Goal 19: Establish global land use policies to replenish the natural landscape.
[For those who haven't been following this series, I post several per week, each dealing with a specific goal for the 21st Century. The full list is cited at the end of the diary. Visiting my profile page will give you citations to prior sections.]
Obstacles
Large sectors of the world have been deforested, strip mined, drained or flooded, or otherwise transformed for economic development. This has now reached a level where it has had an impact on global climate. Those exploiting the land and its natural resources are being driven by demands for materialistic goods. They, and their customers, can be expected to resist any efforts to limit new initiatives or to return land back to a less developed state. Changes in demand can only come as a result of the lifestyle changes mentioned in previous essays.
Implementation
The collapse of the world ecology may not come from some widely discussed trend like global warming, but from poorly managed local land use policies. The deforestation of much of the world may reach an unexpected tipping point and cause sudden, catastrophic, changes. We don't know enough about the balance of forces in nature to be taking such chances. We have many examples of what the results of poor planning have been. Prominent examples include the destruction of the cod population in the Atlantic, the deforestation of the North East US in the 19th Century and the ongoing destruction of the Amazon region.
Because the costs of wise land use policy are local while the benefits may be global there is little incentive for localities to undertake the changes needed. We must establish international funds which compensate localities for the expense of restoring the landscape. Perhaps the revenue for this can be raised by establishing a global tax which is based upon the amount of implicit expense the developed world forces on undeveloped societies. A society which uses more lumber than is replaced would pay a tax equal to the cost of regenerating the resource. A country that extracts more from the sea than it replaces in other areas of the biosphere would be similarly taxed. The exact mechanism is not as important as the acknowledgment that we can no longer get something for nothing.
The full list of goals can be found here.
The list of general objections can be found here.