XR - Extinction Rebellion at the recent demonstrations in London. My wife, Jo, is third from right.
I have always had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that ornamental gardening is a vaguely decadent activity. After all for a lot of people in the world gardening is about growing veg and food crops and so is crucial to survival, the growing of plants for their looks or the sheer joy of growing them must seem a great luxury. With the threat of uncontrolled climate change this nagging feeling may be prescient. We potentially face the death of the ornamental garden. In the lifetimes of many of us who will be reading this.
I do not wish to sound alarmist or seem willfully pessimistic, but the signs are not good. We may get to the point where, once again, the demands of food production thrust us back to 'gardening for survival'. Gardeners and growers are very much at the forefront of noticing the changes, almost everywhere: hotter summers, longer and deeper droughts, more erratic and unusual weather. Having spent some time in Holland this summer, I was surprised to see so many fields of crops being watered, and gardens being laid out with irrigation pipes. Many I spoke to mentioned this as being a new and disturbingly alien experience for the country.
So here, in the spirit of XR – Extinction Rebellion, is my realistic-pessimistic bit of futurology. I want to stress that XR's preditions are thoroughly supported by the work of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Unfortunately the work of these climate scientists is not making the impact it should - all environmental activists of today still suffer from the backwash of Paul and Barbara Ehrlich's extraordinarily ill-conceived book of 1968, The Population Bomb, which was so little supported by evidence and so wildly wrong in its predictions (mass famine and water wars by the 1990s) that its refutation has kept American climate sceptics in ammunition ever since.
When many garden people talk of 'climate change and its impact on gardening' it tends to be couched in the rather genteel way of suggesting we might need to shift our range of plants somewhat and that perhaps some warmer climate crops may become practicable in the south of England; and that Kent might start to produce better bubbly than Champagne itself. I would like to suggest that these complacent thoughts might be a very long way indeed from the very real possibilities. It is becoming increasingly obvious that not only are CO2 levels rising alarming, partly owing to the pig-headidness of leaders like Trump and Bolsinaro (and of the electors who put them in power, and in particular of the media moguls like the Murdoch family who have misled them with misinformation for years), partly to the general slowness with which the human race has started to change its technologies and partly because it looks frighteningly as if the time lag between CO2 going in to the atmosphere and its impact on climate is such that what we are experiencing now might be the result of what we did ten or even twenty years ago. If so, imagine what it might be like in ten or twenty years time. And that many of the processes involve feed off each other in a positive feedback cycle, e.g. ground left bare by melting ice will heat up a lot quicker. Runaway climate change is a real possibility.
Such runaway climate change would result in drastic sea level rises and life-threatening heatwaves over much of the globe. Huge population shifts would follow as people flee the world's flooding lowlands or insufferably hot regions, which would threaten all our social and political structures. Gardening will inevitably turn back to its food growing roots – there will simply not be space for the luxury of growing anything else. I'm not suggesting that we'll all be growing our own food. Far from it, as in age of climate unpredictabilility, global trade networks will be more important than ever in getting food staples (by which I mean, our calorie crops like wheat and rice) from where they can be grown to where the are needed. What is highly likely to change is the need to grow fruit and vegetables (high volume, low weight – therefore expensive to transport) closer to where they will be eaten. The no-doubt-finally-introduced realistic carbon taxes will make their transport prohibitively expensive and so much of the land currently used for growing them en masse will need to be devoted to the all-important calorie crops instead. So finally, the rather idealistic and often poorly-thought through, urban veg growing movement of a few years ago will finally come of age. Goodbye inedible geraniums, tulips and roses; hello cabbages and potatoes (the one calorie crop practicable to grow on this small scale). Hostas and a few other edible-ornamentals may survive as luxury sources of vitamins.
The social dislocations caused by mass evacuation from the flooding lowlands will be so massive that much economic activity will be lost, as factories and offices flood. One skill that can be (and will need to be) re-learnt relatively quickly is that of vegetable growing. Many of the lowland refugees will become a new class of peasant farmers as every little patch of land around all the surviving human communities, many of them inevitably shanty towns built of scavenged materials, will have to be cultivated. We could end up like Haiti, where there is virtually no nature left, only intensive smallholding.
The outlook for nature could be grim. Just at a point where we were beginning to talk of rewilding, of handing increasing amounts of the earth's surface over to nature (in the developed world at any rate), we may get to the point that any surface capable of cultivation will need to be given over to growing food. Nature reserves and national parks will be ploughed up, or handed over to intensively-reared animals (if the wasteful practice of meat production is still permitted). With our backs to the wall, there will probably be much regret but little real opposition to such a human take over of our surviving wild spaces, and the resulting mass extinction of wild animal and plant species.
Enthusiasts may keep plant species extant by growing them in narrow strips between their veg crops or on green roofs or other spaces where cabbages and herbs will not thrive. They will probably swap them enthusiastically amongst themselves to keep genetic diversity alive. Vast numbers will probably fall by the wayside. There is a chance though that the coming together of genomics and computer software will allow species to survive long-term storage as digitally-coded DNA, ready to be re-written to real DNA when conditions (maybe in a few thousand years, even tens of thousands of years) allow.
The new class of vegetable growing peasants may well manage being organic, but the producers of the calorie crops will not have the luxury of indulging a system that only produces 60-70% of the yield per area of 'conventional'. Central to non-organic farming is synthetic nitrogen fertilizer; indeed around a third of the world's population is indirectly fed by it. Of all the industrial processes we rely on to supply our resource-hungry lifestyle, this is probably the easiest to render sustainable, using biogas methane to power the energy-greedy process instead of natural gas. On the other hand, key crops could just possibly become nitrogen-fixing like legumes, which was always the pot of gold at the end of the genetic modification rainbow.
Our other great plant nutrient need is phosphorus, which is in fact pretty much our most seriously depleted vital resource. Environmentalists have always warned about diminishing resources, despite the fact that there has not been much evidence for this; quite the opposite, as if we were really facing the last oil, the last iron and the last coltan, we would almost certainly have learnt to manage things a great deal better much earlier. Phosphorus however is getting really low, and once those deposits are exhausted there is nowhere to turn. Agriculture has, until recently, been incredibly profligate with the stuff, and foolishly, the one renewable source of it, sewage waste, has never been properly exploited by modern agriculture– modern people (unlike our ancestors) don't like the thought of using it as a fertilizer. That is going to have to change.
Genomics and high-tech gene editing and modification procedures will give us some hope. Laboratory procedures that used to be slow and vastly expensive, get cheaper and easier and more automated over time. The local artisan plant breeding lab in a shed, producing new genetically-modifed crops for whatever local climate or other extremes may throw at them, may be a real possibility. But not if the industries that produce the lab equipment and the accompanying computer software are under water.
I don't think many passionate gardeners only want to grow veg, as the waters rise around them. But if the politicians don't act, or be forced to act, that's where we'll be. All of us.