SEVEN BILLIONS AT THE DOOR

For most of our tenure on the planet, the human impact
on the synergy of air, water, soil, energy and life that
make the Earth habitable has been small. But as our
technology, industry and numbers have increased, that
impact has also increased. The increase has been
exponential in terms of our population as well as our
influence on the natural systems that create a life-
sustaining environment. In some ways humankind has
become the ultimate invasive species. To be equated
with some sort of fuzzy-clawed crab or other gravid
invertebrate seems rather an insult. But as Caldwell
notes above, we seem to be just as oblivious to the
world around.
To many observers, we seem to be a species wheeling
out of control; apparently senseless to the
consequences of our actions in the world and with little
means of control either of ourselves or of anyone or
anything else.
Thus as the United Nations pegs October 31, 2011, as
the date when human population passes 7 billion, we
can expect increasingly strident calls for a deep
evaluation of our planetary role. The UN’s 7 Billion
Actions Web site suggests that, “Individual actions are
needed—to think, live and engage one another
differently, and to manage this growth responsibly. Our
increasing global population will affect us all and it is
everyone’s business to do something about it.”
EVEN MORE IN THE PIPELINE
But what does “live and engage one another differently”
mean? Commentators may simply focus on the fact that
no one really knows when number 7,000,000,000 will
come off the line. And while it is correct that the actual
date cannot really be known, the greater symbolism of
the moment is what the UN is seeking to capture: at a
time of global economic and political turmoil, there are
ever more of us that need food, water and space. To
act “differently” will mean in essence that everyone, and
especially those of the First World, will need a more
global perspective.
If we are to create a sustainable global community,
there must be, for instance, more equitable use of
resources. Just as we have seen global economies
become destabilized through “every man for himself”
corporate and financial strategies, the same type of
ecological abuses will surely lead to a day of reckoning
as well. Unfortunately, the biosphere of the planet does
not so easily forgive its debts. The way forward is to
accept and operate from the principle that we are our
brother’s keeper, and there are ever more brothers on
the way.
Analysis of world demographic trends shows that we
will be pushing 9 to 10 billion in the next 40 years. “And
then what?” asks Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich.
Unfortunately, according to one UN population estimate,
the high-end scenario if world population growth falls to
just 0.5% (rather than a 0% growth rate) grows to 36
billion by 2300. (The world population growth rate today
is 1.2%.)
Ehrlich has been discussing these questions for more
than 40 years. Beginning in 1968 with The Population
Bomb, Ehrlich predicted a dire future for the burgeoning
human numbers. He admits he was wrong concerning
the timing of the massive famines and ecological
unraveling he foresaw. While human civilization has
always faced food shortages and resource bottlenecks
from time to time, Ehrlich believes our modern
equivalents are not so easily hurdled.
Like Ehrlich, many ecologists have come to the
conclusion that we are “ecosystem engineers.” Writing
in The Dominant Animal , Paul and Anne Ehrlich, for
example, note that human influence is so pervasive that
we have altered the paths of all life. They write that “a
burgeoning human population, perpetually trying to
increase its consumption, is now reshaping the entire
Earth to suit its own immediate needs—to be its
niche.”
“There’s no fear that the population will grow to
infinity,” Ehrlich told Vision. “We either stop it by
adjusting the birth rates or nature will stop it by
adjusting the death rates. My ethical system tells me
we ought to avoid the latter. We don’t want to solve the
population problem by having several billion people die
in misery.” (See more of our interview “ And Then
What? )
While the green revolution in farming and increases in
dam building, aquifer drilling, fishing fleet
industrialization and fossil fuel consumption abated the
detonation of Ehrlich’s 1970s’ population meltdown,
these efforts did not defuse the bomb. In fact, many of
these technological fixes have been faux saviors; while
they seemed to advance the status quo for a time, they
ultimately may have only offered borrowed time—time
which might have been used to better our ends.
Instead, it seems to have been time lost. According to
Ehrlich, these natural-capital-consuming practices have
merely put more people and the planet itself in greater
peril. “We are in the middle of a large scale disaster
right now. Globalization has given us the privilege of
perhaps having the entire civilization go under.”
A SENSE OF LIMITS
Lynton Caldwell (1913-2006) was one of the first
political scientists to recognize the connection between
human activities and the threat that we would create for
ourselves. A designer of the National Environmental
Policy Act of 1969, Caldwell understood that growth and
consumption were not without limits. “Without a strong
and governing principle of limits built into public policy,
the ingenuity of humans may impel them toward their
own demise.”
In a 1998 article “Is Human Destiny to Self-Destruct,”
Caldwell was spot on. “Limits hold true for all life-forms
and will ultimately constrain the direction of human
development. If the present widespread commitment to
a sustainable future is realistic, people and policy
makers must act upon the axiom that unfettered growth
and unrestrained expansion in a finite system leads
toward a condition of cul-de-sac which, if irreversible,
could result in destruction.” Of all the threats to
humanity, proposes Caldwell, the greatest are arguably
war and civil disorder. “One need not minimize their
dangers to also recognize that attrition of the Earth's
biosphere and life support systems could continue
unobtrusively under conditions of peace until a point at
which environmental disintegration led to societal
disintegration.”
In a section relevant to the October 31, 2011, milestone,
Caldwell focused on population. It is also relevant to
note that at the time he wrote the Earth housed only 6
billion people. “Today there is one human force that is
driving the expansive course of the material economy
and stressing all parameters of the natural environment.
It may be the most significant factor in the prospect of
societal self-destruction. This is the unprecedented and
presently irreversible explosive growth, dispersal, and
concentration of human populations. There are few real
environmental, economic, and social problems that
would not ultimately be significantly eased if world
populations were stabilized below present and projected
levels.” Pointing out the complexity of the combined
forces of population, resources, environment, and the
economy, He adds that “generalizations risk error; and
yet the adverse ecological and sociological
consequences of unrestrained population growth seem
undeniable—albeit nevertheless widely denied. If society
overshoots the limits of sustainability, retrenching to a
stable state would likely be painful and
disruptive. Whether democracy and individualism as we
know them could survive a reverse transition is, at least,
questionable.”
Concerns that current human populations are already
too large to be sustained indefinitely by the earth’s
resources can only increase along with the
numbers. . . . “Stabilizing populations at significantly
reduced numbers would greatly improve the human
prospect, says Caldwell, “But this objective seems far
from acceptable in today's world. There would be pain
in the transition—the benefits in the long-range future.
The plausible expectation is that humanity will be
unwilling or unable to attempt this transition until it is
imposed by forces exceeding human volition or control.
The possibility of disastrous consequences for humanity
should not be discounted.”
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
In the novel The War of the Worlds , historian and writer
H.G. Wells couched the imperialism of his day in the
costume of invading aliens from Mars. Today, we drive
our machines across the Earth with similar abandon
and little regard for our fellow man or for nature itself. It
is an interesting parallel to the 1890s, only now we are
much improved in our capacity to “engage the enemy”
and take possession of what will be ours. Now we have
the run of the planet. We don’t drive spindly-legged
tripods with mysterious heat rays, but we do seem to
be terraforming the planet in our own image; our
vehicles and destructive potential probably even exceed
Welles’ ample imagination.
Selecting October 31 as the seven billion marker also
has an interesting parallel with Orson Welles’ production
of The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938. As he
noted at the end of the program—an hour that many
listeners believed to be an actual newscast of an
extraterrestrial invasion—it was all in fun. “This is Orson
Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure
you that The War of the Worlds has no further
significance than as the holiday offering it was intended
to be. The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of
dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and
saying Boo!”
Who would believe such an outlandish story, he
commented later when told of the panic. Of course, in
1938 on the eve of World War II, Welles likely
understood that he was playing with fire—that an
uneasy audience might just be far enough over the edge
to be taken in.
Today, we are on the same kind of edge. In all three
cases—Wells’ original writing, the Mercury radio version,
and the UN’s current use of this date—the public has
been asked to consider the bigger picture and to take
responsibility for being part of that picture. The world is
at our door, and we are at the world’s door. Will it be
trick or a treat?
“Human beings have broken out of the circle of life,
driven not by biological need, but by the social
organization which they have devised to ‘conquer’
nature,” wrote ecologist Barry Commoner in The Closing
Circle . “Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental
crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of
history.”