"The Biosphere Does Not Belong to Us; We Belong to It."

Friday, December 31, 2021

SECOND OF 2 PARTS

Almost exactly two years ago, environmentalists were making a push for the Massachusetts legislature to advance a bill that was the predecessor of today's House Bill 912, An Act Relative to Forest Protection, now before the Joint Committee on Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture.  The bill they were advocating for had the same title, An Act Relative to Forest Protection, but a different number, House Bill 897; ultimately it did not move beyond the House Ways and Means Committee.

The contents of today's bill, H.912, are similar to the previous bill, H.897, but not identical. Read the texts side by side and you easily see where parts of the original have been dropped, parts have been altered, and new parts have been inserted.  

There's nothing unusual about that. Texts of proposed laws are changed all the time as bills wend their way through the legislative process.  The process exposes flaws and weaknesses.  And it is responsive to the voices of influential experts of all kinds and of powerful opponents who cannot be ignored if bill sponsors and bill supporters are serious about getting something into law.

Late in 2019 and early in 2020, proponents of An Act Relative to Forest Protection brought out some big names to lift their cause, including the noted journalist and author Bill McKibben ("The End of Nature") and E.O. Wilson, a retired Harvard University biology professor who won a slew of awards for his academic work and his writing for general audiences.  His book "On Human Nature" won the Pulitzer for general non-fiction in 1979.

After Wilson's recent death, The New York Times published a detail-rich obituary, "E.O. Wilson, a Pioneer of Evolutionary Biology, Dies at 92," 12-27-21.  It contained this assessment by Paula J. Ehrlich, chief executive and president of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation: "His courageous scientific focus and poetic voice transformed our way of understanding ourselves and our planet."

Back in 2019, Wilson wrote a letter of support for An Act Relative to Forest Protection, asserting, "This is the single most important action the people of the state can take to preserve our natural heritage.  As it has many times in the past, Massachusetts can provide leadership on this issue, inspiring other states across the country to take similar bold actions." 

Wilson's letter on the bill also (notably) said: 

"Many decades of research have convinced me and many other conservation biologists that we must save at least half of the Earth from industrial exploitation if we hope to avoid catastrophic plant and animal extinctions.  A bill introduced into this Massachusetts legislative session would make us the first state to give this protection to all of its public lands.  I strongly support this bill, which will permanently protect (11%) of the Massachusetts land area, reaching from the Berkshires to the Atlantic Coast."

I don't have as great an understanding of An Act Relative to Forest Protection, in either its former or current iteration, as I would like.  I do not know enough about the nuances of the strictures the bill would impose, or about the bigger questions on conservation of our state's natural resources, to say it ought to pass now.  But I do know the obvious: winters were a lot colder and snowier when I was a kid in Revere than they are now, and Wilson's case for preserving half the natural world deserves to be considered on an urgent basis.

In an article he wrote, "A Biologist's Manifesto for Preserving Life on Earth," published in December, 2016, in "Sierra," the magazine of the Sierra Club, Wilson made the  argument for "Half Earth" thusly:

"We are playing a global endgame.  Humanity's grasp on the planet is not strong; it is growing weaker.  Freshwater is growing short; the atmosphere and the seas are increasingly polluted as a result of what has transpired on land.  The climate is changing in ways unfavorable to life, except for microbes, jellyfish, and fungi.  For many species, these changes are already fatal.

"...A biographic scan of Earth's principal habitats shows that a full representation of its ecosystems and the vast majority of its species can be saved within half the planet's surface.  At one-half and above, life on Earth enters the safe zone.  Within that half, more than 80 percent of the species would be stabilized.

"There is a second, psychological argument for protecting half of Earth.  Half-Earth is a goal -- and people understand and appreciate goals.  They need a victory, not just news that progress is being made...It is our nature to choose large goals that, while difficult, are potentially game changing and universal in benefit.  To strive against odds on behalf of all of life would be humanity at its most noble.

"...The biosphere does not belong to us; we belong to it."

I am a collector, a hoarder, I regret to say, of newspaper and magazine articles and books that make an impression upon me.  Often I have no particular reason for cutting out an article or a quote or an excerpt from an article, other than I think it might come in handy one day when I have to write something or might be the key to a door beyond which I will gain an understanding of a problem that has occupied me a long time or where I will perceive a puzzling situation in a new, clear light.

Out of that hoard recently tumbled a copy of a letter to the editor of The New York Times, dated Sept. 14, 2013, from Allen Hershkowitz, who was identified in a post-script as "a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council."  The letter was a response to a column by Eric C. Ellis that had recently appeared on the Times's Op-Ed page under the headline, "Overpopulation Is Not the Problem."  Mr. Hershkowitz's letter said, in part: 

"Contrary to the impression left by Mr. Ellis's article, nature is the ultimate source of all economic value.  (Bold facing added)  No commerce is possible without clean air, clean water, fertile topsoil, a chemically stable atmosphere, raw materials for food, energy and medicine, and the natural processing of wastes by the millions of species inhabiting our soil, water and air.

"It is the availability of these at-risk ecological services that makes possible the technical innovations that Mr. Ellis is banking on." 

Every now and then, it is good for us in Massachusetts to remember that high technology, higher education, advanced medical research and care, biotechnology, biomedicine, pharmaceuticals, etc. -- treasures though they undoubtedly be -- are not our Commonwealth's ultimate source of all economic value.


 



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