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April 4, 2005

Living Beyond Our Means

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Living Beyond Our Means (PDF): A Statement of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Board provides a pretty sobering look at our current situation. Here's a BBC report on it, if you don't want to download and/or read the whole thing.

The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations. The report says the way society obtains its resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading the natural processes that support life on Earth . . . The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years.

  • In some regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, humans use 120% of renewable [water] supplies (due to the reliance on groundwater that is not recharged).
  • Since about 1980, approximately . . . 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and a further 20% badly degraded or destroyed.
  • The use of phosphorus fertilizers and the rate of phosphorus accumulation in agricultural soils both increased nearly threefold between 1960 and 1990.
  • In some sea areas, the total weight of fish available to be captured is less than a hundredth of that caught before the onset of industrial fishing.
  • Some 12% of birds, 25% of mammals, and at least 32% of amphibians are threatened with extinction over the next century.
In this post over at Whiskey Bar, Billmon compares this report to some of the ideas hilighted in Jared Diamond's recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, such as this one:
In the class discussion after I had finished my presentation [on Easter Island] the apparently simple question that most puzzled my students was one whose actual complexity hadn't sunk into me before: How on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which it depended? One of the students asked what I thought the islander who cut down the last palm tree said as he was doing it. ... The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious . . . Polynesian Easter was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.
I'd recommend you read the report, Diamond's book, and everything else related and start to do something.

Posted by George at April 4, 2005 2:40 PM Category: Resource Depletion

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Comments

Thanks for the links, and the analogy - actually the extension of the example - is excellent. There is broad promotion of the idea that we live in a limitless environment. This is far from true. Not only is the environment limited, it is a closed system. What we generate here stays with us in one form or another for a very long time.

I have always been attracted to science fiction, and early in my life I accepted that we would spread out to the universe. As I have gotten older, I believe that is one of the worst things that could happen - at this point in time. Until we address the consequences of our path here on this planet, we would simply move the destructive process to the next planet, and the next, and the next.

Posted by: Rowan at April 5, 2005 7:56 PM

Oh, do I ever agree. The idea of us spreading our own form of xenophobia and colonialism throughout the universe is pretty damn frightenint.

Posted by: george at April 6, 2005 4:59 AM