Too many people drawing on the Earth's resources

I wrote recently of how Brazil's population growth has fallen to the point that it will shortly stabilize at a level that is sustainable, even if the amount of land required to sustain each person increases to Swiss levels. See:
http://globaljusticeideas.blogspot.com/2008/08/sustainable-populations.html

In a subsequent conversation on the George Monbiot email list, someone commented that such land-use calculations are based on using non-renewable resources such as petrochemicals (for fertilizers and transporting food). We can perhaps add to this the tapping of ancient ground water, so-called fossil aquifers, where the water is not replenished by fresh rainfall. An example is comes from the North China Plain as described here:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aquifer_depletion

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Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvests in some countries, including China, the world’s largest grain producer. A groundwater survey released in Beijing in August 2001 revealed that the water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of that country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling faster than earlier reported. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep fossil aquifer, which is not replenishable.
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Which means the problem of increasing food production to meet the world's growing population has not been solved, it has been deferred.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich, now Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, wrote the book 'The Population Bomb'. He was interviewed recently by Public Radio International, and reminded that forty years ago he wrote that the battle to feed all of humanity is already lost.

He responded: "Forty years ago and perfectly correct. We still have about a billion people who don't get enough food to function properly."

Asked about whether a population that is predicted to grow by 2.5 billion by 2050 can be sustained, he replied:

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First of all, 2.5 billion is 500 million people more than were on the planet when I was born in 1932. So we're adding more than existed when I was born.

Second, the next two and a half billion are going to be a lot more expensive to take care of environmentally than the previous 2.5 billion because people are smart, they farm the best lands first. You know you can't get oil by sticking a pointed stick in the ground in Pennsylvania anymore. You got to drill down a couple of miles. And water has to be transported long distances.

And I think anybody who reads the newspapers and can count, can see that we're in deep trouble just from the numbers of people versus the resources that are available. Ask them in Atlanta, where they're running out of water. Ask them in Southern California, where climate change is helping huge fires to devastate areas. I was just in Brazil, and the Pantanal swamp area was burning and the Cerrado, the savannah areas south of the Amazon, were burning in record bouts. So, you know, you just have to look around to see what's happening.
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He suggested the predicted population of 9.7 billion would overstretch the world's carrying capacity unless we drastically change the way we live:

"Certainly in anything like today's lifestyle. You know if you try to move to a battery—what my colleague calls a battery-chicken type of world, in which everyone has the absolute minimum to keep them alive—it might be possible."

However, we are certainly not moving in this rather bleak direction. A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme, called Global Environmental Outlook, tries to be optimistic and praise some action that has been taken, but overall, it suggests, the indicators are all moving in the wrong direction.

The report suggests that the human population has needed more than one Earth to sustain it for more than twenty years.

The green line on the graph below represents living on the limit of what is available on the Earth. Unfortunately, the real demands of the population are the climbing pink line.

Click on the image to see it larger. The full report can be downloaded from:
http://www.unep.org/geo/geo4/media/

As everyone knows, living beyond your means is storing up problems. Here's how the UN report puts it:

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The unsustainability of the way the Earth’s natural resources are being used is increasingly evident.

As a result of the growing competition and demand for global resources, the world’s population has reached a stage where the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available.

An example of ecological overshoot is seen in attempts to increase food production that result in increased levels of environmental degradation, such as deforestation of marginal lands, including wetlands, upper watersheds and protected areas that have been converted to farmlands.

According to the 2005 Footprint of Nations report, humanity’s footprint is 21.9 ha/person, while the Earth’s biological capacity is, on average, only 15.7 ha/person, with the ultimate result
that there is net environmental degradation and loss.
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Remember, this is with the Earth's current population and current consumption patterns.

Ehrlich suggests the crisis - or rather crises from which we do not recover - may not be far away:

"We're facing a crisis in which the way in which many of us live will not be possible for the vast majority of people—sometime in the relatively near future. Hopefully after I'm dead, but maybe not."

Some people, for example some posters on the Monbiot group, suggest that the best we can do as individuals and local communities, is to prepare for a coming collapse that will result in billions being wiped from the Earth's population.

I see pursuing the Simultaneous Policy approach - and doing whatever else we can to transform our relationship with the world - as being a worthwhile parallel strategy to even this survivalist view.

As Ehrlich concludes:

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What other choice do we have but to try and change so that if we haven't reached the tipping point, we don't reach it, because the tipping point is going to be miserable and an awful lot of people will die and lifestyles will change very, very dramatically, and so we don't want to do that so you know, I can't be incredibly optimistic about what we're going to do.

What we can say is that societies can change very rapidly when the time is ripe. Look for instance how rapidly the Soviet Union disappeared when none of us expected it to. When I was a kid, lynchings were common in the south of the United States. They aren't any more. In other words, things can change very rapidly.

We don't fully understand why but when the time is ripe, they change and I think that your chore and mine is to try to ripen the time.
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It seems to me the time could be not riper. If you haven't signed up in support of the Simultaneous Policy campaign, why not do so right now at:
http://www.simpol.org/

Take a look at proposals others have put forward for the transformation to a sustainable, cooperative world in the discussion forum and feel free to put forward you own at:
http://www.simpol.org.uk/forum/

It is a reality of life on this planet that any successful species fills its niche and its population overshoots before falling back to a sustainable level, perhaps with modified behaviour.

We can look on the overuse of the world's resources and the resulting degradation as a sign that we are heading for a very nasty end. Or we could take the view that we are in the amazingly fortunate position of being provided with an overdraft by the Earth which can see us through a short period of living beyond our means. Like any sensible family, instead of burning through the overdraft with no thought for the future, we should be using it as an investment to transform the way we live so no further loan is necessary and we can repay that we have taken.

Certainly not easy. Certainly urgent.

Protecting the Amazon

Last week pictures went around the world of natives in the Amazon rainforest firing arrows at the aircraft taking the pictures (here's a video news report on the BBC). The aircraft was from FUNAI, a Brazilian government organisation that exists to protect the interests of indigenous people. Official policy is to leave uncontacted tribes alone having learned from past experience that populations are devasted when they come into contact with new diseases for the first time.

FUNAI took the pictures to prove its case that there was an uncontacted tribe in the region and so they should be left alone. The tribe is believed to have arrived there having moved across the border from Peru to escape loggers.

Who owns the Amazon? Is it these tribes which date back thousands of years? The Brazilian government, which has sovereignty in international law for that on its territory? Or is it a resource that belongs to the whole of humanity?

A story popular in Brazil - that has been claimed to be an urban myth - is that in school books in the United States the Amazon is shown separately from Brazil as part of a plot to deny Brazilian sovereignty. Certainly there are calls for the rainforest to be taken into global stewardship as it locks up so much of the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere.

We all have reason to be concerned about the Amazon. Ashleigh Meyer of the Global Commons Institute, which proposes the Contraction and Convergence approach to dealing with climate change (see yesterday's blog) talked of this at a past Simultaneous Policy forum. There is a risk that carbon sinks such as the Amazon could become carbon sources if climate change dries them out to the extent that forest fires start to become commonplace, so releasing the stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Apparently the frequency of forest fires is increasing. You can hear Ashleigh's presentation on SL-SPAG radio, which broadcasts a programme of talks on SP at:
http://www.live365.com/stations/luzoorbit?site=live365

We have had meetings about this in the virutal world Second Life SP Adopters' Group (SL-SPAG).

I was very fortunate to be able to visit the Amazon delta last month. I was speaking at Brazil's National Breastfeeding Conference on regulating the baby food companies, including a policy proposal I have submitted for inclusion in SP. I'll say more about that another time.

After the conference I was able to take a trip into the delta. Natives are living from the forest, collecting fruit to sell in the city.


In the course of the tour I spoke with Oswaldo, our guide, of the need to protect the Amazon as the 'lungs of the world'. He objected to this. Firstly on the basis that the Amazon does not produce all the oxygen we use (he cited a figure of 22%) and that at night it emits carbon dioxide. I corrected the terminology so we spoke instead of it being a carbon sink, locking up carbon in the timber.

Secondly he objected on the assumption that my next suggestion would be that the Amazon should be taken into global ownership to protect it. But this was not where I was heading and in the end we found ourselves in agreement.

It seems to me that if the Amazon is such a vitally important resource for locking up carbon dioxide which industrialised countries are churning into the atmosphere, most having largely destroyed their own forest cover, then it needs to be respected. It is a resource that benefits the world as a whole and so the rest of the world should help to pay for its maintenance, just as we pay a country for other resources, such as oil.

A polluter-pays approach to climate change would see collect taxes from polluters. This would provide an incentive to improve efficiency and so pay less tax. At the same time, the taxes raised should be used to address climate change too, both nationally (such as for investment in renewable sources of energy) and for a stewardship fund for important resources such as the Amazon.

The Brazilian government is trying to protect the Amazon with satellite surveys and armed authorities to enforce protected areas and licenses for permitted economic activity. But the place is absolutely immense. The stewardship fund could help pay for policing the Amazon.

But we need to go further. Brazil also wants to improve the living conditions of Brazilians and this places conflicting pressures on the Amazon. Around its edges, it is being cleared for agriculture. An analysis in the news weekly in Brazil, Veja, calculated that it is cheaper for a farmer to clear virgin forest than maintain cleared land for sustainable agriculture. Whatever the regulations may say, money talks. People in every country use their resources to improve their standard of living. So let us see if maintaining the forest for the benefit of others can me a more profitable use of it.

Farmers could receive funds for stewardship of the land, as is increasingly the case in European countries. Legally a licensed Brazilian farmer has to maintain 80% forest cover on owned land. This rule is often breached and poorly enforced. If farmers received payment for forest cover then the situation would change radically.

No doubt there would be all sorts of problems, as with 'set-aside' schemes that have paid farmers not to farm in industrialised countries. But perhaps those problems will be easier to deal with and less catastrophic than the Amazon dwindling away.


It was very interesting to have a Brazilian perspective on this idea. Unsurpisingly it is much more appealing - and practical - than the rest of the world trying to take over responsibility for the Amazon.

It would be great to have much more feedback and, ideally, a group of interested SP Adopters who can develop and promote any such schemes they have thought up. A good place to do this is on the 'Contraction and Convergence' discussion board at:
http://www.simpol.org.uk/forum/index.php?board=14.0