• Current Issue
• Download Print Archives

• SIGN IN
• SUBSCRIBE

• Coronavirus
• News
• In-depth
• Blogs
• Videos
• Book Store
• Africa
• Climate
• Young Environmentalist

By Erika Schelby

Published: Friday 11 February 2022

Hans Carl von Carlowitz who authored Sylvicultura Oeconomica oder Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The proverb "necessity is the mother of invention" has roots that go back to Aesop’s fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" and to Plato’s "Republic." It is realistic to assume that Hans Carl von Carlowitz, mining manager for the Saxon court in Freiberg, Germany, during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was also driven by necessity and a severe shortage of wood to invent the concept of sustainability ("Náchhaltigkeit").

Or to be more precise, he coined the word to describe the quintessential principles of a human activity that goes back to the dawn of history: the sustainable use of natural resources.

Although it may not have been called sustainability until Carlowitz, societies had practiced it for a long time as a vital part of cultural or religious practices.

Ancient Egypt pursued sustainable systems for more than 3,000 years. The Maya, according to anthropologist Lisa Lucero, practiced a "cosmology of conservation." The literature of ancient India is brimful with references to the preservation of the environment.

On the other hand, there are ancient civilisations that may have collapsed because they despoiled the natural world that gave them life. The earliest example may be found in the ancient Mesopotamian "Epic of Gilgamesh," the first version of which dates back to 2000 B.C.

Clay tablets tell the tale of vast cedar forests cut down by the eponymous hero in defiance of the gods, who punish him by cursing the land with fire and drought, turning the region into a desert. Nothing grew anymore, forcing the Sumerians to flee to Babylon and Assyria.

Now, 300 years after Carlowitz gave sustainability its modern name when Europe was short on wood, we again have a timber shortage—this one triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and caused by climate change.

The modern concept of sustainable living on a planet with limited resources evolved from the work done by Carlowitz regarding the need for the sustainable management of forests.

In 1713, just a year before his death, Carlowitz published the 432-page folio book, Sylvicultura Oeconomica oder Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht ("Silvicultural Oeconomica or the Instructions for Wild Tree Cultivation").

Sylvicultura Oeconomica documented the beginning of scientific forestry. It also invented sustainability, which had to be accepted to assure the continuity of human societies and of nature.

Without scientific forestry, people across Europe and around the world would have faced far more severe economic and social disasters than the ones witnessed in the last few centuries.

"In the beginning was the Earth," said Christof Mauch, a modern-day German sustainability specialist and historian, in a 2013 lecture. "The Earth does not need humans to survive, but humans need the Earth."

In fact, Carlowitz envisioned the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social justice. He rejected short-term thinking. He offered solutions, scientific details, guidelines and practical proposals on how to save, select, nurse, plant, re-grow, maintain and protect forests and their biodiversity.

He presented an inventory of conditions across Europe and discussed threats caused by extreme weather conditions, diseases, pests and humans. He pled for careful, frugal consumption and recommended the art of saving timber.

His ideas for using energy-efficient stoves in housing or furnaces in smelters, tips on improving the insulation in buildings and finding substitutes like peat for heating homes are not unlike today’s sustainability efforts.

The main part of the book deals with the urgent work that needs to be done to overcome the Holznot, or wood emergency. In his 2010 book, German journalist Ulrich Grober calls Sylvicultura Oeconomica "the birth certificate of our modern concept of sustainability."

These concepts developed by Carlowitz have been adopted across the globe in the course of the last 300 years. Unfortunately, today the rapid deforestation of large areas continues unabated in various regions, mostly in the Global South.

The developed Global North had already done much of its massive deforestation during the era of industrialisation.

It should be noted that today, the greed of wealthy individuals, corporations and governments from the rich countries often exacerbate the climate crisis in tropical regions, while Indigenous peoples and those who are not in positions of power due to lack of access to capital or being located in the Global South (particularly island nations) often have proven, long-term sustainable forest management and environmental practices and are most affected by the unsustainable practices of developed nations.

But the rich world has been reeling from the climate impacts of unsustainable development for decades, with increasing temperatures and a rise in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. In many ways, we are losing a race against time.

During the summer of 2021 in the United States, firefighters wrapped aluminum foil around the trunk of a giant old sequoia, hoping to save the world’s largest tree from "a raging wildfire" in California.

Sequoias, which can live for up to 3,400 years, have coexisted with occasional forest fires for millennia. They don’t burn easily and have survived wildfires over the years, even benefitting from fires that clear away the underbrush, creating new space and providing the required sunlight for seedlings.

But this no longer works. The new wildfires of the climate change era last too long and burn too hot even for these huge trees, who were once regarded as invulnerable. According to the New York Times, "in last year’s Castle fire, between 7,000 and 11,000 large sequoias died across the Sierra Nevada or about 10 to 14 per cent of them."

All these natural calamities have come in a cluster, bundled together in the last few years: The pandemic, ever more and ever bigger forest fires in the West and leaping north into Canada, excessive heat, lasting drought and the destruction of millions of trees by a tiny creepy-crawly bark-eating beetle.

Businesses closed their doors, sawmills halted production, truckers stopped trucking and logistical bottlenecks multiplied. Builders ceased construction and people were stuck in lockdowns at home.

Then, contrary to expectations, a DIY frenzy broke out. Confined to their houses or apartments because of pandemic-related restrictions, Americans started to improve their private spaces. Perhaps they felt it was the only reality they could count on. It was something they valued as a zone of safety and personal freedom in the midst of turmoil: a room of one’s own.

Wood became a high-demand commodity. Trading at $381 for 1,000 board feet back in 2019, in May of 2021 lumber hit a record high of $1,711.20. Costs for lumber have come down again, but house prices have not.

According to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), "the average price of a newly constructed single-family home has increased by about $ 36,000 since April of 2020."

It’s a vicious cycle: trees are stressed by heat and drought, which makes them less resilient. A cold climate used to keep the mountain pine beetles under control but warming temperatures have upset the balance and increased their numbers.

With more mouths to feed, the beetles advanced into new areas, attacked weakened trees, and have already devastated 27 million hectares of forest across North America "an area more than three quarters the size of Germany."

There are also more and more people who are directly confronted by climate change. The Washington Post reports that "[n]early 1 in 3 Americans live in a county hit by a weather disaster in the past three months … On top of that, 64 percent live in places that experienced a multiday heat wave."

So how long can people function and be productive under the present and increasingly worse circumstances? How can governments govern? When will the governed discover that the powerful Wizard of Oz isn’t so mighty after all?

Americans are still embedded in a never-ending stream of the same-old growth and consumption messages that contradict what society as a whole must do to become sustainable.

But finally, there is a shift in public awareness. According to the Yale Program on Climate Communication, "three out of four Americans now believe that global warming is happening today." It is hard to tell if this change of mind will last; public opinion is fickle, and there is the fact of a short attention span.

Perhaps it is helpful to acknowledge that the world was in trouble before, and that, driven by necessity 300 years ago, it found solutions. The challenges being faced by people across the globe are far bigger today, but the tools available to them are better too. The world has added much science, and people should have a better understanding of how nature and societies work.

Three scientists have recently been awarded and will share the Nobel Prize for physics 2021: Syukuro Manabe of Princeton, Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Giorgio Parisi of the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. All three of them did long-term groundbreaking work related to complex physical systems and modeling the Earth’s climate.

Hans Carl von Carlowitz had no access to such advanced science. All he had was his observation, the science of his time, and a bold mind.

But he would most certainly agree with the physicist Giorgio Parisi, who commented on the timing of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics to climate change researchers: "It is clear that for the future generations, we have to act now in a very fast way and not with a strong delay." We’ve had sustainability concepts for more than 300 years—it’s certainly past time to utilise them.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

Subscribe to Daily Newsletter :

Donate Now 

By Anubha Aggarwal

Published: Friday 21 January 2022

Ease of doing business is set to become synonymous with fast-tracking environmental clearance in Indian states.

On January 17, 2022, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) issued an office memorandum defining criteria for rating of State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAA). The evaluation of efficiency of respective SEIAA is premised on the number of days it takes to appraise a project for environmental clearance — the faster the project appraisal, the higher SEIAA score.

SEIAA is a state agency that reviews specific projects enlisted in the Category B of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2006. These projects are considered to have comparatively low spatial extent and potential impact on human health as well as natural and man-made resources.

There are separate expert committees at the central level to deal with different project domains falling in Category A. But the same 15 experts in SEIAA in a state deal with the entire bandwidth of projects in Category B.

The wide spectrum of projects in Category B extends from mining of minerals (sand, limestone, bajri), hydroelectric power projects, metallurgical industries, cement plants, chlor-alkali industry, leather industry, distillery, building and construction, among others.

The vast nature of projects, although of comparatively smaller scale, indicate the immense number of applications that SEIAA has to review. Undermining the mammoth task assigned to the state authorities and rushing them to clear the applications faster instead of enabling them to appraise them more efficiently, compromises the principles of the EIA Notification (2006).

The fine points

The office memorandum stresses on the ‘ease of doing business’ and listed seven parameters for evaluation of the efficiency of project appraisal by SEIAA. All these parameters hold equal weightage except for the first one.

Criteria for giving score to SEIAA

Source: MoEF&CC, 2022

The parameters have oversimplified the law by putting varied projects in the same bracket. It attributes submission of online application as justification for reducing the number of days taken in appraisal of the project from 105 to only 75 days in total. This is irrespective of the quantum of applications and the wide array of businesses or industrial sectors that the state authority has to deal with.

Average time taken by SEIAA / SEAC for each stage in the appraisal process

(*) This may alter the time taken in the process. General understanding is that a well-defined application will take less time in getting clearance than an application that is poorly drafted.

(**) Total time taken excludes the 45 days for Public Hearing

Source: CSE, 2022

Excluding any inefficiency from the system should be welcome. However, the parameters seem to favour the project proponents more by using the number of days as a benchmark for scoring the state authority. The concept of quality appraisal is completely eluded from the methodology.

Some of these parameters are highly problematic.

First, the terms of reference for conducting environmental impact assessment by the proponent are determined on the basis of the application. These reference points determine what all environmental streams will be covered in the EIA report and upto what extent.

Any oversight in this process may lead to severe environmental damages. Reducing the number of days for grant of ToR should be undertaken with precision.

Second, these parameters completely put the onus of the project clearance on the authority, and absolves proponents of submitting quality applications for review. A quick glance at the project applications and minutes of meetings for SEIAA and SEAC shows that a lot of these applications submitted for review do not follow mandatory due-diligence.

There is a lack of documentation in some cases, and in others information provided is not sufficient to form any decision. In a majority of the cases, the kml-files (with geographic data) required to understand the on-ground topography of the project location, are missing from the online application and wrong documents uploaded in several cases.

Allocating less score if more information is sought (EDS) from the proponent during appraisal defeats the whole purpose of seeking environmental clearance and safeguarding the environment.

Third, the low ranking for taking up more field visits is a distorted logic at best. The purpose of the sitevisit is to assess the ground situation and take a more informed decision. Minutes of the meeting for the appraisal committee suggests that these site visits are as it is taken only in a handful of cases.

Undermining the purpose of these visits and simply discouraging them is delusional and obliterates transparency in the environmental clearance process.

Moreover, equal weightage for criteria outweighs the importance of one parameter over the other. For grant of environmental clearance to a fresh application, an average of 105 days are taken.

An amendment in the environmental clearance required much less scrutiny. This is because proposed amendments to the project do not have any additional implication on the environment. Therefore, they do not entail revisiting the baseline study for environmental parameters. However, these still have been put in the same category and allotted the same weightage.

The marks to be allocated for all the parameters also have been kept the same for all the parameters. It ranges from 0 to 1, where the former is an indicator of poor performance.

It is beyond comprehension how conducting more site visits can earn a state authority not only less marks but a zero score. This will imply that somehow the site visit negatively impacted the appraisal progress.

Better late than never

The office memorandum has taken a very myopic view of any perceived delay in appraisal for environmental clearance. Inclusion of ‘transparency, efficiency and accountability’ in the process have solely been premised on the number of days taken for appraisal.

The concept of rating SEIAA to encourage its better functioning is ingenious and should be appreciated. But the parameters considered for its execution only seem to favour the proponent and hardly will have any positive implication on environmental compliance by a project.

Any undue delay needs to be discouraged but processes that bring transparency in appraisal, such as more site visits, inclusion of more expertise in the committees, development of a granular environmental database and ensuring uniform documentation of environmental impact of the project by the proponent will serve as better indicators for this purpose.

The criteria defined in the office memorandum for scoring the state authorities dilutes the due-diligence and asserts a preferential perspective on alleged delays in project appraisals.

Subscribe to Daily Newsletter :

Donate Now 

We are a voice to you; you have been a support to us. Together we build journalism that is independent, credible and fearless. You can further help us by making a donation. This will mean a lot for our ability to bring you news, perspectives and analysis from the ground so that we can make change together.