Practical Ethics

Saving the planet by reducing birth rates

Climate change will impact the well-being of future generations, directly by, for example, increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heavy storms. It will have also indirect impacts on human heath – via cardiovascular diseases or by a rise in epidemics as emerging disease leave the tropic and go North.

 
The beginning of this year, the British Medical Journal declared that since climate change impacts public health, doctors have to deal with it. And in tackling the problem, John Guillebaud, emeritus professor of family planning and reproductive health at University College London , and GP Pip Hayes from Exeter suggest that doctors should talk to their patients about climate change and encourage them to think about the environmental impacts of having a big family: see for example the Editorial or an article in the Daily Telegraph, or the Guardian. After all, “each UK birth will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse ags emissions […] than a new birth in Ethiopia.”

 
Fair enough, the world is interconnected: environmental changes involve impacts on the population, and changes in the population impact the environment. But is it sensible to treat environmental problems not primarily as such, but making them problems of family planning?

Unpopular policy and public rationality

The BBC reports that the Japanese town of Kamikatsu has become the first ‘zero waste’ town. Residents compost all of their food waste, and must sort the rest of their rubbish into 34 different categories—all of which they must take to public waste centres, since there are no rubbish collections from people’s homes. It seems that the inhabitants of the town are generally enthusiastic about the scheme, which offers small financial rewards for recycling, and has encouraged people to make an effort to reduce the rubbish they produce.

This is one of those relatively rare, uplifting stories about a scheme designed to reduce environmental damage that is not only successful, but supported by the community. Could something similar work in the UK? Recently, many UK councils reduced domestic refuse collections from once-weekly to once-fortnightly, with recyclable waste being collected in the intervening weeks. Whilst this has boosted the amount of rubbish being recycled, some news reports reveal that the new measures are unpopular, and some councils have bowed to public pressure by re-introducing weekly collections. Given the environmental impact of adding to landfill waste sites, ought the government to placate the public by relaxing measures designed to reduce waste, or should unpopular measures be enforced regardless of public opinion?

The Clash of Environmental Values

GMO and climate change seem currently one of the more upsetting issues not only for environmentalists, but for the wider public as well. Carbon tax proposals like the one released by Canada’s opposition party last week (e.g Financial Times) or requests to the EU by Britain to embrace a more liberal attitude towards GM crops (e.g. The Independent) are the order of the day in many newspapers. 

Precautionary arguments of any sort regarding the release of GMO or greenhouse gases commonly invoke the complex and still badly understood entanglement of different parts of the environment: Present greenhouse gas emissions may trigger a catastrophic runaway climate change: An initial global warming may yield to, say, the release of vast amounts of methane that so far was bound in the permafrost of the Russian or North American tundra; the methane further increases the initial warming.  We simply do not sufficiently understand such type of feedbacks. The same holds true for releasing GMO into the atmosphere: Via horizontal gene transfer to wild types or feral relatives, for example, GMO may yield unpredicted and unwanted side effects.

Releasing greenhouse gases or GMO are both interventions in the complex environmental system. But how, if at all, do these two issues, commonly discussed as separate and isolated questions, interrelate?

Helping others to save the rainforest

The Congo basin rainforest is a natural resource of staggering scale, second only to the amazon in size. It stretches across six countries in the centre of Africa and provides shelter, food, income and fuel for millions of local people. However, like most of the world's remaining forests, it is being destroyed at an unsustainable rate. Like all the world's major rainforests, it lies in developing countries which are desperate for any small income it can provide. This adds to the sense of tragedy: these great resources are being destroyed for what is a relative pittance to conservationists in the rich countries. Happily, this tragic element is starting to be turned around and may give us our best chance at preserving the forest.

Two approaches to climate control

The Guardian leader today drew what it called a crude distinction between “two sets of people who both want to fight climate change”.   Some think we can carry on more or less as we are while pursuing technological means to counterbalance the accelerating impact of our species on the natural environment, while their opponents think we should be getting that species to make radical changes in its way of life before its home becomes uninhabitable.   The article was mainly about plans for carbon capture, but there had been another piece a few days before about much further reaching ideas of geoengineering or ‘ecohacking’ – “using science to change the environment on a vast scale” by such means as screening the whole planet from the sun – which, it seems, might become feasible sooner than we realize.

The Dignity of the Carrot

What are you allowed to do to plants? At least in Switzerland you are not allowed to do research that deeply offend the dignity of plants. The Swiss federal Gene Technology Law stipulates that any scientific research should respect the "dignity of creation". All plant biotechnology grant applications must now state how they take plant dignity into consideration, confusing researchers.  The Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) have issued some guidelines (pdf) which make the situation even more confusing. Neither humans nor plants are likely to be helped.

Killing the goose that laid the golden egg

The US government has just announced that it is likely to close its enormous Pacific salmon fishery, which stretches across 80% of the USA's west coast. The once vast salmon stocks have crashed and are now at a mere 6% of the long-term average. Many readers will remember the similar crash in the cod stocks off the east coast of Canada in the early 90s which led to great economic hardship in the area. The cause of both incidents is the same: overfishing. The Canadian and US fishing industries destroyed these vast renewable resources and in doing so have probably killed their very own geese of the golden eggs.

Methuselah's planet: the population cost of longer life

Ageing is a mysterious process. There is a good deal of ongoing research aimed at trying to understand its biological cause, though much remains unknown. Some research is aimed at trying to unlock longevity, for example a study published this week that found a particular gene mutation in a group of long-living Ashkenazi Jews. Other researchers are actively looking at rare diseases like progeria which lead to accelerated ageing. It is often expressed that such research will make it possible to extend the normal human lifespan.

But should we try to make our lives longer? In an era of increasing environmental awareness, when the costs of human overpopulation are all too clear it might be argued that the planet cannot support a significant increase in our lifespan.

Lights out! For our Climate! For what else?

Last Saturday, people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland were asked to switch off the lights for five minutes between 20.00 and 20.05. “Lights out! For our Climate!” was the motto. Similarly, on February 1 this year –  the day of the publication of the latest scientific report of the IPCC – people all over the world followed a call of a French initiative to turn off the lights for five minutes. The recent call to arms was widely supported by the German-speaking media, including the internet portal Google.

Luckily, not too many people followed the call. Luckily, not because I want to doubt that present forecasts on the future climate provide a need to worry –  they clearly do! But had 10,000 homes participated in the campaign, then it is likely that the the Power supply system would have broken down – in all of Europe. Hopefully the worries of the power generators will have been heard the other side of the Pond, when the campaign “Lights out in America" calls for a similarly rash reaction to global warming in March 2008.

These campaigns do not seem to be the only hasty reaction to global warming.