This short web page, Hooked on a System That No Longer Serves, saved me from writing a post I’d been considering. Please read it and watch this related video from the same source:
Dave Gardner produced this public service announcement last week to submit to ABC News for the upcoming special, Earth 2100. The spokeswoman is Citizen-Powered Media board member Stephanie Gardner. I can’t wait for Dave wrap up his documentary Hooked on Growth, and you can help him complete it.
More to come on this film and Dave’s approach.
[update: Dave says one of the most important things to do now is get the word out about his project so when the film is released there is as big an audience as possible eagerly waiting. Note too he's been invesrting his time, energy, and I suspect not a little of his own money in this for four years, in between doing his day job (also film related) and being a normal human being like the rest of us. The parts of the project I've been exposed to so far are fascinating, insightful, and more critical to the current world situation that ever before. If enough of us help, maybe Hooked on Growth can compete with An Inconvenient Truth for the most influential documentary award if anybody is offering one of those. Then I can stop writing this blog and relax. ]
Add Verdurous to your feed reader. The “green ramblings of a thirty-something Australian” are just as good as ever and well worth your time. Among his recent posts are this video about clean coal technology — short and very engaging — and this smart, witty piece about economic growth.
economist Hernando de Soto (who Time magazine called one of the 100 most influential people in the world), “a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of property rights. He is the president of Peru’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), located in Lima.”[Wikipedia entry]
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank who has said, “If our patterns of living, our patterns of consumption are imitated, as others are striving to do, the world probably is not viable.” [his website, Wikipedia entry]
and moderator David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center — City University of New York
It’s sheer pleasure to listen to an in depth discussion among four intelligent, well-qualified people about a complex and important topic, and Verdurous provided the path to that nourishment for the mind.
The 60th anniversary, still a lot to be done. But it is a start.
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories.”
Watch and listen to The Price of Silence, a “music video that brings together 16 of the worlds top musicians—some of whom have fled oppressive regimes—in a rousing musical plea to guarantee human rights for all. ” [h/t change.org]
Even though not formally legally binding, the Declaration has been adopted in or influenced most national constitutions since 1948. It also serves as the foundation for a growing number of international treaties and national laws and international, regional, national and sub-national institutions protecting and promoting human rights. [source]
Full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights follows. Have you ever read it?
John Feeney formerly of the Growth is Madness! blog has done something special in organizing the Global Population Speak Out which will take place during February 2009. Read the letter and note the stellar group who have signed on. It’s a brilliant idea and I will being doing my part to support it in my local community. Maybe you can too.
As noted by the Global Sensemaking community there is no one isolated issue facing us with the status of “most important” but rather an interlocking set of global wicked problems. We hear about climate change and issues around oil and energy in the mainstream media, but rarely about population pressure and not much regarding
poverty
water and food supply sustainability
the destructive aspects economic growth
declining biodiversity
equal access to basic education and medical care for all
equal rights for women world wide
the production of and market for weapons
My sense is we need a label for this, a word that conveys that the number one problem we face as a global community is really this entanglement of several imporant issues all of which need attention but each of which can only be addressed effectively by understanding the interwoven nature of the collection. “Global wicked problems” has been suggested and I’ll use it until a more compelling one comes to mind.
So if population is but one of a rats nest of difficult problems, why am I going to the trouble of organizing a local event in support of the Global Population Speak Out? Because it is one of the wicked problems and John is exactly right when he says
…there exists today a taboo of sorts against public discussion of the population issue.
Several of us have written about that taboo and I want to use the GPSO in February to address it explicitly by acknowledging the rational (and irrational) concerns that give the taboo life and show that in spite of these fears we need to open up the discussion of wicked problems to include population pressure. By their nature, wicked problems must be solved as a system. Leaving out population issues will ensure we don’t solve any of them.
More to come as I get my material pulled together. Meanwhile check out the wealth of resources John has pulled together. The venue I have in mind is in Bethesda, MD, so if you are interested and in the Washington DC area please get in touch.
For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.
So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.
If we can be so wrong about those things, perhaps it’s possible we are wrong about how we Americans will respond to population pressure, CO2 emissions, land degradation, and water shortages in our own country and poverty worldwide.
Another long, fine article by Pollan in the NYT Magazine:
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.
In 1940 0.43 calories of fossil fuel were used to produce one calorie of food. Today it is 10 to 1; that’s 23 times more fossel fuel to create the same amount of food.
Read the whole article. It’s rich in detail and shows the connection between our food and health systems.
In a short and to the point essay, NYT columnist Bob Hebert says what I’ve been thinking for a long time. Since 1980 the USA has been leaning to the right for so long we have now fallen over.
Update: His conservative colleague David Brooks chimes in:
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.
The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone. …
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment. …
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.
This graph of world population growth probably doesn’t provide the scare factor it once did. We see it too often nowadays. Still, the population trend of the last 200 years can’t be ignored when thinking about the sort of world the next generation will inherit, the world as it will be in just 42 years.
The 9.2 billion projection for 2050 is the “medium variant” from the UN WPP2006 report (see “notes” below for links). The 7.8 number is “low variant” which assumes a fertility rate of 0.5 children/woman less than the medium scenario.
The editorial that prompted the previous post offers this way to think of the population growth the world is experiencing:
The annual increase in population of about 79 million means that every week an extra 1.5 million people need food and somewhere to live. This amounts to a huge new city each week, somewhere, which destroys wildlife habitats and augments world fossil fuel consumption.
This incredible growth also means we can not begin to solve the problem of extreme poverty let alone those built on its back — terrorism and environmental degradation — without getting a handle on population growth.
The current world population of 6.7 billion is double that of 40 years ago. We are now poised to add 2.5 billion more to that number in the next 40 years — even though about half of the people alive today live in what an American (or European or Japanese) can only think of as abject poverty, that is, living on less than $2.50/day which produces some mix (and for some all) of the following conditions:
without adequate safe water for cooking, washing, and drinking
without adequate sanitation
without adequate nutrition
without adequate medical and educational resources
without adequate access to capital to improve their conditions
Here’s another way to look at world population growth:
The “medium variant” assumes fertility on average will continue to decline, mortality will on average improve, and we will gradually improve the treatment for HIV/AIDS, in short, current trends will continue. The “low variant” assumes on average a fertility rate of 0.5 less than the medium.
What if through enhancing education, contraceptive availability, and women’s rights we could achieve a peak global population of 7.8 billion in the next 40 to 50 years? Although still 1.1 billion more than today’s population, that’s 1.4 billion fewer people on the planet than the 9.2 the UN projects in that time frame if we go about business as usual. Think of the impact on global demand for water, food, living space, and energy. Think of the reduced production of CO2, the biodiversity that won’t be destroyed, the human conflicts over resources that could be avoided. Think of the increased quality of life the smaller population number (1.4 billion less) makes possible.
Should we now explain to … couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less child than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren? We must not put pressure on people, but by providing information on the population and the environment, and appropriate contraception for everyone (and by their own example), doctors should help to bring family size into the arena of environmental ethics….
Of course this sort of thinking only applies if we care about the kind of planet we choose to leave to future generations.
“The world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people.”
“The world’s entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas.”
It’s one thing to see statements like these in online forums and blog comments, quite another when they appear in the New York Times. The article, now a couple weeks old, is Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again? by science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. which not only was selected for the Week in Review section of the paper but also referred to approvingly by NYT columnist and science writer John Tierney:
Before any other readers post another comment about “overpopulation” and doomsday scenarios, I suggest they take a look at my colleague Donald McNeil’s excellent article on Malthusian mistakes.
I understand exaggeration and misdirection in political speech but not in science reporting, and especially not when it concerns important science topics. When I went to the trouble of cataloging odd and troubling responses to population pressure I was thinking more of pajama warriors rather than science writers in the mainstream press.
Here are McNeil’s words in context:
…over the last 200 years, with the Industrial Revolution, the Transportation Revolution, the Green Revolution and the Biotech Revolution, Malthus has been largely discredited. The wrenching dislocations of the last few months do not change that, most experts say. …
Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians,…
Theoretically, there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever, because 10 billion humans is roughly where the United Nations predicts that the world population will plateau in 2060. But success depends on portion control; in the late 1980s, Brown University’s World Hunger Program calculated that the world then could sustain 5.5 billion vegetarians, 3.7 billion South Americans or 2.8 billion North Americans, who ate more animal protein than South Americans.
Even if fertility rates rose again, many agronomists think the world could easily support 20 billion to 30 billion people.
Anyone who has ever flown across the United States can see how that’s possible: there’s a lot of empty land down there. The world’s entire population, with 1,000 square feet of living space each, could fit into Texas….
The parts in bold text are false and/or offered without any evidence which, given the nature of the article, is egregious.
Over here, George Mobus poses an excellent question about the philosophical aspects of sensemaking and its operational definition. (See below for where this all is coming from.) I think he provides an excellent informal definition with this:
Sensemaking … is about understanding reality sufficiently well that one feels comfortable making statements about the future. That is, not necessarily making predictions, but anticipating future possibilities based on understanding how the world works.
In that light consider this series of definitions:
to grossly understate the case, the upward trend in the last six years is worrying
I’ve overlayed the population curve on the graph to emphasize (as did the WSJ article) that rising prices are not solely the result of central bankers putting more money into the economy. Since minerals and other natural resources like good agricultural land are finite resources, population growth and rising per capita consumption must force prices up — unless counterbalanced by rising productivity.
A couple of weeks ago I made essentially the same case, suggesting that inflation has been tightly bound to the price of oil (a commodity) rather than the actions of central banks, and offered this chart:
And this one annotated with past oil crises and the coming of age of the Asian “miracle” economies:
The Bangkok round of climate talks begins on Monday so I took a look at how climate change was fairing in the mainstream media. Here are some of the AP and AFP articles in just the last five days:
Organizers of Earth Hour 2008 estimate that in excess of 30 million people worldwide will take action on Saturday to raise awareness of how small changes can make big differences when it comes to climate change.
I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think the there has been a clear trend of increasingly frequent reporting of environment news, particularly about climate change and its negative impact on people and the economy. Now if we can begin to respond to the message….
In the last few weeks there has been a noticeable change in tone. Wall Street, which for the last 8 months has been seized by the mortgage and liquidity crises, has finally noticed that $100 oil and the prospects of $4 gasoline might just become a real problem. A growing number of economists are becoming concerned that the Federal Reserve, which has been cutting rates in hopes of reinvigorating the economy, will be forced to stop because of more expensive energy. All the money from the “stimulus package” we will get this summer may end up going into gas pumps. In short, further increases in oil prices could trump anything in the government’s arsenal to aid the economy. [source]
Perhaps we give central bankers too much credit for both stimulating growth and controlling inflation. Look at the correlation of inflation rate and oil prices over the last 35 years.
I put this graph together after reading a news report that said the current inflation rate in the US was the highest in 17 years. The data I found (sources below) say that’s a true statement. The article, however, focused on what the US Federal Reserve and its chairman Ben Bernake were going to do about it, the assumption being that they should keep inflation low and avoid a recession.
]
This graph of world population growth probably doesn’t provide the scare factor it once did. We see it too often nowadays. Still, the population trend of the last 200 years can’t be ignored when thinking about the sort of world the next generation will inherit, the world as it will be in just 42 years.
