Projecting the future
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What shape will the future take? I am at heart an optimist, but that is more a preference of viewpoint than an expectation. I mean, if you are going to think about the future of the natural world, it obviously is going to be grim. We will lose so much, destroy so much, and degrade so much. The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a rotating island of plastic garbage from the last five decades. The world is slowly heating up, an enormous ball of warming rolling downhill. Soil erosion and degradation is impoverishing many countries in Africa, the number of ocean dead zones is multiplying, and the absolute number of desperately poor people is growing. Pandemics are becoming inevitable; there are so many interconnected people that one day a flu, or a plague, or some other virus, is going to come along and kill off a few hundred million people. Technological change is just not helping the world fast enough (or much at all, if you live in rural villages all over the world). Humans currently control roughly 40% of the land's surface, and that figure already includes almost all of the fertile land. Fish stocks are collapsing just as our population is really taking off. The future of humanity's 9 billion souls is linked to the fate of our environment, and it does not look pretty.
In fact, it is all too easy to be down-hearted about it all. For example, being pessimistic about the future is stock-in-trade of the fellow, J.H. Kuntsler, who wrote "World Made by Hand." He is not alone: many environmentalists fear that we are in an overshoot, like Wylie E. Coyote on thin air, just waiting for a crash.
Our problems do make for sobering stuff. But any projection of the future depends on assumptions about human behavior, and it is worth examining the assumptions of the most dismal "environmental doom" projections to see if they make common sense.
1) Humans will continue the same destructive path they have been on, because that is human nature.
2) The future will see a collapse of human society as we fight over ever-decreasing resources and reel from horrible plagues.
3) The natural world is doomed by an ever-growing human population that uses ever more resources per person for technological toys.
NUMBER ONE: In the short term, sheer inertia will continue to carry humanity on a destructive path: rainforest burning, overfishing, and overgrazing won't stop overnight. But the longer-term response of humanity to its most pressing problems depends more on human nature--whether we can change our habits and our thoughts.
It is a truism that humanity's nature is two-sided: loving and destructive, greedy and kind, self-centered and other-centered. It will probably always continue that way. But to assume that humanity cannot and will not change is wrong-headed. For two brief examples, take the change in thought about slavery and African-Americans in the last century and a half, and the change in behavior about capitalism that have swept China in the last couple decades. Human societies can do many new things (e.g., recycling, talking on cell phones, creating national parks, saving the ozone layer) and give up many old things (e.g., hanging bad slaves, sleeping with little children, killing off annoying native peoples, painting radium on watches, using lead paint, dumping trash directly into the ocean).
Humans are primates that think and change: that is our real nature. Where does that leave the future? An unknown country.
NUMBER TWO: By any metric, human civilization is tough. It survived a black plague and has had very few resource-driven wars up until now. While it is logical that more resource wars should be the offing in the near future, the vast majority of conflicts over water are resolved peacefully (not necessarily equitably--just peacefully). When it comes to resources, there is very little evidence that a lack of resources causes conflict (believe me, I have did the reading for a graduate class--hundreds of pages of papers). Instead, we find that sudden changes in resources cause conflicts (droughts, etc.); slower changes do not. Societies seem to be able to adapt peacefully to every type of resource condition under the sun. Farmers become ranchers, or migrate to other areas, as the climate dries. Sworn enemies negotiate water treaties so they can drink, and live to fight again.
In the final analysis, most non-renewable resources are recyclable, renewable, or replaceable. It will just take special political cooperation to properly manage renewable resources like forests, fish, and water. But it is difficult to name a problematic non-renewable resource. The world is running out of oil, but coal, solar, and wind could replace oil and power the world for another two hundred years (then fusion can take over). For minerals such as silver and nickel, they are simply moving from the earth to products and back to the earth (landfills). Mining landfills and recycling trash will be the waves of the future, as prices rise. For plastic, bioplastics are one answer, silicon products another, and plastic recycling another still.
NUMBER THREE: In the short-term, human population and demand for products will seriously hurt the natural world. Roughly 20-50% of species will likely have gone extinct by 2100. But can we save the remainder? First, human population growth must stop. Human population growth has been slowing for years, so that is a real possibility. Second, human demand for natural resources must decrease. That one is a tough one, but it is possible. Technologically, we can choose to build ever-cooler toys with less and less energy and resources--the average car in 1970 and today is a great example. Rising price signals as habitats get rare might help to change consumption habits--tree plantations grow most of the wood in the U.S. on very little land, for example. Global efforts to conserve forests and protect the oceans are gaining traction: the most recent version of Kyoto will fund tropical forest protection on an unforeseen scale.
This is where I choose to hope. To assume that the future will be horrible is to assume that the future is fixed. Some things--global warming, human population growth--are really likely for the near-term. But if you never know what is going happen in your own life, why assume that the world's life is going to be predictable? Hoping keeps you open for solutions to the problems that we have. Being a pessimist is akin to closing your eyes to possibility. Since the world we are driving is speeding toward some pretty big obstacles, it doesn't make much sense to close our eyes just yet.
What shape will the future take? I am at heart an optimist, but that is more a preference of viewpoint than an expectation. I mean, if you are going to think about the future of the natural world, it obviously is going to be grim. We will lose so much, destroy so much, and degrade so much. The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a rotating island of plastic garbage from the last five decades. The world is slowly heating up, an enormous ball of warming rolling downhill. Soil erosion and degradation is impoverishing many countries in Africa, the number of ocean dead zones is multiplying, and the absolute number of desperately poor people is growing. Pandemics are becoming inevitable; there are so many interconnected people that one day a flu, or a plague, or some other virus, is going to come along and kill off a few hundred million people. Technological change is just not helping the world fast enough (or much at all, if you live in rural villages all over the world). Humans currently control roughly 40% of the land's surface, and that figure already includes almost all of the fertile land. Fish stocks are collapsing just as our population is really taking off. The future of humanity's 9 billion souls is linked to the fate of our environment, and it does not look pretty.
In fact, it is all too easy to be down-hearted about it all. For example, being pessimistic about the future is stock-in-trade of the fellow, J.H. Kuntsler, who wrote "World Made by Hand." He is not alone: many environmentalists fear that we are in an overshoot, like Wylie E. Coyote on thin air, just waiting for a crash.
Our problems do make for sobering stuff. But any projection of the future depends on assumptions about human behavior, and it is worth examining the assumptions of the most dismal "environmental doom" projections to see if they make common sense.
1) Humans will continue the same destructive path they have been on, because that is human nature.
2) The future will see a collapse of human society as we fight over ever-decreasing resources and reel from horrible plagues.
3) The natural world is doomed by an ever-growing human population that uses ever more resources per person for technological toys.
NUMBER ONE: In the short term, sheer inertia will continue to carry humanity on a destructive path: rainforest burning, overfishing, and overgrazing won't stop overnight. But the longer-term response of humanity to its most pressing problems depends more on human nature--whether we can change our habits and our thoughts.
It is a truism that humanity's nature is two-sided: loving and destructive, greedy and kind, self-centered and other-centered. It will probably always continue that way. But to assume that humanity cannot and will not change is wrong-headed. For two brief examples, take the change in thought about slavery and African-Americans in the last century and a half, and the change in behavior about capitalism that have swept China in the last couple decades. Human societies can do many new things (e.g., recycling, talking on cell phones, creating national parks, saving the ozone layer) and give up many old things (e.g., hanging bad slaves, sleeping with little children, killing off annoying native peoples, painting radium on watches, using lead paint, dumping trash directly into the ocean).
Humans are primates that think and change: that is our real nature. Where does that leave the future? An unknown country.
NUMBER TWO: By any metric, human civilization is tough. It survived a black plague and has had very few resource-driven wars up until now. While it is logical that more resource wars should be the offing in the near future, the vast majority of conflicts over water are resolved peacefully (not necessarily equitably--just peacefully). When it comes to resources, there is very little evidence that a lack of resources causes conflict (believe me, I have did the reading for a graduate class--hundreds of pages of papers). Instead, we find that sudden changes in resources cause conflicts (droughts, etc.); slower changes do not. Societies seem to be able to adapt peacefully to every type of resource condition under the sun. Farmers become ranchers, or migrate to other areas, as the climate dries. Sworn enemies negotiate water treaties so they can drink, and live to fight again.
In the final analysis, most non-renewable resources are recyclable, renewable, or replaceable. It will just take special political cooperation to properly manage renewable resources like forests, fish, and water. But it is difficult to name a problematic non-renewable resource. The world is running out of oil, but coal, solar, and wind could replace oil and power the world for another two hundred years (then fusion can take over). For minerals such as silver and nickel, they are simply moving from the earth to products and back to the earth (landfills). Mining landfills and recycling trash will be the waves of the future, as prices rise. For plastic, bioplastics are one answer, silicon products another, and plastic recycling another still.
NUMBER THREE: In the short-term, human population and demand for products will seriously hurt the natural world. Roughly 20-50% of species will likely have gone extinct by 2100. But can we save the remainder? First, human population growth must stop. Human population growth has been slowing for years, so that is a real possibility. Second, human demand for natural resources must decrease. That one is a tough one, but it is possible. Technologically, we can choose to build ever-cooler toys with less and less energy and resources--the average car in 1970 and today is a great example. Rising price signals as habitats get rare might help to change consumption habits--tree plantations grow most of the wood in the U.S. on very little land, for example. Global efforts to conserve forests and protect the oceans are gaining traction: the most recent version of Kyoto will fund tropical forest protection on an unforeseen scale.
This is where I choose to hope. To assume that the future will be horrible is to assume that the future is fixed. Some things--global warming, human population growth--are really likely for the near-term. But if you never know what is going happen in your own life, why assume that the world's life is going to be predictable? Hoping keeps you open for solutions to the problems that we have. Being a pessimist is akin to closing your eyes to possibility. Since the world we are driving is speeding toward some pretty big obstacles, it doesn't make much sense to close our eyes just yet.
posted by Tree Texan at 1:03 PM
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