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Eco Doom

 
 
Quantum
12:48 / 29.10.08
In the BBC today Earth on course for eco 'crunch', guess what- we consume too much. The Living Planet Report topically frames it relating to the credit crunch - the more than $2 trillion (£1.2 trillion) lost on stocks and shares is dwarfed by the up to $4.5 trillion worth of resources destroyed forever each year.

"If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles," said WWF International director-general James Leape

I remember discussing these figures five years ago, nobody seems to take them seriously. Take a look at this biodiversity index-



Notice that the timeframe is from 1970, and we've seen a 30% drop with about 15% in the last five years. So if we continue like this all the mammals will be dead in 40 years.

Well, except us, livestock and pets.
 
 
grant
16:13 / 29.10.08
The mammal index. Lovely term.


There are probably more telling indexes among living things - population of photosynthesizing plankton? - but there is a certain poetry to that one.
 
 
Quantum
17:01 / 29.10.08
I almost posted the bird index from the same article, but they changed it and now I can't find the gif- not even the wayback machine could help me.
 
 
Nocturne
21:39 / 24.02.09
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization had some interesting things to say. Mostly that we should all decrease the amount of meat that we're eating - it's unsustainable. The Guardian covered it more recently, but apparently the origional study was released a few years ago. The UN Environment Programme has recently released a study which claims that up to 25% of the world's food production could be lost to environmental degredation by 2050. We're supposed to reach baby nine billion by 2050. Scary.
 
 
JohnnyDark
21:51 / 25.02.09
I'm with Lovelock - he came out with some interesting stuff in an interview about a month ago but I can't find the URL.... We're fucked. He compared us (humans) to the 'arrival of the oxygenators' way back in the way back when. Massive upset to the ecosphere, eventual benevolent co-adoption into equilibrium. Its much too late to do anything about the damage we've done, even if we had the social & political structures to allow such enormous change. He predicted a human population of around a billion by the end of the century (I think?). After that we can begin to realistically consider our response.

I'm not trolling the lets-all-recycle types - its just the only sensible thing I've heard in this area for a long time and the timescale he talks on feels right.. Reducing emissions 80% by 2050? Yeah, right...
 
 
JohnnyDark
20:26 / 01.03.09
Having posted carelessly a thread or two up, I'll make some more effort. The interview with Lovelock was at New Scientist and entitled One last chance to save mankind, he actually compared us to the arrival of the photosynthesisers, and his estimate of the world population was indeed around a billion.
 
 
trouble at bill
09:35 / 03.03.09
Just to add a purely emotional point, having heard this interview alone in the middle of the night which is very different to reading on screen surrounded by other people, what frightened me most was how utterly blase he is about the forthcoming "cull".
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
07:37 / 05.03.09
See? We really are the Great Old Ones now...

This stuff used to make me angry. Then it made me sad. Now it scares the living crap out of me. It feels like it used to feel in the 80s with nuclear war - sleepwalking to the apocalypse.

And when last I posted that sentiment on my blog, a surprising number of people got up n my face about how it was all a fraud.

So what the hell do you do about that? There's no point yelling. You need an easy-to-grasp, easy-to-quote evidence kit, I suppose.
 
 
trouble at bill
12:02 / 06.03.09
If it helps I don't think it's quite so bad as the 80's threat. What will happen will happen more gradually, there will be time to respond and the wealthier countries will be better able to protect themselves than the poor ones. That means that the 'west' will be okay and the 'rest' will bear the brunt of it, just as is the case now. In sci-fi terms is not going to be The Road, it will be more like Code 46 or at worst Soylent Green. Or so go my speculations (for what they're worth!)

The blog response is interesting, a think tank recently reported that people's views on environmentalism are either a fatalistic 'we're all doomed' or a cynical 'it's all hippie lies' with the middle-ground generally excluded. This was explained as being due to the media taking extreme positions at either end of the spectrum.
 
 
Quantum
15:46 / 17.03.09
Also vested interests encouraging that feeling of impotence IMHO.

how utterly blase he is about the forthcoming "cull"

One of the growing cadre of neo-Malthusians who think a cull is inevitale or even desirable. I heard someone on radio 4 supporting this the other day saying there were "just too many people" which is of course patent nonsense.

sidebar-
"One notable critic of Malthusian theory, including its neo-Malthusian version, was Vladimir I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party and main architect of the 1917 Communist Revolution that resulted in the creation of the Soviet Union"
 
 
Tsuga
01:16 / 18.03.09
I heard someone on radio 4 supporting this the other day saying there were "just too many people" which is of course patent nonsense.
Is the nonsense in that they said it in support of thinning the herd, or because they said it without qualification, like on a rainy day saying "there are just too many raindrops", or because the technology exists to support the current population, or something else, like six billion plus people don't really matter in the grand scheme of things?
Unclear. Please elaborate.
 
 
Quantum
11:56 / 18.03.09
First it was nonsense because it assumes a fixed amount of resources and a fixed consumption (the Malthusian fallacy). Second, because it assumes there's an optimum number of people globally and we've exceeded it, and third because it assumes people are the problem and not the solution.

For example- the USA consumes roughly six times a sustainable amount of resources per capita. It's not because there's too many Americans that's a problem, it's because they're consuming too much.

If there's going to be a cull it would be best implemented by reducing the population of highest consumers, but that never seems to be on the cards- it's always about the developing countries booming populations and the threat they pose to the way of life in the west.

In fact a prime example is just upthread, if the world went vegetarian there would suddenly be loads of spare resources- a cow has to eat 7lbs of protein to produce 1lb of meat, 130 litres (29 gallons) of water is required to produce 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs of beef), cows produce up to 500 liters of methane a day each, there are around 1.5 billion cattle on our planet - more than double the number 30 years ago.
And that's just cows. Say everyone ate half as much meat as they do, that would free up one sixth of the global cereal production, loads of potable water, loads of land, reduce methane emissions etc. just by eating less meat.
In the past fifty years, global meat consumption has increased fivefold and is still on the rise. A third of the land surface of the entire planet is already used to raise animals, which is about seventy percent of all agricultural land. Over a third of all cereal production is needed to feed those animals.

I could go on, there are dozens of easy fixes attained by changing our behaviour- travel less, eat locally, conserve energy, switch production sources, support developing countries toward green energy, redirect a portion of nuclear defence budgets to international charity work, overtax dirty businesses, none of this is new and has been well known since at least the '80s.

The problem is not that there are too many people, it is that those people are behaving in a way that will kill us all. Even Pete Postlethwaite agrees.

Cow facts-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcGFjo62LdI
 
 
Quantum
12:36 / 18.03.09
Getting to the end of that youtube it goes very pro-vegan, but the facts stand. There's enough food for all, it just never makes it to the plate. Anyone noticed the rising price of bread?

The international market price of wheat doubled from February 2007 to February 2008 hitting a record high of over USD$10 a bushel.[80] Rice prices also reached ten year highs. In some nations, milk and meat prices more than doubled, while soy (which hit a 34 year high price in December 2007[81]) and maize prices have increased dramatically.
# 5 Unrest and government actions in individual countries and regions

* 5.1 Bangladesh
* 5.2 Brazil
* 5.3 Burkina Faso
* 5.4 Cameroon
* 5.5 Côte d'Ivoire
* 5.6 Egypt
* 5.7 Ethiopia
* 5.8 Haiti
* 5.9 India
* 5.10 Indonesia
* 5.11 Latin America
* 5.12 Mexico
* 5.13 Mozambique
* 5.14 Pakistan
* 5.15 Myanmar
* 5.16 Panama
* 5.17 Philippines
* 5.18 Russia
* 5.19 Senegal
* 5.20 Somalia
* 5.21 Tajikistan
* 5.22 Yemen
 
 
elene
19:58 / 18.03.09
Hi Quantum,

I think you're being a little optimistic in your calculations. There's currently somewhat more than half an acre of arable land per person on this planet. I know from experience that I could live with very minimal comfort on that much land, presuming it was accompanied by comparable shares of wooded and stony land from which I might extract other resources I need. I do agree, therefore, that there's no reason we couldn't manage things much better at present, were it not for our greed and self-interest, of course.

When we look forward forty years though, to the time Lovelock anticipates, I think, things do not look as promising. The population is expected to have almost doubled by then, and our rapidly depleting hydrocarbon resources, on which the technologies that allow me to be optimistic about a half acre of land depend, may well be practically exhausted by that time, and will certainly have become prohibitively expensive for most purposes. It's not at all clear to me that ten billion can survive on this planet without much oil in anything but the most abject squalor. In that case they will die in their billions. You need only consider the origins of the Great Famine in Ireland to see how that must proceed.

There is hope. I’m not saying the world can’t support, say, ten billion people reasonably well. I am, however, quite sure we will need technological breakthroughs if that is to happen, presuming we even try. I do hope your optimism doesn’t depend on people’s greed and self-interest diminishing as the world’s population grows. The idea of everyone becoming vegan does seem to me to depend on just such a development.

On an unrelated matter, one shouldn't call it a cull, unless one really believes in Gaia as a person. What the Nazis did was a cull; what Lovelock insists will happen is environmental collapse, à la Easter Island, though, apparently, not so complete.
 
 
Quantum
20:44 / 18.03.09
Looking at it another way than acres per person, there's enough food-

"World cereal production in 2007 is forecast to increase 4.3 percent to a record 2 082 million tonnes, according to the April issue of FAO’s Crop Prospects and Food Situation report"

http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2007/1000533/index.html

...but it's being used to feed cattle, make biofuel etc.

If we just ate it, cereals alone would provide a third of a tonne a year each- that's a fair amount of bread. I'm not a vegan but I do think eating less meat would make a big difference.
I don't think I'm optimistic though, what I think will happen is that people will continue to eat more meat and exactly what is happening now will continue and get worse. Food and water riots, international incidents, probably some wars, that's what I'm expecting.
 
 
elene
18:59 / 19.03.09
Yes, that's the scale of production we need, and it would certainly be plenty if we didn't use it to make meat or oil. I agree, unfortunately, with your entire post.
 
  
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