Yesterday I read Elizabeth Kolbert's What’s Causing Deadly Outbreaks of Fungal Diseases in World’s Wildlife? (Environment 360, January 18, 2015). The word "anthropocene" does not appear in Kolbert's report, but that's what the report was all about. Consider the causes of recent fungal outbreaks.
Still, the question arises: why now? Why are we seeing a growing number of fungal diseases of wildlife? Experts offer two possible explanations, both of which may be valid.
Here are the two explanations. Read Kolbert's essay for the details.
The first is the increase in global trade and global travel. Between 1990 and 2013, the tonnage of cargo transported in ships more than doubled, to over 9 billion metric tons. During that same time, passenger air travel tripled, to more than 3 trillion passenger miles. As the sheer volume of global trade and global travel rises, so, too, do the number of opportunities for pathogens of all sorts to disperse. Because fungi don’t need a host to survive, they may be particularly well-suited to intercontinental travel. And when a pathogen is let loose in a new place, the results can be spectacularly deadly.
“We’re just moving more things,” said Jeffrey Lorch, a microbiologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. “And even though there might be a little bit more regulation than there was previously, you can’t screen everything thoroughly to make sure there’s no pathogen on it, especially when we don’t even know that something is a pathogen. So that’s a big factor.”
The movement of goods and people almost certainly played a role in several of the recent fungal disease outbreaks... [documents cases]
And the second reason for fungal outbreaks?
And this, in turn, points to another possible answer to the question “why now.” Fungal diseases tend to be opportunistic; in humans, usually they affect those with compromised immune systems. Climate change, habitat loss, heavy metal pollution, competition from invasives — these are just a few of the forces that may be lowering animals’ resistance.
“I think it’s very likely that habitat in general is degraded, and so you have greater problems with disease,” Tim James, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan and associate curator of fungi at the university’s herbarium, said. “Everything is more stressed.”
Fisher, of Imperial College, noted that movement and stress can occur together. When people carry animals around the world, often the animals suffer. If they’re carrying any sort of pathogen, that pathogen is likely to thrive. This means imported species are apt to be carrying particularly heavy pathogen loads.
“You’ve got this enormous pet trade, and those animals are unhealthy,” Fisher said. “So you have this movement mechanism, but you also have more susceptible, amplifying hosts.” Whether the explanation is more movement or more stress, or — most likely — both, the pattern, unfortunately, seems likely to continue.
“As an individual body becomes weakened or sick from any sort of process it’s more likely to get an infectious disease,” Allender, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, observed. “So the same thing is going to be happening in ecosystems. Fungi are really efficient and are the ones that are popping up. But I think until we start to invest a lot of energy into looking at our ecosystems and valuing the components of ecosystems, the chances of emerging infectious diseases are going to keep going up.” [essay ends]
Both factors affecting fungal outbreaks in wildlife—1) we are moving stuff/living things around willy-nilly; and 2) we have degraded the environment generally—are characteristic of the human-dominated world (the anthropocene). Before recent times, it was never the case over geological time that species could move hither and yon on this planet without restraint. Now humans are doing the moving for their own purposes and have been doing so for centuries. This has all sorts of destructive effects, which Kolbert documents at some length.
Here at DOTE, we (my readers and I) take a dim view of developments like this. As Kolbert once tweeted in response to Andrew Revkin's search for a "good" anthropocene, [there are] 2 words that probably should not be used in sequence: "good" & "anthropocene."
Still, in characteristic fashion, humans continue to search for a "good" anthropocene. The Boston Review recently hosted a forum discussion of Jedediah Purdy's book The New Nature. (Follow these links to learn more.) Purdy is also looking for a "good" (democratized) anthropocene, though he is doing so in a more thoughtful way than Revkin did.
I liked this part of Anna Tsing's response to Purdy's initial argument. Her response also speaks to the devastating fungal outbreaks now taking place all over the world.
Many commentators continue to put their hope in more engineering, more capitalism, and more human exceptionalism—in other words, a “good Anthropocene.” The most strident good-Anthropocene advocates—the ecomodernists—argue that attention to ecology should exclusively fulfill human dreams of profit and control; they oppose other views and goals as anti-modern. Purdy brings a critical eye and a more egalitarian vision of the good Anthropocene to the discussion, but his proposal retains the unlikely-to-be-fulfilled desire to see modern man in charge. It is time to fight for a “short Anthropocene,” that is, to endeavor to hold on to the cross-racial, cross-national, and cross-species entanglements that make our lives, human and nonhuman, possible.
As Audre Lorde advised, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” More plantations, for example, will not solve the problems caused by plantations. Plantations, indeed, are an important element of Anthropocene threats to biodiversity. The industrialization of plants and the plant industrial trade have bred and spread pathogens that endanger even those plants most happy to live with humans. Consider the disease called sudden oak death, which is destroying anthropogenic woodlands in California. It is caused by a water mold, a Phytophthora, which was introduced repeatedly, probably through the industrial nursery trade. Industrial nursery production has both spread the disease and augmented its virulence through hybridization of once-isolated strains. As botanist Oliver Rackham warns: “Catastrophes are not necessarily abnormal. . . . It is the rate of catastrophes—every few years instead of once in a millennium—that matters.” He continues, “Globalizing tree-planting inevitably tends to globalize tree diseases.”
Rackham offers a clear program for halting the enhancement of Phytophthora virulence: the de-industrialization of the plant-nursery trade. He shows how care for woodlands is incompatible with shipping soil and seedlings around the world at the speed and scale of current commercial standards. This is a dangerous practice that has no practical advantages: it kills the familiar local trees that are its most common commercial objects.
This example points to emergent thinking about the possibilities of strategic deindustrialization and degrowth programs that might attend to the multispecies coordinations of Holocene ecologies—that is, those in which humans and other species continue to share common conditions for flourishing. And while it is important to begin with specifics, there is a big story here.
So far, so good. Things go sour now because Tsing goes on to talk about the terrible effects of the "Cold War" (!) on human domination of the Earth.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cold War sponsored a race toward the dream of the modern. Bigger and bigger earth-transforming projects were put into play as part of that race. The megadams of the twentieth century were each designed to be higher than the last—not for reasons of necessary irrigation, electric power, or flood control, but rather because doing so allowed developers and nations to promote themselves as successful in the game. In this process, modernist earth-changing projects were naturalized as the only way for humans to inhabit the earth. Other alternatives, such as small dams, an old vernacular practice, were denigrated as backward or unproductive. The “great acceleration” after 1950, with its characteristic J-curves connecting world systems and earth systems, resulted in large part from the Cold War race to the dream of the modern.
To mobilize for a short Anthropocene is to dismantle this race, much of which has made little contribution to well-being of any kind...
Humans can no more "dismantle" this race than they can colonize Mars, though some believe they can do both. Cold War behaviors have deep roots in the behavior of our species over tens of thousands of years. We're near the end of an unhappy exponential curve. The Cold War happened almost literally yesterday.
The anthropocene will be "short" as Tsing wants, but not because humans exercised wise choices (for example) to halt the spread of fungal diseases by de-industrializing the plant-nursery trade. The plant-nursery trade will go on just as it has until conditions make the status quo impossible or very hard to maintain.
So the "good" anthropocene does not exist. At this point, we know that much (for example, it has led to fungal outbreaks in wildlife). Even worse, it doesn't seem that a "good" anthropocene can be brought into existence through intentional human action. For that to happen in some way we can only imagine, humans would have to behave in ways never observed heretofore. Don't hold your breath waiting for that.
"Good" implies "good for humans", an anthropocentric outlook, which is our predicament in a nutshell. We can't look beyond ourselves, so we will only get ourselves.
Purdy is stuck there, and I couldn't help but laugh at the article stating how he started out writing about "irony's corrosive effect on culture" (very telling). He acknowledges that human natural tendencies exist, but he still thinks we'll slough them off and become a new entity once we start understanding the damage we're doing. Besides the progressive mindset displayed there, the trouble there is that the damage will have then already been done.
He also talks a bit about loving destroyed landscapes for what they are, and I can't help but think about shifting baselines. Each generation assumes they live in the norm, and this helps drive a progression to destruction instead of improvement. Looking at a destroyed landscape and thinking it's wonderful would seem to work against the notion that we'll wake up after seeing the damage we're doing.
Posted by: Jim | 02/04/2016 at 12:51 PM