Showing posts with label consumption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consumption. Show all posts

Monday, 8 March 2021

Collapse you Say? Part 7, Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics

Reflection
Tree on the South Pier
Kincardine Harbour

In my last post we looked at two major problems facing mankind: overpopulation and overconsumption. I used the I=PAT equation (Impact=Population X Affluence X Technology) as a framework to hang this discussion on.

For a long lived species such as ours, there is a lengthy delay between reducing the rate at which our population grows, and any actually reduction of the population. At best, if the demographic transition keeps spreading in the developing world, it will be many decades before our population stops growing. During that time our impact will exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by a much greater extent than it does at present. In all likelihood this will result in at least a parftial dieoff of the human population. We need to take action to mitigate such a dieoff. I believe we should still do everything we can to reduce population growth (excepting morally abhorrent things), but we also need to look elsewhere for something that can be done to reduce our impact in the short run.

Many have turned to technology as the most promising way to reduce our impact. Sadly, no real solutions have been forth coming. The oft promised "decoupling" hasn't happened, and there is good reason to think that it won't, ever. The only remaining alternative to reduce our impact would be to reduce consumption (affluence). And this would be especially effective if applied first to the richest segtments of our global society. It's clear that the people who are most seriously overconsuming don't want to change, but I believe that we must, and that we can, do so.

Before we can take a close look at what drives consumption, and the continuous growth of consumption, I think we need to look at several touchy subjects—human needs and wants, human nature, and politics. So that's what I'll be talking about today.

Needs and Wants

If we are proposing a reduction in consumption, it seems natural to talk about needs versus wants. The idea being that overconsumption results from people trying to satisfy desires that are not actually needs even in the most generous definition of the word. The resulting consumption being something which they can perfectly well do without.

Often when I hear discussion of this subject, it's part of a criticism of poor folks' money management skills, by someone who knows little or nothing of what it's like to be poor. What I want to do here is just the opposite—to criticize rich people, who are champion overconsumers and drive the rest of us to consume more in order to support their efforts to amass more wealth.

Figure 1, Consumption versus Income

I've included this diagram in several posts in this series, and I'll probably use it again in the future, because it is so central to our overconsumption problem. Keep in mind that all the people represented in this diagram—poor, rich and in between—have the same basic needs.

It seems to me that the bottom decile, maybe the bottom two, are not having even their most basic needs met—many are suffering from malnutrition and don't have access to clean water. They are in need of some help from the rest of us, and their situation is so dire that even a small amount of help would make a big difference. At the other end of the scale, it also seems clear that those in the top decile are overconsuming by a large amount, and that they could significantly reduce their consumption while still satisfying all their needs and even some of their wants.

We must realize that people legitimately do have many needs. These have often been portrayed in Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, illustrated as a pyramid:

Figure 2: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I'd advise reading the Wikipedia article on this before taking it as gospel, as many refinements have been suggested since the mid-twentieth century when Maslow originally came out with this. It turns out that the pyramid representation isn't even his. Others have suggested this might be a better representation of our needs:

Figure 3: Alternative graphic to the Pyramid of Needs

I hear many people talking about needs as things like water, food, warmth, rest, and safety, while discounting needs higher on the pyramid as luxuries. But those higher needs are just as real, though perhaps of less concern in the very short run. In the long run, if they aren't met, it will cause problems just as certainly as not satisfying the more basic needs. It seems to me that the reason for having a society in the first place is to provide a way for people to satisfy all their needs. Any society that doesn't do so is failing in a major way. Note that I didn't say society should provide peoples' needs, but rather provide a way for them to provide their own needs.

People have a very strong need to be part of a community that function of the basis of mutual aid, where we can contribute by helping others and be sure that we will get help when we need it. This provides for the needs on top three levels of the pyramid as well as the bottom two. And satisfying the needs on the higher levels of the pyramid can often be done without increasing the consumption of material goods, or our impact on the planet.

But in the developed world, especially in North America, where physiological needs are often very well met, our society is failing to provide for those higher needs. Individualism is over emphasized, and we are left with a feeling that we are missing something. Capitalistic marketing efforts take advantage of this, generating artificial desires for consumer goods and services. These should be viewed not as needs or wants, but as things that are being forced on us for the benefit of others.

Human Nature

A little thought brings me to the conclusion that when we are talking about needs and wants, we are really discussing human nature. Very frequently, I am told that you can't change human nature and that some aspects of this unchangeable nature are the source of both our population and consumption problems.

I don't agree—humans can adapt to live in many different cultures, and much of what people see as aspects of human nature are actually adaptations to the culture we are living in. If we were living in a different culture, those adaptations would be different and people looking at us would get different ideas about what human nature really is.

As I said in my last post, I don't see that the amount of food available to people directly determines population growth rates, especially reductions in growth. It seems that various cultural and economic factors determine the desired family size and are currently causing a decrease in the growth rate, albeit not quickly enough.

It's the same with overconsumption—greed, materialism, toxic individualism and so forth are adaptations to modern consumer culture. Basic human nature is not the main reason for growing consumption, at least not in the straight forward way that many people imagine.

If I was asked to identify the essential, underlying elements of human nature, I would point to our adaptability and our skill at working together co-operatively.

At some point early in our evolution as human beings, our ancestors developed a resistance to primate-style sexual and political dominance and took up communistic and assertively egalitarian social arrangements. The term usually applied to this lifestyle is primitive communism. We lived like this for most of the 2 million years since we became recognizably human.

If you grew up in a highly individualistic modern society, this must seem odd. Why would our ancestors have chosen such a lifestyle? There must have been some evolutionary advantage, but evolution works on individuals. That is, changes happen at the individual level, and changes that benefit the individual, so that they are are better able to survive and reproduce, will accumulate in the population. How could such a lifestyle do so? It was focused, after all, on the success of the group and actively discouraged single individuals from attaining a preferred position. That's what "assertively egalitarian" means.

Well, it turns out that this kind of an approach does lead to better outcomes for the individuals in the group as well as the group as a whole. Individual human beings do much better in groups based on mutual aid than we do as isolated individuals. Even if those idividuals are strong enough and capable enough to get by on their own. And in the course of living in this way for so long, we evolved strong skills in areas such as empathy, communication and co-operation which made the lifestyle work even better. We also came to need the closeness and comradery found in such groups. Knowing that we are needed and can rely on having our own needs met is important to human beings.

Someone, I am sure, will accuse me of romanticizing the life of hunter gatherers. I am well aware of the hardships of that life and have no desire to go back to it. Especially since there are few habitats left on this planet where hunting and gathering could be pursued successfully. Certainly not by eight billion people, probably not by more than a very few million.

Nor am I indulging in the "appeal to nature" fallacy. But there is something called an "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" where you consider the circumstances in which a species has evolved in order to generate hypotheses about what might be best for that species today. Of course, a hypothesis is only valid if it can be tested and proven correct. From what I've read, most of what I am saying here about human nature is part of the accepted scientific consensus.

Small, close knit, egalitarian communistic groups were our evolutionary environment. Outside of that environment, you may see dysfunction or evolutionary mismatch. Now, humans are nothing if not adaptable and we can survive in environments wildly different from those where we evolved, but that does not mean we will thrive. You see people behaving badly all the time, but I suspect that in most cases it's because they are struggling to adapt to bad situations. Which our society provides in abundance.

Politics

I believe our level of consumption, and of economic growth, has to do with the way our society is organized. To a large extent that amounts to economics and politics.

It is only fair, I suppose, to warn you up front about my own politics. I am what people these days are calling an "ancom", an anarcho-communist or anarchist-communist. Both of those words are likely to provoke a negative reaction, but bear with me. It is my opinion that these sort of political/economic relationship are best suited to human nature.

The primitive communism I mentioned in the last section was so successful that it wasn't until a few thousand years after we switched over from hunting-gathering to agriculture and about 1000 years after we started to live in cities that we began to create hierarchies and develop the concept of property. In the moment, this no doubt seemed like a reasonable response to the challenges of living together in larger groups. Especially to those at the tops of the hierarchies and in possession of the property. For everybody else, probably not so much. But by the time the disadvantages were clear, the lower classes were no longer in control of the situation.

It is my opinion that this is a dead end that humanity has pursued for the last few thousand years, and which has lead to many of the problems we are facing today. Eventually—soon it is to be hoped—we will give up on it and return to some form of anarcho-communism, the lifestyle to which we are best suited. I'll have more to say about that in my next post.

It is interesting to note that even inside the most capitalistic of enterprises, when people work together in teams they usually behave in a cooperative, egalitarian, one would almost say "communistic" way. I mention this from personal experience. For many years I worked as a "power maintenance electrician" for the grid company here in Ontario. We worked in small teams of tradesmen, and while our relationships with supervision and management were often fraught, the workers got along well for the most part and enjoyed working together.

I do know you've been taught that anarchists and communists are the worst sorts of people.

But is that really so? To quote the late David Graeber, an anthropologist and notable anarchist scholar, "Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous."

That quote is from a short essay by Graeber that is really worth reading. You may find that you are already an anarchist without knowing it. Of course, many people today are libertarians, (capitalist-anarchists), which involves caring very little for one's fellow man, and a great deal for one's own success. That's why I think it is important to add communism into the mix.

Many people have the wrong idea about communism too, based on the 20th century totalitarian regimes who called themselves communists, but who, for the most part, never managed to achieve anything close to it.

The goal of a communistic society is to provide for the needs of all its members by having them work together, to the best of their abilities, to achieve that goal. From everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their needs. All this with no one being exploited or oppressed, and no one doing any exploiting or oppressing. Large scale productive properties are owned by the community and there is no private property (property owned for the purpose of making a profit). There is personal property—things like clothing, shoes, toothbrushes, etc., and depending on what the community decides is best, perhaps even things like tools, housing and garden plots. Anarcho-communism does this without a state, decisions being made by consensus among the members of the community.

While there certainly are "large A" anarchists who would advocate violent revolution to achieve these ends, I am "small a" anarchist. We just want to be left alone by the state so we can get on with developing the sort of society that we consider ideal.

I do realize that this will not be easy. It will involve a much more horizontal and direct type of democracy, with decisions made by consensus, which can be quite challenging if you've never done it before. The feminist movement has done a lot of work on teaching people how to succeed at this. There are all kinds of good books on consensus decision making and courses are available to help you get started at it or hone your already existing skills. It will also involve something closer to living and working communally than most people are accustomed to today. This can be a trial for those who didn't grow up doing it, but it can be learned, even by people from nuclear families or those who have spent much of their lives as isolated individuals. Both consensus decision making and community life can very rewarding.

Having covered these issues in some detail, I think I am finally ready to look at over-consumption, growth, capitalism and hierarchies in my next post.

I'll wrap up today's post with a comment on collapse, the subject of this series of posts. Both overpopulation and overconsumption are real problems, of such magnitute and severity that a successful solution is unlikely. It would be smart while working on such a solution to also be preparing for collapse, getting ready to adapt to what most of us will see as continually worsening conditions. The goods news is that reducing consumption at the personal level will also be a good start at adapting to collapse.


Links to the rest of this series of posts: Collapse, you say?

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Friday, 8 January 2021

Collapse you say? Part 5, Over Population

Geese and Gulls on Lake Huron

Last time I talked about growth, overshoot and dieoff, and promised to continue with a look at human over population in this post. So here we go.

Figure 1: Human Population level and growth rate 1700 CE to 2100 CE (Current Era)

The diagram above is helpful since it charts not just total population (the green areas), but also the yearly rate of growth (the red line). I believe that, by referring to the various sections of this graph, I can make most of the points I want to make here.

Over on the left side you will note this statement, perhaps not readable on your screen, ".04% was the average growth rate between 10,000 BCE and 1700 CE." From some of the reading I have been doing lately it seems that the growth rate for hunter gatherers before 10,000 BCE was similar.

It turns out that humans are like other species—our population grows when there an abundance of food and shrinks when there is a shortage. For typical species, ways of getting more food include expanding their range, successfully competing with other species and evolving to occupy new niches. This sort of change, based on genetic evolution, tends to happen very slowly. But, unlike other species, we have evolved the ability to have a culture, which acts as a medium for change, and language as a way of passing that change on to future generations. During our approximately 2 million years as hunter gatherers we developed many new ways to access more food and get more good out of it. And we spread to all the continents except Antarctica.

I suspect that by about 10,000 years ago we had just about filled up the world, given the amount of food that was available to hunter-gatherers. Only a few islands, mostly in the Pacific, remained to be discovered and settled. It was not too long after that, in various places around the world, that we began to practice agriculture.

It surprises me that the extra food available from even pre-industrial agriculture didn't cause an increase in our growth rate. Apparently it didn't, but it did allow our population to continue growing at about .04% per year, increasing the population density in areas that were suited to agriculture.

In the millennia that followed the invention of agriculture, we went on to develop irrigation, draft animals, animal and plant breeding, using manure and compost to improve fertility and so forth, all of which increased yields and increased the areas where we could practice agriculture, enabling further population growth.

With a growth rate of .04% per year, a population doubles about every 1700 years. This sounds pretty slow, but give it a couple of million years with no interruption and that population will have doubled nearly 1200 times. No, that's not increased by a factor of 1200, but doubled 1200 times. It would only have to double 10 times to increase by a factor of more than 1000, or 30 times to increase by a factor of more than a billion.

The population around 10,000 BCE was only somewhere between a million and 10 million. It is clear that our past population growth was interrupted frequently, when we exceeded the local carrying capacity, when natural disasters reduced that carrying capacity, or perhaps when diseases reduced our fertility rate. For concrete examples, read Chapter 3 of Jared Diamond's Collapse, which details complete dieoffs on Pitcairn and Henderson Islands in the Pacific and a partial dieoff on the neighbouring Mangareva Island.

This is one of the points I want to make—even with only pre-industrial technology and a relatively small growth rate, the eventual result is that we exceed the carrying capacity of the region where we are living and experience dieoff. The only long term solution is to aim for a steady population with no growth. Again, referring to Diamond's Collapse, read Chapter 9 on sustainable societies in the New Guinea highlands, the island of Tikopia and in Japan during the Tokugawa period. It has been done and without modern technology.

But, with those few exceptions, what actually happened is that around 1700 CE our population growth rate began to increase. I am not certain exactly what caused this, but two things happened at around that time that I suspect had something to do with it. First, we started using fossil fuels to industrialize our economies, greatly increasing the per capita amount of energy available, which drove what we think of as "modernization". Second, Europeans expanded into the so-called "empty" continents of the New World (including Australian, Oceania and parts of Africa). For the indigenous peoples this was not a pleasant experience, with a 90% death rate in many areas after the arrival of Europeans. But it did allow the people of Europe to spread out into new areas, accessing new resources and space to grow. And grow we did.

Around 1900 the growth rate started to increase even more and kept it up with only a couple of bumps until 1968.

A number of advances drove this increased rate of growth. Heat engines burning fossil fuels replaced much of the muscle power used in agriculture, and meant that we no longer had to grow food for draft animals. The invention of processes for converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia made synthetic nitrogen fertilizers available in large quantities. Before that nitrogen in a form accessible to plants was created only by bacteria and this was a serious limitation on the amount of food that could be grown. And advances in medical care significantly reduced infant and child mortality.

By the 1960's essentially all the land suitable for agriculture was already in use and a food supply problem was looming on the horizon. The green revolution "solved" this problem by developing varieties of the major cereal grains whose yields respond very well to irrigation and fertilization, and by using pesticides to control competition from weeds and crop damage by insects and fungi.

The people responsible for the Green Revolution saw it as a temporary solution that would allow us to get our population growth problem under control without a major dieoff. In the years since then it has actually been used a means to support an ever growing population with little serious thought of getting it under control.

All this leads to another of the points I wanted to make. Looking at the human race's history with food and population growth, a trend starts to become pretty obvious. Again and again we have increased our food supply, which has led to an increase in population, which required an increase in the food supply, which once provided led to a further increase in our population. That population currently (January 2021) stands close to eight billion, and the majority of people still believe that we'll be able to pull more rabbits out of the hat as needed, using technology to feed an ever growing population, into and beyond the foreseeable future.

To me this seems unlikely. We are using ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food these days. This includes large amounts of natural gas for the production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. The other two primary plant nutrients, potash and phosphorous, are non-renewable mineral resources. And much of the water used for irrigation is pumped from fossil aquifers that are essentially non-renewable. So, modern agriculture is critically dependent on resources which are becoming depleted as we speak, and for which there is no renewable substitute. Further, climate change threatens to put an end to the mild and predictable weather that has made agriculture easier to do for the last few millennia.

The good news is that the growth rate of our population peaked out at 2% per year in 1968, and has been declining since then. But population growth itself, as opposed to the rate of growth, is still a long way from stopping. For a long lived species such as ours there is a big delay built into the process—our population has continued to get bigger and will continue to do so before it finally peaks out. There are a lot of people alive today who have quite a few years left to live, and our population cannot significantly decrease until they have died. And there are a great many women of child bearing age, who could bear more children and increase our growth rate if circumstances encouraged them to do so.

The right-most section of the graph, covering from 2019 to 2100, is seen by many as pointing to a solution.

This solution comes in the form of the "demographic transition", which according to Wikipedia is: "a phenomenon and theory which refers to the historical shift from high birth rates and high infant death rates in societies with minimal technology, education (especially of women) and economic development, to low birth rates and low death rates in societies with advanced technology, education and economic development, as well as the stages between these two scenarios."

This phenomenon is largely due to the affluence made possible by fossil fuels and the fact that in modern, rich societies children are more of a burden than a blessing, encouraging smaller family sizes. The graph's authors make the assumption that affluence will continue to spread to the developing areas of the world and the rate of population growth will continue to drop, causing our population to peak out at almost 11 billion by the turn on the century. While the graph doesn't show it, those who support this optimistic scenario assume that our population will actually decrease and settle out at a more manageable level in the next century. Our population growth rate would have to go below zero to achieve this. Admittedly, in many developed nations it already has done so.

Many people embrace this scenario enthusiastically, assuming it means that "business as usual" can continue on with no problems. It is especially attractive to the rich and powerful, who are looking for a "guarantee" that they won't have to give up their privileges to get us through the problems that lie ahead.

As you can no doubt imagine by now, I am not convinced. The trouble with this graph is that it is based on the assumption that there will always be adequate resources to support the existing population and to continue with the development that drives the demographic transition.

So many of the resources we rely on are non-renewable and are already becoming depleted, but even if we could somehow manage to switch over to renewable resources, things don't look good.

We are at around 165% of carrying capacity with a population of 7.7 billion (in 2019). With 10 billion people and no increase in average levels of consumption, we would be at 214% of carrying capacity in 2100. But in order for the demographic transition to happen in the developing nations, their level of affluence must increase significantly, taking us even further into overshoot. This is a bottleneck that is going to be very difficult to get through. I expect that we will experience a significant dieoff long before 2100. That dieoff will serve to correct our over population and over consumption problems, but it will not be a process that we have any control over, nor any wish to take part in.

Has anyone done a study which took into account resource and pollution limits along with population growth? Well yes, actually, just such a study was done in the early 1970s, and repeated twice since then: The Limits to Growth. This study used a computerized simulation of our world which produced results in its base run (Business as Usual) that have turned out to be pretty accurate.

Figure 2, The Limit to Growth: Business as Usual version

I did a series of posts about The Limits to Growth a few years ago if you want more details without having to read the book. But the main thing to note here is that the population grows until around the middle of this century then decreases dramatically , along with the food supply and our industrial output, with resources becoming depleted and pollution spiking just before population drops off.

Unfortunately, very few people have taken The Limits to Growth seriously. Criticisms generally take the form of, well, if we just do this or that, it will nicely get us around those limits. This makes me think most people stopped reading after the chapter that describe the "Business as Usual" run of the simulation. I say this because the authors anticipated what people would suggest and did many more runs of the simulation that tried those solutions to see if they would help. They did not. What did help was reducing our level of consumption and living within the limits imposed by the planet and its ecosystems. But of course almost no one wants to do that, so we have continued to head deeper into overshoot and closer to dieoff.

To see in more detail how this dieoff may happen, we need to be aware that thus far we have been discussing the situation in global averages. But we live on a large planet, with many different regions that experience change at different rates.

Resource depletion and climate change, the driving forces behind the coming dieoff, are just getting underway in many parts of the world, and it is still easy to ignore their effects. But in others areas—the Middle East, sub-Saharan African and Central America certainly come to mind—they are already disrupting human habitation patterns. The economy suffers first, with volatile energy prices and increases in prices of food and water. Many people are left unemployed and governments are less capable of supporting social safety nets. Agriculture suffers due to some combination of droughts, floods and heat waves. People from farming communities are forced to pack up and move to the cities, where more people looking for jobs and food are not welcome. Civil strife and sometimes outright war ensues and refugees start to stream out of the areas affected. Most of the refugees are absorbed in nearby countries who are not themselves in the best of shape.

In the past when a society collapsed, it's members had little choice but to tough it out with no outside help. Today, in our smaller, more connected world, some help is usually available from outside an area that is experiencing trouble. And it may be possible to move to an area that is not yet affected. That's good, but it also means that trouble in one area is more likely to spread to others in a domino effect. I expect that this will intensify during the coming decades and gradually lead to the almost complete collapse of our industrial civilization.

So, this has been a lot of information. What conclusions do I reach from it?

Is overpopulation the main problem we should be trying to solve? I would say no, but it is certainly part of the problem. Increasing the size of our population makes coping with over consumption harder, and vice versa. The thing to remember about trying to control overpopulation is that, because of the large delay between reducing population growth rates and eventually reducing our population, this project is not likely to bear fruit in time to get us through the bottleneck we face. Unless we tackle consumption at the same time.

As a successful species we have the built in tendency to multiply if resources are available and to expand until we overuse the resources. Can anything be done about this? The demographic transition is tied to affluence in many ways, so it seems likely to make things worse by increasing consumption. Greater awareness of our situation could lead to cultural influences which would make smaller families more desirable in areas where the growth rate is still high. Educating women can do much to help with that, without requiring excessive consumption. Like so many of the problems we face, the solution is probably doable, but not likely to be implemented in a timely fashion for ideological and political reasons.

Reducing the food supply would definitely reduce our population, and this is likely to be what happens in the event of dieoff, whether we want it to or not. But to deliberately quit feeding people should be morally repugnant. Especially if forced on poor people by rich people who are exempt. The term "eco-fascist" has been coined for people who are in favour of this sort of thing.

I am not one of those people, and I should make it clear that I am not blaming the problems I've been talking about here on the poorer and more heavily populated areas of the world. Indeed, the high level of affluence in the developed nations is directly supported by their exploitation of the developing nations. And the ridiculously high level of consumption by the rich everywhere is a major factor in the overshoot that I've been talking about. Ten percent of the population of the world does over 50% of the consumption.

Next time we'll take a closer look at affluence, the "A" term in the I=PAT equation, and the way our world is organized to drive the continued growth of consumption.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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Saturday, 2 January 2021

Collapse you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff

Nature's Ice Sculptures Along Lake Huron

On the rare occasions when the subject of collapse comes up in polite conversation, a kollapsnik like me is liable to get responses like: "Collapse you say? Surely not!" Thus the title of this series of posts. But I've found that responding with "Surely yes!" isn't very effective (as well as sounding rather childish). The pandemic this year (2020) has got some people thinking a bit more, but most still expect things to get back to normal any day now.

So in this series of posts I've been talking about what collapse is and why I think the our civilization has been slowly collapsing for several decades and will continue doing so. This in the hope of laying out the facts clearly enough that just about anyone should be able to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

In the last two posts(Part 2, Part 3), I looked at problems with the inputs to and outputs from our civilization, and pointed out a number of issues, any one of which alone should be cause for great concern. And taken together, well....

Now I think it is time to have a look inside the box labeled "Industrial Civilization". When you look around you from within this civilization, you are confronted with a complex and confusing sight, of which I don't have any sort of complete understanding. But there are some aspects which bear more directly on collapse than others, and I'll have quite a bit to say about them in the next few posts.

The problems we've looked at so far—resource depletion, declining surplus energy, climate change, overshoot and decreasing carrying capacity—all seem to be a result of the ongoing growth of our civilization, both population growth and growth in affluence. So you would think we'd be making a serious effort to get growth under control, maybe even initiate "degrowth", in order to cope with these problems. And yet, over the last few decades economic growth has come to be seen as a necessity. If you paid attention to election speeches, you'd conclude that the most pressing problem we face is maintaining and further stimulating such growth, not preventing it. It seems to me that this obsession with growth is a built in feature (dare we say a fault) of our civilization.

To more clearly understand our impact on the planet—our footprint—we need to review the subjects I touched on at the end of my last post: eco-system services, carrying capacity, and overshoot. Eco-system services are things like breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. And also important, though I neglected to mention it in my last post, is the ability of the eco-system to (within limits) absorb and process our waste products. All these things are available to us free of charge and we simply could not do without them.

It is reasonable to call the rate at which the eco-system can supply those services to us its "carrying capacity". The portion of those services that the human race uses can be called our "footprint"—the impact we have as we walk upon this planet.

According to the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity, credible estimates of carrying capacity range from 4 to 16 billion humans, with a median around 10 billion. The literature I've read on carrying capacity and dieoff typically talks about us currently being at around 165% of the planet's carrying capacity. If such estimates were made when our population was around 7 billion, then the carrying capacity was a little over 4 billion. That's at the low end of the range of estimates, which seems prudent. Using the high or even median estimates would lead us to do nothing in the belief that everything is OK and may well continue to be OK. Instead, we should be setting ourselves up to run well below carrying capacity, allowing us to live on this planet without damaging it and with a comfortable margin to allow for unforeseen circumstances.

Being over carrying capacity is called being in overshoot, and it leads to collapse. Some of the extra over 100% comes from consuming non-renewable resources, and some of it comes from using renewable resources at greater than their replacement rate, so that they too are irreversibly consumed. This means that we are actually reducing the carrying capacity of the planet and digging ourselves into an ever deeper hole. Certainly judging from the resource depletion and pollution (mainly climate change) problems we're currently experiencing, it seems that we are indeed in overshoot, and the condition of the ecosphere is definitely worsening.

If we are to solve the problems caused by our overshoot we need not just to reduce our impact below the current carrying capacity of the planet, but rather to go below the smaller carrying capacity that will be left by the time we get to where we are aiming. Further, since it is a big planet with different conditions in different places, we can't just look at global averages, but must consider impact versus carrying capacity on a region by region basis. This to avoid being fooled if we are lucky enough to live in an area that is not as yet hard hit. In much of Europe and North America, it seems we are currently being fooled.

Our footprint (impact) is expressed in the following equation: I=PAT.

"I" stands for impact, or footprint, which is the product of three factors:

  • "P", which stands for population.
  • "A", which stands for affluence, or consumption of resources.
  • "T", which stands for technology, and is included in the hope that improving technology can reduce our impact

We seem determined to do whatever it takes to increase "I", no matter how negative the results. Is this because of something inherent about human beings, or the way we organize ourselves, or the circumstances we find ourselves in? Or perhaps all three combined together?

In the rest of this post and the following one we'll look at this from the viewpoint of our growing population. In future posts we'll look at the role affluence and technology play in our problems.

But first I think we need to understand something about the mathematics of growth. In cases where the rate of growth is related to the size of what's growing, growth is "exponential". If you chart such growth on a graph, it looks something like this:

Figure 1, The Exponential Function

This is the kind of growth you get with a compound interest savings account, where even if the interest rate stays the same, the balance in the account increases dramatically over time. It is convenient to look at exponent growth in terms of the doubling rate, the amount of time it takes for that bank account to double. A rule of thumb is to divide 70 by the percent growth rate per year, and that gives you the approximate doubling period in years. If you are lucky enough to get 10% interest, your savings will double in 7 years. At 5% interest it takes 14 years to double and at 1% interest, it takes 70 years to double.

What may not be clear from Figure 1 is the degree to which the curve takes off as it moves to the right. Growth is very slow at first until we reach the "knee" of the curve, then it goes right through the roof, so to speak. A great deal has been said about how exponential growth is counter-intuitive for most people. Here is a short (not quite two minutes) YouTube video about the subject. If you have a little more time (11 minutes), this video goes deeper into it.

But in the physical world, growth consumes resources, which are only available at a certain maximum rate and can a only support so large a population. At some point the rate of growth starts to decrease and the curve levels off rather than continuing upwards. So the exponential curve doesn't really give us a very good picture of how growth actually works. For that we need to look at the logistic function.

Figure 2, The Logistic Function

Of course the logistic function assumes a constant supply of whatever it takes to support a population, so that the right side of the curve levels off and stays flat. Again, the real world doesn't exactly work like that. In the real world it is possible to go into overshoot, and over consume resources so that the rate at which the system can supply them is reduced. This results in something like the curve shown below.

Figure 3, Overshoot and Dieoff

The population in this case is of some sort of simple organism with a more or less fixed consumption rate per individual, and a growth rate determined by the availability of food. I have chosen to show the worst case scenario where the population we are considering declines to zero because of decreased carrying capacity and the rest of the ecosystem is so badly damaged by the overshoot that it dies out as well.

Fortunately, this is not necessarily the case—as the population goes into dieoff it eventually goes below even the reduced the carrying capacity of the environment and quits damaging the environment. The environment, if the damage is small enough, may be able to recover, even if the species that was in overshoot doesn't. If it recovers enough before the population under consideration goes extinct, that population may be able to recover as well, something like this:

Figure 4, Overshoot, Dieoff and Recovery

What happens as time progresses off the right end of the graph varies. The population may go into overshoot again, then die off and recover, and this may be repeat on an ongoing basis. Or, at any point along the way, a dieoff could lead to extinction. In any case the idea that there is a "balance of nature" that would cause the population to level out just below the carrying capacity is largely bogus. Things are always changing and don't stay balanced forever, or even for very long.

So now that we've looked at growth in general, we need to look in detail at the growth of the human population of this planet. Because human populations can change their growth rates, their levels of consumption and even the carrying capacity of their environment, this is complex, and I'm going to devote the whole of my next post to the subject. In short, though, based on the ideas of carrying capacity, overshoot and our capacity for growth, I am not in the least dissuaded from my predictions of collapse,"dieoff" in the language we've been using in this post.

This has turned out to be quite a short post, mainly because I have split it in two and saved the slightly longer second half for next time. So, there is room here for a couple of graphics about carrying capacity and ecological footprint.

Figure 5, Biocapacity and Ecological Footprint

This an interesting and possibly misleading graph, which compares the carrying capacity (biocapacity) of various countries with their consumption, on a per capita basis. The units on the vertical axis are "global hectares per capita, Gha".The Wikipedia article on GHA is a short and informative read. Here is one central paragraph:

"Global hectares per person" refers to the amount of production and waste assimilation per person on the planet. In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time. Due to rapid population growth, these reserves are being depleted at an ever increasing tempo. See Earth Overshoot Day

To understand what I mean by misleading, take a look at Canada, the country where I live. The graph might make it seem that we are doing fine, since we have a large biocapacity compared to our population. but our per capita consumption (ecological footprint) at 7 Gha is among the highest in the world.

Figure 6, Footprint in terms of "Planets"

Another way of looking at footprint is to calculate how many planets like Earth it would take if everyone on Earth today lived like they do in a certain country. As is so often the case, Canada is left out of Figure 6, but a little calculation using the numbers in Figure 5, leads me to believe that if everyone lived like we do in Canada, we'd need around 4.4Earths. I find that quite a sobering idea.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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