No Impact Man

For the first several years after  my family moved to Massachusetts in 1997,  New York became a place we passed through as we drove between our new home in Bridgewater and our relatives in Maryland. Sometimes these trips would include a stay near the scenic Hudson with our geographer friend Jeff, who is a planner for, well, Scenic Hudson. In more recent years, we have spent a lot more time exploring the center of the state, as we take our daughter to and from a camp in the Adirondacks. One of those outings, in fact, led me to post a Concept Cache about a coffee shop in rural central New York.

During all of this time, our visits to New York City have been relatively few, though we have enjoyed the visits when we have enjoyed The City (as it is often known) immensely when we have made the effort. The “effort” has to do with two main factors: expense and transportation. Both of these barriers can be lowered with a bit of ingenuity and experience, of course, but so far our visits have been very special treats. Recently, I watched the film No Impact Man as part of my wife Pamela’s Celebrating the States blogging project, and it led me to think critically about the role of New York City — and cities in general — in human-environment interactions.

In my course on the geography of environmental problems, I use Andrew Goudie’s Human Impact Reader anthology to help my students examine the spatial aspects of a variety of impacts humans have on the environment. In simple terms, the impact of humans on the environment can be summarized as I=PCT, which is to say that the human impact is a function of population, per-capita consumption, and the technology used for that consumption. As we read the anthology’s seminal scientific articles on a wide variety of human impacts — from coastal erosion and soil degradation to flash floods and climate change — I emphasize the spatial dimensions of each of these impacts.

No Impact Man — which should really be called No Impact Family — is the story of one year in the life of Colin Beavan, his wife, and their young daughter. As the title implies, the goal of the family’s year-long approach was to reduce their net impact on the environment to zero, by a combination of reducing negative impacts and increasing positive impacts, with an emphasis on pursuit of the former. Their effort leads to some important findings about the spatial dimensions one the other side of the equation. Specifically, how might high density mitigate or enhance the relative contributions of population, consumption, and technology?

In my earliest thinking about the environment, I viewed cities mainly as sources of environmental problems, given the high density of some sources of air and water pollution.  I have since learned that low density can also be problematic, as  suburban sprawl tends to increase the use of private vehicles, among other effects. From an environmental-impact perspective, the clearest advantage of urban density is the ability to reduce or eliminate automobile dependency and thereby eliminate a major source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The Beavan family gave up airplanes and automobiles for the entire year, used trains only for long distances, and used walking and biking for almost all of their transportation needs. To do this while still enjoying access to many cultural, educational, and employment opportunities, it is almost essential to live in an urban place, where a great number of such opportunities can be found within a short travel distance.

In reducing their impact, the Beavins also focused a lot of their effort on food — growing some of their own and buying from nearby sources. The spatial dimensions of this are a bit more complicated. Food that is grown locally does not have to be transported very far, reducing the use of fossil fuels for transportation. Food that is grown organically does not require chemical inputs (and therefore eliminates chemical waste streams). Eating low on the food chain — that is, vegetarian or vegan — further reduces the use of both energy and chemicals. An advantage of pursuing these goals in an urban setting is that a critical mass of like-minded consumers can be found, creating enough demand for farmers from the region to supply urban farmers’ markets. Whether such efforts could ever be scaled up to supply the entire food needs of major metropolitan areas, however, remains to be seen.

Colin Beavan hopes to have an impact beyond the one-year experiment. His No Impact Man blog is an effort to build on the experience.

Mato Grosso: The Future of Food

Paul Ehrlich’s publication of The Population Bomb in 1968 explained why human population growth was accelerating, and touched off serious debate about whether enough food could be produced to feed ever-more billions of people. Even as many have faced malnutrition and even starvation, however, total food production has tended to keep pace.

For the foreseeable future, population will continue to grow, albeit it at a decreasing rate. Over the next half-century, the question seems not to be whether humans will produce enough food, but rather how that food will be produced. The human population is passing through what E.O. Wilson has called the bottleneck, and by the middle of the twenty-first century, it is likely to level off at somewhere between 8 and 9 billion people.

Overall food production can be achieved in just a few ways:

• Distribute food more equitably by curtailing over-consumption and reducing the production of meat
• Increase crop yields
• Increase the land area under cultivation

Each of these broad strategies involves a lot of possible specific cases and a number of complicated trade-offs. The story of soybeans in Brazil — particularly in the huge, interior state of Mato Grosso — illustrates several of the complications associated with the second and third options.

I took these photographs of Cargill’s riverfront terminal just downstream from Porto Velho, Rondônia in 2003. Much of the soy grown in the center-west portion of the country is brought by road to this break-in-bulk point, where it is transfered to barges that can take it all the way to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, for export.

For many years, agricultural production in Brazil increased slowly, if at all, and sometimes not fast enough to keep up with domestic population growth. What little increase did occur was strictly the result of increases in the amount of land being cultivated. Even though considerable efforts were made to increase yields, improvements in technology did little more than offset the poor quality of the new lands being cultivated.

The twentieth-century experience of Brazil is hardly surprising; humans farm about 1/8 of the earth’s land surface and almost by definition this is the most productive 1/8. Any new areas brought into production are likely to be marginal lands in both senses of the word: in peripheral locations relative to existing human settlement and of lower quality relative to already-settled lands.

By the close of the twentieth century, however, something clearly had changed, as Brazil’s agricultural output — particularly of soybeans — began to challenge the role of the United States as the dominant producer in the Western hemisphere. Reporting for the radio program Living on Earth, Bruce Gellerman has described this transition beautifully in Magic Seeds and the Miracle Crop. (His report is available as an mp3 and as text with some excellent photographs.)

The report describes how Mato Grosso has become such a large and still-growing producer of soybeans, despite the unsuitable soil conditions. It then goes on to describe the consequences associated with such success: increased reliance on pesticides, the tendency of crop pests to develop pesticide resistance, and the great loss of habitat in the savanna, known in Brazil as cerrado, or “closed” for its traditional inaccessibility.

Brazil is advancing on its frontier just as the United States did more than a century ago. A decade ago, I wrote  comparison of the two frontier experiences: that of the United States in the 19th-century West and that of Brazil in the 20th-century Amazon. According to Gellerman’s report, the process continues in the 21st-century cerrado, but with more than one biome at stake and with the potential for much more substantial clearing. With the techniques currently being employed, the area remaining to be cultivated in Brazil might be greater than the area currently cultivated in the entire United States.