Earth Day Thoughts from Global Ecologist Dr. Michael Charles Tobias
“We're still so far behind what it’s going to take to stabilize, let alone improve, conditions for the vast majority of large vertebrates. We've got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Note: In March 2020, as panic over COVID-19 was just swinging into full-blown empty-the-grocery-shelves madness, I was working on a video project to interview Dr. Michael Charles Tobias about his thoughts on Earth Day, 50 years after the first Earth Day.
From that interview, several videos were created. Leading up to this year’s Earth Day, I re-read the entire transcript of the interview and edited it down as a book-end “print piece” to the videos produced earlier. This includes some of Dr. Tobias’ ideas not incorporated in the videos (see links to those videos at the end of this post).
The content is as interesting and relevant today as it was a few years back … I think! Of particular interest, Dr. Tobias references world population of 7.8 billion in March 2020. We’ve shot up to 8.1 billion in the short period to April 2024!
About Dr. Tobias: A global ecologist and president of the Dancing Star Foundation, Dr. Michael Charles Tobias is an interdisciplinary ecologist who looks at systematics and large-scale systems of eco-dynamic flux. With more than 60 years of field research, Dr. Tobias has worked on every continent examining threats to biodiversity and exploring realistic strategies that can be implemented in a collective, compassionate and conservation manner to rescue creatures from near oblivion.
A humanist who looks at the history of ecology, and multi-disciplinary approaches to compassion and nonviolence, Tobias also explores the intersection between humanity and the natural world. His background includes comparative literature, philosophy, anthropology, science and biology, and he has worked on population matters, demography and the interaction of demographic flux with large scale regional and local ecosystem dynamics.
DR. MICHAEL CHARLES TOBIAS ON …
Why Earth Day Matters
Earth day is a punctuation mark every April that reminds us of humanity’s enormous inordinate footprint on the planet in every sector. We are in an era, an epoch known geologically as the Anthropocene, which coincides with the sixth great extinction spasm in the annals of biology. There’s nothing great about it; it just happens to be massive and unending, and escalating rapidly. So Earth Day should measure, in our psyches and our souls, the tally that is occurring right before us. And we are, of course, the species solely responsible for this infliction.
So Earth Day is not so much a celebration as a commemoration, and an ongoing wake-up call to all of us that if we do not heed common sense and biological, scientific data – that is pouring in like an avalanche every second from all over the world into our laptops – then we will go extinct as a species.
I personally believe that our ability to celebrate nature is key to our survival, or not, as a species. So it’s important; it’s a moment in time. It’s like the doomsday clock, which is close to midnight. And ecologically speaking, we’re just seconds away. So Earth Day reminds us of that.
In terms of 1970 and the first Earth Day, it coincided with NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act). Earth Day and NEPA are key indicators of where we’ve been in the last 50 years. They coincide with much that has happened legislatively in terms of the Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, those three being the largest public land holders in the United States.
All three have very intricate histories steeped in contested legislation, which is all under fire, particularly the Endangered Species Act from 1973 and hundreds of acts. But we still find ourselves, when we reflect on Earth Day, in a situation that is inescapably problematic with respect to the amount of protected areas and protected corridors, and what each one of us can do within the realm of so-called sustainability – a word which almost means nothing at this point. For example, there’s no such thing as sustainable forestry in fragile ecosystems like the neotropics or the boreal forests.
But I think generically speaking, Earth Day is certainly a reminder of all the legislative challenges before us right now. And it also can give us some sense of reassurance that our species, in my opinion, does have what it takes to get it right ultimately at the collective level. That’s a broad statement, given that most people that I speak to these days are desperate and almost hopeless, and very angry, terribly frustrated and saddened by the distractions geopolitically that are occurring, when we should be putting all of our energy into salvaging the rich biodiversity that still exists on this planet, working collectively to endeavor to resuscitate those species, genera, families and orders that are really on the brink of extinction. And they’re everywhere. We’re talking about a vast numeric tally of endangerment right now.
So Earth Day addresses all of that. Everyone who has his or her respective seat at the table of deliberation, action, activism and compassion is going to relate to it in some form or another. We are being awakened to the reality of the interdependency of all species, of economics, of geopolitics, of collective decisions, of bad jurisprudence, of bad organizational skills versus good organizational skills.
All of these areas of the human experience have now hit us right in the face. I could rattle off all kinds of treaties and situations where we have given ourselves hope, but let’s not forget we’re narcissists. Our species is a narcissistic, solipsistic, anthropic species. We see it through our eyes, through our lens. While there has been a vast amalgam of animal rights legislation, of animal liberation and conservation biology, animal protection legislation and agitation by consumers, we’re still so far behind what it’s going to take to stabilize, let alone improve, conditions for the vast majority of large vertebrates. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.
Biodiversity – Historical
All threats – unnatural threats with respect to unnatural selection in terms of basic evolutionary rubrics, pre- and post-Darwinian rubrics – are at a bifurcation point, and have been for centuries. That is to say, humanity poses, and has always posed, down through archeological records and paleontological records going back tens of thousands of years, the quintessential threat to biodiversity on this planet. That has been the case ever since the earliest documented paleolithic forensics, which show our kind herding mass numbers of large ungulates and other mammals over cliffs, for example.
We know that we killed in excess. Megafauna extinction theories relate to the fact that for at least 60,000, 70,000 years, Homo sapiens and some of our hybrid cousins that coexisted with us 20,000 to 50,000 years ago were deeply immersed in carnivorous behavior, which is not to say we’re a carnivorous species. We are now, by and large, of course, but there’s great ethnographic and dietary debates with respect to the so-called Paleolithic diet and what our species was actually consuming out of necessity 50,000 years ago, keeping in mind that’s predicated on the theory that Homo sapiens are approximately 315,000 to 320,000 years old.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is simply a measure – a human measure, through a human lens, utilizing human metrics that have evolved over centuries of mathematics and physics, and natural history – to try to get some sense of who our colleagues are, our fellow kindred spirits on this earth. The numbers of these biological brothers and sisters of the human species are debated as to how many species are out there – we’ve demarcated into so-called species, or organisms that can reproduce.
The reason it’s so critical to us is not just the pollinator services, the estimated $125 trillion worth of annual nature services provided by biodiversity – clean air, clean water, turnover of soil nutrients that are at a pace and at a rate that will ensure the perpetuation of old forests, new forests, of seedlings. Everyone who has a potted plant on a balcony can understand the different embryological stages of a plant. Well, that plant is not just for our solace and psychological well-being. It is there to soak up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to provide oxygen for us. That’s why children now learn that the Amazon is the lungs of the Earth, that the coral reefs are absolutely critical.
All of the elements of biodiversity provide the essential, quintessential biological fundaments of what gives us the right to be alive. Without it, we’d be dead. Just like ozone, if oxygen levels differed too dramatically we’d be gone in a heartbeat.
This planet was not a friendly place 2 billion years ago; there was virtually no breathable oxygen. We were living in mud and underwater. By the time we came terrestrially to look up at the sun, 700 or 800 million years ago, our predecessors in different forms had been given a new birth through evolution. And as a species that is bipedal, that stands, that uses its hands, that is no longer climbing in trees or racing across savannas on four legs, we have been endowed with this incredible biological gift, if you will, of consciousness. Which in turn segues into human consciousness. I believe all species have consciousness; all species feel pain. Many much more so than we do, fish specifically.
But biodiversity is the lifeforce that enables us to have this conversation. Anything short of that, we wouldn’t be here. Again, let’s not forget we’ve only been here for barely 300,000 years. So we’re newborns in terms of hominin evolution, in terms of primates. It is incumbent upon any newborn to get its behavior down pat in a manner that coincides with sustainability. To continue to walk on our own feet. To digest our food. To breathe. To sleep at night. To enjoy the comforts of a loved one. To express friendship. To communicate guilelessly, to have a linguistic facility that has empowered our ability to scheme, and to dream, and to write Hamlet. To toss frisbees, to make chocolate chip cookies and to do all of those things that we take for granted now as human beings. That’s biodiversity.
No. 1 Issue
Global Biodiversity Loss
Global biodiversity loss is the No. 1 issue on the planet, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many of my colleagues, in every country, scientifically. But the other aspect, the counter part of that is the human population explosion, which is continuing – that deep demographic crisis of over 80 million people being added to this planet every year. Multiplied by all the consumer aspirations which we all share, and we all want, and feel empowered and deserving of. That’s what’s driving the biodiversity crisis and climate change. But what is not being spoken of very much is the biodiversity crisis. And I would really like to see, especially the youth of this generation, focus deeply on saving wildlife.
Biodiversity is something we should more than care about – our lives are indebted to it. It’s a word of course, just a word. But it connotes everything that lives, and everything that interacts with things like rocks that don’t live necessarily (although some religious traditions would disagree with that). Biodiversity gives us the fundaments for clean air, clean water, soils that produce food, energy that can be recycled with respect to the basis of photosynthesis. All of the food stuffs that provide nutrition for our species, and every species, is at the heart of nature’s services. Services that have been calculated to be worth, in human dollars, about $125 trillion annually. Which is probably a vast underestimate, because how do you value life? How do you value your mother’s life, your daughter’s life, your own life?
Courts can put a $5 million value on an individual in some countries; in other countries, it’s as low as $300. So when we value biodiversity, we’re talking about, how do you value your life? And biodiversity is that interconnectivity that absolutely, necessarily integrates a human being, an individual, his and her family, into the great community of lifeforms. The mites in our eyelashes. The bacteria in our armpits. The cells in our bodies. The genes in our bodies. They’re all connected, and they’re all speaking to each other, by the way.
This is the neurological reality that we now are increasingly beginning to get a handle on with respect to all creatures speaking to each other, or at least communicating in a fashion that enables a tree to know how to bend in the wind and that enables certain fish to know which pools to leap into, which pools not to leap into. It provides guidance and roadmaps for every single organism, and it doesn’t culminate in a species called Homo sapiens. We’re one of possibly a trillion species, if you include bacteria and viruses. If you include just the current formal numeric tally of how many other species are out there, it’s well over 8 million. So we’re just one of them.
Positive Indicators
There are numerous indicators that suggest we have the capacity to move in the right direction. One example for America – what’s been called its best idea – is the National Parks. Some of them are as small as the Indiana Dunes at 15,000 acres; others as large as our largest national park, Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, which is well over 13 million acres.
We have indicated to ourselves and our future human descendants that we appreciate and love nature and wildness. And we have created all kinds of societies – The Wilderness Society, The National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy and so forth. Thousands of NGOs, nongovernmental organizations, dedicated at all costs to protecting precious wilderness – not resources, wilderness. Or wild lands, or park areas. And so these are measurable success stories.
The world database on conservation that works with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Switzerland utilizes over 11,000 scientists and about 12,000 member nations and nongovernmental organizations working with UNEP (the United Nations Environment Programme), and other entities around the world, to measure how much land and water is protected, which is a good indicator of the progress we’re making.
The Convention on Biological Diversity, based in Montreal, Canada, develops action plans to determine how to ensure biological and bio-cultural heritage, to protect species, to protect corridors and link one protected area with another. There now are more than 190 nations that are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
All of these can be measured, and we have now measured about 124,000 protected areas on the planet. We’re trying to achieve what’s called the Aichi protocols, which are United Nations’ indicators of how much it would take by 2020, 2030, 2050, by percentage for land and water, to ensure through our protective mechanisms and our umbrellas of protection that we can predict and ensure the proliferation and perpetuation of evolution herself.
There are other indicators that we have followed, such as the hot spots methodology which suggests that if we can protect just under 3 percent of the highest flowering plant areas of the world, we will ensure genetic viability for the future.
We’re not there yet. The problem with these metrics and with patting ourselves on the back as a species is that we really need to be looking at about half the planet if we’re going to really talk about ensuring the future of evolution. And that is a far cry from where we’re now.
Measurable Successes
When one thinks about measurable successes that our species can take credit for, it’s mostly redemptive, biologically speaking. We’ve managed to recognize the whole concept of endangered species, and we’ve targeted those species greatest at risk. Through oftentimes just commonsense conservation practices and other times through more sophisticated approaches with respect to molecular biology and other kinds of genetic research, we have been able to bring back species.
We know how to rescue species from oblivion, from extinction. For example, the California condor had numbers down to fewer than 30 individuals, and now there are more than 300 through the devoted work of collective conservation efforts in many states. That involved techniques like translocation. Some condors had to be moved from the mountains above Santa Barbara, California, to the Grand Canyon.
While there are some tremendous conservation success stories like that of the California condor, there are opposite examples. The Iriomote cat in Southwestern Japan numbers fewer than 100. The Mauritius echo parakeet numbers 10 or fewer individuals. The only flightless parrot in the world, in New Zealand, which is an iconic species there, the kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) – if you can imagine naming such a gorgeous, big parrot Strigops habroptilus – they’re down to about 146 individuals. New Zealand is absolutely mobilized in an emergency, ER effort to save this species – this gorgeous, wonderful species – from extinction. We’re in a desperate mode with species like the Hawaiian crow – just absolutely down to almost nothing. And the Spix’s macaw, there’s just maybe one in the wild, if that. Most of them that survive are in zoos now.
The Cost of Saving Biodiversity
So we have to be careful; we’re not at any place where we can pat ourselves on the back. But we do know, as I indicated, how to save species. We know how much it costs to save species. We know that there is enough money out there to save every endangered species that exists. For anywhere from $50 to $75 billion per year, we could virtually ensure the safety of every currently listed endangered species on Earth. That’s not a big number when you compare it, for example, to the $3.5 trillion, or 17 percent GDP, healthcare services currently being expended in the United States for our species.
So when we put conservation in economic perspective, great work has been done in the last few 100 years, but especially since Rachel Carson and since earlier Teddy Roosevelt and the formation of places saved, such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Yellowstone. Our species really knows how to do this. We in this generation have what it takes to save most species on the planet. So that gives me great cheer.
Human Numbers
The discussion of population was a huge issue for the first Earth Day. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which became an overnight bestseller. It hit people in a way that they hadn’t been hit before, intellectually and morally. They hadn’t been challenged quite like that.
And so ZPG, or zero population growth, spawned a lot of controversy, exacerbated by the one child policy in China. It was a source of much consternation in the U.S. Congress and other bodies around the world, such that it almost backfired on the population movement. Because it became such a sensitive issue, most major environmental organizations have been very leery of going there.
So we’ve inherited a bias against open, free, rational commonsense discussions of compassionate population stabilization. People like Bob Gillespie, who’s a true luminary in Southern California, has gotten leaders of the world to sign population stabilization declarations, which really entails simply acknowledging that if we hit 8, 9, 10, 11 billion ungainly, largely carnivorous Homo sapiens, then that footprint – forget about unsustainable – is absolutely a killer on this Earth.
We’re continuing to add 80 million plus people per year to the planet. We’re still living in the illusion that a pro-natalist world, in which people are free to have as many children as they like, is great. And yet there are 900 million people right now who are chronically malnourished; they’re not doing okay, and that is an absolutely inexcusable sin committed by our species – that we would let fellow humans suffer that way, let alone all of biodiversity. So population is a delicate, difficult war zone, teeming with pitfalls. And words are dangerous, because they can be taken either way. And they can be, as we know, cropped and edited, and transmuted, and transmogrified, and perverted into whatever cause one wants to align oneself with.
But for me personally, I can speak unambiguously as an ecologist; 7.8 billion people leaves a footprint that is so unsustainable that there’s absolutely no question in my mind that it is the fuel that is destroying the biodiversity on this planet.
Is Any Country Getting it Right?
One of the areas of research that I’ve been personally involved with for going on 50 years now is the matrix of sustainability behavioral patterns in different communities and nation states that are positive from an ecological perspective, and from a humanistic perspective.
There are very few countries in my opinion that actually demonstrate a nationwide observance of nonviolence and ecological sustainability. One of those places is the Kingdom of Bhutan in the easternmost Himalayas. I’ve been working there since 1974, and our Dancing Star Foundation has been engaged there on various levels with the government to not only help ensure the perpetuation of indigenous peoples who live in what is largely an agrarian country of 750,000 people, but who are largely Buddhists, Mahayana Buddhists, and nonviolent devotees.
Years ago, they developed a replacement for our normal accounting practices of gross domestic processes and they came up with something called GNH, Gross National Happiness – not gross national product (GNP). GNH has really caught on in countries around the world in accounting practices.
Bhutan is a country that is largely vegetarian. As a Buddhist nation, they really practice what they preach. I’ve been deeply impressed by Bhutan. We just finished what we call an assessment of conservation priorities for Bhutan. A group of about 15 technical experts and 50 others in the field have come together during the last year to assess every sector of Bhutan’s economy and understand what it’s going to take for Bhutan to continue to keep over 60 percent of its primary forests intact, which it has managed to do, to maintain the largest and most robust population of Asian tigers, and many other species.
Bhutan is really at the cutting edge. Sadly, Bhutan is the downstream, unhappy beneficiary of climate change. Because the glaciers are melting, our expectations are that in the next 10 to 15 years, 70 percent of all the glaciers in Bhutan will melt. That’s serious on so many levels I wouldn’t know where to begin. But economically it’s going to hit the country very hard, because her major foreign revenue source comes from the sale of hydropower to countries like India and Bangladesh due south. So when all those waters flood, and all those glacial lakes overflow and demolish village after village, it’s going to be catastrophic for countries like Bhutan.
One other country I would mention is Suriname, at the northern tip of South America. All her water is flowing north into the Atlantic. She borders Brazil, French Guiana and Guyana and has managed to protect almost 90 percent of her forests. Part of this is because she has a low population, about 530,000 people.
Suriname and Bhutan are two brilliant templates for ecological governance, which I would urge all to look at, because these are two countries that are getting it right.
Go Vegetarian, Vegan
I would really like to see the number of vegetarians and vegans increase. It’s no surprise to me that the former head of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, came out some years ago and advocated for vegetarianism worldwide. Leonardo Da Vinci, Percy Bysshe Shelley and so many other luminaries throughout artistic and scientific history were devout vegetarians. Going vegetarian is the one thing I believe that you can do that costs you nothing, that takes no additional energy and that you can do in the privacy of your home with your family. I would urge everyone to at least experiment with vegetarianism as Mahatma Gandhi did.
I think vegetarianism would be probably the number one ecological conflict resolution manifesto that the entire world could embrace. As it would reduce global warming, it would also be the one thing we all could do to alleviate suffering on Earth. As Jane Morrison and I wrote in our book, “God’s Country: The New Zealand Factor,” the largest amount of suffering is aggregated in slaughterhouses amongst the tens of billions of chickens that are being slaughtered every day.
And when you add up all the data coming in from food and agriculture organizations to the UN and to 50 other data banks that we study every day, we are killing between 2 and 4 trillion animals every year for our pleasure. That’s including all the fish, all the mammals, all the vertebrates, all the birds, all the roadkill, the poaching, all the consumption on our dinner tables, all the purchasing of leather and still people purchasing fur and other products from animals. So, that would be the biggest step that you could take if you truly want to be an ecologist. Experiment with vegetarianism and veganism.
Tobias videos from Earth Day 2020
Biodiversity
Wake-up Call for the Planet
Measurable Successes
Maria Fotopoulos writes about the connection between overpopulation and biodiversity loss, and from time to time other topics that confound her. On FB @BetheChangeforAnimals and givesendgo.com/calliescathouse.
Thanks so much for sharing this, and for including the call to action about vegetarianism/veganism. It's so important to wrap our individual choices into the broader conversation about climate and conservation.