The threat of climate change has been a driving motivation for both my professional and personal choices for many years. In practice, this has manifested as getting into the weeds
with various academic subjects (i.e. air quality, statistics, public health, computer science) as well as recurrent introspection on many aspects of lifestyle. This spring, I was reminded of the importance of picking my head up and seeking out new perspectives -- despite the countless hours I've spent educating myself on environmental and social/economic justice topics, there is always more to learn and consider. In this blog, I'll share some broad reflections from several recent experiences.
Most of the ideas here were inspired by:
Reading the book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet (2022), by George Monbiot, and discussing in the Harvard graduate student Science Policy Group
Serving as a Review Editor for the US' Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), facilitating the incorporation of comments from public and peer review on the Western Wildfires Focus Box
Attending the annual Health Effects Institute (HEI) Conference, specifically the sessions entitled "Exploring the Link Between Air Pollution and Health in High Pollution Environments" and "Addressing Air Pollution and Climate Change with Shared Solutions"
Facilitating or listening in on various climate and/or air quality-related webinars
Appreciating the complexity
Reading Regenesis, in particular, was a powerful reminder of how multifaceted our global environmental + social justice challenges are. While at this point in my academic career, I rarely encounter truly novel information about air pollution or its impacts on public health, I was struck by how many fundamental things I did not know about our global food system -- on topics ranging from soil, plants, water, and their interactions with each other and with the atmosphere, to the many ways in which antibiotics, toxic metals, and microplastics are introduced to various stages of our food production, to the countless perverse financial incentives affecting farmers worldwide, to the degree of corporate monopoly / oligopoly not only in agrochemicals but also in the overall supply / trade of food. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
Despite the previous paragraph mostly being about problems, my favorite thing about Regenesis was its balance: between problems and solutions, between narrative and traditional nonfiction, between breadth and depth, between science and philosophy. One of the most compelling (and generalizable) sections was a discussion of modern complex systems. Monbiot (the author) illustrates how there is a tradeoff between pursuing efficiency and maintaining resilience: basically, while standardization, just-in-time delivery, and strong interconnectedness between nodes (companies, regions, etc.) all make sense for each individual actor at the time of implementation, they also facilitate cascading failure when something goes wrong at any place in the system. Think global supply chain issues during Covid, the financial crisis of 2008, etc. This comparison is even more apt given the increasing coupling of the financial sector with the global food system. While the concepts of diversification and redundancy are not at all new, I found that Regenesis effectively shone a spotlight on how our current food system is particularly vulnerable to cascading failure (with deadly consequences for people in low-income countries or circumstances), especially in the context of climate change. The main takeaway, echoed in other recent seminars / experiences, is that while individual action is important, what is really needed to ward off system-level failure are system-level safeguards.
Reasons for optimism
One of Monbiot's critiques which felt particularly relevant to me (as a current grad student) was directed at modern academia: "A tremendous body of knowledge accumulates, but the walls between disciplines are high. In science, modularity is dangerous." This year, participating in the preparation of the US NCA5 gave me a rare view of what fully bringing together and bridging scientific disciplines can look like. The National Climate Assessment is a large report, produced approximately every five years, summarizing the current and future impacts of climate change on the US. It is written by more than 300 experts, spanning disciplines ranging from forest ecology to urban planning. For the NCA5, a new element is the inclusion of "focus boxes", or short chapters on topics that touch many other disciplines: compound events (disasters), Covid-19, risks to supply chains, blue carbon, and western wildfires. Other developments of the NCA5 (in contrast to previous assessments) were an increased focus on adaptation in addition to mitigation and both acknowledgement and discussion of environmental justice in every chapter.
For me, sitting in a conference hall filled with the authors of the NCA5, listening to presentations (both scientific and activist*) at the HEI conference as well as other climate change-related seminars, and reading Regenesis were all positive reminders of how many smart, caring people are dedicating their lives to figuring out how to solve our pressing environmental / societal challenges. This is not to say that it feels in any way inevitable that everything will turn out alright -- there is a tremendous amount of work yet to be done, much of it in translating the science into regulatory, industrial, and social reform. But I feel more hopeful than I have in a while. And I imagine that by reading this, you might too.
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* As an example of actions being taken to fight environmental injustice, one of the most memorable presentations at the HEI conference was by GreenRoots, a community-based organization started in Chelsea, MA. Despite its close proximity to Boston, Chelsea (which is majority-racial minority) has much higher levels of pollution, mostly due to the high density of industrial facilities sited in and near the community. Check out a list of GreenRoots' recent successes here. But don't forget to come back to this blog -- the most important section is below!
Re-examining techno-centrism
After reading Regenesis, I looked up some critiques of the book, to see what aspects might be reasonably contested. I've included the links to the most credible at the end of this blog. The following recommendations made by Monbiot appear to be somewhat universal among environmentalists (who care about human welfare) with regards to the global food system:
Dramatically shift our diets to rely less on animal products and highly-processed sugars/carbohydrates (the latter more for public health reasons)
Minimize our use of water and farm chemicals, relying on organic interventions where necessary to enhance fertility
Research and develop a high-yield agroecology, including deepening our understanding of different kinds of soil
Break global corporations' grip on the food chain and diversify the global food system
Monbiot then goes on to make the following recommendations, which are the target of some critique:
Limit the land we use to feed humanity
Stop farming animals entirely
Replace the protein and fat from animals with precision fermentation
Rewild the land released from farming
In general, Monbiot also puts a lot of emphasis on numeracy, shifting the discourse about food and its production to be less aesthetic and more practical, and wherever possible using scientific "understanding of complex systems to trigger cascading change". While I was reading the book, Monbiot's suggestions all made a lot of sense to me. But some of the critiques I later read helped me to zoom out even farther, identifying some of my own blind spots.
One of the most salient critiques of Monbiot's whole platform is that despite his calls for strong antitrust laws and restraint of intellectual property regarding precision fermentation, history and current movements by major corporations indicate that oligopoly control of this new technology has relatively high likelihood. Using his own logic about increasingly-standardized nodes in complex systems, critics argue that although precision fermentation is less vulnerable to climate change than crops and animals living outdoors, it is still exposed to the capriciousness of the financial sector. My personal take (acknowledging that this is not my field of expertise and I haven't thought about it for more than a couple of months) is that if precision fermentation is what it takes to save humanity's existence on Earth in the short run, then we will have time to figure out everything else (e.g. economic inequality) in the long run.
However, I also acknowledge the broader critique of Monbiot's platform: that it is very techno-centric. Techno-centrism, or the belief that technology can address all environmental / ecological problems, has long been debated in the context of climate change. Historically, a lot of the buzz surrounded carbon capture as a possible solution to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. (The current scientific consensus is that while carbon capture can help us with the "last mile", it is not cost-effective for counteracting the vast majority of emissions.) But this is only one example of holding technology up as a silver bullet to fix environmental degradation.
One of the critiques of Regenesis articulated an important point:
"The question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is 'how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?' then the answer can only lead you to a globalized technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is 'how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?' then you may be led in a very different direction."
The author of this article, Paul Kingsnorth, also posited a broader critique of 21st century environmentalism:
"If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the 'peer-reviewed science' then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green 'thought leaders' are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen."
Having spent my last 3 years in the Biostatistics PhD program at Harvard, the 4 years before that at CU Boulder surrounded by people in STEM, and my childhood in Boulder (one of the most highly-educated cities in America), I am a poster child for Kingsnorth's critique. And while I think the whole "treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen" is overly harsh, I see some truth in his point about climate change lending itself more easily to quantitative analysis than many other environmental and societal problems.** Similarly, environmental (health) statistics research is dominated by questions related to the quality and temperature of the air, rather than other mediums like water or soil, in part because of our ability to use measurements from technologies such as stationary ground-level monitors and satellite imagery to make inferences about broader areas and population exposures, given atmospheric mixing.
But ultimately, Kingsnorth and several other critics don't seem to care so much about the elevation of climate science and renewable energy research over marine biology or soil science so much as the elevation of formal scientific investigation and technology overshadowing other forms of knowing and interacting with the environment. Several articles expressed concern that although in Regenesis Monbiot describes the importance of personal connection with nature, his recommended solutions might further distance people's feeling of being connected to and dependent on the Earth and non-human species, with negative consequences both for people's pursuit of meaning and concern for the environment. Borrowing one of Monbiot's examples, I personally don't see how a "dinosaur nugget" whose inner protein is sourced from precision fermentation distances people any more from nature or life meaning than one with protein sourced from chicken born, raised, and slaughtered on a factory farm. But I fully agree with the overarching point that it is important to be guided by diverse, not necessarily quantitative perspectives -- including lower-income, rural, Indigenous, Global South -- in attempting to design a more just and sustainable future for us all. And of course, that it is critical to continue trying to make both quantitative data sets and the groups of people who analyze them more representative of the population at large.
Harmony between these two visions was articulated nicely by someone at the HEI conference, who said that while it's easier to identify hotspots at scale, fixing the hotspots has to happen locally. In other words, while scientists with access to large data sets can help identify things like distributions, trends, or clusters from above, and can make recommendations for where (and even how) to allocate societal resources to where they are most needed, and technologists can design tools that can be widely used, the ultimate implementation of effective, lasting solutions requires local buy-in and often also local tailoring. One size does not fit all -- even in the case of precision fermentation. Local government, businesses, and community-based organizations have a vital (possibly the most significant) role to play in the pursuit of environmental sustainability and social justice.
In closing
Whether you've enjoyed this blog or not, I highly encourage you to go read Regenesis! As I've discussed here, not everyone agrees with Monbiot's perspectives, but being exposed to them and all the research he references is prime fodder for individual reflection and conversations about food, people, nature, and more.
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Critiques of Regenesis:
** 2024 addendum: I ran across this blog post which has a nice figure and discussion about "earth crisis blinkers".