The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [74]
This gainsays conventional environmental wisdom in several ways. Clearly, the best strategy to curb future population growth is to speed up the “demographic transition” in developing countries—and this transition toward women having fewer babies is inextricably linked both with increasing levels of prosperity and with urbanization. Therefore rising rates of economic growth and the expansion of cities are good news for the environment because—more than anything else—they will restrain the future growth in human population. Moreover, although the idea of getting close to the land in small-scale communities has a deep cultural resonance in some schools of environmentalist thought, in reality this is probably the worst thing that anyone can do. It is much better to encourage as many people as possible to continue to seek to improve their livelihoods and prospects by embracing urban living and migrating out of rural areas.
All around the world, rural depopulation is leading to forest regrowth in abandoned areas—from the vast tracts of secondary broadleaf woodland in America’s New England states to tropical forests in Puerto Rico,66 the Dominican Republic, and many other areas. In Costa Rica, abandoned cattle pasture is nurturing a flourishing young forest that in turn now supports a stable population of jaguars and other threatened fauna.67 A recent scientific paper looking at Latin America lists “similar patterns of ecosystem recovery following rural-urban migration” in Patagonia, northwest Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Honduras, and the montane deserts and Andean tundra ecosystems of Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru.68 Even in rich countries, proposals for “rewilding”—which I strongly support—only stand a chance of success in areas where rural populations have collapsed and formerly subsidized unproductive farms can be shut down to allow them to revert to nature.
These observations, and many other studies around the world, suggest that environmentalists need to take land use more seriously. This challenges much conventional wisdom, however. It suggests that rural depopulation should not necessarily be opposed with “sustainable development” schemes aimed at improving rural life to stop people migrating to cities. Equally, instead of encouraging low-tech traditional farming methods it may be preferable to focus on improving high-yield mechanized agriculture on the most fertile farmland to feed the new urban residents, while allowing mountainsides and other marginal lands to revert to forest. This is already happening by default in Latin America and elsewhere: In Vietnam, forest area has been increasing since the 1990s after small-scale, unproductive agriculture was made uncompetitive by more intensive, larger-scale farming in the more open market economy. The environment has benefited as extensive areas were abandoned by people moving to take up jobs in the expanding cities.69
This trend should be cause for optimism that we can make progress in meeting the biodiversity planetary boundary. “Current human demographic trends, including slowing population growth and intense urbanization, give reason to hope that deforestation will slow, natural forest regeneration through secondary succession will accelerate, and the widely anticipated mass extinction of tropical forest species will be avoided,” write the biologists Joseph Wright and Helene Muller-Landau.70 Through examining UN data on forest cover and populations, Wright and Muller-Landau found a strong relationship between rural population density and deforestation that appears to hold true across 45 developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and tropical Asia.71 The implication is simple: fewer people, more forest.
As always, one should not oversimplify. Cities themselves