By Gigi M. Campos
With all the talk on climate change and its far-reaching effects, environmentalists and others who speak of approaching environmental disasters are often portrayed as pansy-headed doom-and-gloomers who just don’t know how to relax and enjoy life. Yet do we really think we can live outside the laws of God and nature forever, because the technological advances we have witnessed in the last century make us think otherwise?
Without our realizing it, environmental problems can build slowly until these problems reach a tipping point, eventually causing serious harm to the inhabitants of a region - or worse, our entire planet.
There isn’t much we can do about climate change, but there is plenty we can do to change how we do things here on this earth to avoid the consequences of unsustainable activities. There are some very simple things we can do as individuals regarding the problems we face globally.
Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse. It is time for us to look deeper into the problem and see what steps we need to take to avoid environmental disaster, the collapse of our economy and, ultimately, the collapse of our civilization. In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the earth’s resources. A century ago, annual growth in the world economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions.
As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing, and soils are eroding. We are using up oil at a pace that leaves little time to plan beyond a peak in global oil production. And we are discharging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb them, setting the stage for a rise in the earth’s temperature well above any since agriculture began.
Can we avoid environmental disaster? Our twenty-first century civilization is not the first to move onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable. If we look back in history, many earlier civilizations also found themselves in environmental trouble. Some were able to change course and avoid economic decline. Others were not. We study the archaeological sites of the Mayans, Easter Islanders, and other early civilizations that were not able to make the needed adjustments in time.
Fortunately, there is a consensus emerging among scientists on the broad outlines of the changes needed. If economic progress is to be sustained, we need to replace the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, the new economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels.
Instead of being centered around automobiles, future transportation systems will be far more diverse, widely employing light rail, buses, and bicycles as well as cars. The goal will be to maximize mobility, not automobile ownership.
The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive reuse/recycle economy. Consumer products from cars to computers will be designed so that they can be disassembled into their component parts and completely recycled. Throwaway products such as single-use beverage containers will be phased out.
The good news is that we can already see glimpses here and there of what this new economy looks like. We have the technologies to build it - including, for example, gas-electric hybrid cars, advanced-design wind turbines, highly efficient refrigerators, and water-efficient irrigation systems.
We can see how to build the new economy brick by brick. With each wind farm, rooftop solar panel, paper recycling facility, bicycle path, and reforestation program, we move closer to an economy that can sustain economic progress.
If, instead, we continue on the current economic path, the question is not whether environmental deterioration will lead to economic decline, but when. No economy, however technologically advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental support systems.
We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will come more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.
Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.
We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archaeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.
Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 fixation everywhere. They are today’s clear signs of an impending environmental disaster.
The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. There is an approaching “perfect storm” of global problems that we will be facing over the next couple of decades, including a peak in global oil production (“peak oil”), continued population growth, declining per capita food production, climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable levels of debt of major economies and international political instability. It is clear we can no longer continue to remain uninvolved. We need to understand what we face and be part of the effort to get going on real concrete solutions before nature takes care of the problems for us in the most disastrous manner.*
