Ground Rules

“The land is a being who remembers everything. You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs,” writes Joy Harjo in her poem, “ Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” Harjo’s words are a poetic embodiment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which envision a greener, fairer, better world and are integral to the overall vision. One goal, Life on Land, asks us to protect and restore terrestrial ecosystems, manage forests and halt land degradation and biodiversity loss.

As a response to changes that are rendering our planet hotter, less varied and more stressed in almost every measurable way, Life on Land’s brief is daunting in scope. The implication is that environmental problems are solvable, but not with the same kind of thinking that got us here. We need a cognitive and strategic shift, a big bet on what we might call “systems thinking.”

That means thinking of nature itself as a vast network of interconnected subsystems. And it means thinking of the humans who fouled the nest, and are tasked to fix it, as a system as well, with every last voice needed in the existential brainstorming.

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When we think of the natural world, we ought to consider time and place. We must “think like a mountain,” the ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold said, hatching plans on a scale that measures time by eons, and space by the contours of the Earth itself — but knowing that local acts have massive reverberations.

“We’re learning that an impact on one thing will affect something else,” says Nadir Erbilgin, professor of forest entomology and chemical ecology, and chair of the Department of Renewable Resources. Consider what happens when development projects slice and dice an animal habitat. “Habitat fragmentation is, in my opinion, the biggest threat to ecosystem functions everywhere in the world,” he adds. “There’s a great big web of systems, and we’re cutting the cords.”

Erbilgin is an entomologist, which means he studies insects. He thinks of his world as a triangle where each point — insects, plants and microbes — influences the others. “Any change in the soil,” he says, “affects what’s growing above.”

And one of the things that’s growing above this part of the world is the boreal forest. That’s the bailiwick of Stan Boutin , ’77 BSc(Hons).

Boutin is a mammalian population ecologist and former co-director of the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute’s Science Centre, whose innovative modelling helps steer land-use decisions in the boreal forest. The boreal accounts for a third of the world’s forest cover. Next to the rainforest, it’s our biggest carbon sink.

Boreal management, then, is Earth management: a huge determinant of the future of life on land.

Squeezing economic juice out of our natural resources within the confines of strict environmental standards: that is a delicate, high-stakes endeavour for which we have limited time. “We can’t just put a wall around the boreal forest and keep humans out,” Boutin says. “Our human footprint has a big bearing on that forest. Like it or not, we’re playing God now.”

This is something Erin Bayne thinks a lot about, too. He’s a conservation biologist and co-director of the ABMI Science Centre, which also studies how human behaviour influences wildlife populations. ABMI works with industry and government to provide real-time data on wildlife numbers — a lot of it. (“Our goal is to do that at a much bigger scale than anyone’s ever thought of before,” Bayne says.) The data goes to a centralized repository that other wildlife scientists can access, and from which they can build complex statistical models of species’ populations. The big-data approach will help us intuit the complicated interactions between natural and human-made change.

“We can know that an action that destroyed two per cent of the wildlife population of species X also played a role in carbon sequestration, in the hydrology of the system, and a hundred other processes,” Bayne says. “Luckily, we’re in a better position than some countries to prevent some catastrophic outcomes.” The key is planning our way out of cascading species loss.

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Think of the UN’s Life on Land strategy as having two main roles: protect and restore. Resource managers love innovative double-duty solutions that do both — like Sasha Wilson’s work.

Wilson, a geochemist who runs the Environmental Economic Geology Laboratory, helped pioneer a process that dissolves rock and recovers the embedded metals (chiefly nickel) for use in renewable-energy infrastructure (chiefly batteries). In ways not previously explored, it unlocks the tools to fight climate change — and captures CO2 in the bargain.

“We called it ‘two birds with one stone’: metal recovery with carbon sequestration,” Wilson says of his collaboration with developer Jessica Hamilton, a geochemist at the Australian Synchrotron. The process leaves behind a silicon-rich goo that collaborating scientists have taken a keen interest in. “They tested it to see if it could be used, for example, as an additive in cement. We’re trying to move toward zero tailings from mines.”

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There is a Buddhist term, “interbeing,” that captures the scope of the co-operation we need going forward. Five years ago, Boutin founded the Canadian Mountain Network, a necklace of centres of excellence in scientific research that has since been re-branded as Braiding Knowledges Canada. The goal is to thread Indigenous wisdom and academic science for a multiplier effect. “Indigenous people have figured out parts of the puzzle, just as scientists have figured out parts of the puzzle,” Boutin says.

“Most problems happen because we lack understanding,” says Erbilgin. “Academics are ‘horse view,’” he says, meaning metaphorical blinders keep their attention narrow, focused tightly on their domain. “We won’t solve big problems that way. What’s key is multi-disciplinary co-operation with various interested parties.”

Two of the students in Wilson’s group are working with process engineers at the University of Calgary, looking for geological solutions for carbon-sequestration projects. “Earth scientists know what the Earth does, and we have ideas that will help fight climate change,” Wilson says. “Whether those ideas are economical and practical is a different question. Geologists and engineers together can help us know if our climate solutions will work.”

Bayne’s statistical models tell the blazingly clear story of human actions affecting biodiversity. Clear to scientists, that is. Getting that understanding into the noggins of the rest of us is trickier. “People need to understand that trade-offs come with every decision,” Bayne says. “You can’t have everything — healthy wildlife and ever-growing industry. My job as a scientist, at minimum, is to communicate those trade-offs so we make better policy decisions.”

This, then, is the story that needs to land. It’s the story the UN is telling: To pull on any one thing is to pull on everything. Life on Earth involves compromises, and we should make them deliberately, prioritizing ones that align with our values and with our species' survival. Ones that honour our ancestors and give those not yet born a hope.