Tuesday, November 01, 2011

we really need a widespread, bottom-up social movement

Stanford | Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich still sees runaway population growth as a threat to the planet, but is hopeful that humans can avoid the first catastrophic collapse of a global civilization.

The United Nations projects that world population will reach 7 billion this month and could top 10 billion by the end of the century.

In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of the threat of unchecked human population growth. Over the past four decades, the book has brought attention to the question of how many individuals our planet can sustain.

As we approach Oct. 31, the United Nations' symbolic day of 7 billion, Ehrlich discusses post-Population Bomb growth with the Stanford News Service.

Global population has more than doubled since you wrote The Population Bomb. What major consequences of that growth do we see today?

We are seeing climate disruption leading to rising food prices, loss of biodiversity, deteriorating ecosystem services, increased chances of vast epidemics and nuclear resource wars and a general reduction in the odds of avoiding the first catastrophic collapse of a global civilization.

Have any of your prescriptions from The Population Bomb been followed to success in the last 40 years?

There has been a cheering reduction in birth rates, but sadly not far enough in rich countries such as the United States and Australia, and not sufficiently widespread.

Will the additional 2 billion people projected to arrive by 2050 have the same environmental impact as adding the last 2 billion?

No, they won't. People are smart. Farmers didn't first till marginal soils where water was scarce, but rather the most productive, well-watered soils they could find. To support 2 billion more, it will be necessary to farm ever poorer lands, use more dangerous and expensive agricultural inputs, win metals from ever-poorer ores, drill wells deeper or tap increasingly remote or more contaminated sources to obtain water, and then spend more energy to transport that water ever greater distances. All this will require vastly more energy than is now used. As a result, the next 2 billion people probably will do disproportionately much more damage to our life-support systems than did the last 2 billion. Of course, if humanity got serious about protecting the environment, and now especially the atmosphere, the next 2 billion could do less damage.

Sometimes we hear reference to a "cluster bomb" of growth rather than a "population bomb." What does this mean?

Sadly, this howler slipped through the refereeing system at Science, the world's premier science journal, in a recent issue on population. The "cluster bomb" focuses on the population plight of a cluster of poor countries that struggle with rapid population growth and increasing hunger, without looking at the role of rich countries in worsening that plight. More importantly, it doesn't look at the role of wealthy countries in contributing to the most important population-related problems that are global: climate disruption, toxification of the entire planet, the possibly insurmountable challenge of transitioning rapidly away from fossil fuels, looting of the seas, and increasing the risks of pandemics and nuclear war.

How do you respond to the statement that we should focus on overconsumption, not population growth?

Most of humanity's environmental problems trace to too much total consumption, but that consumption is a product of population size and per-capita consumption. Population and consumption are no more separable in producing environmental damage than the length and width of a rectangle can be separated in producing its area – both are equally important.

Can individuals with high per-capita consumption make a difference by changing their behaviors, or do we need to look to systematic changes?

Individual changes can help, but we really need a widespread, bottom-up social movement such as the one which Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) is trying to generate. The MAHB is an outfit you can join if you want to help figure out how society can avoid a collapse. Political action is essential.

17 comments:

umbrarchist said...

Talking about consumption without talking about design and depreciation is nonsense.

What would have happened if the original IBM PC had been a passive backplane design?  Most people don't even know what that is.  It would have been much easier to upgrade if the CPU and memory had been on a single card.  Just unplug the card and plug in the more advanced version.  How many millions of cases and power supplies were thrown away because it was the only way to upgrade the computer?

The initial cost would be higher but the very first upgrade would save more than that.  So 4 or 5 upgrades would save how much?

So it is implementation of technology and population.

nanakwame said...

The species is get ready to split, not immediate but in the next 100 years or forced early. The idea that we go closer to the machine; is it is our child; the animal will exist, but not as prominent.  We see children like this now; but is wrong not to have them still train as warriors. The actual blend of gadgetry within the body is fucking amazing for me, who once read everything of the brain. And we know this was augmented  by Sport Athletics Science, and years of trying to keep a white male's heart ticking, and of course hard violent, epilepsy seizures. And the rise of conscious mindfullness has been great, especially for Americans. We been a long way. The viewing of the present future has been great in the last 60 years, you are so correct there is no distinction between human population and technological forms. We have a conscious, what ever that is.   

CNu said...

You make a good point here Umbra by concretization of the accounting abstraction you consistently stress.

I assign a 99.9% probability of phase IV nanotechnology and genetically engineered biological structures and machines that will render all current material constraints moot. Even given the certainty of these material science and biotechnological revolutions that will change the face of everything we know, I assign a 99.9% probability to a massive and engineered human population cull.

John Kurman said...

Just out of curiosity, what's your post-cull narrative for humans? I'm guessing no Rapture of the Nerds, no Kurtzweilian masturbatory fantasy. So, furtive vermin? Glorified turbo-servo helper monkeys?  Ignored and irrelevant, to fend for themselves? What?

nanakwame said...

Is this an example of magically thinking Doc

From an astrological
viewpoint, it is interesting to note that today, August 27, 2003, the planet
Mars, God of War, is closer to Earth than at any time in the past 60,000 years.

CNu said...

Please restate your question in the standard vernacular Nana if you want me to attempt a response.

nanakwame said...

One of the best thinkers I ever read:

"In a very real sense
we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck,
human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make
the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may
look forward as worthy of our dignity".

"Organism is opposed
to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise".

We have modified our
environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new
environment.

 Norbert Wiener (The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society)

CNu said...

nevermind, I see where you got it from...,

just because Caldwell is an old fart-knocker, skurred a dyin, and prone to flights of fancy such as the one that has him sucking up the Cassiopeans, I don't dismiss the value of what he has been writing about in comparative obscurity for a long, long, time now. In fact, I'm very grateful that somebody with direct access and exposure to the late 60's early 70's pentagon operations analysis (also when the Population Bomb and other Club of Rome-esque tomes were originally written) has furnished an informed projective narrative which takes into consideration population, climate, and peak natural resources, and nuclear arsenals.

CNu said...

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

lol..., take away about 6 billion and change is a meaningful self-modification...,

nanakwame said...

Your Ass Got to Go,Music By Sun Ra

Well Doc based on probability, one site says 2017 using 1945 as the base. 

nanakwame said...

Forgive me:

My calculation shows that the probability of war NOT occurring by 2007 from 1945 is about 29%. If we were in 1945 then we could say that there was a 71% probability of a major war by 2007.= (1 – .02) ^ 62 = .2858http://www.1913intel.com/2007/09/04/what-is-the-probability-of-world-war-iii-occurring/

John Kurman said...

Okay, went through, but skimmed. Then again, my skim is most people's deep read so...

As no doubt you have picked up (reading furthur down the thread) the biggest, hairiest problem with Caldwell/Pentagon planners/Dr. Strangelove et al is that they have a plan.

Secondly, the problem with diving into a hidey hole and waiting things out is always the risk of population implosion. In other words, if you manage to not eat each other and come out of the hole, do you have enough people to get civilization to going again? Charlie Stross made a similar argument with regards to the unlikely occurrence of space colonies. You need a minimum population number. Even with people multitasking and everyone very,very, very useful, and no slackers, you still don't have enough people to do anything.

5 million? Maybe if you want to go back to 500BCE life style. And this is after you've already trashed the planet. It's not like you can wait three million years for a whole new resource base to erode out of the crust.

So 500 million? Late 19th century tech? Not much more than that. Again, you've already trashed the planet. And if your survivors are 2012 billionaires who paid for the gig, you're fucked each way to Sunday, and then crosswhen and back down the line to Tuesday as well.

I am well aware of the fact that the continued optimistic Anglo-Saxon capitalist/science ever onward/3% compounded growth model that gets us to that Star Trek socialist utopia also, in the process, eats the entire Universe in about a century and a decade, and no small irony there.

But, well, you can if you got self-replicating robots and resource extractors, and plan on going to live off planet. But, if you got self-replicating robots and resource extractors, what do they need YOU for? Thus back to my original question. If after the nano/geno/nucleo/myco flouresence that Kurtzweil and others beat off to occurs, then...

CNu said...

I disagree with this premise: You need a minimum population number. Even with people multitasking and
everyone very,very, very useful, and no slackers, you still don't have
enough people to do anything.


Well established ancient homo sapiens bottlenecks took the population to disastrously tiny numbers, yet the species rebounded mightily in the era of pure sticks, stones, and pluck. Bleeding edge military technology is ~25 years ahead of anything commercially available - what that means in biology and nanotechnology is somewhat uncertain, but what it means in robotics, energy storage and transmission, and space, oceanic, and subterranean exploration and exploitation technology is very clear.

5 million? Maybe if you want to go back to 500BCE life style. And
this is after you've already trashed the planet. It's not like you can
wait three million years for a whole new resource base to erode out of
the crust.


The aftermath of Chernobyl contradicts this premise, and remember, I'm banking on advanced biological and nanotechnological materials capabilities.

But, if you got self-replicating robots and resource extractors, what do they need YOU for?

Stigmergy is not the same as sentience and we do a fair number of non-computable things...,

If after the nano/geno/nucleo/myco flouresence that Kurtzweil and others beat off to occurs, then...

What transcends the yeasty stage of human development and escapes the species Great Filter becomes a farmer in the field of stars http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2010/05/farmers-in-fields-of-stars.html

nanakwame said...

Past future as Haruki states is quite exciting than describing  present future. That is for sure, yet; anyone who says they can see past the shadows or the brilliant conjectures are liars, and no different than than Cleric Absolutist.
I do believe that you are correct Doc, what we describe as life can not come from looking at the human as through entanglements and memes. Did you see The Fabric of Space - Greene hosting? And before that The Animal House - "if ants can't move their city they eat themselves." How different are we? LOL. The years of visual work is delightful.
But Space, man loved it from H.S., and it ends with the notion that all we see may just be an "illusion" a Hologram of a 2 dimensional space and time. 
The Einstein Effect took for 1954 to 2004 to prove - from a mathematical a priori to a practical experimental finding. Goes to show how investment, with no products built is quite important for what comes after, as you pointed out the other day about the common knowledge. I don't know how far we can go into Space as humans, as Tom Murphy elucidates, but the notion that we can colonies the space around earth and even in the deep sea is quite probably. But w/o Magical Thinking, we nothing but a bacteria's child.

John Kurman said...

Irony is cheap coin, else I'd get more enjoyment out of the fact that, between the two of us, it turns out you are the starry-eyed optimist. Well, if/when we are scavenging the less putrid bits of extinct walrus up near the Arctic Circle in stifling subtropical conditions, whilst weakly godlike entities flit above us transmuting the atmosphere into something more to their particular whim - like xenon - remind me to tell you "I told you so".

CNu said...

Irony is cheap coin, else I'd get more enjoyment out of the fact that,
between the two of us, it turns out you are the starry-eyed optimist


lol, hardly, mind is precious - the sentient hominid perhaps not so much.

I've asked time and time again "are we smarter than yeast" and the answer is decidedly NO! Understood as a specific set of capabilities, a means to an evolutionary end rather than an end-in-itself - everything falls rather nicely into perspective.

The fact that these humans have invested an inordinate amount in their very own suicide solution (the nuclear energy/nuclear weapons complex) suggests something more and far more profound about the locus of agency within our species. It makes it fairly plain that we are not only deemed expendable, but that we're designed to be expendable and very promptly so in the event of extreme exigency.

See John, I'm convinced, and only become more so with the passage of time and acquisition of additional data, that the real underlying locus and physical substrate for our sentience/agency is bacterial. So when you step away from the spectacle and the saga of these humans as agents of their own destiny - and appreciate and accept that we're just large and accidentally self-aware automata executing a much longer term bacterial evolutionary agenda, then the constant magical thinking much ado about nothing all falls by the wayside.

Somewhere between the first time I saw Village of the Damned and read Julian Jaynes and realized that all the fundaments of human civilization are stigmergic - but that at some point along the way - we abruptly and fairly recently became self-aware - I concluded that something besides us is running the show. And since I don't believe in ghosts and other such ephemeral hokum, I had to conclude that our microbiome which has been aborning for evolutionary aeons as compared with our microsecond of existence is really calling the major shots, just not as directly as we're fond of imagining ourselves to do.

As Gurdjieff noted, we are highly suggestible sleepers, automata with delusions of conscious grandeur but scant little effort on our part to make the most of what is potentially available to us in these machines from which our narratize existence emerges.

CNu said...

But w/o Magical Thinking, we nothing but a bacteria's child.

Bacteria's "machine" that has suffered the tragedy of getting partially off its leash, but such is the delicate-yet-contagious nature of mind given the proper conditions for its arising.

Why it's important to realize the tragedy of the situation, understand that it's not our place to effect the movement of our own inordinately bulky and fragile organisms across the macrocosmos (between the stars), much as it's likely not our place and would be our even greater tragedy to master Lawson's Criteria and harness nuclear fusion at our scale of being http://youtu.be/EnlOCFcJa4I (such as it is, it's the primary means of our own undoing).

No.

It is our place to serve as the instrumental means to an end which spans geological scales of time, to foster the cultivation and mobilization of mind itself - which I believe happens with or without such instrumental intervention, much as bacteria showed up on the earth long, long ago, and then subsequently, long after, fungi did, as well. http://youtu.be/VVpB4qr7DS4

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