From: http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch01_ss2.htm
Support for the belief that a healthy, sustainable environment must come
first.
Natalia
*THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD *
Lester R. Brown
We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world,
one where the collisions between our demands and the earth's capacity to
satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering
heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or
another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the
trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more
frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.
Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being
consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds
that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize.
These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.
Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In
our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after
the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the
sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this
threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and
lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding
populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it
collapses.
We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic
decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the
soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the
sequence is all too familiar.
Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to
shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water
tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries,
expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting
glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and,
soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive
trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at
the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.
The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an
"overshoot-and-collapse" mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield
of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now,
for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are
shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread.
Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are
falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2
sequestration.
In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads
the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity's collective
demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980.
Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,
estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20
percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider.
We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth's natural assets,
setting the stage for decline and collapse.
In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical
presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of
AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has
calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He
notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets
together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he
estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth's total
vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the
latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats,
birds, small mammals, and so forth.
Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse
phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast
Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering
Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a
station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was
closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a
thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen
that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the
absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had
reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an
island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of
the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There
were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.
Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our
natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to
a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the
former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a
resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental
resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its
population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to
today's population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old
Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing
entirely in the face of environmental adversity.
Even as the global population is climbing and the economy's
environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping
oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production
may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil
production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving
prices upward.
Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers
will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to
produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops.
Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this
effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new
threat to the earth's biological diversity.
As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of
international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access
to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily
dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers
for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security
deteriorates, so, too, will food security.
As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be
reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last
century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the
world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for
energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and
geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of
the world energy economy.
The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is
already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other
developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the
future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil
but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land
and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will
intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of
scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an
overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the
Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization's waning years.
You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental
trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down.
It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national
governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before
time runs out.
Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," in Lester R. Brown,
*Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in
Trouble <http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm>* (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), available for free downloading and
purchase at www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm
<http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm>.
/This Earth Policy Institute Book Byte follows:/ *Learning from the
Past* <http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/Seg/PB2ch01_ss4.htm>.
Released October 2, 2007
*Earth Policy Institute
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*
---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 000778-4, 10/05/2007
Tested on: 10/5/2007 1:11:32 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2007 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca
http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework