While the term “sustainability” and the values it implies have gone mainstream, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide yet continue to rise, as do per-capita consumptions rates in developed and developing counties. “Consumer cultures” in places like the U.S. apparently die hard. Meanwhile, a warming planet dissolves ecosystems and life-sustaining natural cycles and resources like sugar cubes in a pressurized teapot.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and colleagues both at the University and representing the Nature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington, imparted wise words and inconvenient truths alike on the state of our planet in a recent Nature article published in a June 2012 issue dedicated to the Rio Earth summit and “second chances” for Earth. Citing the words of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the article started out thus: “… We believed in consumption with consequences. Those days are gone… Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”
Agricultural soils are being destroyed in a tenth of the time that it took to form them. Water in aquifers is being pumped out much faster that it is being recharged. The animals, plants and other organisms that run our life support systems for us are being destroyed at unprecedented rates, in what is essentially the sixth large extinction in 65 million years.
I interviewed Dr. Ehrlich for this article on the paradox of sustainability.
“You can’t negotiate with the environment,” Ehrlich said. “A standard footprint analysis shows that if you want to be sustainable with the kind of civilization we have now – that is with seven billion people, about a billion of them hungry and about another two billion living more or less in misery – you have to have one and a half Earths.”
According to Ehrlich, humans are not living on the interest from Earth’s natural capital, but rather on the capital itself. We can’t change the physics of climate and the laws of nature, he points out, but we can change our social and economic systems.
“Climate change may very well not be the worst of the problems we are facing,” Ehrlich said. “There is no significant dispute in the scientific community that the climate is changing, that humanity is playing a very large role in that change, and that it threatens to destroy our civilization. But on the other hand, the toxic chemicals that we are distributing from pole to pole may turn out to be a worse problem, as could be the epidemiological environment, which grows worse and worse as our population grows and we get more and more immune compromised. And the resource wars that we are already involved in could easily escalate.”
Ehrlich and his colleagues at Stanford University and beyond have offered up their own vision of a sustainable future and how to get there. They propose an interwoven web of goals including population rescaling, social equity across gender, and buffering against global shock waves through resilience and natural capital planning. According to Ehrlich, the currently limited reach of sustainability is just as much a problem of governance as it is a problem of environmental and technological constraints.
“The destruction of agricultural, water, and ecosystem resources – these things are well known in the scientific community,” Ehrlich said. “But if you followed the debates among the seven dwarfs running for the Republican nomination for President, no single serious problem here was even mentioned in those debates. That is why we need dramatic social change. The scientific community knows what sorts of things we ought to be doing to solve these problems, but we aren’t doing any of them.”
While the term “sustainability” and the values it implies have gone mainstream, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide yet continue to rise, as do per-capita consumptions rates in developed and developing counties. “Consumer cultures” in places like the U.S. apparently die hard. Meanwhile, a warming planet dissolves ecosystems and life-sustaining natural cycles and resources like sugar cubes in a pressurized teapot.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University and colleagues both at the University and representing the Nature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington, imparted wise words and inconvenient truths alike on the state of our planet in a recent Nature article published in a June 2012 issue dedicated to the Rio Earth summit and “second chances” for Earth. Citing the words of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, the article started out thus: “… We believed in consumption with consequences. Those days are gone… Over time, that model is a recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”
Agricultural soils are being destroyed in a tenth of the time that it took to form them. Water in aquifers is being pumped out much faster that it is being recharged. The animals, plants and other organisms that run our life support systems for us are being destroyed at unprecedented rates, in what is essentially the sixth large extinction in 65 million years.
I interviewed Dr. Ehrlich for this article on the paradox of sustainability.
“You can’t negotiate with the environment,” Ehrlich said. “A standard footprint analysis shows that if you want to be sustainable with the kind of civilization we have now – that is with seven billion people, about a billion of them hungry and about another two billion living more or less in misery – you have to have one and a half Earths.”
According to Ehrlich, humans are not living on the interest from Earth’s natural capital, but rather on the capital itself. We can’t change the physics of climate and the laws of nature, he points out, but we can change our social and economic systems.
“Climate change may very well not be the worst of the problems we are facing,” Ehrlich said. “There is no significant dispute in the scientific community that the climate is changing, that humanity is playing a very large role in that change, and that it threatens to destroy our civilization. But on the other hand, the toxic chemicals that we are distributing from pole to pole may turn out to be a worse problem, as could be the epidemiological environment, which grows worse and worse as our population grows and we get more and more immune compromised. And the resource wars that we are already involved in could easily escalate.”
Ehrlich and his colleagues at Stanford University and beyond have offered up their own vision of a sustainable future and how to get there. They propose an interwoven web of goals including population rescaling, social equity across gender, and buffering against global shock waves through resilience and natural capital planning. According to Ehrlich, the currently limited reach of sustainability is just as much a problem of governance as it is a problem of environmental and technological constraints.
“The destruction of agricultural, water, and ecosystem resources – these things are well known in the scientific community,” Ehrlich said. “But if you followed the debates among the seven dwarfs running for the Republican nomination for President, no single serious problem here was even mentioned in those debates. That is why we need dramatic social change. The scientific community knows what sorts of things we ought to be doing to solve these problems, but we aren’t doing any of them.”
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