Breaking Boundaries: The Science of our Planet
David Attenbourgh, or J. Steffen Rockström, his collaborator on this project, or perhaps Netflix may have decided that Breaking Boundaries was perhaps a bit too grim and hopeless, and would drive audiences into despair. So they put a hopeful conclusion at the end that felt like it had been tacked on the way a happy ending was tacked on Spielberg’s AI, and like the robot’s ascension from the deep, was largely unconvincing.
The documentary is based on Steffen Rockström’s work, in which he identifies nine different boundaries in which humanity has challenged and endangered life on Earth—including, of course, human life.
Those boundaries are climate change, biosphere integrity, ocean acidification, the depletion of the ozone layer, atmospheric aerosol pollution, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, freshwater use, land-system change, and the release of novel chemicals such as heavy metals, radioactive materials and plastics.
The documentary illustrates our status on each of the nine with humanoid figurines marching blindly from a green “safe zone”, through a yellow “perilous zone” to a red zone, in which lay points of no return, or tipping points, where efforts at amelioration can no longer do any good.
“[O]ne characteristic of tipping points is that once you pressed the on button, you cannot stop it,” Rockström says. “It takes over. It’s too late. It’s not like you can say, ‘Oops. Now I realize I didn’t want to melt the Greenland ice sheet.’”
There’s a depressing amount of red in the graphs, and far too much yellow. The documentary can only identify one of the boundaries where we’re actually moving away from a path of self-destruction, and that’s the ozone layer. But even then, Attenborough notes that the gains we’ve made since the 1980s are being eroded by a new rush toward new chemicals which can damage the ozone layer because profits. For now, it’s one of two of the nine still in the green.
Greenhouse gasses are the best known of the threats, with CO2 nearly at 420 ppm. The safe level is 350 (preindustrial humanity thrived in a stable climate during which CO2 ranged between 175 ppm and 270), and 420 hasn’t been seen since the Pliocene, some four million years ago. We’re well into the yellow there, and before the effects can possibly begin to ease, will be deep into the red. We will lose the Greenland ice cap, and probably much or all of the far vaster ice sheets of Antarctica.
Loss of biodiversity threatens the entire structure of life on Earth, ranging from loss of tropical forest to cattle and soybeans to depopulation of pollinating insects such as honeybees. We’re in the red there in some areas, yellow elsewhere.
Ocean acidification is the result of increase CO2 and temperatures, and dumping of organic chemicals off the land. It threatens deoxygenation of the oceans and a collapse in the biosphere there. Red.
Aerosol pollution, or “global dimming” masks the worst effects of global warming, and more directly, puts crap in the air that is hazardous to breathe. It’s attributed to some seven million premature deaths per year world wide. Yellow.
Overuse of fertilizers and the subsequent run-off are killing vast reaches of ocean along many coastal regions. A third of coastlines world wide are so affected. Yellow in most areas, red in the most heavily affected.
Overuse of fresh water is becoming a problem in the developed world, even without longer and more severe droughts such as what western North America is experiencing. It’s always been a problem in Africa and much of Asia. Yellow.
Land-system change is changing entire bioregions into monocultural or extremely limited over-utilized lands, and humanity has so affected 90% of the arable land on Earth. Red.
Novel chemicals is the only one still in the green, but that’s only because we have absolutely no idea where the tipping points are. We’re already suspecting that a sudden world-wide drop in fertility amongst mammals—including us—may be a result of microplastics and “forever chemicals” that permeate our air, water and food. Sperm counts are dropping world wide. Green. For now.
Attenborough concludes that we can reverse much of this through not eating meat, conserving, recycling plastics, sustainable energy and the like. And if we all did all of that right now, it might help.
Destroying the 25 corporations that make up 75% of the problem would help, too, but that’s not going to happen.
Happy ending in this documentary, but it’s got a ‘whistling past the graveyard’ quality to it that utterly fails to convince. In baseball terms, we’re down 8-1 in the ninth inning, with no heavy hitters in sight.
Now on Netflix.