January 25 2015
HOW MANY PEOPLE CAN THE EARTH SUPPORT?(1)
How about that for an ambitious title! How many people can the earth support? This topic is so huge that, I must warn you at the outset, this will become a series, will consist of a number of articles, because a lot of questions are involved in this issue, touching upon a number of different fields, such as ecology, religion, economy, geography, and possibly others as well.
No, don’t expect me to come up with an exact number, only the Lord knows the precise total. What we do know is that today the earth, by hook and crook, supports (?) more than seven billion people. I put a question mark behind ‘support’ for obvious reasons. I will outline how this has come about and how that number cannot be sustained for much longer.
In my series I will, of course, rely on a number of sources, including the Bible, something no other of the essayists ever include. I may also quote some excerpts from a book I wrote DAY WITHOUT END available free in digital format when you search my name. That book has its setting in a world where all the ideal conditions for permanent sustainability are present. That means that I know where I am going, something very few people do, it seems to me.
About 10 years ago Harper’s published an article with the title The Oil We Eat. It made a lasting impression on me. Underneath the title it showed a saying by Balzac:
The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.
Both Toronto – in the Distillery district – and Stratford – on the Main Street – have a coffee shop by that name, serving coffee better than Starbucks or Tim Horton. However, if wealth in Balzac’s maxim is seen in terms of eternity then this is a false statement. Great wealth in Biblical terms is being a Child of God and an heir to the Kingdom. That Kingdom is eternal life on a pristine planet where bliss is forever, where all partakers share in the wealth of the world. The secret of that imperishable wealth is indeed the often forgotten crime that Jesus, who was sinless, was nevertheless hung on the cross to die.
Sorry for this little sermon, but I had to correct Balzac on this score.
So why do we have in excess of Seven Billion people on this world? Simple. We eat oil, a poisonous substance, something which we are increasingly experiencing when its carbon-saturated gases are more and more asphyxiating the atmosphere leading inexorably to the earth’s demise. At this point there is no stopping this from happening sooner than later. Be prepared.
More than 40 years ago I wrote an essay which earned me a substantial monetary award, and a free trip from St. Catharines, where our family lived from 1955-75, to Vancouver for the award ceremony. In it I, among other things, outlined the laws of Ecology then already very much in my mind. That was in the same year I read Limits to Growth which influenced me more than any other human book. In that essay I wrote that Ecology’s guiding principles are:
- Everything is connected to everything else.
Ideally all facets of life should be part of a person’s life with living, working, learning, leisure taking place within a family or community setting, where we are in harmony with nature.
- There is no waste.
This applies to us as well as nature. Nothing actually disappears. When energy is burned, the waste is evident in Green House Gases. Our planet is a closed system.
- Nature knows best.
When we go against the laws of nature, introduce species where they do not belong, nature’s revenge is all too evident, especially today when the weather has become totally unpredictable.
- Nothing comes free.
We are finding this out with The Revenge of Gaia, how increasingly pollution and ever more costly reparation has stalled he world’s Economic Growth. The law of Unintended Consequences are increasingly at work on our planet.
I will come back to these laws, as they will be a guide arriving at my conclusions. Back to the We Eat Oil article. Here is a quote from the article in Harper’s:
“We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.
“Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.
“Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.”
That was 10 years ago. Since that time we have added another billion of us humans: we now have 7 billion of ever more greedy customers. Since 2004 we have seen the advent of China, its unbelievable growth in factories, cities, roads, contaminated land, displacing millions of farmers in the process and causing a good part of land and water to become polluted almost beyond repair. The same has happened in India and Indonesia which makes me think that in the decade 2004- 2014 Primary Productivity has accelerated faster than ever, perhaps now reaching 50%. We know as a fact that in the last 40 years the number of mammals has been halved, that fish has disappeared at an even faster pace. All this means that humans are claiming more and more for themselves and leaving less and less for the rest of creation, with inevitably disastrous results. This Seven Billion Plus number of Human Beings on the earth is proving to be fatal for all of God’s creatures, that process significantly accelerating with Fracking in the USA and the Tar Sands in Alberta. How long can our world-class de-creation go on? That’s the reason why it is time to consider what the optimum number of us humans is that our tiny planet can support, and how we can go about this. Does it not make sense to work to create the circumstances that would make this possible? Isn’t that our Christian duty?
That we are rushing to the end is obvious to those not blinded by the illusions of Perpetual Economic Growth.
It was not always so. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Agriculture is a recent invention. Evidence indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since. Not much has changed. Today One percent of humanity owns 50 percent of the world’s wealth, an intolerable situation. Basically this is the result of organized agriculture, enslaving the earth for the purpose of enriching the owners, the kings, the food companies, the nobility who own the land.
I am an avid reader of several online newspapers. Every day I skim 2 Canadian, 2 British and the New York Times as well. I also often have a peak at the German Der Spiegel. Davos is in the news, the annual gab fest of the world’s billionaires, where a simple hotdog costs more than $50 (Can.) But then 50 bucks for these guys- almost all men – is no more than a penny for us – if there still was one of these coins around. These real rich remnants are getting worried about inequality. More than one speaker in that secluded Swiss Alpine resort has said that Capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s maxim that ‘capitalism carries the seed of its own destruction,’ something all too evident to me. Paul Polman, the Dutch boss of Unilever, a Dutch-British food giant also mentioned that “Capitalists are a threat to Capitalism”.
Imagine: just 80 of the world’s richest now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The even more infamous 0.1% has been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s. Contrast this with Africa, where the absolute number living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1981. Thanks to the advance of computer power and the smart brains of one of my grandsons who works in Los Angeles, robots have proliferated, and wages stagnated under this regime of privatization, deregulation and low taxes on the rich. At the same time finance has sucked wealth from the public realm into the hands of a small minority, even as it has laid waste the rest of the economy.
All this signals trouble. Both the inequality of all regions except South America, and the ongoing and unstoppable advance of social and climate conflict, wars, mass migration and political corruption, everywhere in the world we are stunting health and life chances, increasing poverty, and widening gender and ethnic divides.
This past week I met with a good friend who is active in the field of counselling. He told me that the leading cause of death today is suicide. People are both depressed and angry, filled with both fury and anxiety.
The earth feels it and is angry in turn. Perhaps the anger originates with the earth which is suffering as in pain of childbirth. After all, we and the earth belong together. Years ago I wrote a book with the provocative title The Pregnant Earth. And indeed, what is happening is that from the ashes of the Old Earth will arise a New Earth, where the number of inhabitants is regulated by the exact number it can carry in perpetuity.
Back to our current reality, where farming is an equal opportunity earth- destroyer. Not only does open pit mining – look at the Appalachians and the coal mining there – destroy the earth, block waterways, poison people, but present day farming and the distribution of food products does the same.
Let’s face it: Farming is a cruel business. Where the original prairie supported millions of buffalo, and saw billions of pigeons flying overhead days on end, today farmers rip open this soil to grow corn and soya beans to feed the same millions of cattle which before had the precious prairie grass as fodder. Basically the entire beef industry is a gigantic waste of effort and energy and a horrendous source of pollution. Earlier, before the advent of us humans, on the endless prairies where the “antelope played and the buffalo roamed”, food was totally free. Today these beasts can only exist because of oil. Oil to pull the tractors, oil to fabricate fertilizer, oil to …. And I could go on, oil till it reaches our dinner table.
Once that oil is gone, we cannot go back to the prairie of old were food was as close as a bow and arrow. There is no going back. We are on a dead end path. Our Seven Billion Plus are speeding up head over heels our sudden demise.
Better get ready. Here is the latest on the APOCALYPSE:
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race today, we’re now only three minutes away. The clock last week was advanced by two minutes. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
More about that next week.