Carol Brewer says education is key to raising awareness.

Professor Carol Brewer is co-Principal Investigator and Education Director for the National Ecological Observing Network. She is also a biology professor at University of Montana in Missoula. Earth & Sky’s Abby Frank spoke to her about humans’ relationship to the environment.

Frank: Can you tell us how you perceive the relationship between humans and the environment in the 21st century?

Brewer: There is a notion – I hear this a lot where I live, and also when I travel – that humans have a big influence on the planet today, and these influences take many different forms. But humans have had influences on the environment ever since there have been humans on the planet. I think that’s one important thing that people need to understand.

Now the number of people that we have on the planet today is causing changes at paces and scales that we haven’t seen before. But I guess I’m not one of those who thinks the number of people is a crisis. It’s certainly a problem. But what I think is a crisis is how resources are distributed among people.

Here in western Montana, you really don’t have to go very far to get to really wild places. I can take the city bus in Missoula to almost the edge of a wilderness area. I have black bears and mountain lions in my yard in the middle of downtown Missoula. So, I think that where we live has a big impact on our impression of how humans interface with the environment. I’d be surprised if a lot of people in western Montana thought that the way that humans interact in the 21st century with the environment is that much different than it was for them in the 20th century, or maybe even than it was for their grandparents in the 19th century. Maybe the biggest difference is that it’s harder for typical people in Montana to base their livelihoods on extraction industries.

So, how are human interactions with the environment going to change in the 21st century? I would say that the way we think about using resources, and the way we think about distributing them to all the people on the planet, is going to change. As mindful beings on the planet, we need to think more about conservation. We need to think more about restoration of ecosystem functions and maintaining ecosystem services. The way we interact with the environment needs to have more focus on ecologically informed, designed solutions about how we build on the landscape and how we move around on it.

Frank: How have human activities changed natural ecosystems?

Brewer: Well, humans have changed landscapes by building on them, by extracting resources from them, and also by moving things around on them. One of the ways that we’ve changed landscapes that I think is becoming ever more apparent to people, particularly in the way that it influences the delivery of ecosystem services if you will, is the way we’ve moved around species. And it’s becoming more and more clear to us and there’s more and more data in the scientific literature that says that invasive species are really changing landscapes around the world. And I think that this notion of invasive species and how they change landscapes or habitats even around our neighborhoods is one that people around the country and around the world are becoming more aware of.

Frank: Can you give examples of your personal observations of these changes?

Brewer: Boy, there are so many. One local example in Missoula, Montana – one ecosystem that’s changed in the 12 years I’ve lived here – is the hillsides that surround the city. Missoula sits at the bottom on a bowl. On the hillsides surrounding the city, one thing that we have seen over the past decade is an invasion by spotted knapweeds. This invasion is apparent almost anywhere you look around Missoula. You look up in the hillsides and what you see are purple knapweed flowers. And this is a change that’s apparent to every single person who lives in this valley. And what it means is that the kinds of insects that pollinate other plants that used to live on those hillsides – and the kinds of animals and birds that have lived there – are changing. So, napweed has been this creeping carpet of a plant that has really changed the way we see those hillsides around us.

Frank: Earlier you said that it’s the distribution of resources on Earth, not the number of people, that threatens ecosystems. Can you elaborate on this idea?

Brewer: We really don’t know what the human carrying capacity of the Earth is. We do know that there are systems across the Earth that are clearly being stressed. There are places where land has been degraded to the point where it can’t support crops. There are places on the Earth where the water has been degraded to the point where it’s not safe for consumption by any animal on the planet.

But we also know that the distribution of people, by and large, is clumped. Moreover, we know that resource use among people use is very uneven. I think it’s useful to think about the human footprint. I know that my ecological footprint on this Earth is a lot larger than the ecological footprint of a colleague of mine living in San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina. And my footprint certainly is enormously bigger that the footprint of someone living a somewhat nomadic lifestyle in Afghanistan. So the resources that I use are hugely bigger than the resources that either of these other two people or their families uses.

So, I think one of the really big problems facing us in the 21st century is the difference in the ecological footprints of people living in very developed places on this planet compared with the ecological footprint of people living in undeveloped places on our planet.

One of the great challenges that I see facing us is that the ecological footprint of other people may grow as well as they start moving around more, acquiring more goods and being more tapped into the global marketplace. When you think about the number of goods it takes, the number of goods that need to be extracted, that need to be constructed to support the lifestyles of people in the developed world compared to the less developed world, you can see that’s the source of a lot of our environmental challenges and problems.

Frank: What will it take for us to solve the problem of over consumption?

Brewer: Education is really important. I think that education about the environment and the services that we accrue from a healthy, functioning environment are really important to tell people about. Another aspect of this education about the environment is that when we learn about ecology, when we learn about environmental science, there is also a social context. People who are environmentally or ecologically literate do need to know something about what it is that science can tell us about environmental problems. But they also need to know something about the limits of what science can tell us about solving environmental problems. There are limits in part because, when we learn about ecology, when we learn about environmental science, there is always a social context. Solutions about consumption and distribution of resources to people on this planet have a personal aspect, but they’re also very much centered in the social and political realms.

And this is one of the real challenges for scientists. The models that we have in our society for consumption are based on the idea that more is always possible. In reality that’s an economic model and not an environmental model. So, solving the problem of the fair distribution of resources and quality of life for everyone on this planet is a bigger problem than what ecologists by themselves can resolve.

Without a doubt the first starting place is education, I think that it’s really important to tell people about the services that we accrue from a healthy, functioning environment. And I believe that education about the environment starts in learning something about our own neighborhoods, our own backyards, and our impact in the places that we live. It involves understanding something about our ecological footprint, that is, how much of the Earth’s resources we use as individuals, particularly in the context of what other people around the world are using.

Frank: Thank you, Dr. Brewer.