Cav's Place

The results of another study, which apparently took two years to complete and is supposed to feed into the preparations for the Rio+20 summit in June, have been published. It shows that biodiversity loss is off the scale, the nitrogen cycle is completely out of control, climate change has already exceeded the safe margins, the phosphorus cycle is almost at the upper limit of those same margins and ocean acidification quickly approaches unsafe levels as well. As far as solutions go, it suggests giving all women access to family planning, reducing food waste and no longer using GDP as virtually the sole indicator of an economy’s health, concluding that the main causes for these problems are overconsumption and overpopulation.
No shit?! Was it necessary to waste all this time and all these resources on coming up with some conclusions and recommendations that anyone willing to have a look around and think for a moment already knows instead of actually doing something about the problems themselves? After all, it’s not like those in power are likely to do anything more than glance over it and use it in their continuous struggle to gain even more influence and control, hanging on to the points that support their existing views and completely ignoring the rest.

Then again, there’s not much else to do with suggestions like these, seeing as we’re talking about the same old list of politically correct, necessary but far from sufficient measures. Yes, offering access to and promoting family planning will gradually reduce the number of births and possibly end population growth by the end of the century, but by then we’re likely to have at least some 50% more people living on this already severely overpopulated planet, so relying solely on voluntary measures is far too little, far too late, coercive and even utterly draconian ones being absolutely necessary if we are to still have a chance to solve this problem before Nature will solve it for us in ways that will be extremely unpleasant for nearly all living things that call this pale blue dot their home.
And that’s not even the sole problem, as we have another very common but also potentially inefficient suggestion here as well. Now of course we should reduce waste of any and all kinds, not just the food waste that the study seems to focus on, that makes perfect sense and is simply a matter of efficiency, and of course we should also try to develop methods of obtaining the necessary resources without causing unsustainable harm to the environment, but saying that methods must be found to greatly reduce the per capita consumption in rich countries without this necessarily having any negative impact on living standards implies wasting even more time, resources and ingenuity on mitigating the effects of a problem that we ourselves create at the expense of further development and at the expense of our continued evolution, if you will. It implies struggling to stay where we currently are while turning a blind eye on the real problem instead of solving it and advancing further.

Yes, as I said, we have a waste problem, a huge one, and that needs to be solved both because it harms the environment and because it’s simply a matter of efficiency. And yes, we also have a problem with the specific resources we choose to use, seeing as anything that’s not renewable will get depleted sooner or later and anything that requires causing long-term harm to the environment in order to obtain can certainly be said to in fact waste other potential resources. However, both the total consumption and the total amount of damage being done are directly related to population and solving just these problems would be far from sufficient at this time, especially since we don’t only need to stop causing harm but also to fix the damage already caused and realize that, being the most highly evolved species on this planet, we have a duty and a responsibility to protect and nurture the others we share it with.
In addition, it’s completely wrong to say that we have a population problem in poor countries and a consumption problem in the rich ones, as this study also appears to claim. In this age of globalization, the problem is the total environmental footprint, and if you want to take things separately then the only thing you can say is that the rich countries carry a large share of the blame for that and the poor ones a much smaller, albeit currently also increasing, one. This means that, while even some poor countries and communities may already have an unsustainable impact, at least in some ways, at this point we could simplify matters and say that we can keep things in check in those parts of the world by conditioning any improvement in the standard of living of those who live there on a proportional population reduction, putting the pressure on them to solve their population problem as quickly as possible if they want better lives for themselves. However, there can be no such balance for rich or even developing countries and communities, as those already live well beyond their means, so it’s actually in these areas that the population must drop the fastest.

What this all means is that the solution remains very simple: If we are to have any chance of solving any other major problem, we must first drastically reduce the population, and at this point it’ll probably be a much better idea to focus on the rich and developing countries and regions, because that’s the only efficient way to actually reduce the existing overall impact. I don’t even know whether we still have enough time to do enough strictly by drastically lowering the number of births, but I sure wish to get to work on that immediately and reduce the risk of needing to kill or unnecessarily allow people to die, because this is the other option and the one that will be chosen for us if we keep on waiting and shying away from the measures that need to be taken simply because they’d be too unpopular or would go against this or that outdated tradition or dogma.
It’s really as simple as that: The longer we wait, the worse it will be, and we’re long past the time when anything but very drastic measures could possibly be sufficient. As such, we either bite the bullet and start doing what needs to be done right away in order to perhaps still be able to choose how the situation will unfold, at least to some extent, or we’ll find that these choices will be made for us… And unfortunately most of the other species we share this planet with will pay the price for our failure to act even before we will.