The world is at a unique point in history. For the first time a single species – us – dominates the entire earth and has developed the power to make drastic changes in the environment. This dominance has been achieved in an extraordinarily short time frame when considered in evolutionary or geologic time scales. Furthermore, the forces of globalization have ensured that no place is isolated from what happens in the rest of the world – there’s no place to hide. At the same time, a number of interrelated problems have reached a critical stage.
Some problems that come to mind:
- Hunger – by UN estimates one billion undernourished people before the year is out
- Energy limitations (peak oil, natural gas not too far behind) -
- Rapid climate change
- All kinds of water related issues
- Major irreversible degradation of the environment
- It takes a lot of time and money to build large energy, infrastructure, etc, projects
- Without force it takes a lot of time to change people’s habits
- Conflict with deep rooted causes
- A fundamentally unsustainable greed based global economic system
The first thing to keep in mind is a fact usually ignored: everything is related. There are no independent variables in the real world – you can’t separate consideration of oil from energy, from transportation, from food, from climate, from environmental degradation, from geopolitics, etc, etc, etc. – they’re all related, they all affect each other. Similarly, all life is related, and no living thing can exist except through a huge number of cooperative relationships with other lifeforms.
Looking at the problem list makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that there are just too many people on earth. Certainly that problem list gets much easier to deal with if there were a lot less of us around. However, it really looks to be much worse than just a few too many people, it looks like population overshoot. Overshoot happens when a population grows larger than the long term carrying capacity of its environment. In our case this was enabled by using up stores of oil, natural gas, water in ancient aquifers, deep, fertile old soils, etc, etc.
Populations that go into overshoot eventually crash – a very painful process. Their attempts to survive cause them to do maximum damage to their environment thereby lowering its carrying capacity well below what it originally was. As a result, they usually end up at population levels very much lower than they were at their peak.
The earth now is supporting almost 7 billion people – but how many of us can it support in the long run? Lots of estimates out there – an interesting one, the Earth Manifesto, makes a good case for one billion or less. But how would we get there? To be continued….