Pathfinders: Regreened and pleasant land (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In what may be an omen of the new Trump incumbency, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket underwent a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ last month. In a similarly unpromising start to the MAGA 2.0 regime, large areas of Los Angeles also underwent their own version of a rapid disassembly as winter wild fires raged along the beachfronts and through the Hollywood hills. When even millionaire celebs’ houses are burning down, you know the world is in crisis.

The LA fires were particularly devastating because of the ‘weather whiplash’ effect. Global warming is disrupting weather systems and rainfall patterns, making wet events in Southern California wetter, and dry events longer. Heavy rain a year or so back resulted in a profusion of new foliage, which then dried out during the subsequent and prolonged drought, creating a mass of kindling just waiting for the next lightning strike or discarded cigarette butt (tinyurl.com/vp6fd9jv).

This weather whiplash effect is being felt around the world, leading in many places to increasing floods and desertification, aided and abetted by human activity including deforestation, industrial farming and overgrazing, soil degradation, building, mining and pollution. It’s estimated that 25 percent of global land will be under threat by 2050. The Gobi desert in Mongolia and China is expanding by around 6,000 square kilometres a year, causing tens of thousands of migrants to flee to the cities. The Sahara, a desert the size of the United States, is advancing by around 48 km a year, exacerbating land conflicts in already poverty-stricken areas. The Thar desert in north-west India, for centuries held back by the natural barrier of the Aravalli mountains, is now blowing dust storms across croplands and into cities as the government have failed to prevent illegal mining of those same mountains.

Capitalism, which cares nothing for consequences, is the real ‘tragedy of the commons’, in which Earth’s common resources are owned and controlled privately and for private gain, to the impoverishment of all. In socialism, where resources would be commonly owned and managed, this unnecessary tragedy could be shunted into reverse. We don’t even need new technology to do it. We can simply apply ancient techniques used by the Egyptians and the Inca to create artificial water-harvesting structures to regreen the land.

Some of this is already happening. One famous regreening project is in the Sahel, the wide strip of semi-desert that borders the southern edge of the Sahara. Contrary to popular belief, it does rain in the Sahara, but rarely, and the water runs off the dry and impermeable ground in violent flash floods, leaving nothing behind. But since 2007, locals have been digging crescent-shaped depressions in the ground to catch the run-off, with deep sinkholes to permeate the sub-soil. The result has been a return of trees – a natural barrier to Saharan dust storms – and lush vegetation. The ‘Great Green Wall’ project runs right across Africa from coast to coast, involves 22 countries, and aims to restore 100 million hectares of marginal land by 2030 (youtu.be/udaihhReGAA).

Look online for stories about regreening deserts. They’re everywhere. Take Ethiopia, birthplace of coffee and once a ‘garden of Eden’ with at least 66 percent forest and woodland cover, reduced by human activity to 3.1 percent by 1982. It stopped raining and the wells dried up, causing droughts and biblical famines. But local community projects have been building micro-watersheds consisting of terraces, deep trenches, check dams and percolation ponds. Since these started, 13 streams have returned, of which 6 now flow throughout the year. Project lead Tony Renaudo put it plainly: ‘If you give nature a chance it will heal itself’ (youtu.be/RBP2uRQk5pQ).

China’s Kubuqi desert project is one of the world’s most successful, where desertification expanding at a rate of 10,000 km2 per year in 2000 has been reversed, leading to a re-greening of 2,000 km2 annually, using only local rainfall.

Also in China, the Loess Plateau had been stripped bare by overcropping and overgrazing, causing soil erosion, flooding, desertification and dust storms. The 35,000 km2 project was explained to local volunteers this way: you need to ‘dress’ the landscape – the hilltops need to wear hats (trees), the hills need to wear belts (terraces), and the valleys need shoes (dams). They regreened the entire area in a decade.

In India, monsoons come for just 3 months, giving farmers a fleeting window to produce just one annual crop, before 9 months of drought. The Paani Foundation project in India’s Maharashtra region hosts an annual Watercup competition to see which village can install the most water-harvesting structures within 45 days. Thousands of villages have participated since 2016, replenishing the water table in just one season and saving an estimated 145 billion gallons of water in 4 years, enabling 2 or more crops a year, creating food security, and ending migration to cities.

The Arvari river in north-west India had been dry for 60 years, with monsoon water simply running off the dry earth. In 1986 they started building water-harvesting crescents as in the Sahel, and by 1995 had restored the river year-round. They’ve since done the same thing with four more dry river systems (youtu.be/Tpozw1CAxmU).

Saudi Arabia has used subterranean water for crop irrigation but this is not sustainable as low rainfall can’t replenish the water table. The west-coast Al Baydha project, begun in 2010, built dams, channels and ditches to direct the floodwater into long-term storage areas, with the result that local vegetation was able to survive a 30-month drought without artificial irrigation (youtu.be/D6Kz_OcOgvE).

These and many other projects are being done now, not thanks to capitalism but in spite of it. What they mostly require is simply the cooperative labour of vast numbers of local people who understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s a tantalising foretaste of what socialism could achieve on a world scale, once the barriers of private ownership and profit-seeking are torn down, and more of us start rolling our sleeves up.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Russian roulette (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism would, in a certain sense, be quite boring. Gone would be the constant drama of economic crises, production gluts or shortfalls, and inflating and exploding speculator bubbles (to say nothing of wars, muggings, organised crime, and other sources of popular excitement). Instead it would a comparatively sedate affair, with the practical business of living being mostly a matter of known and predictable factors, managed in a steady and sustainable way. The requirements of society, measured through consumption figures, would be known. Production levels would also be known. The two would never become misaligned by much, and fairly easily recoupled.

But where’s the fun in knowing what we’re doing, when we can use wild stab-in-the-dark guesswork instead? Capitalism moves in mysterious ways, its balls-ups to perform. Instead of a transparent, steady-state production system that reliably delivers what’s required, it’s a secretive casino where almost anything can happen at any moment. The one percent play the tables to make a fast buck, with no regard for what damage they’re doing, or what disasters befall the rest of us as a result.

There’s no need to play roulette over global production, when we could understand and control the process simply by closing the casino and using democratic common ownership instead. What’s worse is that capitalism is gambling with large-scale processes that we don’t understand, namely the world’s climate. This is not just roulette, it’s Russian roulette, with the muzzle pointed at the planet.

The reason scientists don’t understand climate science is that it’s hard, and the reason it’s hard is two-fold. Firstly, it is not part of the mechanistic world of Newtonian dynamics, where everything is theoretically predictable if you know the initial states, trajectories and velocities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes the climate as a ‘coupled non-linear chaotic system’, meaning that long-term predictions will never be possible, and probabilities are as good as it gets.

Secondly, there is a critical shortage of data from which to derive models. Accurate measurements don’t exist before recent times, making extrapolations from past historical periods nearly impossible, and consistent and coherent data still don’t exist in many parts of the world, particularly at the poles. Moreover, the IPCC has noted that ‘a serious concern is the decline of observational networks’ (tinyurl.com/3yxwa937).

These difficulties, combined with strong political inertia as well as heavy industry lobbying, have tended to make IPPC forecasts err towards the conservative, in turn attracting criticism from climate scientists themselves, who argue that the IPCC is playing too safe and not putting a strong enough case.

Anecdotally at least, news stories seem to be making the case for them. July was the hottest month ever recorded, though the record was only set in 2019. In August, Morocco broke the heat record with temperatures of 50 degrees. Wild fires also raged in Hawaii last month, killing hundreds, and the military were drafted in to fight fires in Canada. Meanwhile Australia could be facing another ‘Black Summer’ with this year’s bushfire season, which last year emitted the equivalent of 80 percent of the coal-exporting country’s typical annual greenhouse emissions (tinyurl.com/5bb7rscs).

Nevertheless, uncertainty remains at the core of the climate problem, as two recent examples illustrate. A new study has warned that the system of heat and density-driven ocean currents known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is in danger of collapse by the 2050s and possibly even as early as 2025. Not to be confused with the Gulf Stream, which can’t shut down as it is driven by winds and the Earth’s rotation, AMOC is highly vulnerable to changes in ocean temperature as a result of global warming. It is known to be at its slowest in 1,600 years, and its collapse could mean temperature drops of 5-10 degrees in Europe, with Britain’s climate becoming like that of northern Canada. Meanwhile equatorial regions, unable to dissipate their acquired heat northwards, would become virtually uninhabitable ovens for around 3 billion people. Where previous populations would have coped by migrating, property and nation-obsessed capitalism will of course do its best to fence them in and make migration impossible.

The researchers did not expect their report to be received favourably, even by the IPCC: ‘Obviously, I would have preferred the outcome of our study was less controversial because we are of course being attacked from all sides now. But that’s how science works’ (tinyurl.com/4kcf9dva).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Americas, a huge area of the eastern equatorial Pacific that according to climate models should be warming, has in fact been cooling for 30 years, and nobody knows why, or what it will do next. If this ‘cold tongue’ carries on cooling, it could conceivably reduce global warming by up to 30 percent, which would be a big win. But it could also increase the risk of droughts in the Horn of Africa and the southwest US, already suffering from a twenty-year megadrought. If, conversely, the cold tongue flips and starts to warm, it will desiccate the Amazon, Australia, Indonesia and India, while places like Peru and Ecuador could be inundated by floods and landslides.

Nobody knows which scenario to plan for, even supposing governments can make plans that won’t be foiled by the capitalist market. Scientists call the cold tongue ‘the most important unanswered question in climate science’. But from a socialist perspective, there’s an even bigger unanswered question, which is why we are letting the wealthy capitalist class and their pet governments gamble recklessly with forces nobody understands, with potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth.

There are people who believe that no real revolutionary change can happen unless there is first a global catastrophe and a general collapse of civilisation. Indeed, some even wish it. We think that’s a prescription for barbarism, not socialism. But workers of the world need to get together to put a stop to this capitalist game of hazard, and soon, otherwise the doom-lovers may get their wish.

Paddy Shannon

Even if He Wasn’t an Idiot (2020)

From the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has expressed regret over his handling of the bushfire crisis ravaging the country, a disaster that has killed 28 people. He conceded there were things he could have handled much better. He had been heckled in the town of Cobargo in New South Wales, where some locals called him an idiot and said he wouldn’t be getting any votes there. He had been was on holiday in Hawaii. When the bushfires worsened he said there was a new appetite for the government to take a more direct role in responding to the disaster. In an interview, the PM defended his government’s approach, saying he took into account the effect of climate change, another one of capitalism’s features, on the bushfires.

Australia is just like any other capitalist country, operating a system of society where the means of production are in the hands of a tiny minority who use the land and all the machinery, raw materials and the instruments for producing wealth and distribution solely for profit and reinvesting it as capital to make more capital. Until the working class understands this, the capitalist system will carry on bringing what it must bring to the working class, the same social problems.

This will go on until the working class organise consciously and politically to get control of the state for their own class interests, using the vote and parliament and to establish socialism as a system of society based on common ownership of the means of production and distribution and the democratic methods of meeting to decide and mandate what products will be built and used to meet their human needs.

The working class keep voting for the status quo, all the orthodox parties and all the ones that call themselves socialist but in reality it is capitalism with reforms they mistakenly think will lead eventually to socialism.

The Australian working class must understand that Mr Morrison, even if he wasn’t an idiot and doesn’t understand this, must run capitalism in the only way it can be run – in the interests of the capitalist class.

E. O’Neill

Flaming Forests (2017)

From the August 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

High temperatures and heat-waves are spreading like...wild-fires.

Recently extreme hot weather of 40 degrees Celsius in Portugal resulted in a devastating forest fire in the Pedrogao Grande region, some 150 kilometres north-east of Lisbon, leaving scores dead and many more injured. Early this year, firefighters died battling some of the worst forest fires to hit Chile in half a century. In both countries the natural compositions of their forests had been changed for the sole commercial purpose of exportation of timber and wood-pulp with the planting of eucalyptus and pine trees, known for their enormous thirst for water. Capitalism has always placed profit before people, and it always will. The timber industry has contributed to the destruction of native forests and its habitat. The state is at the service of capital, at the service of forestry companies that have only benefited a small group of individuals. Yet the responsibility ultimately lies with those who keep voting for capitalist politicians.

There have also been numerous big fires in various other places around the world and in increasing numbers where typically there used not to be large-scale wildfires. Forest fires aren't always necessarily bad and sometimes beneficial to the forest ecosystem for them to stay healthy. But this unnatural increase where entire forests burn down uncontrollably is bad for the environment and a risk not just to human life but also detrimental to human health.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, every state in the western US has experienced an increase in the average annual number of large wildfires over past decades. 2015 was a record-breaking year in the US, with more than 10 million acres burned. That's about an area the size of the Netherlands or Switzerland. Large forest fires in the western US have been occurring nearly five times more often since the 1970s and 80s. Such fires are burning more than six times the land area as before, and lasting almost five times longer. The wildfire season has universally become longer over the past 40 years. There is very well-documented scientific evidence that climate change has been increasing the length of the fire season, the size of the area burned each year and the number of wildfires. Prevailing climate conditions have become warmer and drier due to global warming from greenhouse emissions and this enhances the likelihood of forest fires.

The winters are shorter and warmer. The summers are hotter and drier. Human-caused warming makes forests more susceptible to burning. Record heat has increased evaporation and dried-out the soil and tinder-dry vegetation will set forests ablaze. Worldwide, droughts associated with climate change are causing increasingly unnatural forest conditions leading to forest fires in a way never seen before. 

The situation is a direct result of unplanned and unrestrained industrial growth and an economic dependence on fossil fuels. It is crucial to understand that climate change/global warming has contributed to the higher temperatures. Our choice is between capitalism and its environmental destruction or building a healthy socialist planet. Socialism will place the resources of the world in the hands of the people. Until the capitalist is removed from the management of natural resources, we can only expect that the antagonism between human society and nature will continue with mounting tragic consequences. What we are witnessing is the impact of capitalism throughout the world and humanity needs a socialist society that has social control, where production is for use and not for profit. The capitalist system is working against the interests of humankind.

ALJO