The World Is Dying and We’re Doing This

Amid the growing certainty and omnipresent evidence that our species will soon drive itself extinct along with many other species, it is harder each day to justify living in a way that enables it. This is especially true in a society with its physical and social infrastructure that demands doing so in exchange for the surviving and thriving of ourselves and the people we care about.

Collection, processing, distribution, and use of resources throughout a population to sustain and grow it is arguably the primary purpose of life for its members. As a consequence, some of those resources become waste, which is not directly usable or reusable for that purpose by the society or others outside of it. 

Part of the waste can be further processed, by generating more waste, to create and distribute artificial environments, or parts thereof, that enhance personal experience of life. An increasing focus on this secondary purpose eventually inhibits achieving the primary purpose; and, if continued, results in death leading to extinction as the waste overcomes other species whose existence depends on the same resources and contributes to those resources.

Members of a society who want to reduce the risk of extinction can do so by attempting to decrease the amount of waste that is created. This can involve limiting the use of tools like money that enable that creation. Direct destruction of resources such as habitat for members of other species and killing more of those members than what can be reproduced, also increases the risk of extinction, and can be avoided in order to reduce the risk.

A healthy ecosystem is a community of life whose members collect, process, and distribute resources in such a way that they can be reused without decreasing their quality and quantity over a long period of time, thus extending the lifetime of the ecosystem and the number of its members. A dying ecosystem is the opposite, which is what we have now on a global scale.

If we choose to create more waste, then we are demonstrating that we do not value the health, and therefore longevity, of life in our ecosystem. Since humanity has global impact, our ecosystem is the world ecosystem. If we promote the growth of life such that it can achieve a level that can be maintained with available resources and/or other resources that can be acquired without destroying life, then we are demonstrating that we value health, life, and longevity.

The world as an ecosystem is currently dying. What we’re doing, and what we will do with that knowledge, is up to us.

Power and Responsibility

As of this writing, the U.S. Government is dangerously close to defaulting on its debt, which would likely be devastating to a lot of people. The compromises I've heard about are less harmful, but harmful nonetheless. In my opinion, this entire brutal exercise is proof that our political system, like our economic system, has lost a fundamental level of reliability in performing its core mission. This is not because the concept of government is fundamentally flawed, as the political Right would have us believe. It is, like many of the world's problems, because the acceptance of responsibility has not scaled up with the exercise of power.

By “responsibility” I mean an obligation to maintain the life-giving functionality of the systems our actions affect, and accept personal blame or credit for the consequences of our actions on the people and other creatures within those systems. This is as true for organizations as it is for individuals, whether those organizations are businesses or governments. As individuals who are parts of organizations, the increased amount of power that comes from working with others becomes part of our personal power, and our responsibility extends to its use.

In the rest of Nature, responsibility is part of biology: creatures get what they need from an ecosystem in return for innate behavior (filling a niche) that keeps the ecosystem functioning. If they don't fill a niche, they can't survive and procreate. We humans are capable of a wider range of behavior, and therefore a greater amount of control over ecosystems, which we have typically used by reducing their complexity. Effectively, we have simultaneously increased our impact on other species and attempted to avoid our responsibility for that impact. As a consequence, we have progressively degraded the health of the world's ecosystems so that we are now threatening the health of the entire planet, which, if we continue, could ultimately result in our own demise.

The core mission of a government is to provide the basic needs for a functioning society, such as resources, security, and both physical and social infrastructure. Businesses, on the other hand, have a core mission to maximize the economic power of their owners by efficiently providing products or services to the rest of the economies of the societies in which they operate – the equivalent of an ecological niche. Each type of organization serves its own constituents, and has traditionally limited its accepted responsibility to those constituents regardless of their potential for harming others.

In healthy societies, like healthy ecosystems, survival takes priority; and government's mission – where it has the power and accepts responsibility for executing it – supersedes that of business wherever they are in conflict (in an artificial ecosystem like an economy, government enforces the equivalent of natural laws, which, unlike Nature, it gets to change). In unhealthy societies, on the other hand, the wants of the few supersede the needs of the society, making it – like an ecosystem with little diversity – vulnerable to collapse.

In an ideal world built from scratch, we would all accept responsibility as I've defined it. We would learn as much as possible about the way the world works so we could assess the impacts of our actions. To the extent that we couldn't do so, we would create and support organizations that could make up the difference and inform us in terms we could use, while also accepting responsibility for their impacts. Such a world is the only kind I can imagine where total freedom of the sort preferred by ultra-conservatives could survive. In the absence of universal acceptance of responsibility, we are bound to be stuck with something else, which is either healthy or unhealthy; and based on what I've been seeing in the news, it looks like we're settling for the latter.

Limits to Capacity

BACKGROUND: My population-consumption model shows that the world's human population has, on average, been consuming resources as though they were non-renewable for more than 2,000 years. To survive indefinitely (barring any major changes in conditions, including moving to other planets), we would need to meet existing consumption using resources that could be replenished at the rate we are consuming them. I have recommended building capacity – the mass of renewable and reusable resources – as fast as possible to equal the amount of mass we consume annually. The effect of this solution is to eliminate our consumption of non-renewable resources, which is currently reducing our population growth and may lead to a sudden drop in population when growth stops (consumption and population will reach a peak).

I have assumed that we will somehow be able to exactly match our consumption with capacity that the biosphere can't provide, likely with efficiency technology. For example, we could create structures that can last as long as we need, which are effectively one-time uses of our remaining non-renewable resources. What if this assumption is wrong?

The model shows that if, beginning at the end of 2012, we held consumption constant, relied on available biocapacity, and reused an amount of resources equal to 90% of the remaining consumption, we would need to reach the maximum capacity within two years, and our non-renewable resources would last until 2377. Raising reuse from 90% to 99% would give us 65 years to reach maximum capacity and extend resources to 2864. At the low end, if capacity was limited to available biocapacity and no reuse, and reached in no more than three years, resources would last until only 2050, which is 29 years longer than if we had no capacity at all.

A sustainable alternative is to provide all of the 2012 consumption with biocapacity, which would need to be increased by at least 81%. In a crude sense, this may correspond to additional habitat, perhaps as land area that is available for other species to use. If we occupy that land for purely human use, we might have to abandon it. Because we would replacing non-renewable resources with renewable resources, what we consume it for would change. Because we could no longer extract and use the metal, oil, coal, minerals, and other resources that comprise our artificial existence, nearly every aspect of what we think of as “modern civilization” would be replaced by natural and very likely labor-intensive alternatives.

If we can't increase biocapacity or find an alternative to it (which seems unlikely given the time we have left), and don't want to lose population, we should reexamine the idea of reducing consumption. Cultural measures, such as government controls, might conceivably be used to keep people from killing each other while a rapid conversion is made to all-natural economy that uses no more than the biocapacity we have (and preferably less). If one hectare of global ecological footprint corresponds to 1,000 pounds of mass consumed, then a minimum of 1.5 hectares per person needed to maintain a society would, beginning with a 47% drop in consumption in 2012, allow us until 2133 to fully convert our economy.

In what appears to be a recurring theme in these discussions, humanity is faced with a tradeoff between lifestyle and species longevity. If no “magic bullet” technology can be found to meet our desires with replenishing resources, we must use only what a healthy biosphere can spare, and change our desires accordingly.

Fatal Flaw

The artificial ecosystems we call economies developed so we could gain more personal power, without having to give anything back to the rest of the natural world (and, to a growing extent, each other). Knowledge translated into tools (technology) that could enhance this power through access and processing of “raw materials” – the lives and life-blood of the biosphere – to create environments under our direct control. Social manipulation, enhanced by communications technologies, allowed people's behavior to be coordinated so these environments could continue to be built, improved, and function with minimal disruption in the service of their main goal.

Natural ecosystems were obvious templates for the artificial ones, except they had the unfortunate characteristic of diffusing the power of individuals rather than concentrating it. This characteristic was understandably left out of our creations. Several early attempts failed dramatically, and others much less so, merely harming large parts of their populations without totally self-destructing.

Associating the failures with the lack of power diffusion, some people tried to force that diffusion in alternate types of economies, but without realizing that it was a consequence rather than a cause, a consequence of a deeper aspect of ecosystems they failed to reproduce. And their economies also failed.

Eventually, technologies grew so powerful that the world was able to unite under a dominant economic model, a model that sadly still had the fatal flaw, but with a workaround that kept it from totally failing. Then the workaround began to lose its effectiveness, and the global economy began to falter. The prospect of worldwide failure, accompanied by the collapse of the entire human population, became too obvious to ignore.

Tragically, the underlying cause was known decades before.

Natural ecosystems function by using available energy to drive the transformation of non-living materials into life and back again, recycling everything, and collecting and reusing as much of the energy as possible. Life is not only a consequence of this transformation, it manages it. To do so, it must adapt to the variety of materials and energy sources available. Different forms of life (species) operate with different sets of inputs, and produce a different sets of outputs. Many interact with each other, using what the other has created as an input, and providing its output to another species. Every individual of every species has a role to play, and is rewarded with survival and the ability to reproduce for as long as it can do so. “Power” in Nature is a reward for keeping the transformation process going, not a goal in itself. If any population interferes too much with the process, by reducing the diversity of life or consuming more than it produces, it is generally punished severely, often by death; if it is the only population of a species, the species may go extinct.

Our artificial versions (economies) treat groups of people with specific skills as the equivalent of “species” and process energy, materials, and other species into people, objects, chemical compounds we can't use or that makes us sick (waste), and useless energy (entropy). These then become “outputs” that are returned to natural ecosystems, typically without regard for whether they can be processed by other species and eventually become “inputs” to our economies in useful forms.

Those economies that collapsed did so because they were unable to consistently acquire usable inputs from natural ecosystems, get rid of their waste (so its toxicity overwhelmed people), or both. Those that diffused power arbitrarily, without demanding that individuals perform their roles adequately, failed because they couldn't effectively do even the processing they were attempting.

Today's dominant economies survived this long because they could change where they got their inputs and where they sent their outputs. If one ecosystem became unusable, they could effectively move to another one. They did this, and became adept at changing their internal processing to handle a larger variety of inputs. They even learned to use several ecosystems simultaneously. This workaround was not without negative consequences: often there were people and economies dependent on those ecosystems, and they either resisted (sometimes violently, and generally unsuccessfully) or were assimilated into the dominant economy. Dealing with these consequences became a standard part of the workaround, often co-opting social institutions such as governments to do the dirty work (such as military domination).

The success of the dominant economies led to globalization, which ironically has made the workaround both harder to use and less effective. People have more political options for fighting the co-opting of their ecosystems. Economies are so dependent on each other now that what affect one, affects the others. Technology has become powerful enough for economies to affect the entire biosphere – all ecosystems simultaneously – and there's also nowhere else to go, though a few enterprising souls have their eyes on extraterrestrial sources.

The most popular approach is to fix our economic model. This can involve creating fewer outputs, and incorporating into our internal processing a way to make the outputs we do create more acceptable (or at least less toxic) to the biosphere. More efficient processing can be used to reduce the amount of inputs we use. And we're still working on changing the types of inputs we can use, such as directly processing solar energy (instead of relying on plants and increasingly scarce embodied energy from millions of years ago).

Another approach, gaining interest but far from popular, is to reconnect our civilization to the rest of Nature by finding ways to become useful partners in the ecological process again. Among the options being considered is decentralizing our population into communities that rely on, and interact in healthy ways with, local ecosystems, including revitalizing them through restoration of habitat and detoxifying our existing waste. Many of the same people who diagnosed the problem with our dominant economies argue that the critical resources (among them easily used energy, rare metals, and fresh water) that they use as inputs cannot be replaced fast enough (if ever) to avoid their demise; we can only transition to smaller, resilient communities as soon as possible to avoid catastrophic population loss. To work in the long term, this approach would require a drastic reset of our personal aspirations, from increasing power to valuable service, which may be the hardest change of all.