The geology professor warns of what awaits us in the future: man to the planet, like cancer to a living organism

The prestigious BAFTA awards have been awarded for documentaries and programs produced by the BBC, an honorary doctorate from many universities has been awarded to a 94-year-old Briton named after a polar ship, plant and animal species, and a scientist Vilnius agrees: “Let’s stop, catastrophe is imminent.”

– Professor, the phrase ‘living in the shadow of a catastrophe’ is heard more and more. Isn’t it exaggerated?

– No, you’re absolutely right. An article has recently been published describing the current state of all terrestrial systems that are important to human existence. Most of them are already exhausted and end up completely collapsing. For example, global catches in the oceans have reached such proportions that fish stocks are overexploited. Rainforests, which regulate the hydrological cycle and climate, are being destroyed so that people have areas to grow soybeans that, as David Attenborough wrote, could feed cattle on giant farms for more meat.

The amount of CO2 increases with acceleration, in parallel with the growth of human well-being. This increases the temperature and the probability of catastrophic events: storms, floods, droughts that can destroy the basis of our diet. All systems are on the brink of collapse. It seems to us that the most important goal is to increase GDP growth, such a model of capitalism: the economy must grow steadily, but the planet has finite resources. Over time, the rate of consumption must equal the rate of renewal of those resources, and now we are consuming something hundreds of times faster than it is capable of renewing. Nature will take it away from us.

– How to withdraw? Those disasters you mentioned?

– It could be global hunger, instability, mass migration of people, when millions will no longer migrate, as they do now, but billions. Some of these migrations will try to resist and genocide is likely to begin: someone will protect their resources, someone will want to take them away. And they just won’t. We will be like those bacteria in the Petri dish that ate all the sugar, with only the by-products remaining. We are moving towards that. And we have to realize that in order to get started.

The operational philosophy is now this: we live to spam, increase our productivity and most products are concentrated in a very small part of the population.

In other words, most people increase productivity, but the wealth they create goes to the minority. Because of that minority, we have overexploited our planet: we are cutting the branch we are sitting on. To live well enough, we would have far fewer resources than we are wasting now.

As David Attenborough mentioned, four fifths of farmland is used for livestock so that we can feed the animals from which we get meat and milk. However, such consumption is not effective. Animals eat grass and grow meat through their metabolism, which gives us a tenth of the energy that we could get if we ate plant foods.

Meat must once again be a luxury, it must be eaten much less, as our ancestors did. It would be more beneficial to health and would not lead to extinction. It is estimated that by giving up meat, we could give wildlife the size of the North American continent. We live, we consume a lot and we think that we are not doing anything wrong. But for us, by our order, others do it, so the whole chain is formed.

– David Attenborough is building a new chapter in his life book, starting with eloquent figures: rising CO2 over the years, a growing human population, and declining areas of wildlife. Do these parameters better illustrate the changes on our planet?

– Yes. According to my calculations, it would take several hundred years to return CO2 emissions to the earth’s crust. And so far we have this: the climate will continue to warm, there will be more fires, overheating, catastrophic rains, droughts, floods. It can be said that today we are still living in the good old days, which are constantly deteriorating along with economic growth.

We must stop growing, move to a stable state. Some evolutionary biologists have compared humanity to the dynamics of cancer. After all, cancer is nothing more than an endogenously formed parasite that kills cells that spread throughout the body. The man works in a similar way. It appeared in the biosphere, spread through it and began to destroy it. And he rejoices that he takes more and more resources from the structure that supports his life. When a person feels like a winner, a conqueror of nature, he will be a loser.

– Is the current pandemic a sign of defeat?

– Of course. In this way, nature regulates the excess of humanity. Man travels into the wild, catches and sells meat from many species of animals in markets, and pathogens spread instantly throughout the world. What about other pandemics after COVID-19? The question is not if and when they will be. Of course there will be. And let’s keep in mind that as the weather warms, its rate of spread will increase.

– And Sir David in his book, and talks about the extinction of species. What is the process

– It happened more than once, and if it happened now, nature would not disappear. More precisely, the nature that we know and in which we are would disappear. In other words, the world will not disappear anywhere, nature will recover, only we will not have a place there. So we have to protect nature to preserve ourselves.

– The book “Life on our planet” states that once in 10,000 years the planet’s climate has not changed by more than one degree.

– During the Holocene, when the glaciers melted, the climate stabilized. We exist in an anomalous period of stable climate, which has allowed us to expand in this way. Before that it was very hot or very cold. As soon as the human population began to grow, that growth was immediately interrupted by changes in temperature. We have had 10,000 years of climate stability, but now we want to break that success card for ourselves.

– You said that global warming is more terrible than nuclear war. Really?

– Of course. Hundreds of millions would die if nuclear war broke out. That, of course, is scary. After that, the soot would rise to the stratosphere and block the sun’s rays, and a cold nuclear winter would begin. As a result, billions more would die. It would take maybe a year. But today’s global warming due to harmful human activities and the associated depletion of civilization will last for centuries or millennia. Imagine a bad harvest, an endless drought for a hundred years in a row, without respite. We can compare a nuclear war to a blow to the fist and global warming to a moving bulldozer. He rolls over us. No matter how much we win, we will have to suffer, we will not disappear from the planet.

– And have we already done everything to our ears?

– Yes. We continue to deny that, we exist as if it were not tomorrow. As David Attenborough says, the consequences of our behavior are disastrous, but if we act, we can go in the right direction and we can reduce those effects. How? Working as precisely as possible in the direction of renewable energy, wasting resources as much as possible, such as consuming meat, forgoing disposable packaging – twenty years ago, people used the same glass bottle many times.

The current philosophy that everything must be used and discarded so that whoever produces has a job leads to destruction. We should exist in a more sustainable way and the quality of life indicator should not be the gross domestic product but the sustainability index. Recently, I heard on the radio that a person wears purchased clothes on average seven times and then throws them away. You can imagine? Seven! So we buy because stocks are cheap because we want that moment, then we throw them away.

– To do?

– First of all, consume less. Sir David Attenborough writes about the prevailing attitude in ancient cultures: take all you need, no more. Once upon a time, the Indians hunted bison and consumed everything. The Europeans arrived, they began to shoot the beasts in vain, they barbarously used bones as fertilizers, they threw away what they did not use.

We do a lot of experiments on a planetary level with the climate system, the soil, the drinking water and we really experiment with ourselves. In Lithuania, we are rich in drinking water, but if a drought starts, it can disappear. According to climate projections, one day it will be unbearably hot in the Mediterranean, as in the Sahara. Then refugees from southern Europe will travel to seek help in Lithuania or other colder countries.

This is because humanity has never existed in the heat that already exists. And what else will it be! We are moving into another climatic state, although we try not to think about it and do nothing. Until now, environmental sciences are less valued than those of manufacturing objects, devices. In fact, every person who graduates from university must take a course in geosciences, ecology, must learn the basics of how our planet exists in order to learn to live rationally. Today, for example, eating tuna can be equated to a crime.

Because tunas are predators, they regulate fish populations in the oceans, which also leads to a decrease in their resources. Tunas are disappearing, some species have almost disappeared, but they are still in their meat stores. This is not how it was supposed to be. For sharks not to fish for tuna, it would take decades. If we overfill the fish populations, we will experience the fate of some Caribbean seas, which have been dominated by jellyfish, which eat fish fry.

David Attenborough with his amazing movies and this book helps us understand what kind of world we live in. And the world doesn’t end at the office. It is not our city or town where we think we are safe. No. If we don’t stop, future gears will go through us like a roller of asphalt. And it won’t matter what our political opinions are about what we dream about. Global change is “democratic”, affecting those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in the same way as anti-taxpayers, academics and ordinary workers.

So maybe we think about consumption?