Since the 1970s, departments of the environment have been created in governments around the world; hundreds of conservation and protection acts have been passed, thousands of hectares of land set aside from development, and dozens of toxic and harmful chemicals banned. Today there are more than a thousand environmental treaties in place, and a seventh of the Earth’s landmass is officially protected in some way.
And still the planet is becoming unfamiliar. The Arctic is currently 20°C warmer than it should be, and the last time atmospheric carbon was over 400 parts per million, humans were not around. A new study predicts that warming will cause a feedback loop of carbon release from soil, equivalent to adding another industrialized country the size of the United States and making all the current treaties to reduce emissions irrelevant. (It is unfortunate, given this arithmetic, that the president-elect has no plans to actually remove the United States from Earth....
Lev Bratishenko has written for Abitare, Canadian Architect, Cabinet, the CBC, Disegno, Gizmodo, The Guardian, Icon, Maclean’s, the Montreal Gazette, Opera News and Uncube. He is co-editor of It’s All Happening So Fast: A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment, the book that accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
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