I
recently wrapped up nearly six weeks of work developing the latest
version of my Population-consumption model. The main goal of the
model has always been to provide guidance in how to make our
collective future better by providing understanding of how that
future is determined. My next step, which I'm starting now, is to
share both the understanding and guidance, while continuing to test
and and flesh out more useful insights. The details of the new
version are spelled out on my Bigpicexplorer
Web site, which includes a non-technical
overview of how it was developed and what I believe its main
lessons are.
In
short, I came up with a way of thinking about happiness, population
size, consumption, and life expectancy that ties them all together
and enables what I think are more reliable projections of each into
the future. Those projections show that without access to a
radically large set of resources to replace the ecological base we've
already nearly depleted, our population is likely to peak in size
within a decade, and drop to zero by early in the next century. They
also show that there may be an ultimate limit to how happy we can be,
as well as how long we can live, and if we further attempt to reach
those limits we will complete the job of making our planet
uninhabitable.
One
intriguing suggestion from the model is that the huge uptick in
economic and environmental problems we've been experiencing since
2008 may be symptoms of ecological collapse that has been in
progress for thousands of years. Essentially, it's now directly
impacting the environments we've built for ourselves, and any
attempts we make to get more resources will only make things worse,
because they're no longer "out there"; they're here. That
intuitively makes sense, given all I've read, but now it can be seen
in the numbers coming from simple analysis of some of the most basic,
publicly available data. We've gambled everything on growth; and the
more we try to grow, the harder it gets, and the more damage we do to
ourselves.
Yet
grow we must, because we are hard-wired to seek out total life
satisfaction. As long as we perceive that there are more ways to
find it, a larger set of environments we can inhabit in our pursuit
of it, then we will do whatever it takes to get it, including growing
our population so our descendants can help and have it too. Those
who are happier with more of other species around will try to help
those species survive and thrive. Others who prefer to be around
people like them will have no problem crowding out everything and
everyone else. What and who we grow depends on our particular wants
and needs; but grow we will, until we are satiated or we simply can't
grow any more.
My
model confirmed that we are in an existential crisis, and the most realistic solution I could find – so far – was one I already knew, that we
need to use less resources, and soon. The model puts a finer point
on that last part: it's sooner than I thought, if not already too
late. Instead of 2030, as the last version indicated, we're already
on the peak; and it's just a technicality whether our population will
reach its maximum size next year or in 2022. A healthy level of
ecological consumption (because that seems to be the kind of resource
we're most tuned to) is no more than about half what an average
person is using now, yet to reach it we would probably decrease life
expectancy by 26 years, which is a considerable sacrifice in a world
that still looks healthy enough.
I'll
finish with a caveat that deserves repeating everywhere this is
discussed. The model, like most of the ideas I write about,
represents my personal understanding of how the world works. It is a
set of hypotheses, with some observations and testing to back it up,
which I try to share where appropriate. I share it because others
might benefit from it, just as I benefit from what others share, and
because I believe that only by helping each other can we offset our
own shortcomings and amplify each other's strengths. That's what
gives me hope as I take in this new view from the peak.
