7. How many people can live on this earth with a sustainable economy?

 

Thirty years ago Garrett Hardin wrote an article in Science (1968) under the title: "The tragedy of the commons".

In this classic, Hardin illustrates why communities everywhere are heading for tragedy. We make an effort to review his most important statements. It may help us understand the problems of today and the future.

"The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe. (…) But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable future technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not - during the immediate future - assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite. "Space" is no escape. A finite world can support only a finite population; population growth must eventually equal zero. (…)

It is the freedom in the "commons" that will bring disaster. All commons, like air, water, ground was in the beginning public property.  In the beginning of our mankind, the people respected these commons".

(Link 6.More on the "commons" of Garret Hardin click here)

An important principle is the carrying capacity of a certain region on earth.

It gives the limit of a certain number of people living on a specific area on earth that can live on the long term in harmony with their environment from which they are living.

It implies a sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.  If we look at the world of today, it is fully clear that a certain number of people (in the developed countries) increase their carrying capacity by importing locally scarce resources from other parts of the world. They import the surplus carrying capacity of export regions. There is however not a net gain in carrying capacity when we are considering it on a global scale. It reduces the carrying capacity of the export regions.

 

It is of importance to note that our economy gives us the impression that it can increase or maintain a sustainability growth through technology or trade. This is an illusion. For example, the more advanced techniques are in recovering oil from the earth the quicker the depletion. Another example is the high tech catching technology of fishing leading to a quicker depletion of the fish from the oceans. The intensive agriculture may be more productive than the low input practices in the short term, but it also increases the rate of soil and water depletion. The gains in carrying capacity of trade are another illusion.  Commodity trade may give a local population some relief, but it must be extracted from other places. Cheap imports lower the incentive for people to conserve their own local natural capital stocks.  

 

Figure 11: Carrying capacity. The Netherlands depends on the ecological productivity of an area almost 15 times larger then the entire country. (After Rees, 1996).

By an exponential growth of the world population, there will by on global scale a net result of shrinking carrying capacity. When all the 6 billion people living today on the earth were to live like the current standard of living in the rich countries (US), we need a total productive land requirement of 26 billion ha. At this moment, we have 13 billion ha of land of which only 8.8 billion ha are productive cropland, pasture or forest. We need therefore an area of two extra planets!

 

We have so far only taken in account the productive land without considering the accelerating depletion of fossil resources. The wealthy nations with a quarter of the world's population use 75% of the global resources. It needs not much imagination that this situation cannot last. The poorer nations will want their share. As we have seen the carrying capacity on our planet is inadequate to meet their justified demands. The result of all this will be a global crisis and a breakdown of human global society. In the past, we have seen the collapses of a great number of civilizations. However, they were not on a global scale as we are facing today. The world is one global economy. Our earth ecosystem is a developing, finite, non-growing and a materially closed system.

 

Bartlett (1997) summarized the meaning of sustainability:

1. Sustainability has to mean, " for a time period long compared to a human lifetime"

2. Exponential arithmetic shows that steady growth of numbers of things for long periods

    is impossible

 

The inescapable observation that follows from these two facts is that the term "sustainable growth" is self-contradicting:

"An misunderstanding of exponential arithmetic is one of our most dramatic shortcomings of mankind". (Bartlett 1997)

 

The increase in any doubling time is approximately equal to the sum of all the preceding growth!

When we are dealing with exponential growth we do not need to have an accurate estimate of the size of a resources in order to make a reliable estimate of how long the resources will last.

 

We do not realize that a steady moderate growth (2 or 3 %) gives an astronomically large number in a modest period. Our political leaders completely lack the implication of this fact. 

Grant  (1992) gave some mathematical examples of the power of exponential growth:

* Even if the entire mass of the earth were petroleum, it would be exhausted in 342 years, if pre-1973 rates

   of increase of consumption were maintained.

*  Assume that we have one million years' supply of something- anything with a fixed supply- at current

   rates of consumption. Then increase the rate by just 2 percent per year (very roughly the current world

   population growth rate). How long would the supply last?  Answer: 501 years!

* At current rates, how long would it take for the world's human population to reach the absurdity of one

   person on each square meter of ice-free land? Answer: 600 years

 

Another aspect, which is detrimental to sustainability, is the increasing complexity of our society.

Tainter (1996) has some interesting remarks on this issue:

"Hunter-gathering societies contain no more than a few dozen distinct personalities, while modern European census recognize 10.000-20.000 unique occupational roles and industrial societies may contain over more than 1.000.000 different kinds of social personalities. Complexity can be both beneficial and detrimental. The increasing of complexity is in the beginning favorable. Thereafter it evolves in a more costly direction. It reaches a point where continued investment in complexity yields lower returns. It has entered the phase where it starts to become vulnerable to collapse. The collapse finally is a rapid transformation to a lower degree of complexity, involving less energy consumption".

 

One outcome of diminishing returns shows the collapse of the Roman economy. To raise new funds they debased their silver currency to such an extent that the following inflation devastated their economy. With raising taxes marginal lands were abandoned and the population declined. Peasants could not support large families. This is a good example of how increasing complexity to resolve problems leads to higher costs, diminishing returns, alienation of a support population, economic weakness and collapse. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the world economy today. (Asian and Russian crisis).

 

About the crisis in Russia already in 1990, Chandler and others had foresight view:

"Italian socialist writer Antonio Gramsci wrote 60 years ago, in very different context, in Prison Notebooks that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.  Most socialist nations seem to be headed for a new system of greater market reliance, but because no nation has ever made the transition from a planned to a market economy, much remains to be learned. With regard to energy, success will depend part on the cooperation of Western nations and corporations. But the tough issues can be solved only from within".

 

Wealth and poverty are at the opposite ends of the economic continuum.

The "happy" few on one side: 358 billionaires control assets that are greater than the combined annual income of countries with 45% of the world population, and at the other side 1.2 billion people below the poverty level.

In 1993, 20% of world population receives 82.7% of the world income. These richest 20 % have:

80 % of world trade, 95% of loans, 80% of domestic savings, 80.5% of world investments, 70% of world energy, 75% of all metals, 85% of timbers, 60% of food supplies.

 

The United States takes the biggest piece of the world cake.

The average American owned and consumed twice as much in 1990 as in 1948, but enjoyed much less free time." The meaning of being an American has changed from being a citizen in a democracy to being a consumer in a market place" (Vicki Robin, Consume Less Now). Recent findings show that American parents spend 40% less time with their children now than in 1965, and spend nine times more minutes a week shopping than playing with their children. Employed Americans are spending 163 more hours per year on the job than they did in 1969, and an average of nine hours per week behind the wheel. Its is estimated that up to seven million children in America are looking after themselves every day.

Over a lifetime each person in The United States uses on average:

540 tons of construction materials, 18 tons of paper, 23 tons of wood, 16 tons of metals, 32 tons of organic materials; 10 to 15 times as much as people in the underdeveloped world. (Orr, 1994)

Between 1960 and 1990 the annual tonnage of US solid municipal waste has more than doubled (National Wildlife Foundation 1997)

 

The gap between the rich and the poor has doubled in the period from 1960 to 1991.

Already in 1958 John F. Kennedy, as junior Senator from Massachusetts recognized this serious threat of this widening gap. 

"In the midst of this age of plenty, the standard of living for much of the world is declining, their poverty and economic backwardness are increasing and their share of the world's population is growing. In the world community of nations, the rich are getting richer while the poorer are getting poorer… First of all is the rapid, overwhelming and utterly unprecedented world population growth".

 

In 1960 was the ratio of the richest 20% to the poorest 20 %: 30 : 1, in 1991 was the ratio 61 : 1!

Stunning wealth on one side and absolute poverty on the other side. Some statistics will give an idea of the magnitude of world poverty:

·         15-20 million people are starving

·         14 million children die every year mainly from lack of food (one child every second)

·         200 million children world wide work in factories as virtual slaves

·         1 million women die each year from preventable health problems

·         100 million people are homeless

·         500 million people have just enough food not to die.

·         700 million people are unemployed (35 million in the industrialized countries)

 

Not only in the poor countries is poverty. What to think of the poverty in the rich US: 35 million people live in poverty and one fifth of all US children!

The number of homeless families (mother and children) in the US increased from 27% in 1985 to 34% in 1989. Every night between 61.500 and 100.000 homeless children sleep in emergency shelters, welfare hotels, abandoned buildings or cars and in the streets.

 

Than to realize that there is enough food on earth to feed every world citizen. Hunger is a matter of poverty and accessibility to food. Overpopulation is not the cause of hunger. It is the other way round. Hunger is the real cause. A poor family needs many children to work in the field or in the city to add some income for the family.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that the undernourished people in the developing countries have increased from 822 million in 1990-1992 to 828 million in 1994-1996. (State of Food and Agriculture Report, November 1998).

 

It is the more so tragic when we compare the prognoses for the wealth on Earth of more than thirty years ago with the present reality.

In 1967 Herman Kahn, an authority on world futures:

"The year 2000 will find a rather large island of wealth surrounded by a certain measure of relative misery (…) more than 90 per cent will live in nations that have broken out of the historical $50-$200 per capita range. But for the first time in history the great mass of people in the seven large and partially industrialized nations will have broken through the pre-industrial barrier."

 

The 1997" report on the World Social Situation" of United Nations:

"Poverty in on the rise in South Asia, sub-Saharian Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. More than 1.3 billion people live below the poverty line, surviving on a dollar a day".

 

The big paradox of world poverty is that foreign aid increased instead of decreased poverty. Dumping free food to the Third World depresses prices for local farmers and results in less domestic production. The less developed countries become permanently dependent of the rich countries.

Development aid destroys economic incentives. It also strengthens the political power of the ruling class of some countries. It promotes wide scale corruption. Joseph Fletcher (1991) commented on the food aid:

"Food relief in places of chronic famine is self-defeating. It subverts its own purpose naively turning  human concern for human beings into a monstrous injury. When Alan Gregg was a vice President of the Rockefeller foundation back in 1955, developing medical and health services all over the world, he explained in the bluntest language that overpopulation is a cancer and said that he had never heard of a cancer being cured by feeding. (…) … we ought not to help the starving if it hurts them by increasing their misery instead of relieving it".

 

John Majewski (1998) has also some strong statements:

"While foreign aid is a political success, it is an economic and social failure. By increasing government, destroying economic incentives, promoting unprofitable enterprises, and subsidizing misguided policies, foreign aid increases Third World poverty".

 

At the end of this chapter on a sustainable society, we will tell the sad story of the Easter Island population. It is a good metaphor for the way we are treating this earth. There will be a day that we will cut down the last tree, pump the last barrel of oil. There is no place to anywhere, just like the Easter islanders had no place to go. The ocean surrounded them, whereas we are surrounded by the dark space of the universe.

 

The end of the civilization on Easter island.

The Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen landed on Easter-day (April 5) in 1722 on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The island is therefore called Easter Island. He saw an impoverished population and poor vegetation. The island was covered by grass without a single tree or bush over ten feet high. The native animals included nothing larger than insects, not even a bat, bird, snail or lizard. For domestic animals, they had only chickens.  The islanders Roggeveen met were totally isolated. Therefore it was completely incomprehensible for him that the ancestors of this population could have constructed huge stone statues weighing up to 82 tons and as great as 33 feet. There were also 700 statues, in all stages of completion, abandoned in quarries and on ancient roads between the quarries and the coast. The strangest thing to Roggeveen was the fact that the population had no wheels, no draft animals and no source of power except their own muscles.  How did they transport the giant statues for miles, even before erecting them? It is more astonishing to know that since Roggeveen came to the island, the statues were still standing till 1770, but in 1864, all of them have been pulled down by the islanders themselves.  What has happened to this civilization?

 

Figure 12: Easter Island in the middle of nowhere.  

Radiocarbon dates suggest than Easter Island was settled sometime before the 4th century AD, probably from elsewhere in Eastern Polynesia, most probably Marquesas. The period of statue construction peaked around 1200 and 1500 AD the population counted at most 20.000. Before the people arrived, the island was covered with large palm trees and woody bushes. They used these trees to build large canoes and the wood for the transportation of the statues. The hauhau tree was used for making ropes, which they used to pull the stones.

 

Figure 13: Stone statue (2.5 Meter high) on Easter island (Pacific Ocean) (Grote Winkler Prins)

The palm tree was also used as a food source. In garbage heaps dating 900 to 1300 AD, they found bones of fish (one-third form dolphins), land- and seabirds, and rats. Palms and other trees disappeared and were replaced by grasses. In 1400 AD, all palms were chopped down and rats chewed grains, so that the palms could not be regenerated. In addition, the hauhau tree became extinct so they could no longer make ropes from it. The shellfish was overexploited and people must rely on sea snails. Because timber for building seagoing canoes vanished, fish catches declined. The Islanders began to cultivate chickens and then turned to the last remaining meat source available: humans. Bones of humans were found in late Easter Island garbage heaps. There was no longer enough food to feed the chiefs, bureaucrats, and priests. The warrior class took over. Testimonies were stone points of spears and daggers. Around 1700, the population was reduced to probably one-tenth of the original population. They lived in caves for protection against enemies. 

Around 1770 rival clans started to topple each other's statues, breaking of their heads. Diamond (1995) compared this collapse with our society:

"By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious.  Today, again, a rising population confronting with shrinking resources. We can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. Personal stakes block corrective action, by well-intentional political and business leaders and by their electorates, all of whom are perfectly correct in not noticing big changes from year to year. Instead, each year there are just somewhat more people and somewhat fewer resources on Earth".

 

In April 1999 I will go tho Easter Island (Rapa Nui).  I have chosen this Island, because it is an excellent metaphor for the future of our planet. When the inhabitants cut the last tree on this island, the only food that remained was human flesh….

There was no place to go. Will this be our future on earth? We do not have a place to go, when the last unit of non-renewable energy has been used.

 

By this example of a lost civilization, we recognize great similarities to our global society to day. Catton in 1982 expressed some thoughts on this issue:

"To think about human history, we can see instead that the end of exuberance was the summery result of all our separate and innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family automobile and not depend on public transport, to specialize, exchange and thereby prosper".

 

C.Wright Mills (1958) had similar thoughts:

"Fate is shaping history when what happens to us, intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people".

 

Price (1995):

"All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until the resources are used up".

 

Price gives a good example of this fact with the experiment of reintroducing reindeer on the St Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. This island had a mat of lichens more than 10 centimeters deep, but no reindeer until 1944, when a herd of 29 was introduced. By 1957, the population had increased to 1350; and by 1966 it was 6.000. However, the lichens were gone and in three years the population crashed. Only 41 females and one apparently dysfunctional male were left over.

Klein estimates that the primeval carrying capacity of the island was about 5 deer per square kilometer. However, during the population peak it was 18 per square kilometer. (Rees, 1996)

 

Figure 14: Rise and fall of reindeer population on St Matthew Island.