... from
http://globalpublicmedia.com/how_do_you_like_the_collapse_so_far
By Richard Heinberg, 5 June 2008
[Originally written for The Ecologist.]
Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.
What do you get?
Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it.
Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, you know this in a way that others don’t. It’s not just that the current crop of world leaders is idiotic. It’s not just a matter of a few policies having gone awry. We’ve been on a perilous track since the dawn of agriculture, capturing more and more biosphere services for the benefit of just one species. Fossil fuels recently gave our kind an enormous economic and technological boost, but at the same time enabled us to go much further out on an ecological limb. No one knows the long-term carrying capacity of planet Earth for humans, absent cheap fossil fuels, but it’s likely a lot fewer than seven billion. The implication is not just sobering; it’s paralyzing.
So what to do with such traumatic knowledge? An argument can be made for denial. Why ruin people’s day if there’s nothing they can do, if it’s too late to unseal our fate?
But we don’t know that it’s too late.
[As will become clear below, Heinberg means by the above sentence that we don't know whether it's too late to prevent an imminent extinction of humanity. He assumes it *is* too late to prevent economic collapse and human die-off. –DD For more on the die-off, see http://www.dieoff.org/–RM]
As hard as it is to get up every day and remember, "Oh yes, that’s right, we’re headed toward systemic collapse," in fact we can’t afford to forget it, if there are in fact measures to be taken to save a species, an ecosystem, or a human community.
To be sure, some of us are better able to handle the information than others. Many fragile psyches come unhinged without constant doses of hope and assurance. And so for their sake we need continuing positive messages about a project to make a village sustainable, or about a new coal power plant halted by protest. Some will cling to these encouraging news bits, believing that the tide has turned and we’ll be fine after all. But as time goes on, collapse becomes undeniable. Limits to growth cease to be forecasts; instead, we see daily proof that we’re hitting the wall. As this happens, those who can handle the information spend more of their time managing the fraying emotions of those around them who can’t.
Strategy shifts. We move from rehearsing "Fifty simple things you can do to save the Earth" to discussing global triage.[And how amazingly rapid that move has been! – RM]
As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.
Taking in traumatic
information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be
the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.
Thursday, 01 May 2008
By Peter Salonius
News of food price escalation is bringing global carrying capacity for human
beings 'front and center'- with food riots all over the world.
This is being precipitated now by food-to-ethanol programs, although with constantly
rising populations fed by the increased food produced by various agricultural
revolutions (the Green Revolution being the latest), these riots would have
eventually happened. However the speed of these developments is awe inspiring.
On April 14 2008 we heard Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, calling for a crash program of food production increases to stave off the approach of famine. How many times does he think we can pull new ‘productivity rabbits’ out of the hat when soil resources of the planet continue to be degraded to produce more food for the irresponsibly breeding horde?
At the core of our problems today has been our unwillingness to see the relationship between the population numbers that we have built up since the advent of cultivation agriculture, and the sustainability problems that we have been side stepping for 10,000 years.
Many keen thinkers have understood that the driver enabling our numbers to shoot so far over long-term carrying capacity has been the one-time gift of fossil fuels, and that this overshoot has resulted in our rampant destruction of the biosphere. The global human population, before the start of the Fossil-Fuel Revolution, was about 1 billion, while it is now about 6.7 billion and rising. These holistic thinkers suggest that without oil, the earth will only support about 2-3 billion people.
Their forward thinking has not yet included an understanding of the thesis that the other major factor that has enabled our numbers to shoot so far over long-term carrying capacity has been the one-time gift of erodible soils and the vast store of nutrients they contained until we began to irreversibly mine them about 10,000 years ago with cultivation agriculture.
The global imbalance between
humans and their supporting environments is much more serious than most people
on Earth realize.
I suggest that without petroleum, and after we stop mining arable soils, the
Earth will only support the 100-300 million people it did before the advent
of cultivation agriculture.
Recent prognostications about the possibility of sustainable development in the context of further population and economic growth, are in direct opposition to a growing understanding among ecological economists that all economic and population growth since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago has effectively lowered the basic long-term carrying capacity (food productivity potential) of the soil resources on the planet.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel who developed the Ecological Footprint analysis appear to believe that humanity overshot global carrying capacity sometime in the 20th century. I have been circulating the thesis that the human family has been in overshoot mode for the last 10,000 years and it is long past time to address this issue.
Most of us agree that the human experiment, which is now the size of the Earth, has gone terribly wrong. At issue is the point at which humanity took the unsustainable fork in the road -and- what we must do to get back on track. There is a growing realization that human numbers will decrease, either by planned contraction or by the development of various scarcities.
My recommendation for the necessary decrease of the global human footprint includes allowing the functional integrity of terrestrial (and aquatic) communities to begin to re-establish by ceasing to stage-manage ecosystems. A reliance on self-organizing/self managing systems, that evolution has already created, would feed a very small number of humans sustainably. This sustainability would be predicated on the ability of this small population to regulate their exploitation/harvesting activities to fall within the (now better understood) capacity of their supporting ecosystems to maintain critical breeding populations, species and structural diversity, to replace soil lost by erosion and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvest export or leaching.
For fisheries, because they represent such a small fraction of the global human diet, a return to sustainably harvesting restored wild populations would not cause widespread starvation.
In forestry a shift to alternate harvesting systems that accommodate the time requirement for full species and structural restoration, and that approximate natural disturbance dynamics - as opposed to creating ecosystem-simplifying, product-driven species assemblages - could be initiated very quickly.
The abandonment of agriculture in favour of the re-establishment of self-managing, native, nutrient-conservative forest and grassland/prairie ecosystems would require much more time because these unmanaged systems cannot produce enough food for human needs until population numbers have fallen to a fraction of present levels.
For the sustainable future of the global human experiment, cultivation agriculture must be relied upon to feed us until we have reduced our numbers to a level that can be supported by carefully regulated exploitation/harvesting activities that fall within the (now better understood) capacity of supporting ecosystems to maintain diversity, to restore soil mass lost by erosion and to replace soluble plant nutrients lost by harvest export or leaching.
Peter Salonius is a Research Scientist at the Canadian Wood Fibre Centre Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service.
__________________
See also: “Population
Growth in the United States and Canada: A role for Scientists”
By Peter Salonius, NRC, Canadian Forest Service, Conservation Biology, pp. 1518-1519,
Vol. 13, No. 6, December 1999. File: RoleForScientists_Peter Salonius CONS BIOL_12_1999.pdf
in My Documents\My Resources\EnvResources\EnvBySubjects\Ch03_growth\
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