Paul Ehrlich, “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment”

On living without regard to hard truths, matters of scale or limits to growth.

How freedom without responsibility destroys life as we know it.

How do rich and famous people, who live large and have huge ecological footprints, as well as corporate ‘citizens’ that cast giant shadows over the Earth today, so easily get away with socially irresponsible behavior which could soon precipitate an ecological catastrophe?

As everyone knows but few openly discuss, wealth and power buy freedom. What is all too obvious but often cloaked in silence is this: A small minority of individuals in the human family with great fortunes and virtually all large corporations exercise their great wealth and power in ways that allow all of these self-proclaimed masters of the universe to live lavishly as well as to willfully refuse assumption of the responsibilities which necessarily come with freedom.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

“He defined cultural evolution as everything we pass on in a non-genetic way.”

I guess that would include parasites.

From another comment in his Q&A: gas prices are actually too low. We need to deter rather than enable consumption.

This point was just also invoked in a great article in the NYT (via Jon Udell: http://jonudell.net/ ). On the failure to keep up CAFE standards and the lack of a spine to increase taxes (as has been done in Europe)…

American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot : http://tinyurl.com/57n9qs

excerpt:

Consumers overseas might not like higher taxes on gasoline, but they’ve adapted, says Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, the European energy giant. “A society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices,” he says. “It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

In Mr. van der Veer’s native Holland, for example, gasoline sells for more than $10 a gallon, with $5.57 of that going to taxes. Even in Britain, which has substantial North Sea production, gasoline sells for $8.71 a gallon.

A SUBSTANTIAL gas tax increase was considered during the administration of the first President Bush, recalls William K. Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency at the time. But it was whittled down in 1990 to just 5 cents after Mr. Gingrich and other conservatives in the Republican Party broke with the president.

“This was a stark lesson and people decided the gas tax was the third rail of public policy,” Mr. Reilly says.

Thanks for the mind expanding seminar!

In regards to Mr. Ehrlich’s concerns regarding the understanding and adjustment of human habits re: adopting sustainable practices here is a link to a recent article in the New York Times – the article discusses techniques used by marketting wizards to manipulate habits at a population level and how those techniques can be used to educate people as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13habit.html?em&ex=1216180800&en=893d6d16b2643e20&ei=5087

Letter to the Editor
Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper
July 29, 2008

What purpose do bigger families serve?

We in the town of Chapel Hill are implicated in a daunting global threat, a colossal problem that appears to involve every citizen on the planet. No one is to blame for this human-driven predicament; yet all of us could be enjoined by the requirements of practical reality to humanely and voluntarily take responsible, self-limiting action to meet the challenge, I suppose.

Please note that annual birthrates of newborns in the human community are rising precipitously in the United States as well as in many other countries worldwide. For example, more than 4.3 million newborns joined the American family in 2007. That is more births than occurred in 1957 at the height of the post-WWII baby boom. Would someone please point out what advantages the American family derives from such rapid growth in its population numbers?

The total number of human births last year exceeded the highest annual number of births ever achieved in the United States. How much longer can the United States sustain the momentum bound up in the skyrocketing growth of the human population? How long can the frangible ecosystems and finite resources of Earth be reasonably expected to sustain the human species, given the determination of people in most countries, not to regulate the growth of human numbers?

Many capable scientists are validating the projection that the human population on Earth could increase from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in the next 42 years. That is a 40 percent increase in our global population. Given its current and anticipated growth, it appears to me that the human species may well ravage the Earth between now and 2050 unless meaningful individual and collective efforts are made to slow the growth of human numbers.

Perhaps someone will kindly explain how much longer a planet with the relatively small size and make-up of Earth can be sensibly expected to support the well-established and easily discernable over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation behaviors of the family of humanity.

– Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill

On a technical note, the silences at around 50 minutes where Paul shows a slide but doesn’t read its contents, may be nice for the audience and video watchers, but are disappointingly tantalising for those of us listening to the mp3!

Perhaps future speakers could be alerted to this risk, and perhaps someone could splice in a voice-over for those two silences on this piece?

Just a thought! Great seminar, nonetheless. :-)

[...] is stronger than evolution The rather superb Long Now Foundation seminar series featured a presentation by Paul Ehrlich where he explains an investigation into what evolves most: the form of a canoe or its decoration. [...]

Dear Friends,

The global, human-induced predicament visible in our time to the family of humanity makes one thing clear: people with eyes to see, ears to hear and no speech impediments have got to speak out loudly, clearly and often now. Silence, the greatest power the rich and powerful possess, cannot be allowed to prevail. The reckless way a few people with wealth and power maintain a “golden” silence, one that protects their greed, gluttony and hoarding, is dangerous and cannot longer be endured because a good enough future for our children and coming generations is being mortgaged and threatened by these leading elders in my not-so-great generation.

Regardless of whether or not other human beings choose to accept the “answers” to one question, I believe we must ask ourselves, “Can we teach one another to live within limits?”

It is necessary, I suppose, for human beings to recognize and affirm human limits

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1332674

and Earth’s limitations

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYP/is_/ai_n15690553

To do otherwise and, by so doing, choose willfully and foolishly to ignore the practical requirements of biophysical reality runs the risk of putting life as we know it and our planetary home as a fit place for human habitation in peril, even in these early years of Century XXI.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Imagine for a moment that we are looking at an ocean wave, watching it move toward the shore where it crashes finally at our feet. The wave is moving toward us; however, at the same time, there are many molecules in the wave that are moving in the opposite direction, against the tide. If we observe that the propagation of the human species worldwide is like the wave and the reproduction numbers of individuals in certain locales are like the molecules, it may be inaccurate for the latter to be looked at as if it tells us something meaningful about the former.

Abundant research indicates that most countries in Western Europe, among many other countries globally, have recently shown a decline in human population growth. These geographically localized data need not blind us to the fact that the absolute global human population numbers are skyrocketing. The world’s human population is like the wave; the individual or localized reproduction numbers are like the molecules.

Perhaps a “scope of observation” problem is presented to everyone who wants to adequately understand the dynamics of human population numbers.

Choosing a scope of observation is a forced choice, like choosing to look at either the forest or the trees, at either the propagation numbers of the human species (the wave data) or localized reproduction numbers (the molecular data). Data regarding the propagation of absolute global human population numbers is the former while individual or localized reproduction data are the latter.

From this vantage point, the global challenge before humanity could be a species propagation problem. Take note that global propagation numbers do not vary with the reproduction data. That is to say, global human propagation data and the evidence of reproduction numbers of individuals in many places, appear to be pointing in different directions. The propagation data are represented by the wave; the reproduction data are represented by the molecules moving against the tide.

In the year 1900 world’s human population was approximately 1.2 to 1.6 billion people. With the explosive growth of the global human population over the 20th century in mind (despite two world wars, ubiquitous local conflicts, famine, pestilence, disease, poverty, and other events resulting in great loss of life), what might the world look like in so short a period of time as 41 years from now? How many people will be on the planet at that time? The UN Population has recently made its annual re-determination that the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion people around 2050, and then somehow level off. No explanation is given for how this leveling-off process is to occur.

We can see that the fully anticipated growth of absolute global human population numbers is about 8 billion people for the 150 year period between 1900 and 2050.

Whatever the number of human beings on Earth at the end of the 21st century, the size of the human population on Earth could have potentially adverse impacts on the number of the world’s surviving species, on the rate of dissipation of Earth’s resources, and on the basic characteristics of global ecosystems.

For too long a time human population growth has been comfortably viewed by politicians, economists and demographers as somehow outside the course of nature. The potential causes of global human population growth have seemed to them so complex, obscure, or numerous that a strategy to address the problems posed by the unbridled growth of the human species has been assumed to be unknowable. Their preternatural, insufficiently scientific grasp of human population dynamics has lead to widely varied forecasts of global population growth. Some forecasting data indicate the end to human population growth soon. Other data suggest the rapid and continuous increase of human numbers through Century XXI and beyond.

Recent scientific evidence appears to indicate that the governing dynamics of absolute global human population numbers are indeed knowable, as a natural phenomenon. According to unchallenged scientific research, the population dynamics of human organisms is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other organisms.

To suggest, as many politicians, economists and demographers have been doing, that understanding the dynamics of human population numbers does not matter, that the human population problem is not about numbers, or that human population dynamics have so dizzying an array of variables as not to be suitable for scientific investigation, seems not quite right.

If I may continue by introducing an extension of my perspective.

According to the research of Russell Hopfenberg,Ph.D., and David Pimementel, Ph.D., global population growth of the human species is a rapidly cycling positive feedback loop in which food availability drives population growth and this recent, astounding growth in absolute global human numbers gives rise to the misperception or mistaken impression that food production needs to be increased even more.

Data indicate that the world’s human population grows by approximately two percent per year. All segments of it grow by about 2%. Every year there are more people with brown eyes and more people with blue ones; more people who are tall and more short people. It also means that there are more people growing up well fed and more people growing up hungry. The hungry segment of the global population goes up just like the well-fed segment of the population. We may or may not be reducing hunger by increasing food production; however, we are most certainly producing more and more hungry people.

Hopfenberg’s and Pimentel’s evidence suggests that the magnificently successful efforts of humankind to increase food production in order to feed a growing population has resulted and continue to result in even greater human population numbers.

The perceived need to increase food production to feed a growing population is a widely shared and consensually validated misperception, a denial both of the physical reality and the space-time dimension. If people are starving at a given moment of time, increasing food production cannot help them. Are these starving people supposed to be waiting for sowing, growing and reaping to be completed? Are they supposed to wait for surpluses to reach them? Without food they would die. In such circumstances, increasing food production for people who are starving is like tossing parachutes to people who have already fallen out of the airplane. The produced food arrives too late; however, this does not mean human starvation is inevitable.

Consider that human population dynamics are not biologically different from the population dynamics of other species. Human organisms, other species and even microorganisms have essentially similar population dynamics. We do not find hoards of starving roaches, birds, squirrels, alligators, or chimpanzees in the absence of food as we do in many “civilized” human communities today because these non-human species are not annually increasing their food production capabilities.

Please take note that among tribal peoples in remote original habitats, we do not find people starving. Like non-human species, “primitive” human beings live within the carrying capacity of their environment. History is replete with examples of early humans and more remote ancestors not increasing their food production annually, but rather living successfully off the land for thousands upon thousands of years as hunters and gatherers of food.

Prior to the agricultural revolution and the production of more food than was needed for immediate survival, human numbers supposedly could not grow beyond their environment’s physical capacity to sustain them because global human population growth or decline is primarily determined by food availability. Looked at from a global population perspective, more food equals more human organisms; less food equals less human organisms; and, in one and all cases, no food equals no humans.

Thank you.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

“Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.”

Henri-Frederic Amiel