“We must listen to science and take action to avoid collapse... We are reaching points of no return.” —Susana Muhamad, (COP16 President)

Figure 1: Annual global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from 1940 to 2024. The estimate for 2024 is provisional and based on data from January to October. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service /ECMWF.

CHANGE ALWAYS COMES with hubris. The data are in and some will take pride in the success of years of climate denial and obstruction of science. 2024 is proving to be the warmest year on record yet. Less than a decade after the world’s governments committed to keep climate deregulation below 1.5°C, thanks to the well-orchestrated disinformation and obstruction campaigns of the fossil fuel industry lobby, we remain entrenched in an economic status quo which for fifty years has been known to be unsustainable. As a result we have now breached the 1.5°C limit and are set to exceed that consistently over the coming years. As Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth tersely summed up the situation: “The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5°C is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act.” Both COP 16 in Cali and COP29 at Baku have been resounding failures because the system has been gamed to protect the fossil fuel industry’s interests, not the interests of ordinary human beings who depend on nature’s well-being.

In fact, the World Wildlife Foundation’s 2024 Living Planet Report sums it up: “Nature is being lost—with huge implications for us all.” Every indicator shows serious global species population declines and seven of nine of the Earth’s natural boundaries being exceeded. Failure to address economic problems clearly identified 30 years ago at Rio is either triggering or bringing us dangerously close to “tipping points” that have been on the horizon for the past decade. Change increasingly resembles a free-fall.

In BC change comes like Carl Sandburg’s fog—“on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.” Change like the fog has its ebb and flow. Change in BC is full of contradictions and inherently foggy. In a country in which federal lawyers can shamelessly argue that Canada has no legal obligation to provide First Nations with clean water, notwithstanding that access to potable water is a human right, some momentous change sometimes comes, even if it is to recede in short-sighted economic realities. With the implementation of Gaayhllxid/Gíhlagalgang “Rising Tide” agreement the federal and provincial governments have had the courage to live up to their obligations to recognize aboriginal title under UNDRIP. The Rising Tide agreement returns title and governance of “crown lands” in Haida Gwai to the Haida Nation. While not perfect, in principle this agreement heralds the kind of cultural change that is needed to prioritize the rights of the land and other species, which is key to addressing climate change. Recognition of aboriginal title does not just redress decades of dispossession and exploitation. In theory it marks a shift in the cultural management assumptions of two centuries of capitalism and colonialism that have resulted in the devastation of at least two thirds of the forests and ecosystems of this province. In principle it prioritizes the rights of nature, not the misappropriated rights of the stock market and corporations.

This is important for climate change, not because of its focus on aboriginal rights, or the correction of historical wrongs. It is important for the same reasons that made the the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights possible. Written as a response to the intolerance and racism that were the focus of the Nuremberg trials, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a recognition of the rights of “the other.” It is a recognition of the rights of other ways of beings and a call to the imperative of tolerance and respect for the rule of law. It is in that sense the groundwork for “woke” acceptance of other ways of being and decolonialization. The key to addressing climate change lies in the recognition and tolerance of “the other,” and of our historic obligation to basic environmental and climate justice. Baku and Cali failed because of the opposition of wealthy countries to recognize the importance of climate and environmental justice. Gaayhllxid/Gíhlagalgang is a recognition of the other and an expression of environmental justice.

The practical reality of reconciliation is somewhat at odds with the theory when we stop to consider the social impact of economic assimilation. Alaskan First Nations in Ketchikan and Metlakatla live in fear of the proposed development of rare earth mines in Canada’s “Golden Triangle”. They fear that the expansion and development of mines upstream will contaminate their rivers and destroy their native salmon runs that are essential to their economic and cultural survival. Seventy years on, the memory of the contamination of the Taku River by the Tulsequah Chief mine which leached arsenic and heavy metals from 1951 to 1957, and has yet to be cleaned up, is still fresh in everybody’s mind.

Notwithstanding the perpetual claim that “in BC we mine responsibly”, the Mount Polley disaster and the Teck mining contamination of the Elk Valley are just more recent cross-border irritants that were singled out in a 2020 letter in Science detailing BC’s de facto poor mining practices. None of that has been cleaned up yet, so Alaskan First Nations have every right to be very concerned. Although the mining industry claims compliance with water quality guidelines, testing downstream from these mines revealed “concentrations of copper, cadmium, selenium and zinc on the Canadian side, in some cases “at sites downstream relative to operating or historic mines,” that exceeded provincial guidelines. Sediment samples from sites in both Alaska and British Columbia had concentrations of elements above provincial and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration guidelines for aquatic life.”

Of perhaps greater concern is the inter-indigenous handling of the rights of “the other”, bearing in mind everybody’s obligation to water quality as a human right. No mine in Canada can be developed without entering in some form of partnership or royalties agreement with local First Nations. Nisga’a Nation are part owners of five of the major mines in the Golden Triangle, as are Tahltan, Haida and Wet’suwet’en Nations. In June of this year Nisga’a Nation launched the indigenous-owned “Nations Royalty Corp.” which began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange. The point here is that this is “economic-reconciliation”, and this too is part of the indigenous or aboriginal economy, which is firmly grounded in conventional extractive capitalism. It is therefore misleading to pitch the concern for the survival of salmon in rivers downstream from the mines of BC’s Golden Triangle as a simple opposition between indigenous groups in concert with environmentalists, and a mining industry dominated by settlers. It is not just complicated, it is downright foggy, particularly when it leads to cross border indigenous disagreements.

As suggested in a recent review of a book by the noted American First Nations’ botanist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World), it is time to rethink the foundations of capitalist economic thinking, and replace references to: “natural resources” with “Earthly Gifts”as understood in “aboriginal economies.” Together with an increasing number of scientists, in the wake of the failures of COP15 on Biodiversity and of COP 29 in Baku, largely because the fossil fuel industry hijacked the agenda, Kimmerer comes to the conclusion that: “climate policies and action fail at the global level because of our collective failure to value gift economies. A continued emphasis on climate solutions based in capitalism will yield little progress, no matter how many resources and funds are allocated to convenings where global leaders and politicians discuss climate change.” The passage is highlighted in boldface, because the sentiment is increasingly repeated in science journals, and it reiterates the economic advice of the Club of Rome, and the Limits to Growth working groups since 1970. This is not a trivial point, because since the end of the Second World we have benefitted from the prosperity of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement which undergirds American global hegemony and the relatively stable “pax americana” that has come with it. The capitalist economic system that came with Bretton Woods is now showing severe signs of stress, and is greatly challenged by economists and intellectuals of developing countries, such as Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), who have been at the forefront of questioning the ideological foundations of the colonial capitalism on which Bretton Woods rests. The economic rise of developing countries, notably India and China, combined with the climate crisis, puts into question the viability of American capitalism. If the climate change crisis cannot be resolved within the current economic system under the American aegis, the problem will not go away, and will find a solution under another economic system and under another leadership. The global social tensions we see today should be interpreted as a jockeying for that global leadership.

If we are to address the ongoing climate and biodiversity emergencies, we need to return to what Wall Kimmerer proposed when she was invited to talk at a “College of Natural Resources.” To understand Indigenous values within economies that are not rooted in consumerism and do not view nature as an ecosystem service, she proposes that the college change the department’s name to the “College of Earthly Gifts”.  Such a reframing, she believes, would better convey the reciprocity of our relationship with the planet. (“It’s [a] beautiful idea,” a colleague later tells her, “but it would kind of put the kibosh on grinding up trees.”)

Indeed this move would put the kibosh to “the economy” which is destroying both the planet and human culture. And that also has contradictory consequences for the various subjective interpretations of “Reconciliation” in British Columbia, as illustrated by the Nisga’a and Tahltan First Nations’ mining interests in the Golden Triangle, which we should not ignore, and which affect us all. Reconciliation begins with the land—not with economic assimilation into a failing system that pitches conflicting interests across borders and forgets that rivers and waters are highways that bind us in economies of sharing “Earthly Gifts” in a global village.

How bad the devastation is caused by one hundred and fifty years of extractivism and cornucopian belief in technology in British Columbia was locally illustrated by the massive Chilcotin landslide at the end of July which shocked the nation. This single phenomenon was a focus of public attention because of its impact on the salmon runs of the Fraser River, but it was by no means a unique slide event, as will be discussed below. Similar landslides are becoming increasingly common as climate change progresses particularly in permafrost regions. The causes of this slide, reviewed by Dr. Younes Alila (Forest Hydrology, UBC) are highly instructive. While an atmospheric river consistent with climate change impacts triggered the slide, the clearcutting of about two-thirds of the regional watersheds at increasing rates over the last thirty years resulted in increasing fluctuation of the water table, which loosened the deep accumulation of glacial till (“soil”) characteristic of these watersheds.

As every scientist knows, it is never one single cause but a complex of factors that increases the probability of a disaster. In this case, the complex of causes was largely driven by poor management practices prioritizing economic objectives and disregarding the wellbeing of the land and its biota. It was, after all, seen as just “natural resources” being extracted from an inert landscape made up of a collection of objects, not gifts valued and cared for that have inherent value and rights. Factors increasing the probability of an environmental disaster were entirely human: anthropogenic climate deregulation provided the trigger and industrial over-cutting set the scene.

The consequences of the failure to understand the geological and biological individuality of the site, to appreciate and control climate change drivers and to minimize biodiversity impacts, all contributed to make this a disastrous year for salmon runs throughout the system of watersheds that feed BC’s lakes and rivers. The 2024 State of Salmon Report confirms that 2024 is shaping up to be one of the worst years on record. The Pacific Salmon Foundation’s annual survey shows that: “Of the 41 region-species combinations we assessed, more than 70 per cent are below their long-term average spawner abundance.” Contrary to climate change expectations that salmon productivity and abundance would move north, declines are worse in northern ecosystems, and some recovery coinciding with stewardship efforts are observed in the south (Fraser, Vancouver Island and Coastal inlets).

The 70 per cent figure may not be coincidental. It tallies with global trends in species population declines since 1970. It isn’t just BC’s salmon that are in decline. There are documented population-level declines going on all around the world. The biennial Living Planet Report prepared by the Zoological Society of London and the WWF concludes that: “Over the past 50 years (1970–2020), the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73 per cent, as measured by the Living Planet Index (LPI). This is based on almost 35,000 population trends and 5,495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest declines, falling by 85 per cent, followed by terrestrial (69 per cent) and marine populations (56 per cent).” This year’s 70 per cent decline in wild Pacific salmon long-term spawner abundance throughout British Columbia is therefore not an anomaly. It is simply consistent with global trends of declines in wildlife populations in both aquatic and terrestrial environments. It is a normal response to the economically-driven over-exploitation of the planet and a straightforward manifestation of the declining natural productivity of the Earth.

This picture is consistent with the collapse of the ecological processes associated with “carbon sinks” that have until now been essential to constraining CO2 impacts associated with the climate impacts of fossil fuels and land development. Rising ocean temperatures are now adversely impacting productive ecosystems of coral, kelp and eelgrass, as well as fish and marine bird productivity. With the rise in temperatures that made 2023 and 2024 hottest years on record, we now have unprecedented reports of forests no longer being able to absorb carbon, and ocean temperatures disrupting the algal productivity essential to fixing atmospheric carbon. In other words, we have maxed out the capacity of the natural carbon sinks. If we have not already set in motion accelerated tipping points, as suggested by a study published in Science in February, before we knew that 2024 was crossing 1.5°C, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is well en route to reaching a tipping point. Unfortunately, here, as with the reality of the climate, the basic physics seem to be meaningless to 90 per cent of the planet’s population and the politicians whom they elect to lead them.

As with pacific salmon, Environment Canada’ s The State of Canada’s Birds Report 2024 indicates a 36 per cent population decrease of bird species since 1970. However, it also reports an increase with strong recoveries in waterfowl, birds of prey and wetland birds (Figure 2):

Figure 2: Population trends of the state of 10 groups of native Canadian birds since 1970 (The State of Canada’s Birds 2024 Report, Environment and Climate Change Canada)

The positive spin in this report is that the data seem to indicate, as with salmon, recovery in urban areas in BC where restoration has been a priority. Where conservation action has been taken (in wetland, waterfowl and birds of prey), declines in bird populations appear to have been halted and reversed: “Overall results of the report indicate that 36 per cent of species has decreased in population, while 31 per cent of Canada’s bird species has increased since 1970, with some of strongest recoveries seen in waterfowl, birds of prey, and wetland birds. The data shows us that when deliberate and informed action for conservation is taken, declines in bird populations can be halted and reversed.”

Those numbers however may be questionable because by grouping “Birds” in very general categories it takes a very broad sweep that does not really tell us what is happening at the species population and species diversity levels. It may tell us that we have a lot of mallards and a lot of crows in urbanized artificial Ducks Unlimited ponds, but it may not be providing an accurate picture of the dynamics of the ecological re-organization and extinction that is happening around us. This may not be giving the public a real picture of the state of the environment, and the long-term instability of these numbers. [The data do not square with this author’s personal observations of 2024 duck population declines in Strathcona Provincial Park.]

While important in giving the public a general picture, The State of Canada’s Birds 2024 presents a biased picture of the state of nature as a static collection of bird groups, when it is in fact an interplay of species in an increasingly unstable environment. It glaringly overlooks the ongoing impact that avian flu (HPAIV) and climate change are having on the very groups which are reported to be be in recovery, namely: raptors, ducks and wetland birds. As of 2024 HPAIV has already been reported to have had a dramatic impact on European bird populations. In 2023 Nemeth et al reported Bald eagle HPAIV mortalities in Georgia and the southeastern USA. Recent work indicates that the initial observations of bald eagles affected by HPAIV in the southeastern United States appear to be rapidly spreading across the continent. Following a mass-mortality event of seabirds in 2022 in Eastern Canada, Stephanie Avery-Gomms et al reported that: “Correcting for double counting, HPAIV is estimated to have caused 40,391 wild bird mortalities in eastern Canada during the spring and summer of 2022; however, this figure underestimates total mortality as it excludes unreported deaths on land and at sea. Seabirds and sea ducks, long-lived species that are slow to recover from perturbations, accounted for 98.7 per cent of estimated mortalities.” As Avery-Gomms et al note, it is extremely hard to ascertain mortality rates and the cause of individual wild sea bird mortality. Most of the information comes from “inhabited” regions of eastern Canada. Entire areas in a country as vast as Canada where the human population, and therefore, observation, remains scant, are a black box.

There are two points to be observed with regards to HPAIV which the public and politicians do not seem to be aware of or connect together. The first is that HPAIV is a potentially zoonotic virus which mutates rapidly. The second is that its spread and transmissibility are a reflection of the state of our environment and the extent to which it is being altered. The more unstable the environment is the more the reservoir organisms and their predators become physiologically stressed, the more the virus is likely to spread and adapt.

HPAIV is spreading. It has been reported in Caspian tern colonies on the west coast, and has been observed to have spread to pinniped populations. It mutates rapidly and is transmissible from wild to domestic bird populations, and it is zoonotic. The virus is therefore spreading to wild mammalian populations, and to humans. On November 12 BC confirmed its first case of avian flu transmission to a human being.

A 2023 paper in Nature Microbiology reported on “Climate change impacts on bird migration and highly pathogenic avian influenza”. It attributes the transmission of the virus not just to the slow progress of long-term climate change, which is mistakenly thought of by lay persons as a linear or arithmetic progression that sets impacts in a distant future, but to EWEs (Extreme Weather Events). As everybody in the world is increasingly aware, climate change is increasingly experienced as a succession of extreme weather events. In the opinion of this international team of American and Chinese researchers (Diann J. Prosser, Claire S. Teitelbaum, Shenglai Yin, Nichola J. Hill & Xiangming Xiao) it is these extreme events that trigger and facilitate the spread and transmission of the virus. The authors put together what a regime of extreme weather events signify for bird populations, and how that translates in disease dynamics. The re-alignment and re-assortment of species ranges, habitats and niches affects food availability, body condition, immunity and reproductive ability. Those conditions increase transmissibility of the virus. HPAIV is only one of the many zoonotics likely to emerge in the coming decades.

The Chilcotin landslide illustrates just one well-publicized case of the growing climate-associated, landscape-level environmental instability that we are increasingly witnessing. It is just the most emblematic of many similar events happening across mountainscapes in Canada and the world. Readers may recall that in spring 2021, I reported and commented on a mass-wastage event that took out a lake and sent a 100-metre wave down the Southgate River valley in Bute Inlet. It was just another event caused by the impact of climate change on rock friability. These landscapes are being destabilized by anthropogenic impacts, in which climate deregulation and EWEs play an increasingly large role. For most of us they occur in remote locations and remain out of sight and out of mind. The Alpine Club of Canada’s 2024 State of the Mountains Report documents not just data concerning the destabilization of the snowpack and the melting of glaciers, but also reports growing concern with increased instabilities of rock and soil landmasses with the loss of permafrost. As with the Chilcotin River event, the 2023 rockslide at the Chandindu River in the Yukon initially went unreported, and similarly blocked river flows and fish passage.

Even more disturbing is the work of Dr. Isla Myers-Smith (UBC) at Qikiqtaruk (Herschel Island). Both a Guardian article and the UBC Forestry website provide real-time access to continuous landscape events, which are aptly described as “the land tearing itself apart.” It is well worth a view of the video recording of the active disintegration of landscape as water levels rise and the permafrost melts releasing massive amounts of methane and cliff slumpage into the ocean. Initially intended as a biological species survey of a new national park at Qikiqtaruk the work of Myers-Smith’s team quickly turned into a last minute recording of unknown and endangered species.

This raises an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question. Myers-Smith’s work is in one of the few sites monitored in real time in the vastness of the arctic which is one of the fastest warming areas on the planet. Is the slumpage rate at Qikiqtaruk an anomaly or a rule? If it is not a rule this year what is the probability that it will be in 2025?

It is bad enough having to weigh the impacts of climate change, but it is worse when science denialism and obstruction exploits an already precarious situation. Apart from the environmental implications of BC’s endless softwood lumber trade dispute with the United States, perhaps the most important current environmental concern in BC is the renewal of the Columbia River Treaty. Notwithstanding recent news of hurricanes and flooding in Florida and the southeast, 87 percent of the United States is currently experiencing a severe prolonged drought, not just California. The drought is caused by the warming of oceans, as one should expect with climate change. Warm Pacific ocean temperatures cause high atmospheric pressure to build up over the continental US land mass which collides with the east-coast Atlantic hurricane air mass. This results in a stationary heat dome, such as the United States has been experiencing since 2020.

As elsewhere on this planet, climate change has direct implications for agricultural productivity: “As of mid-November, 64 per cent of corn production areas in the United States were experiencing a drought, with local reports of a meagre harvest in Ohio.” Notwithstanding this reality, the climate change denialist president-elect has pointed out that this is no problem since in BC “they have essentially a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive.” That faucet is the Columbia River system for which an international treaty is currently being renegotiated. The revised treaty needs to incorporate concerns for fish habitat restoration, adaptive management and climate change, as well as First Nation rights, all of which were not concerns when the original treaty was first signed in 1964. This comes at a time of environmental concerns set out above, which the new administration treats with the same contempt as it does science.

The assumption that BC has an unlimited supply of water that the United States could just tap into is, runs counter to basic facts. The BC Wildfire Service has pointed out that BC is in a three-year precipitation drought that has only provided about 50 percent of expected levels, with marked impacts on the water tables all around the province. These are not primary concerns for the new American administration, which is contemptuous of basic science. It is bent on dismantling environmental protections and is intent on withdrawing from international climate obligations. Additionally, the withdrawal of the Colville Federated Tribes from the fifteeen-year salmon habitat restoration efforts of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, are indicative of looming cross-border environmental friction. Political bullying is likely to override common interests rooted in common sense and science.

Elections around the world show a strong shift to the extreme right. This has serious implications for science in general and environmental conservation in particular. While not as extreme, elections in BC mirrored trends in the US. Since scientific and regulatory institutions in the United States have provided leadership in corporate oversight since the end of World War II, it is important to understand the environmental implications of the ongoing political shift for science globally. Most science today is a fruit of international collaborations supported by multiple funding streams. By denying funding to science, as in the simplistic “giant faucet” illusion, the US is looking to get a free ride. The Trump campaign and administration are overtly hostile to science and opposed to a rule-based system based on multilateralism. As reported in both Nature and Science the new administration has vowed to dismantle the NIH, the NOAA and the EPA, and to fire government scientists whose work diverges from the administration’s interpretation of America’s business interests.

For conservation this is a step back to the world of rogue industrial mayhem before 1970. It is a sweeping rejection of international United Nations-led work based on scientific consensus. It is an end to the rules-based aspirations of The Clean Air Act (1970), The Clean Water Act (1972) and The Endangered Species Act (1973), all of which have provided public protection and international leadership for the past half-century. While we may pretend that this problem is only American, this policy shift follows a global trend and has important cross-border implications, as witnessed by what the American drought and climate change mean for The Columbia River Treaty. It will affect Canada, because it reflects a disturbing shift in America’s international science leadership that has been essential to its international economic and democratic leadership. Perhaps the most disturbing comment came from the editor of Science in his editorial of 18 October 2024:

“Science now gets more submissions from China than from the US, and the number of accepted papers from China is increasing, whereas the number from the US is decreasing. Chinese science is not only productive but continues to grow in excellence.

The US should worry about this. One of the main justifications in 1945 for establishing a federal role in funding science research was to bolster the economic and geopolitical power of the nation after physicists working on the Manhattan Project were perceived to have won World War II. Being surpassed as a scientific superpower by China would be anathema to the leaders of postwar and Cold War America.”

It is not anathema to the current set of fundamentalist politicians who trust the Bible and business more than science. China is not only the world’s second-biggest economy, it is fast becoming the leading scientific powerhouse it needs to be in order to make it the leading economic and political global power. Being a leader in science is not a given, it needs a complex infrastructure and public support. Banning or censoring Chinese scientific papers, will not stop the rise in excellence. Throughout the twentieth-century the United States has relied on waves of immigrant scientists, not least of which included Einstein and the leading lights of the Manhattan project, to bolster its scientific enterprise. As Holden Thorp goes on to point out, over the past three decades the United States has come to rely heavily on Chinese scientists, many of whom have stayed, but are now leaving due to the rise of xenophobia and general bigotry in the United States.

After four decades of substandard scientific education in high schools and colleges that saw renewed debates on old chestnuts like Creationism, Salem’s old ghosts of fundamentalist bigotry and rumour have returned to plague science in America, and undermine the entire post-1945 social and economic foundation. While we may be amused by the ravings of republican conspiracy theorists such as congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claim that hurricanes Milton and Maria were “conjured up” by Democrats intent on keeping Americans from voting, the growing number and intensity of hurricanes, floods and droughts remains a scientific reality based on the simple physics of climate change science. Waiving away climate science as Florida governor Ron De Santis has just done by signing into law the banning of the words “climate change” from state documents will not make the facts of science vanish.

The economy always hits a brick wall when it is confronted by ecological realities. While politicians play electoral games, a number of ecological realities should concern us all, if only for very pragmatic social and economic reasons. It is a simple fact of life that the rising cost of food is directly tied to the declining productivity of the planet resulting from climate deregulation, as witnessed by the ongoing US drought. Ironically, the rise of the climate-change-denying right in support of the fossil fuel industry is a voter response to rising food prices. In other words, the voters most affected by climate change have voted for more climate change, and therefore, for even higher food prices.

Food prices rise in an increasingly unstable environment. As one commentator has correctly pointed out” “Jamming up interest rates in London and Washington doesn’t make more olives grow in Spain or cocoa beans sprout in Ghana.” An ecological supply limit resulting from climate deregulation is not addressed by an economic correction. This observation is particularly apt because it reminds us that at 8.5 billion, we live in a highly interconnected global village of supply chains strained by climate change. What affects our fellow global villagers has consequences for all of us. An isolationist view is out of touch with the reality of a world of 8.5 billion, 25 per cent of which are likely to become climate refugees by 2050. UNHCR figures indicate that: “Over the past 10 years, weather-related disasters have caused 220 million internal displacements—approximately 60,000 displacements per day. By 2040, the number of countries facing extreme climate-related hazards is expected to rise from three to 65, the majority of which are hosting displaced populations.”

Countries outside of the United States, particularly third world countries which directly experience the impacts of climate change, are keenly aware of the reality of climate change. When the United States abdicates its global environmental responsibilities, the vacuum is quickly filled by Chinese economic and political influence, and American power declines and loses its market share. Ultimately, this undermines the prosperity of the North American economy, by disconnecting it from the global village’s economics, and the global village’s political and social stability are undermined. A case can be made that the current trend is simply the logical collapse of an unsustainable economic system based on endless growth and individualistic competition. That was the outcome predicated by the “business-as-usual” scenario of the Club of Rome 1972 report Limits to Growth, and every subsequent reassesment right up to 2022.

The recent BC elections provide a glimpse into the magnitude of the problem we face. A review of the social and ideological results is instructive. Significantly, 43.3 per cent of the population—representing mainly areas outside of Vancouver and Victoria—voted for a party that overtly denied the reality of climate change, vowed to tear up the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, and generally turn the clock backwards on environment protections that stand in the way of a presumed right to endless development. Another 44.9 per cent voted for an economic status quo that has favoured the interests of corporate giants and that has been at best tepid on environmental protections, and opportunistic on climate change policy resulting in the collapse of our forests. A minority, 8 percent voted for radical transformational social and economic changes consistent with the recommendations of the IPCC and the Limits to Growth.

The results encapsulate the ideological range of reactions to the reality of the climate and biodiversity crisis, found around the globe. Reaction to the climate change and biodiversity crises falls into three broad categories. The first cohort, a minority, acknowledges the reality of the crisis and the need to address the root causes of the crisis in the economy. This cohort, therefore, advocates for transformational changes in the social and economic structure, largely consistent with what was proposed in the Limits to Growth. The second, in light of the climate events experienced and the deterioration of social institutions, also acknowledges a need for social changes, recognizes the reality of climate change nominally, but wants to maintain the economic status quo. This second group expects “government” to fix things while they make no substantive personal changes. That is in fact a tacit denial of the magnitude of the crisis, and is effectively just another form of climate denialism. The third cohort generally denies or ignores the reality and implications of the climate and biodiversity crisis which it views as simply “normal progress” or at worst as part of “God’s plan” to which humanity will adapt through technology in a society in which only the strongest or “chosen” will survive.

After 52 years the common sense and factual message of Limits to Growth that following the business as usual scenario would lead to environmental, social and economic collapse within the first half of the twenty-first century, seems to be unfolding.

In spite of much political posturing, Brundtland’s “sustainable development” continues to be as illusive as a desert mirage. Even more so, as the multilateral political and economic system needed to support it fades. Not too strangely, more effort and public subsidies to corporations seem to be expended to shape perceptions, rather than to actually address environmental problems caused by economic growth. A review of 1500 “public policies” implemented to address climate change over the past 25 years shows that only 65 actually produced results. It is not policies promising change that are needed. Science has determined the problem, and the solutions. Change called for 50 years ago simply requires implementation now.

In a 2022 review of the impact of Limits to Growth after 50 years, Dennis Meadows provided an insight into the problems faced by environmental scientists. Notwithstanding fashionable discussions about the actual objectivity of science by social scientists, objectivity and facts are real and inescapable. The laws of science are real and objective, even believers in fairies cannot escape the realities of gravity and entropy:

When the behaviour of a system is affected only by physical forces, and the laws governing them are comprehensively and precisely understood... aspects of the future can be predicted very precisely. However, when human free will influences the behaviour of a system, influential factors are only incompletely known. Then it is not possible to predict accurately and with confidence.xxxix

After fifty years of demonstrating the increasing robustness of the science behind Limits to Growth and its contemporary practical articulation in the climate change and biodiversity crises, the question is no longer about what policies are needed to sustain the economy, but what policies might yet be implementable to ensure the survival of human civilization. The situation which now confronts us is not an accident in earth or ocean physics. It is a product of deliberate choices which humans have made of their own free will based on information that has been mounting and available to every human being for at least the past fifty years, and which have been the subject of global discussion at every COP since 1992. The only question now remains (as in 1972): “What choices will we make today, not for us, but for the others, tomorrow?”

Loÿs Maingon (retired biologist)