Green Menace

When has science been more important to humanity than now?

Perhaps in Darwin’s time, when he explained that life comes from pre-existing life rather than from the thought processes of a godhead. Perhaps, in a metaphysical sense, when Galileo proclaimed that the Earth revolves around the Sun instead of the opposite.

Maybe when Avicenna figured out 1,000 years ago that sickness was contagious, or when Pasteur solidified the germ theory of disease in the 19th century and humans could therefore prevent and eventually treat infection.

But while each of these scientific advances had a huge effect on humans—mainly psychologically and medically—today, science is at the forefront of the quest to see if we are capable of survival. It is our future, rather than the past or present, that science is trying to discern. This is the most noble of human pursuits.

And today, these soothsayers are not primarily the physicists, like Galileo, or the physicians, like Avicenna and Pasteur. They are the natural scientists, like Darwin, who are trying to assemble the complex puzzle of whether the planet will continue to grow life as we know it.

Among them are the biologists who concentrate on an individual species or family of species, the oceanographers who try to piece together how the vast sweeps of the currents work and the climatologists burdened with the task of parsing the meaning of increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And then there are the ecologists, a cabal born of crisis over the past generation as planetary life-support systems began visibly to collapse. Ecologists look at the whole puzzle together, and at the systems that underpin it. They are, in one sense, systems theorists who understand the ineluctable power of feedback loops. In other words, they know that systems (biological and otherwise) exist to keep themselves going. But when a whole system begins to fail, at some point, the paradigm shifts merrily into something else altogether and all forces begin to feed that new paradigm.

Here is an example from the world of medicine. Say you have cancer. Your body calls on all its resources to fight the cancerous cells, each supporting the others in the battle to eradicate the intruder. If that fails to stop the progress of the disease, then, at some point, the body switches from supporting life to supporting death. A new paradigm. A new feedback loop designed to foster death rather than life.

You could easily find examples of this theory of systems in finance or in politics, not to mention other fields.

David Schindler is an ecologist. What’s more, he is one of the world’s premier ecologists, who happens to live near Edmonton. In a country more attuned to its icons, he would be a celebrity. He has carried the unhappy responsibility for the past couple of decades of being able to see how the pieces fit together and trying to convince others that a devastating system shift is in the making unless human actions change.

Invariably reasoned and patient (except, perhaps, with the really dumb—a few Alberta politicians come to mind), he has the uncanny knack of being able to tell the future with pinpoint accuracy. I met him a decade ago and have spoken with him several times since. The prophecies he made then to me and to other journalists about such ecological phenomena as the changing climate, vanishing tree cover and water scarcity are all coming true. He is a very scary fellow.

In The Algal Bowl: Overfertilization of the World’s Freshwaters and Estuaries, Schindler has pitched in to do an updated, expanded revision of the book his colleague John Vallentyne published in 1974. The two worked together as pioneers in water ecology and Vallentyne, the grand old man of the lakes, died last year before this new edition saw light.

Vallentyne, something of a prophet himself, predicted in his first edition that North America’s lakes would turn to slime if nothing was done about the human-caused pollution pouring into them. Already at that time, lakes near big human populations and industry in North America and Europe were showing signs of the rise of algae. Vallentyne said the phenomenon would grow. He likened it to a watery form of the dust bowl the prairies became in the 1930s when “black blizzards” of dust blinded everything with eyes and barbers refused to shave men because the grit in their skin dulled the blade so quickly.

That natural disaster was caused by human activities, mainly clearing the land of its natural foliage and trying to till the thinnest land for crops.

The “algal bowl” Vallentyne envisioned was, in effect, a system switch. Instead of healthy lakes with thriving communities of plants, animals and microbes, the algae-dominated lakes would be thick with mats of phytoplankton, obliterating the natural assemblage of life forms. It would be caused not only by clearing the land, but also by allowing agricultural and industrial chemicals and human wastes to flow into the watersheds. In other words, a purely human-caused phenomenon.

And his predictions have, as the preface says, “largely come true, partly for reasons that [Vallentyne] predicted, and partly for reasons such as climate warming, that were not clearly foreseen at the time.” In addition, while some of the algal invasion in the eastern North American lakes has abated, this book shows that the algal bowl itself has become more dominant, centred now toward the west in North America, endemic in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, and spreading to the oceans.

What causes the algae to take over? Essentially, when they get too much food in the right growing conditions. (The word “eutrophication,” which is the scientific term for a body of water that has way too much plant food in it, comes from the Greek “eu,” or good, and “troph” or nourish, a dreadful academic pun.)

Food, in the case of algae, is the phosphorous and nitrogen that farmers put on their fields to help their food crops grow. It is also contained in industrial runoff and human waste that flows untreated into the water in so many parts of the world. The right growing conditions are warm surface water.

Why phosphorous and nitrogen? They are extremely effective plant food. Just as they encourage crop plants to grow, they stimulate microscopic water plants, which is what algae are. It is a positive banquet, and the algae grow and reproduce tremendously fast, die equally fast and drop to the bottom of a lake (or other body of water), where bacteria speedily feed on them, using up the water’s oxygen in their gluttony. One of the offshoots of the algal bowl is the dead zone, meaning a lake or ocean bottom where nothing that needs oxygen can live. It’s a pip for the fish.

Schindler and Vallentyne describe in minute detail how and why this “cultural” eutrophication, or human-caused plant-food glut, has come to be, giving a satisfying nod to the scientists who began working on the phenomenon during the last century. There is a lucid examination of several bodies of water that are slimed with algae and some attempts at recovery, as well as a beautiful description of several lakes where these authors and other ecologists have performed whole-lake experiments to understand better how the whole works. It is impeccable empirical science, written with vigour and precision. Among its other charms, this is an excellent textbook.

But this is a cloak of many colours. The Algal Bowl is also a work of scientific poetry. So, for example, here is an explanation of how micro-organisms break down organic compounds, also known as biological oxidation:

Or this description of what lies under the surface of a lake:

Even more compelling, though, is the book’s touching show of faith in Homo sapiens and our ability to face up to the disastrous changes we have wrought to the Earth’s capacity to support life. The final chapter puts the issue of lake eutrophication into the larger puzzle of planetary change and avers that if we can tackle this piece, we can tackle the whole thing. It is a prescription for hope.

It is touching because few planetary diagnosticians know the full state of the illness better than Schindler. He may be a world expert on lakes and their algal colonies, but he is also one of the world’s experts on how the planet works as a whole. From the lake system to the planetary system is not such a big leap for someone of Schindler’s intellect.

He knows only too well about the rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and the effect these have on, yes, lakes, but also land, ocean and climate. He knows how little politicians have accomplished in their avowed battle to bring down concentrations. Surely, being a Canadian and an Albertan, he can see through Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cynical ploy of saying he is concerned about climate change and then blocking international and domestic efforts to do anything. He knows that Alberta’s tar sands are the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the country and that there is no biologically sound reason they should exist at all in their current polluting capacity.

He also knows that the phenomenon that causes lake eutrophication has spread in an alarming way to the global ocean. At last count, there were 200 human-made dead zones (read: algae going crazy) in the global ocean, meaning huge swathes of ocean bottom near the shores that are devoid of oxygen and life because of chemical plant food that has ended up in the water. I spent two weeks two summers ago as part of a scientific crew researching the workings of the massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That year, the unmixable blob, as we called it, had an area of 17,000 square kilometres and an unknown, but obviously vast, volume. We could travel and trawl for days and find nothing oxygen-breathing in the water except jellyfish, which do not need much. Some days, there weren’t even any birds or insects over the water because they could not find enough food in the moonscape below.

The thing is that the ocean is far more complex than lakes. As Schindler and Vallentyne make clear, it has taken half a century to figure out how lakes work and the understanding is still imperfect. The research on oceans and their eutrophication is not as far along as that, and the algal bowl is spreading faster than the increase in knowledge.

As Schindler no doubt also knows, understanding the dead zones in lakes and even in the more mysterious coastal parts of the ocean is only a primer for understanding something even more devastating that appears, heaven help us, to be in our planet’s future. It is this: new dead zones are appearing in key currents within the global ocean that are not related to chemical run-off. Instead, they are the result of carbon dioxide–induced climate change and the effect it is having on winds.

Those currents include the California off the coast of North America, the Benguela off Africa and the Humboldt of the southeast Pacific. They are some of the most productive parts of the global ocean, meaning they have a lot of fish. Or at least, when they are not dead zones, they have a lot of fish.

News of the dead zone in the California current was published in February for the first time and caused consternation among scientists. It is one of those changes few had predicted and significant because it could—maybe—lead to a cascade of low-oxygen zones in the global ocean similar to those that characterized the Permian extinction spasm about 250 million years ago. That was the greatest mass extinction in the planet’s history and one of just five to have occurred so far. The most recent was when the dinosaurs died out (apart from bird ancestors) 65 million years ago.

These do not appear to be forces to be trifled with.

So, when has science been more important to humanity than now?

Never. Now everything seems to be at stake: 6 billion humans and counting rapidly, plus many of the billions of other creatures that, like us, rely on the planet’s life-support systems. Now we are feebly reliant on scientists to be our planet’s physicians, to help us know how to heal this system before it kicks over its traces and moves on to something new and, likely, post-human.

And when Schindler tells us, as he does in the penultimate paragraph of this book that the time to begin considering the social changes necessary to protect freshwater is “NOW” (his emphasis), I think we had better listen.