstream. Office staff took a holistic approach to management, placing high value on maintaining quality habitat for largemouth bass, other sportfish, and the communities sportfish depend upon. By the mid-1960s, the US Army Corps of Engineers had built water control structures on these and other chain lakes for flood control and land reclamation purposes. This altered the historical filling and emptying of these natural-basin lakes over time, which varied up to 3.2 m; since 1964, water levels have been maintained within a narrow 0.9 m range. This alteration in water levels eliminated the natural control of aquatic vegetation communities, fostering the prolific growth of species that soon reached noxious levels. Concurrently, accelerating human population growth in the watershed, which included the southern portion of the Orlando metropolitan area, resulted in the ever-increasing discharge of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent into Lake Toho. This huge influx of nutrient levels exacerbated the effects of limited water-level fluctuations, further fueling exuberant vegetation growth and compromising littoral-zone habitat quality where sport-fish spawn. Fisheries staff began implementing periodic drawdowns on Lake Toho beginning in 1971 (coincidentally, the year Disney World opened, itself partially in the upper Kissimmee watershed). During drawdowns, managers partially drain lakes for the purpose of controlling the growth of undesirable concentrations of near-shore vegetation and aiding in consolidating shallow-water habitats. But it soon became apparent that drawdowns were not enough to conserve sportfish spawning habitat; something had to be done to control massive nutrient loadings. The littoral zone of Lake Toho had become so overgrown with living and decaying plant muck that broad areas of former sportfish spawning habitat were no longer available. The situ-Dams necessary for sustainable hydroelectric power (HEP) production are themselves quite destructive to the environment. One of the most researched and contentious examples is the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River at the head of the Grand Canyon. Although the damming of Hetchy Valley just to the north of Yosemite National Park initiated the modern environmental movement in the USA (see later in the chapter), the Glen Canyon Dam completely changed the downstream hydrology of the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River water is now colder (water is released from the cold, bottom layers of Lake Powell), and this prevents humpback chub from spawning below the dam. The reduced floods lead to significant erosion of flood-bars, once campsites for rafting tour companies, and has meant even human waste has to be removed from the canyon where seasonal flooding once did that job! Although periodic releases of high water from the dam now occur, the natural ecology of the canyon has yet to fully return.

In 1960, the Aral Sea covered 67,000 km 2 and was the fourth largest inland body of water. It supported a significant fishery, but in 1965, the two rivers that maintained its volume were increasingly diverted to irrigate 5-7.5 million hectares of cotton fields which were part of the Soviet Union. According to Micklin, the 1960s annual water deficits into the sea were ~12 km 3 per year; however, this increased during the 1970s and 1980s to ~30 km 3 per year. As a result, the sea rapidly decreased in volume, increased in salinity from 10 g/l to over 100 g/l of salt, became too toxic for fish resulting in the collapse of the fishery, split into two deltaic reedbeds (homes to hundreds of species of plant, birds, insects, and mammals), declined from >500,000 to just 12,000 ation prompted biologists to couple a muck removal project with their 1987 periodic drawdown; 165,000 m 3 of organic material was mechanically removed, restoring 136 ha of spawning habitat. By 1986, four WWTPs discharged 110,000 m 3 daily into the upper chain. Working diligently with local, state, and federal partners and a conservation-concerned public, fisheries staff was able to implement no-discharge rulings by state and federal agencies for these WWTPs (the effluents were primarily diverted for golf course irrigation). By 1988, nutrient concentrations in the lake were reduced by 75 to 92% from 1980 levels. Conservation of prime habitat in the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes was accomplished with the farsighted vision of fishery biologists, who helped support a billion-dollar state-wide bass fishing industry [in ~1986 dollars] . What this case study illustrates is that state government and local fishermen can take on federal agencies and multinationals and win big and save critical habitat.

It would be remiss if we did not discuss the loss of water resources such as Owen and Mono Lakes in the USA and the Aral Sea, and the negative downstream impacts of dams. Owen and Mono Lakes are casualties of California's insatiable need for water, while the Colorado River was dammed for hydroelectric power and agricultural irrigation. All three have ended up nearly dry. Today, Owen and Mono Lakes and the decreasing Salton Sea are major contributors of highly toxic salt dust to the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. This is true to the east and downwind of the Aral Sea as well. In all three cases, the dust is contaminated with pesticides and fertilizer, and additionally heavy metals downwind of the Aral Sea. To reduce Owen Lake's dust, the dried-up lake bed is now irrigated with a sprinkler system that consumes more precious water but has seemed to solve its dust problem. According to Mansur Mirovalev, some of the salt dust from the Aral Sea can be traced to Greenland and Japan. hectares, and initiated deflation or wind erosion of the salt dust from the dried seabed. The salt dust laced with pesticides, fertilizer residue, and heavy metals contributes to infant mortalities downwind of the sea in excess of 100 deaths per 1000 births, some 7-10 times the US levels. Recent efforts to save the Small Aral Sea are underway, and a small fishery catches in excess of 1000 tons of fish per year, although the toxicity of the fish is quite high. ◄

In 2015, coal still provided 24% of the EU's electricity from some 280 coal-fired power stations, while contributing 18% of the EU's GHGs. Air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter (or PM 2.5 ) or soot from these 280 coal-fired power stations contributed to 22,900 premature deaths, 11,800 cases of chronic bronchitis, and over 21,000 hospital admissions in 2013. Soot is a product of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide coal-fired plant emissions. This soot causes in excess of 60 billion euros per year in health costs in the EU. This does not include health costs associated with the release of coal slag or CO 2 . These health costs are also not covered by the coal industry; rather, they are paid by individuals and by governments. These costs do not include lost or reduced productivity due to poorer health. Sulfur dioxide also causes acid rain that negatively affects agricultural productivity and, through acidification of lakes, reduces fish stocks. SO2's most immediate effect, however, is to cause widespread asthma and other chronic respiratory illnesses. Nitrogen Dioxide causes eutrophication of water bodies and seeds ozone and smog, causing respiratory irritation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and cardiopulmonary disease. Mercury is also a by-product of coal burning and can trigger heart disease and impair learning among children. Approximately 1.8 million EU children exhibit mercury levels above WHO safety limits. The majority of this pollution comes from 30 toxic power stations, most of which are located in Germany (8 plants Although both Chernobyl and Fukushima offer terrible lessons in pollution and loss of life when fail-safe systems indeed fail, for the most part fission-based nuclear power stations are very safe and offer significant savings in GHG emissions versus other carbon-based power stations. For instance, Sizewell B nuclear power station has produced only 6.04 g CO2e/kWh over its lifetime including its construction. Typically, according to Sovacool, across the world, from mining uranium to enrichment to waste storage, some 66 g CO2e/kWh is emitted. Sizewell B supplies up to 3% of all UK homes with low GHG emission electricity; in fact, it saves 3 million tons of GHG emissions each year versus a coal-powered electric-generating power station. Over 40 years of operation, that will amount to a savings of 120 million tons of GHGs.

Fusion energy, on the other hand, has continued to prove difficult to implement. Numerous sources suggest we will have fusion-generated electrical energy input into our electrical grids sometime in the 2030s. At this point, humanity and our power-hungry civilization might be saved! In the meantime, we need to maintain what fission nuclear power we have, reduce our use of coal-or oil-generated electricity, and invest in solar, wave, HEP, biomass, and wind-generated electricity.

Renewable sources of energy are those sources that are not finite or exhaustible, but some are flow-limited. These include solar, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, hydrogen, and hydro-electric power (HEP). To illustrate with solar energy, flowlimited simply means that the total amount of sunlight hitting solar panels is limited by the maximum amount of sunlight incident at the top of the atmosphere and that amount of sunlight intercepted as the rays pass through the atmosphere. Dust particles, water vapor, clouds, ozone, and smog all reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface. Just as in all forms of energy production, energy-production efficiency also affects the total production of energy. Solar energy efficiency is typically 23% (today, solar panels only convert ~23% of all solar radiation incident on the panels into electricity); wind turbines are 50% efficient; wave power is thought to be able to yield 40% efficiencies; geothermal yields 12-25%; biomass is 75-80% efficient in direct heating, but only 20-25% efficient when generating electricity; hydrogen fuel cells driving electric motors exhibit efficiencies on the order of 40-60%, which is twice internal combustion engine efficiencies; and finally HEP exhibits ~90% efficiencies.

Hydrogen power is compromised by the high input cost to create hydrogen in the first place. HEP power is limited to countries with abundant water resources (either rain or river flow in the case of Egypt) but is also limited by the very high initial costs of dam construction. However, the International Hydropower Association suggests that in 2018, China with 8.54 GW, Brazil with 3.87 GW, Pakistan with 2.49 GW, Turkey with 1.09 GW, Angola with 0.67 GW, Tajikistan with 0.61 GW, Ecuador with 0.56 GW, and India with 0.54 GW are the fastest growing countries for new installed HEP capacity. Indeed, Ecuador (with loans from China) generated 58% of its electrical needs through HEP in 2017. The utility of wave power is limited because only 2% of the world's coastlines exceed a power density of 30 kilowatts/meter necessary to generate electricity from waves. The USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Norway, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina have wave powers that typically exceed 40-60 kilowatts/meter! This clearly provides advantages to Global North countries and relative disadvantages to tropical and Global South countries. Wind power is limited, with again mid-latitude areas benefiting from their location coincident with the maximum transfer of energy from tropical regions to polar areas. In other words, mid-latitude areas are the windiest places on the planet and hence have the highest potential for wind-generated electricity. But even in these locations, some places are windier than others: Iowa is the windiest state in the USA and has a high density of windmills, while many coastal areas are also quite windy.

In contrast, solar electrical generation does not appear biased against Global South countries; quite the opposite, the Sahara, the Namib, the Gobi all have few cloudy days. Even the UK, with its high latitude and cloudiness, is the third largest producer of solar power in Europe, yet this is still a paltry 6% of total UK electrical production. However, combined with wind (20%), biomass (12%), and HEP and wave, renewables provided nearly 40% of UK electrical needs in late 2019. That year, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, renewables exceeded nonrenewable energy production in the UK. Elsewhere in Europe, according to Sophie Vorrath, Portugal produced more than 100% of its electrical needs for March 2018 from renewables, while, on average, it produces 62% of its electric demands from a combination of HEP, solar, and wind.

Because defraying initial investment costs are important to many countries as are the need for portability, high-power efficiencies, and the need to have suitable energy conditions, wind and biomass, coupled with solar electrical production, offer the greatest bang-for-the-buck for the Global South. The cheapest and easiest to develop are wind and biomass. Converting to renewable electrical energy production should also be coupled with a move to electric vehicles, and here Norway leads the way. Today, Norway has the largest number of electric vehicles per capita-this was achieved through tax incentives.

Attempts to save ecosystems and hence stop multiple extinctions are political minefields prone to political whim and fancy, and costlier and more difficult, as saving an ecosystem is harder to sell than a cute endangered animal. Saving broad, spatially contiguous areas that harbor rich or unique ecosystems is especially difficult, given competing designs for the land and the fact that all ecosystems are three-dimensional in nature, including the land surface-its flora and fauna, the subsurface, and the atmosphere above.

Amongst the two most critical landscapes we need to conserve are the tropical lowland rainforests and the boreal forests of North America and Russia. The boreal forests are being cut for commercial timber, whereas the tropical rainforests are subject to various pressures including commercial timber production, mineral prospecting, conversion to low-intensity small-scale farming adjacent to roads, and conversion to intensive plantation agriculture including organic soybeans, maize for ethanol, sun coffee, heart of palm, palm oil, and beef and milk production, among other agricultural products (see Agriculture chapter). Yet, the Amazon, Congo, and SE Asian rainforests (that are scattered across the islands of SE Asia) are the most important terrestrial sites for carbon sequestration across earth. Many ideas have been promoted to protect these tropical forests: these include land reform, provision for pharmaceutical prospecting, creation of parks, encouraging industrialization, and expanding ecotourism. In much of Colombia, the best agricultural lands are located in valley bottoms and are mostly employed for raising cattle by rich landowners. As a result, very few people live and work on the land. In contrast, large numbers of poor, disenfranchised people live on adjacent slopes and struggle to grow sufficient food for themselves and families on the poorer quality, more erodible valley-side soils. A much more sustainable approach would be to restrict cattle ranching to the valley slopes, through land reform, which is much more the case across Europe. The good soils in the valley-bottoms could support larger populations and produce significant food surpluses. The problem facing this type of land reform is that the few rich landowners control much of the local wealth and can influence local, regional, and national legislators. Across tropical countries (i.e., Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia), governments are increasingly reluctant to commit land to protection when they know the land might be needed by hungry citizens and rich cattle ranchers in the near future. When pressured to explain why tropical rainforests are being cut, politicians such as Brazil's President Bolsonaro respond that parks benefit foreigners, but the needs of our people are greater. Furthermore, tropical parks tend to be in remote frontier regions that justify limited investment to protect the land. Their remoteness also ensures ecotourism is minimal. As a result of the lack of government investment and limited private ecotourism investment, most tropical parks are inadequately staffed.

For instance, Brazil has 30 nature preserves in the Amazon that, according to Rauch, employ just 23 guards. In contrast, the US National Park Service employs over 4000. Rauch also notes that these guards are unarmed and all 30 Brazil's Amazonia parks have poaching problems, 23 have been invaded by squatters, logging activity affects 18, land titles are disputed in 18, eight harbor indigenous populations, and only 12 parks lie completely within public domain. ◄ All of these parks offer ready access to encroachers. Ecuador also struggles with many of these issues-the eastern portion of Podocarpus Park is deemed off-limits to ecotourists because of the presence of gold miners in the park, while the private Bosque Protector Cerro Blanco near Guayaquil has struggled with land squatter incursions (supported by local politicians) on its northern border in 1997, 2000, and 2010 . Yet, Cerro Blanco is an important conservation area for the great green macaw.

According to Cutter and Renwick, the typical scenario that tropical parks face is one of progressive degradation. This progression is as follows: populations build around boundaries, roads are built, prime timber resources are quickly exhausted around the edge of park boundaries, and yet the park remains a magnet for loggers. If mineral deposits are discovered, then miners move in (e.g., Podocarpus NP). When perceived illegal activities can be carried out with impunity, then the full-scale assault begins. Finally, once hundreds or thousands of peasant families have helped themselves to land and cleared forest, it is nearly impossible to evict the land squatters.

k Industrialization In 1950 In -1990 , forest cover in Puerto Rico (PR) increased from 9% to 37%. During this period and since, more land has reverted to forest in PR than in any other country. The Tandayapa and Mindo Valleys west of Quito, Ecuador, have also seen substantial reforestation due to ecotourism investment (see later case study). Most forest in PR reverted to forest in humid, upland, sugar-and coffee-growing regions characterized by unrestricted out-migration to the USA and populations of small landholders earning more money through off-farm sources. PR is unusual, as it is part of the USA, and so there are no restrictions to migration to the mainland USA. And secondly, investment in commercial activities in PR by mainland US investors and through remittances is not restricted. Direct US investment and remittances have created more attractive social, economic, and educational opportunities in PR cities, and this has compounded problems farmers face in obtaining farm labor and as a result caused more land abandonment. In PR, planters and farmers have also had to compete with producers from other countries who had access to more capital and better land. Thus, many PR farmers have simply not been able to compete, and so many have allowed their lands to revert to forest.

k The case against Ecotourism as a significant form of conservation As a means to protect forest, wildlife, and other landscapes, ecotourism is not a panacea, in part because business volume tends to be low and ecotourists tend to be very fickle. In other words, the volume from year-to-year of ecotourists is quite variable because rapid changes in public image of place (within mainstream media and social media) are possible due to perceived changes in crime, in political conditions, and in disease, among many other things. And a place might become too mainstream and many ecotourists will look elsewhere for "authentic" experiences. Ecotourism is also a double-edged sword-it tends to be lucrative for governments and foreigner-born residents who can invest sufficient capital into a venture that meets the needs of rich, elite ecotourists (who can travel abroad), but ecotourism businesses are difficult to initially capitalize among locals and indigenous peoples. Ecotourism is also limited because it needs an outstanding attraction to draw tourists, yet most national parks cannot offer this. Tropical lowland rainforests that are critical sites of biodiversity and carbon sequestration often awe first-time visitors, but these same visitors are frequently repelled by cool, deep shade, high humidity, and the myriad of dangers! Furthermore, while visitors also want to see animals, most rainforest critters are notoriously hard to see high in the canopy or only venture at night. Specifically, approximately 50-90% of life in rainforests live in the canopy and access is difficult and expensive. Canopy towers are expensive to build, tend to have a short life expectancy due to tree-fall and corrosion, and, as a result, few ecotourist facilities can afford their cost. The Canopy Tower in Panama is a little different: it is a refurbished radar station constructed by the US military in 1965, then abandoned in the 1990s, and repurposed for bird ecotourism. On the forest floor, trails tend to be narrow; guides might see birds or animals high in the canopy, while the next in line may also see it, but the fourth or fifth in line tends to miss the animal or bird.

For example, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is stunning: it is the world's largest tropical island and retains much of its tropical forest; it is home to a unique flora and fauna (birds-of-paradise (BOP), cassowaries, tree-climbing wallabies, tropical fish) and ~800 language groups that maintain many of their traditional cultural elements. Beginning with Wallace's zoological explorations in the 1800s, PNG has become the holy grail to birders across the world. Most, if not all, birders aspire to visiting PNG. Yet few birders visit this birding nirvana! Even David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" video of him being outdone by a lesser bird-of-paradise failed to help. In fact, less than 50,000 tourists visit PNG annually compared to greater than 600,000 that visit Fiji and its principal attraction-its beaches! PNG does sustain a few very expensive, remote ecotourism facilities, but its great attractions and close rich neighbors (i.e., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and China) fail to match Fiji. Foale and Macintyre argue that two quite separate forms of ecotourism exist in PNG and elsewhere across the Southwest Pacific: low-budget, low-impact, small-profit facilities for backpackers run by locals; and foreignowned tourism businesses that offer comfort yet are expensive, high-profit, high environmental impact, and cater to diving, birding, and beach tourism. These stem from efforts in the 1990s to generate alternate forms of income other than extractive industries such as mining, logging, and blue-water fishing. Today, high-end, high-overhead, expensive ecotourism lodges dominate the market, while small family-run ecotourism businesses have been run into the ground as their profit margins cannot compete with compensation offered by competing extractive industries for forest resources and land. According to Sakata and Prideaux, community-based ecotourism facilities also struggle to achieve profitability in PNG because of several significant geographic factors: a poorly developed road network, a limited and expensive telecommunications network, a low rural gross domestic product (GDP) that limits local investment capital, and PNG's peripheral position to a source of rich, mobile tourists such as Americans and Europeans. Sakata and Prideaux also argue that the principle ecotourism attractions-remote hill tribes and difficult to locate birds-of-paradise-create a "periphery-of-the-periphery" situation that drives up costs. So, although cultural tourism and ecotourism offer PNG an additional source of foreign revenue, structural barriers inhibit PNG from maximizing its potential "green" income.

Nevertheless, some individuals are diversifying their income streams and developing small-scale ecotourism facilities that offer outstanding opportunities to observe the unique flora and fauna of PNG. Keki Lodge and owner and guide Moyang Okira offer, just west of Madang on the north coast, the opportunity in the remote Adelbert Mountains to see the extremely rare, endemic, and rangerestricted fire-maned bowerbird, the Pesquet's or vulturine parrot, and, from hides, magnificent bird-of-paradise. Their tourist income supplements monies made from coffee and betel nuts. On Western Papua, Indonesia, the community of Malagufuk in the Klasow Valley to the east of Sorong, with help from local guide Charles Roring, offers the opportunity to see northern cassowary, twelve-wired bird-ofparadise, and king bird-of-paradise from hides.

Regardless of its motives, ecotourism necessarily involves disturbance to animals and damage to local human economies. Disturbance of birds by humans includes mortality changes, behavioral habituation, and related, but nevertheless disturbing, phenomena of increased soil erosion around sites of bird habitation. For instance, Mullner and coauthors found that the survival rates of hoatzin chicks are significantly lower in tourist-exposed nests. According to Walker and coauthors, Magellanic penguin chicks raised in unvisited areas fledge earlier than chicks raised in visited areas. Additionally, Forbes and coauthors found that disturbance by humans produces patches of partially or totally denuded ground and even relatively low-intensity, small-scale disturbances have immediate and persistent effects on Arctic vegetation and soils.

Sekercioglu argues that damage to local economies can be extensive and longlasting. Isaacs, Vivano, and Ziffer found that ecotourism profits are typically transferred out of communities and from locals to foreigners when locals cannot afford to invest in luxurious accommodation demanded by tourists or control of ecotourist businesses and resources (i.e., land) is lost to outsiders. In addition, locals excluded from lands they traditionally had access to either in the form of out-right exclusion from National Parks (e.g., in India, Bosak 2004; in Tanzania, Kamuaro, 1996; in Sri Lanka, Tisdell 2003) or, as Pratt found, that where multi-use common lands that are "purchased" and set aside as private protected areas (PPAs) has created considerable local resentment. The creation of PPAs and associated ecotourist facilities can, according to Isaacs, create the illusion that sufficient natural areas are being conserved and thus encourage entrepreneurs and policymakers to destroy other natural areas. For instance, in Costa Rica, Honey found that PPAs are increasingly stripping funds from National Parks as more and more NGOs, scientists, and tourists work with or visit PPAs.

Tourism, and especially bird-related ecotourism, often involves Westerners traveling to more peripheral, isolated, and hard-to reach communities, resulting in considerable cultural and environmental degradation according to Honey, McLaren, and Tisdell. Enloe suggests tourism is politically inspired in more peripheral nations to internationalize peoples in remote communities and allow governments to more effectively control these communities. McLaren suggests degradation typically follows a pattern-forest is cleared and land converted into lodging for ecotourists, inadequate sewage disposal systems are overwhelmed, and garbage (particularly plastics) accumulates.

Yet in reality, conserving or preserving large-scale, spatially contiguous ecosystems is something that rich countries, that have gone through their exploitative stage in wealth generation, have the means to accomplish. This is not saying newly emerging countries do not have the will to conserve or preserve. For instance, although the Ecuadorian government has more comprehensive environmental legislation than many far richer countries, it still lacks the means to achieve many of its goals. Sadly, at times, the Ecuadorian government has to make critical choices between social welfare and environmental welfare. In Ecuador, four cases stand out: the ongoing deforestation of the western slope of Ecuador, the construction of the 2001 Oleducto Crude Petroleum (OCP) oil pipeline through the Mindo-Nambillo protected forest, the migration of thousands of Ecuadorians to the Galapagos Islands over the last two decades to cash-in on its tourism, and the 2016 opening of oil exploration of Yasuni National Park.

On August 3, 1993, Ecuadorian ecologist Eduardo Aspiazu, botanist Alwyn Gentry, ornithologist Ted Parker, and their pilot died in a plane crash while conducting an aerial survey of a remote patch of Ecuadorian cloud forest near Guayaquil as part of a Rapid Assessment Program inventory. They were there because the western slope of the Ecuadorian Andes is one of the most deforested environments on earth-only 4% of the original forest remains, yet according to Dobson and Gentry, greater than 20% of lowland western Ecuador's plants are endemic. Of these endemic plants, 4% are critically endangered, but federally protected areas are inadequate to stave off extinction: it appears that private-protected areas (PPAs) are the only hope. Much of the deforestation occurred in 1960-1980 as Ecuadorian laws encouraged the conversion of forest to agricultural activities, such as palm-oil production, to reduce ruralurban migration. Yet, sustained deforestation of western Ecuador began in the 1940s when primary lowland forest was first cut for banana production for the US market. Today, fragments of lowland, foothill, and montane primary rainforest remain, for example, 589 ha owned by Mindo Cloudforest Foundation spread out over 4 reserves; All of the federal reserves are remote and support limited ecotourism and suffer from illegal logging, hunting, gold-prospecting, and colonization because most of these activities are carried out with impunity. Sadly, Cerro Blanco also suffers from these illegal activities along its eastern boundary as the owner, the Cemento Nacional, turns a blind eye to these activities. As a result, these reserves are experiencing progressive degradation, while local, regional, and national politicians argue that these parks benefit foreigners, not the greater needs of their voters.

In 2000, a new Trans-Andean oil pipeline was proposed to increase oil transportation capacity across Ecuador, from its oil-rich production fields in the Amazon to its exporting and refining port of Esmeraldas on the Pacific coast. The goal was to increase oil revenues and government taxable income at a time when Ecuador was struggling financially following a period of high inflation and a decade of ten presidents. Funding for the $900 million pipe was provided by a US/Canadian/German consortium, and by 2001, the pipeline had been built through several ecologically sensitive and unique habitats. However, we (the authors) found that four loosely coordinated groups of environmental stakeholders from locals to global NGOs formed a resistance to the proposed route. Although they failed to stop pipeline construction, together they helped the Tandayapa Valley, Mindo, Milpe, and Los Bancos emerge as one of Ecuador's primary ecotourism destinations, as their aggressive manipulation of local, regional, national, and international news media spread the word far-and-wide of the unique landscape and flora and fauna of northwest Ecuador. Among their successes was the establishment of Ecoruta Paseo del Quinde. Although this is the maintenance road for the oil pipeline and new electricity pylons through the Tandayapa Valley, the Ecoruta allows access to critical habitat for birders and ecotourism operators. Purchase of 950 hectares of cloud forest in 2001 by the Fundacion de Conservacion Jocotoco to create the Yanacocha Reserve to save the forest surrounding the Inca (Yanacocha) ditch was followed in 2010 by another 250 ha addition. This reserve serves to protect a strong-hold of the critically endangered blackbreasted puffleg (Eriocnemis nigrivestis), endemic to Pichincha Volcano. One NGO, the Mindo Cloudforest Foundation, wrote two editions of Ecuador's official National Avitourism Strategy. As one local environmentalist stated, "A bad thing became a good thing… Mindo became a model for Ecuadorians to conserve nature, a model about birding, a model about how local people can work on these issues---you can ask everybody in town and everybody can tell you something about conservation." Tourism has begun to replace unsustainable agricultural activities such as cattle ranching and logging. Today, in Mindo, two butterfly farms, a chocolate farm/factory, a beehive tour company, several zip-lining and forest canopy tours, and several tubing outfitters using the Mindo River support more than 20 restaurants and 62 hotels and provide hundreds of jobs.

The imagery of pristine beaches, the blue-footed boobies, and tortoises that was used to sell the Galapagos Islands in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s is sadly under threat. Today, 25,000 people live on the four largest islands of Isabela, Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, and Floreana, and, according to Benitez-Capistros and coauthors, catering to the over 200,000 tourists who bring in excess of 85 million USD/year. Both their direct and indirect impacts are substantial. Once wild land is now being turned into farms and roads and being covered by buildings. Locally obtained rock, sand, and timber is being consumed as building materials, while the growing residential populations and tourists demand more water, more electricity, better sewage disposal, and more consumer goods. More tourists and the importation of more consumer goods place the islands at a greater risk for the introduction of exotic, invasive species, in addition to humans. More residents and more tourists have meant more fishing for locally consumed fish, but the increase in residents has also fueled an increase in illegal fishing of shark fins, sea cucumbers, and lobsters. Although access to the other 15 islands is limited to 74 sites, the sheer numbers of tourists pose many problems, and in a sense, the Galapagos Islands are being loved to death. Not least is the fact that much of the revenue generated by tourism is not invested in conservation efforts. Most of the tourism revenues leave the islands as most tourism operators are either mainlanders or non-Ecuadorians.

The 9823 km 2 Yasuni National Park is a paper park. It was established in 1979 to protect critical Amazonian habitats and several uncontacted Huaorani groups, and became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1989. However, poaching of monkeys by non-Huaorani groups is common, while petroleum exploration was initially banned, but that was recently rescinded. In 2007, then-President Correa, backed by the UN and conservation groups worldwide, offered not to explore for petroleum in the park if Ecuador was paid not to! Although many governments and NGOs pledged millions, only $200 million was forthcoming, and rather reluctantly, the Ecuadorian government opened up the park to petroleum exploration. However, the Ecuadorian government maintains that oil production, now in excess of 23,000 barrels/day, is minimally invasive!

As a by-product of the creation of Yellowstone, the fight over the use of the Hetch-Hetchy Canyon in California led by John Muir, and the efforts by Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, the USA now has five Federal Bureaus charged with administering and managing the nation's forests. These are the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM alone is responsible for 253 million surface acres and 700 million subsurface mineral rights. Today, these Bureau's enforce the Multiple Use -Sustained Yield Act of 1960, conserving land resources following Pinchot ideals, and requiring that forest resources must be made available to the greatest number of Americans. On the other hand, following Muir's philosophies, the Wilderness Act of 1964 sought to preserve primitive areas in their natural state through protected National Forests, National Parks, and National Wildlife Refuges.

The battles between Pinchot and Muir and conservation and preservation of the American landscape led Aldo Leopold to conceive of a more inclusive Land Ethic in his 1939 book The Sand County Almanac. Leopold argued that ethics direct people to cooperate for the mutual benefit of all, and that this community, this land, should include all nonhuman elements such as soils, water, and animals. Although widely read and arguably the first environmentalism book, The Sand County Almanac failed to mobilize a broad-based coalition to rein in runaway capitalism and industrialization. On the other hand, Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring ultimately galvanized the environmental movement. Carson's book came at a time when many US citizens were interested in and concerned about the environment. The creation of a National Park system in the USA, along with the advent of school and work holidays, and the availability of cheaper automobiles had inspired millions in the post-depression and post-WWII eras to drive out west for yearly vacations. In doing so, the American public became more aware of the plight of the peregrine, bald eagle, buffalo, wolves, and other endangered animals. Carson's book that revealed to the general public and media the catastrophic impacts of DDT was not alone in highlighting the perils of runaway capitalism and industrialization. Apollo 11's photograph of earth rising over the moon's horizon sparked the notion of "spaceship earth" and ultimately contributed to the first Earth Day. Donella Meadows 1972 book The Limits to Growth spelled out in graphic detail several horrific future scenarios for earth given the various resourceconsumption projections. All these activities, events, and books, among many others, helped usher in the Clean Air & Water Acts of the early 1970s.

The value of the earth's support services, such as clean air, clean drinking water, and healthy soil, among a myriad of other services, has been ignored or undervalued for all of human history. But beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, their value increased as we realized we were destroying many of their beneficial activities. For instance, deforestation belatedly illustrated the importance of forests to mitigating floods and droughts, reducing soil erosion through rill and gullying and wind erosion, and the silting of rivers and dams. And globally the sequestering of carbon! According to Daily and coauthors, ecosystem services are critical to the continued existence of humanity, and they operate both at a global scale and at a microscopic level such as bacteria detritivores and cannot be replaced by technology. Sadly, human activities have and continue to impair ecosystem services across all scales, and if current trends continue, we will destroy the Earth's surviving natural ecosystems by 2050 if we are to believe the book, The Limits to Growth.

According to Cagan Sekercioglu, birds are among the most diverse groups providing ecosystem services. Birds provide bushmeat, feathers for down garments, and even to this day fertilizer in the form of guano. Vultures consume carcasses reducing the spread of rabies. The recent 97% die-off of Indian vultures has cost the Indian government an additional US$34 million in medical bills between 1993 and 2006 due to the surge in rabies across the country as the number of pariah dogs has exploded as cattle carcasses are not being efficiently cleaned by vultures. Insectivores consume invertebrate pests, while many bird species contribute to pollination, especially hummingbirds in the Western Hemisphere and sunbirds in the Eastern Hemisphere. Granivores and seed-eaters, from sparrows and finches to hornbills to oilbirds, consume wild avocados and disperse seeds, while many birds contribute cultural attributes such as feathers to native Hawaiians, native Americans (eagle feathers), and Papuans. Moreover, localities that support bird watching receive millions of dollars in tourism revenue.

Jezeer and coauthors found that five-hectare coffee farms maximize income when at least a third of their land is shade-grown coffee. The shade trees promote healthy soils through higher leaf-fall and subsequent organic decomposition (free of artificial fertilizer), and higher soil moisture through lower evaporation transpiration rates. Birds also contribute by reducing plant and tree pests, in particular, boring beetles and aphids. According to Hernandez-Aguilera and coauthors, a single insectivorous bird can save 10 to 30 kg of coffee per hectare per year. But the birds also significantly reduce or eliminate the use (and cost) of pesticides, which also reduces the cost of labor. So, although coffee yields among shade-grown coffee is typically 30% less than sun-grown coffee, there is a significant reduction in total costs. Shade-grown coffee is typically organic and commands higher prices per kg when sold to European and North American buyers. In contrast, sun-coffee plantations in Central and South American and the Caribbean have 90% fewer birds present and must use pesticides and fertilizers to the tune of $2000 per hectare. With the explosion of sun-grown coffee from Vietnam since the 1980s, many American farmers were forced out of business. Many of those coffee growers in Central and South American and the Caribbean that have survived have turned to organic shade-grown coffee that can also be sold through fair-trade high-end coffee companies. Gustave Axelson interviewed the Fernández family in Costa Rica in 2019 who grow shade-grown coffee. Richard Fernández, the eldest son, noted that they typically have zero coffee beans spoiled by the broca, the coffee borer beetle. They get more profits "because the habitat is very comfortable and pleasant for birds." And the family receives two premiums-a Rainforest Alliance certification, and the other from Nespresso who are their main buyer because their farm meets their Nespresso's AAA Sustainable Quality certificate. As one of the benefits, Richard sees toucans nearly every single day. ◄

The ecological services that bats offer frequently mirror those services offered by birds, but bats operate at night. Bats provide bushmeat, although given their colonial nesting and roosting, they provide a fertile setting for virus incubation! In response, bats have fierce immune responses that drive viruses to higher virulence and greater lethality when these viruses infect humans. Nevertheless, bats are significant tropical pollinators, and significant consumers of invertebrate agricultural pests. Interestingly, according to Puig-Montserrat and coauthors, bats have proved especially effective in controlling borer infestations in rice paddies in Spain such that the cost of deploying bat boxes is offset by the reduction in pesticide usage.

The cutting up of our once great forests has left much of our forests as patches or isolates among a matrix of high-and low-intensity agricultural fields and urban sprawl, and as a result, their ecosystem services are much reduced. By the 1980s, conservationists had developed a rule termed SLOSS that stated that a single large reserve is superior to several small reserves of equal size to the large reserve. However, Simberloff found that sometimes a few smaller isolated patches of forest could be more diverse than one big forest patch, and hence the smaller patches were worth protecting. This would depend on the size and distance from an adjacent pool of species in a larger, more intact forest, and the dispersal ability of the species in this larger forest. Furthermore, small patches exhibiting more habitat diversity might offer more habitats than a larger patch. In 1976, Lovejoy set out to address these issues in the Minimum Critical Size Ecosystem Project near Manaus, Brazil. Today, this project is named Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project and it covers some 1000 km 2 . Lovejoy's work suggests that one large reserve can hold more species at equilibrium conditions where emigration balances extinctions more than a small reserve. Nevertheless, a reserve located closer to other reserves that are tenuously connected to or at least clustered near each other support more species than a group of reserves that are disjunct or arrayed in a line. A round reserve will hold more species than an elongated one, while a reserve with a river or multiple habitat types will maintain more species than a reserve lacking habitat variation and/or rivers. Lovejoy's work also suggested that a newly isolated reserve will temporarily hold more species than its equilibrium number, but that surplus of species will eventually disappear, as ecosystem decay occurs. The rate at which relaxation occurs will be faster for small reserves than for large ones, while different species require different minimum areas to support an enduring population.

The key element of ecosystem services is the need to understand that very large numbers of species and populations are required to sustain ecosystem services. It is no use just saving giant pandas or elephants; we must save and restore entire ecosystems and not just fragments as Lovejoy's work illustrates. However, minor changes to damaged ecosystems can restore the overall ecosystem to a healthy condition. Yellowstone and the reintroduction of the wolf illustrate the complexities and unexpected changes that can occur even within highly protected forest and wilderness landscapes if these environments are allowed to function as naturally as possible. Although in Yellowstone's case, it is surrounded by a human-mosaic of land uses.

Yellowstone is a microcosm of our modern earth. It is isolated from the surrounding wild matrix of landscapes in Canada and the USA by extensive cattle-utilized rangelands and cultivated and irrigated lands and low-density urban sprawl. And by 1926, the apex predator, the gray wolf, had been eliminated by a government-sponsored eradication program designed to support the adjacent ranchers and protect their cattle. The impact within Yellowstone National Park was catastrophic. Without predatory controls on elk and coyotes, these two animals changed the Yellowstone ecosystem. The elk herd multiplied and changed the spatial nature of forest regeneration within the park, while the growing coyote populations reduced the numbers and diversity of small herbivores and birds throughout the park. Aspens retreated upslope and seed and sapling recruitment ceased due to increasing elk grazing pressures. Elk trampling along and within water courses reduced willow tree density and recruitment, and streams and rivers became muddy and warmer, killing off many native fish. Beaver numbers collapsed as tree recruitment failed around the meadows and valleys; as a result, beaver dams and meadows began to disappear from the park and with them many insect, fish, amphibian and bird species, dependent on these meadows, disappeared as well. Within 70 years of wolf removal, the biodiversity of Yellowstone had crashed, while seed/sapling recruitment among aspen and willows had declined. Even grizzly bears had declined as fewer wolf kills were available to them to scavenge and fewer trees harbored berries in the fall. In essence, a negative trophic cascade had occurred in the 70 years that wolves were absent from the park.

In 1995, this all changed with the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone NP. Although wolves are not numerous throughout the park, their impact and resulting positive trophic cascades has begun to naturally repair a damaged ecosystem. The wolves kill the young, weak, and old mule deer, elk, and moose. These deer now avoid the valleys and gorges where they might be trapped by hunting wolves, and as a result, aspen, cottonwood, and willow trees have regenerated; tree height has grown fivefold since 1995. Beavers have returned and now forage on the new sapling and growing trees. The new beaver dams have become havens for otters, muskrats, ducks, and fish. The dams have improved water quality by trapping sediment, replenishing groundwater, and cooling water. Trout and other fish have returned to the park.

Wolves have also predated on coyotes, and this has led to more rabbits and mice, which led to more hawks, weasels, badgers, and foxes. The wolves have left more carrion and that has benefited both bears and bald eagles. The bears also have more access to fruit and berries resources during their feeding frenzy before hibernation. Finally, and most unexpectedly, the wolves have altered stream and river dynamics because they have excluded deer from the valleys. Rivers braid less, suffer less bank erosion, and exhibit deeper pools and more riffles as regenerating trees have strengthened stream and river banks.

Hunting guides and their clients have benefited in two ways. First, the wolves have helped to create a healthier population of mule deer, elk, and moose by removing the less desired animals from the gene pool, and second, the hunting guides now also guide tourists to see and photograph (but not kill) wolves.

In summary, climate change is likely to lead to major populational health impacts, at the same time that we are at a peak energy crisis (peak oil production occurred in 2007) and we have exhausted many of the natural resources that allowed us to achieve our current state of civilization. We are also rapidly approaching the Earth's carrying capacity and capacity for ecological services to save us. However, recent reductions in GHG emissions and coal-generated electrical production, increases in renewable energy forms such that several countries routinely produce 100% of their electrical needs from sustainable energy forms, and wolf introduction to Yellowstone hold out hope that at the very cliff of environment destruction, we might be able to save ourselves and others! But we are failing to save our tropical lowland forests, our last great site for terrestrial carbon sequestration. We cannot allow business-as-usual approaches to resource consumption to continue, we cannot let The Limits to Growth accurately predict the demise of our civilization and the rampant and deadly pollution of the earth by our industrial and consumptive activities.

Carbon emissions fall as electricity producers move away from coal. The Guardian

Coffee made in the shade can be more profitable, thanks to birds. Living Bird magazine

The biomass distribution on earth

Biodiversity conservation and the struggle for the Nanda Devi biosphere reserve

The J curve: A new way to understand why nations rise and fall

Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals -Study. The Guardian

Life cycle assessment of disposable and reusable nappies in the UK. Environment Agency

Ivermectin, 'wonder drug' from Japan: The human use perspective

Exploitation, conservation, preservation: a geographic perspective on natural resource use (No

What are ecosystem services. Global environmental challenges for the twenty-first century: Resources, consumption and sustainable solutions

Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. 263 p

Climate change indicators: U.S. greenhouse gas emissions

Green fantasies: Photographic representations of biodiversity and ecotourism in the Western Pacific

Am inconvenient truth: The planetary emergency of global warming and what can we do about it

Resurgent vector-borne diseases as a global health problem

Wasted: How America is losing up to 40 percent of its food from farm to fork to landfill

The party's over: Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies

The economics and ecology of shade-grown coffee: A model to incentivize shade and bird conservation

Ecotourism and sustainable development: Who owns paradise?

Long-term climate variations in China and global warming signals

Hydropower status report: Sector trends and insights

The limited potential of ecotourism to contribute to wildlife conservation

Europe's Dark Cloud-how coal burning countries are making their neighbours sick

Ecotourism: Suicide or development? Voices from Africa #6: sustainable development, UN non-governmental liaison service

The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism

Does social capital have an economic payoff ? A cross-country investigation

The long emergency: Surviving the end of oil, climate change, and other converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century

Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient near east

Diapers: Environmental impacts and lifecycle analysis (no. 677.21 L524d)

Dire predictions: Understanding global warming

Climate change vulnerability index 2016. Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas

The Aral Sea disaster

Uzbekistan: A dying sea, mafia rule, and toxic fish

Exposure to ecotourism reduces survival and affects stress response in hoatzin chicks (Opisthocomus hoazin)

Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications

Tourism to altruism: The emergence of private protected areas in Chile

Pest control service provided by bats in Mediterranean rice paddies: Linking agroecosystems structure to ecological functions

Shifting diets for a sustainable food future

Forsaken earth: The ongoing mass extinction

Community-based ecotourism: Opportunities and difficulties for local communities and link to conservation

Why cloth diapers might not be the greener choice, after all

Seasonal investigation of heavy metals in marine fishes captured from the bay of Bengal and the implications for human health risk assessment

The ship breaking and recycling industry in Bangladesh and Pakistan

Impacts of birdwatching on human and avian communities

Increasing awareness of avian ecological function

Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale

Valuing the greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power: A critical survey

Globalization and its discontents

Limits to growth: The 30-year update

Global change and human vulnerability to vector-borne diseases

Germany: Best Governed Country In Environment

Economic aspects of ecotourism: Wildlife-based tourism and its contributions to nature

Ecotourism, paradise lost -a Thai case study

Portugal reaches 100% renewables, ends fossil fuel subsides. Renew Economy 9

Physiological and behavioral differences in magellanic penguin chicks in undisturbed and tourist-visited locations of a Colony

World-systems analysis

Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment

The United Nations world water development report 2015: Water for a sustainable world

Ecotourism: The uneasy alliance. Conservation International/Ernst and Young