Tag: anthropocene

Diese Liebe macht krank

One of the things probably most people do not suspect about Germany is that it has a vibrant gangsta rap scene, whose main leaders is the infamous crew 187 Strassenbande from Hamburg. And, especially, one rapper: Gzuz.

As he himself sings, “the guy is real, whether he comes from Compton or Altona“. He’s indeed a character: He did, among other things, two or three years in jail for armed robbery, slapped a swan, and celebrated New Year with automatic weapons. His over the top, so-real-it’s-unreal videos shocked hip hop fans in Usa.

Why are we talking of gangsta rappers here? One of the best known Gzuz hits is CL500. A celebration of his car, symbol of the wealth he got by rapping, it’s about as deliciously Asozial (a term that in Germany is about the same as chav in England) as it can get:


Why are we discussing German gangsta rap here? I was intrigued by how, in the song, Gzuz is proud to show how much he loves to waste energy and fuel. He loves to enjoy his car even when it does not make sense:

Die Straßen hoch und runter, auch wenn ich keinen Grund hab’

(«Up and down the streets, even when I have no reason to»)

And in the end:

Und wir blubbern, blubbern, blubbern
Blubbern, blubbern, blubbern, blubbern
Wir blubbern, blubbern, fünf Euro weg
Zehn Euro weg

(«And we gurgle, gurgle gurgle, we gurgle, five Euro away, ten Euro away.», referring to the engine roaring and easily burning five, ten Euros of fuel)

This sounds funny, a kind of childish boast: but is it so different from what happens actually all the time in our civilization or, perhaps, in every civilization that has been blessed with cheap energy? It’s the Jevons paradox: the more energy is cheap and available, the more energy consumption is efficient, the more we use it. But there’s more: the CL500 of Gzuz is actually, as far as I can read, quite fuel consuming. He’s not just consuming more fuel because he can, he loves that waste. It’s more of a potlatch, a waste of valuables to show off wealth.

It’s hardly the most pressing issue in the whole problem of climate change, but it’s interesting to see that there are, indeed, cultural barriers to reduce energy and fossil fuel consumption. We are in love with the sheer ability to use cheap energy whenever we can, however we can. This very blog post is inessential: it consumes energy when I write it, when you read it, when it is stored on a server. But oh, how easily inessential things today become essential tomorrow; how necessary is luxury after a while.

Alles ist entspannt wenn er rollt, rollt
Digga, erst der CL und Erfolg folgt

(«Everything is easy when it rolls, rolls
Dude, first the CL and then success follows»)

It rolled for a while. Western civilization has had an intense love story with fossil fuels, which as many love stories first inebriated us, then intoxicated us. They gave us an unprecedented freedom, but at a price. Getting out of toxic relationships is a hard job, and painful. But we have to, because, as Gzuz says, when describing his addiction to the smell of gasoline:

Diese Liebe macht krank

«This love makes you sick».

 

A lesson from the Iceland walrus

One of my pet peeves is the persistent delusion, implicit in many discussions, that the ecological crisis is a recent phenomenon. Industrialization, pesticides, intensive agriculture on a massive scale would have only recently tipped the scales, while before humanity was more or less in equilibrium with the environment. That we were sustainable. Noble savages. Truth is, we’ve never been. The current Anthropocene extinctions are nothing more than the continuation of the Pleistocene extinctions, and all together they are phases of the Sixth Extinction.

There are endless stories about that, from the American or Australian megafaunas, to the dodo. But it is always interesting to have another clean-cut example. Apparently, there was a distinct populaton of walruses in Iceland, until a few centuries ago. Then they disappeared, abruptly. The killers, as suggested by a recent study  by Xenia Kéighley et al. published on Molecular Biology and Evolution (and open access, yay!), were the Norse, that colonizing Iceland found a bonanza of meat, fat, skin and ivory under the guise of long-toothed pinnipeds, and hunted them to extinction.  It is a deliciously interdisciplinary work, where you find genetic analysis of ancient DNA intertwined with the analysis of Norse sagas. So much for who wants to keep the two cultures separate.

There is a twist. Human-driven extinctions are ancient, but they are  land extinctions. Sea ecosystems were, indeed, mostly untouched until recently as far as we know. The Iceland walrus seems to be one of the earliest cases where our hand started to waste marine blood:

This is to one of the earliest examples of local extinction of a marine species following human arrival, during the very beginning of commercial marine exploitation.

A very significant event for the Sixth Extinction indeed. And the cause was, quite remarkably, capitalism, or at least its basic driver: trade.

We show that commercial hunting, economic incentives, and trade networks as early as the Viking Age were of sufficient scale and intensity to result in significant, irreversible ecological impacts on the marine environment. […]

Therefore, the extinction of the Icelandic walrus provides an exceptionally early example of hunting not driven solely for subsistence, but rather international demand for valuable trade commodities including walrus ivory, oil, and skin sold across medieval markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

In contrast to other species, the Iceland walrus did not die because the Vikings needed it. It died because they sold it. It was easy cash, until it lasted. While we have never been capable of a sustainable coexistence with many ecosystems, we live in an age of what has been called the Great Acceleration, where lots of ecological parameters skyrocket into the abyss.  And what drives this acceleration if not trade, economic growth, exploitation of resources?  To those who think that the socioeconomy of the human species has little to do with the Sixth Extinction, the Iceland walrus is a stern warning. The Invisible Hand is tainted forever with the blood of human and non human creatures.

The paper is: Xénia Keighley, Snæbjörn Pálsson, Bjarni F Einarsson, Aevar Petersen, Meritxell Fernández-Coll, Peter Jordan, Morten Tange Olsen, Hilmar J Malmquist “Disappearance of Icelandic Walruses Coincided with Norse Settlement”, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 36, Issue 12, December 2019, Pages 2656–2667, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msz196

 

At war with chimps

For all our prehistory and history, we clashed and fighted with other species. Sometimes they fight back: David Quammen reports on National Geographic of an ongoing and bloody conflict with chimps in rural Uganda. The details are gruesome, but it’s us who started:

The main driver of the conflicts, it seems, is habitat loss for chimps throughout areas of western Uganda, forested lands outside of national parks and reserves, which have been converted to agriculture as the population has grown. The native forest that once covered these hillsides is now largely gone, much of it cut during recent decades for timber and firewood, and cleared to plant crops.

It is a cautionary and worrying tale. The more we occupy habitats and resources of other species, the more we risk direct conflict with them -and so, the more these species will be further jeopardized. Climate change for example will probably add further competition with the rest of the biosphere, humans and non-humans clinging to land and water. Bleak times are ahead.