We live in an era of unprecedented complexity. Not only is humanity exerting enormous pressure on the planet, this pressure comes in different forms that are interacting with one another in new and unpredictable ways. Earth today faces a quadruple squeeze from (1) human population growth; (2) a global climate crisis; (3) a global ecosystem crisis; and (4) the growing insight that we need to maintain redundancy for resilience in order to avoid tipping points, which reduces the ecological space human- ity can utilize. We need to understand how these forces work together on a planetary scale, if we hope to avoid catastrophic tipping points.
common spectacle in places where such forests are rapidly being replaced by large-scale palm oil plantations. In fact, the area under oil palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia2
I has
roughly tripled during the past twenty years, helping to accel- erate—along with logging operations, soya bean cultivation, bauxite mining, and livestock operations—the destruction of the region’s remaining rainforests. The replacement of rainforest ecosystems, rich in biodiversity,
with the monoculture of palm oil plantations takes a ravaging toll. Not only does it eliminate wildlife habitats, it also under- mines local communities. Everything the rainforest used to provide the local economy disappears, from small-scale agri- culture to forest management and fisheries. The intricate complexity of the social-ecological forest system is remarkable. Most people living in the Borneo rainforest get their protein not from the forest itself, but from the rivers flowing through it. Oil palm plantations load up the rivers with sediment from soil ero- sion, gradually destroying the waterways with nutrient overload and pesticides. This degrades fish stocks, which undermines the local people’s access to protein. The plantations are not all bad, of course. As large-scale industrial agriculture, they also create job opportunities, which
t is a staggering sight—to squint into the blinding sunlight across what was until recently a dense Borneo rainforest, and see an endless wasteland of bare soil.1
Yet this is now a
should represent an important social value. But if salaries are not high enough for workers to afford legal food sources, often from animals, to compensate for the protein loss from fish, then the social equation ends up in the negative. What happens next is an increase in illegal bush meat trade and, in time, a severe threat to vulnerable and endangered species. Until recently, such stories did not mean too much to the rest
of us. If industrial agriculture disrupted a distant community living off healthy local ecosystems, it was dismissed as a develop- ment failure. Any negative impacts from such disruptions were seen as limited in scope, causing only local social problems. But now this is changing. We now know that even local uses of the biosphere, once not considered significant enough to draw our attention, generate environmental impacts far beyond the local system. In an increasingly inter-connected world where human pressure on Earth system is approaching a saturation point, what happens on Borneo is affected by and affects societies everywhere. The notion that everyone lives in everyone else’s backyard has come true. The Borneo forest biome has always relied on the relatively
dry conditions of the so-called El Niño climate cycle to trigger re-growth of plants and trees. But today those dry conditions, which come on a roughly four-year cycle, have led to an increasing number of serious forest fires, as deforestation, which opens land- scapes, combines with climate change, which brings a greater risk
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TH E H U MAN Q U E ST – P R OS P E R I N G WI TH I N P L AN E TA RY B O U N DA R I E S