Everyday heralds of climate change – and a persuasive argument against farming

Wednesday, 15 June 2022

Jenny Nicholls is a Waiheke-based writer and columnist, specialising in science commentary.

OPINION: In my last column I wrote about the changes New Zealand gardeners are noticing in their gardens, and asked readers to get in touch if they noticed anything unusual blooming or scuttling in their backyard.

Responses fluttered in from Dunedin to Rangitikei. Hardly anyone nailed their gumboots to the flagpole and linked these changes to climate change, although Paraparaumu gardener Murray Eggers’ weather records, he said, “definitely show a rise in temperatures over [the past 10 years], along with a trend for less rain and longer summers. Frosts are almost a thing of the past with there being only around five each year … we can now grow many sub-tropical species.”

Maria Lampriere, who has tended an organic garden in north Taranaki for the last 13 years, recently picked four large bunches of bananas, and harvested a second crop of apples from early varieties – which probably did not make up for the unusually hot and humid summer’s rotten lettuces and nectarines.

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In early June, Donna Mote in Blenheim and Diane Ramsay in Christchurch reported flowering kōwhai; Donna and Murray saw flowering jonquils.

Sue Novell, hailing from Tainui, Dunedin, says her cabbage and cauliflower have bolted, and her highbush blueberry plants, which usually flower in spring, have flowered disastrously early. She is considering a variety better suited to a warmer climate. “This is on top of great damage done by a slug infestation, which I never had before. I put it down to warmer winters and more rainfall than usual in spring.”

Novell belongs to a New Zealand outfit called the Seniors Climate Action Network, well worth checking out, not least for its book recommendations.

John Flux kindly emailed a clipping from New Scientist (February 5, 2022, issue) with the headline ‘’Spring Comes Early’’; which doesn’t beat around the bush. ‘’UK spring flowers are opening nearly a month earlier than they did before the mid-1980s, due to climate change.’’

So concludes a study of more than 400,000 observations of the first flowering date of 406 plants, harvested from a citizen science project called Nature’s Calendar and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B​. Researchers had access to records dating back to 1753.

“The results are truly alarming,” said lead author Ulf Büntgen, in an article on the University of Cambridge website. “When plants flower too early, a late frost can kill them – a phenomenon that most gardeners will have experienced at some point.

‘’But the even bigger risk is ecological mismatch. Plants, insects, birds and other wildlife have co-evolved to a point that they’re synchronised in their development stages. If one component responds faster than the others, there’s a risk that they’ll be out of synch, which can lead species to collapse if they can’t adapt quickly enough.”

Rotten vegetables, a plague of pests, and more frequent storms of the kind that hurl bucket loads of plums and avocados from Chris Mclean​’s trees in Taranaki (Chris was the star of my last column) are, if not the harbingers of a changing climate, then a good approximation of what it is going to look like.

Chris and John Mclean​ have had to shift their fence, which faces the storm-lashed ocean of the North Taranaki Bight, three times, “as we’ve lost about 50 metres of land. Sometimes the sea spray came across a quarter of the paddock”.

George Monbiot’s book Regenesis: How to Feed the World Without Devouring the Planet is out this month; at first read, it is just the sort of Bunsen-burner-under-the-buttocks manifesto we need, unless someone else can figure out how to double food production by 2050 (this to feed not only our own swelling population but the herds and flocks of mooing, clucking animals we are addicted to eating).

“The biggest population crisis,” writes Monbiot, “is not the growth in human numbers, but the growth in lifestock numbers.”

Monbiot describes systemic failures in global food production, its subsidised inefficiencies leading to colossal habitat loss. “Food production (including commercial fishing) is the main reason why the global population of wild vertebrate animals has fallen by 68 per cent since 1970.”

This is all as overwhelming as it sounds; and Monbiot needs all his writerly skill to stop us from composting his volume in a fit of gloom. But he is a master of inspiring environmental polemic – and he has done the (excuse the pun) spadework.

There’s a wonderfully hopeful tribute to dirt (some of the best science writing I have read this year) as well as well-informed salvos against flaky idealism and ‘’greenwashing’’. Artisanal honey, he explains, will not save the planet. (“Wild pollinators,’’ he says, ‘’are often much more effective at fertilising crops than honeybees.’’)

“A remarkable feature of this debate,” he writes, “at least in the media, is that it proceeds largely in the absence of numbers: it is blinded by poetry. On one side sits brute corporate power; on the other, Arcadian fantasy. Who stands between them? Where are those who care about food, care about people, care about the living world, yet also care about the maths? It’s time we became obsessed by numbers.

‘’We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition, across every aspect of food production.”

If Monbiot’s book disappoints those looking for support for alternative food sources like algae and insects, his furious rejection of farming will be radical enough for most of us.

“Our beliefs about food and farming are dominated by fables and metaphors that describe not the world as it is, but an idealized, simplified planet, prompting us to make catastrophic mistakes … The more we understand about life on earth, the more intricate and connected it turns out to be. The soil might be the most complex of all living systems. Yet we treat it like dirt.”

Correction: A caption in this story has been amended to clarify that the kōwhai photograph was taken near Margaret Mahy playground in Christchurch, not in Diane Ramsay’s garden. (Amended, June 18, 2022 9.37am)