This post is directly related to the one I made on January 25. It is about the possibility of an “ecological Armageddon” (words not used but implied in the 1/25 post), which might occur even before the end of this century.
Becoming Aware
I have been much concerned about this issue
for 50 years, and more. By 1970 or ’71, I had read Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne
Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb (1968), or had read enough of and
about that book, to be greatly concerned about what was often called “the
population explosion.”
Then in 1972, the
Club of Rome published another highly significant book. It was titled The
Limits to Growth, authored by Donella H. Meadows et al. The New York
Times (here)
summarized the central thesis of that book succinctly:
Either civilization or growth must end, and soon. Continued population and industrial growth will exhaust the world’s minerals and bathe the biosphere in fatal levels of pollution. As the authors summarize, “if the present growth trends continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years.”
It was, however, many years later before I began
to be aware of the serious problem of global warming—and I recently learned
that the term “global warming” didn’t even appear in a scientific article until
1975.
In fact, as late as that year, some were still
talking of climate change making the world too cold—which is why the term global
warming is now much to be preferred to climate change.
In recent years, though, I have been very
aware of the danger of global warming, and my 1/5/20
blog post was titled “Climate Crisis: The Challenge of the Decade.”
However, I have only recently become aware of
the fact that global warming itself is not the primary ecological problem
confronting humankind. Rather, global warming is the result of a network of problems
all related to unrestrained growth, which is also called overshoot.
EarthOvershoot.org
explains, “Overshoot is when a species consumes resources and generates wastes
faster than the ecosystem in which it inhabits can replace those resources or
absorb those wastes.”
Further, “Climate change is just one symptom
(and a pretty big one) of a much larger ‘disease’ called overshoot. Overshoot
is the all encompassing threat to sustainability posed by too many people
consuming too many resources and emitting to much waste.”
The concept of overshoot clearly acknowledges the limits to growth—of the world’s
population, of the consumption of nonrenewable resources, and of the global
standard of living (and the stock market).
Unquestionably, we all
need to be deeply aware of this perilous predicament.
Becoming Alarmed
“Listen to the scientists” has been widely
used over the past couple of years in the attempt to get people to fight the
covid-19 epidemic by getting vaccinations and wearing masks. That is good
advice.
But I am afraid that, as William Rees forcefully
emphasizes, politicians as well as the general public don’t listen to
scientists well when it comes to considering overshoot / the limits to growth.
Rees (b. 1943), who has a Ph.D. in population
ecology, was a professor at University of British Columbia from 1969 to 2012.
During that time, he coined the phrase/concept ecological footprint (in
1992).
Since his retirement, he has continued to be an
active advocate of protecting human life on this planet. Several recent talks
are available on YouTube, and in one of them, he wisely emphasizes the great
need for politicians and the general public to listen to the scientists.
In February 2020, Rees gave a talk entitled “Will
Modern Civilization Be the Death of Us” (see here). I
encourage you to watch that video as well as other more recent talks you can easily
find under his name on YouTube.
Given the alarming facts that Rees graphically
presents, I wonder when, oh when, are we the general public and political
leaders going to listen to the scientists about the limits to growth?
And when, oh when, will we (humankind) begin
to take more decisive and meaningful steps to limit growth?
