Source:
The Real Population Problem, Jay Kimball, 8020 Vision, 21 June 2010
WE NEED A MIRROR, NOT A WALL
"America First" and "Make America Great Again" are just symptoms. Neoliberal capitalism is the disease, a cancerous growth that is destroying the entire community of creation, including human civilization. Socialism is a toxic chemotherapy that can fight the cancer but has many undesirable side effects, including the creation of a "new technocratic elite" and, when implemented in the most extreme form as communist socialism, also creates a police state as bad as or even worse than right-wing dictatorships. A new culture of solidarity and sustainability is the best alternative to foster social and ecological justice. An informed citizenship, and participative governance at all levels (local, national, global), is indispensable for such new culture to take shape and function for the common good. We need a mirror, not a wall. We must liberate ourselves from our inordinate attachment to a superfluous and wasteful life style driven by debt, irresponsible consumption, irresponsible parenthood, and selfish neglect of the poor and the planet we call home. All nations must overcome isolationism driven by fear. We all live in a planet inhabited by 7.5 billion people. We all live in the same "spaceship earth." Either we reconcile population and consumption with carrying capacity, or the future of our children and grandchildren is compromised. It is foolish to expect that political quick fixes and/or some miraculous technologies will resolve the ecological crisis. The ecological crisis is a human crisis, and must be resolved by collective social evolution from irresponsible procreation to responsible parenthood, from selfishness to solidarity, and from consumerism to sustainability. Quick and easy fixes are delusional. No pain, no gain.
ARTICLES
Biodiversity Workshop: How to Save the Natural World on Which We Depend, by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
Beyond Physics: Advanced Biology and Climate Change, by Clive Hambler
Laudato Si' Supplement: Population Growth in a Finite Planet, by Rachel Olivia O'Connor
To confront power, one must first name it: Neoliberalism and the sustainability crisis, by Kurt Cobb
The Futile War between Conservationists and Farmers: Conservation and Production Biodiversity, by Andrew Beattie
Donald Trump: The Peak Oil President?, by Richard Heinberg
'Social Self-Defense': Protecting People and Planet Against Trump and Trumpism, by Jeremy Brecher
Concordian Economics: An Overall View, by Carmine Gorga
Post-normal speculation in macro design of a wealth-based economy, by Don Chisholm
Unwinding the Human Predicament: Part 5 - Constituencies can implement social contracts, by Jack Alpert
2017: The Year When the World Economy Starts Coming Apart, by Gail Tverberg
Donald Trump and Economic Growth: A Brief Interregnum on Growthism, by Erik Lindberg
Technology Creates and Destroys Jobs, by Keith Zeff
Experimenting with a Universal Basic Income, by
Keith Zeff
The Basic Income and Job Guarantees are Complementary, not Opposing Policies, by Brad Voracek
Reality 101: Some Notes on Teaching Humanity's Predicament, by Karl North
Modeling Sustainability: Population, Inequality, Consumption, and Bidirectional Coupling of the Earth and Human Systems, by Safa Motesharrei et al
The Pollution Paradox, by George Monbiot
Avoiding Trade-Offs: Can population policies promote
environmental protection and alleviate poverty?, by Gregory Casey and Oded Galor
Data vs. Dogma: Global Warming, Extreme Weather and the Scientific Consensus, by Mathias Weiss
The Case for Universal Basic Income, by Salman Sakir
Furthering Women's Empowerment Through Labour Force Participation, by Margarita Beneke de Sanfeliú et al
Discover a Spiritual and Enlightening Approach to Gender Equality, by Glenn Vellekamp
SUPPLEMENTS
Advances in Sustainable Development
Directory of Sustainable Development Resources
Strategies for Solidarity and Sustainability
Best Practices for Solidarity and Sustainability
Fostering Gender Balance in Society
Fostering Gender Balance in Religion
Meditations on Man and Woman, Humanity and Nature
How to Save the Natural World on Which We Depend
Pontifical Academy of Sciences & Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
10 January 2017
Workshop on Biological Extinction
How to Save the Natural World on Which We Depend
27 February-1 March 2017, Casina Pio IV, Vatican City
Creative Commons License
On our 4.54 billion year old planet, life is perhaps as much as 3.7 billion years old, photosynthesis and multi-cellularity dozens of times independently around 3.0 billion years old, and the emergence of plants, animals, and fungi onto land, by at least the Ordovician period, perhaps 480 million years ago, forests appearing around 370 million years ago, and the origin of modern groups such as mammals, birds, reptiles, and land plants subsequently. The geological record shows that there have been five major extinction-events in the past, the first of them about 542 million years ago, and suggests that 99% of the species that ever lived (5 billion of them?) have become extinct. The last major extinction event occurred about 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, and, in general, the number of species on earth and the complexity of their communities has increased steadily until near the present.
Over the past 66 million years, the number of species has grown to an estimated 10-14 million kinds of eukaryotic organisms (those with complex cells) and an unknown but very large number of prokaryotic organisms (archea and bacteria). The first of our close relatives that we have discovered in the fossil record are about 2.7 million years old, and like all of our earlier relatives, they occurred in Africa. Homo erectus, the species most closely similar to us, migrated out of Africa via the Middle East starting about two million years ago, and was followed by Neanderthals, Denisovans, and ultimately, about 60,000 years ago, by our species, Homo sapiens. Our ancestors soon spread out of Eurasia and by something like 12,000 years ago, had occupied all of the continents. By about 30,000 years ago they had conquered and killed all other forms of humans that had reached the Northern Hemisphere earlier.
For some tens of thousands of years after they reached Eurasia, humans lived as hunter gatherers. During that time they certainly began to make artistic works, weapons, musical instruments, and the like, but since they kept moving in search of food, carrying their babies with them, there was not much chance to develop what we consider civilization today. There may have been sporadic cultivation of small patches of crop plants earlier, but our ancestors turned to cultivation much more extensively about 12,000 years ago. By 10,000 years ago crops, along with domestic animals, provided a major source of storable food, one that could see them through droughts, winters, and other unfavorable times, and the numbers of people that could live together in a village, town, or city was greatly increased, allowing all aspects of civilization to develop much more fully in these centers.
At the time crops became important elements for human survival, 10,000 years ago, the entire world population is estimated to have been about one million people, with about 100,000 in Europe. Written language was developed about 5,000 years ago as distinctive civilizations were appearing in different parts of the world. Human populations began to grow rapidly and overwhelmed the capacity of many natural systems through cultivating crops and grazing. It is estimated that at the time of Christ, there may have been 300 million people globally; now there are 7.3 billion. Some 11% of the world world’s ice-free land surface have been converted to crop agriculture, another 20% to grazing, most of it unsustainable, on natural grasslands.
It is obvious that many of the kinds of organisms that occurred 10,000 years ago have already gone extinct, and that we are dealing with a reduced set of the organisms that existed when agriculture was first adopted by our ancestors. What percentage would have been lost in this period is unknown, but on islands it seems to have been a majority, and on continents a large percentage also. Our civilization and our numbers grew in a relatively stable period of climate following the last expansion of continental ice sheets about 26,500 years ago, and we are now profoundly damaging the conditions under which our numbers have increased from about 1 million to about 7.3 billion people, with a net of 250,000 extra people every day (www.prb.org).
Global Footprint Network (www.footprintnetwork.org) carefully measures our consumption of all aspects of the world’s sustainable productivity, and has calculated that in about 1970 we were using about 70% of the Earth’s sustainable capacity, and now that we are using about 156%. Nevertheless there are 800 million people chronically malnourished and 100 million on the verge of starvation at any one time. How have such imbalances, both among contemporaries and between the present and future generations come about, and how are they sustained? The problems wouldn’t go away if we had another 56% of the earth to take care of our needs, but we could at least stop eating into the productive capacity of the Earth progressively as the years go by. With a number of nations markedly better off than the others, and the wealthy of the earth best off everywhere, draining productivity from poor nations in the form of energy, wood, and fuel, there is no possibility of improving our situation without the widespread adoption of social justice, both as a matter of morality and as a matter of survival.
In recent years the Pontifical Academies have held several colloquia on the subject of social justice, global inequality, and deep poverty in the contemporary world. But we haven’t addressed the question whether the Earth system is able to support the demands that humanity has been making on it, nor how global inequality and poverty relate to that. The survival of the natural world, and ultimately our survival, depends on our adoption of principles of social justice and sustainability. And sustainability requires care for the biodiversity that supplies the services that enable humanity to live and prosper. As PAS President Werner Arber stated recently, the question is now not so much how our children and grandchildren will fare, but whether the world will be able to function sustainably during the remainder of our own lives.
Among the changes that are detrimental to the continued existence of biodiversity are the clearing of land for agriculture and urban development; the introduction of alien species, including weeds, pests, and pathogens worldwide, for the last 500 years, at a dizzying rate; hunting and gathering animals and plants at an unsustainable rate for consumption, building materials, or as medicine; and global climate change. The subject of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (biodiversity especially its Chapter 2), climate change, is estimated in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be on a course to destroy 20-40% of all biodiversity on Earth by the end of this century regardless of any other factors, but of course interacting with them. The living fabric of the world, which we are enjoyed in Genesis, Chapter II to protect, is slipping through our fingers without our showing much sign of caring.
What does this all mean for biodiversity, and what does biodiversity mean for us? In short, everything. All of our food comes directly or indirectly from higher plants, of which there are an estimated 425,000 species. Tens of thousands of these have been cultivated for food at some time by some people, but at present, 103 of them produce about 90% of our food worldwide, while three kinds of grain, maize, rice, and wheat, produce about 60% of the total. We have detailed knowledge of perhaps only a fifth of the species of plants in the world, and a majority could be gone in nature by the end of the century we entered recently. The same can be said for other groups of organisms, on which we depend for many of our medicines, ecosystem services, atmospheric purification, carbon storage, and everything that really makes our lives possible. As eminent Harvard University Professor E.O. Wilson has stated, the extinction of such a major proportion of the life that supports us will probably be the sin for which our descendants will be least likely to forgive us. What can we do about it?
Our desire for enhanced consumption grows more rapidly than our population, and Earth cannot sustain it. Nothing less than a reordering of our priorities based on a moral revolution can succeed in maintaining the world in such a way as to resemble the conditions we have enjoyed here. Even while economists and other social scientists have developed a quantitative grammar for discussing environmental problems, they have in the main neglected to do the same for biodiversity losses. The economics of climate change has advanced to the point where experts are agreed on the ranges in which such ethical parameters as the social rate of discount and the social price of carbon lie. Development economists have arrived at quantitative estimates of income that should be deemed to be the poverty line, and have constructed measures of income inequality. But on biodiversity there is nothing comparable. In the absence of the kind of socio-economic reasoning that informs collective decisions affecting other spheres of the social world, direct efforts to preserve biodiversity are the best that is on offer for now.
We can continue trying to preserve natural areas, particularly in areas with topographic relief where their inhabitants might have a chance in the face of continued climate change, and try to insure sustainable interactions between the people of given areas and their biodiversity; bring organisms into domestication, cultivation, or seed banks to preserve as many as possible of them while they are still there. Cryopreservation may work well for some of them. All of these methods need to be improved and applied based on a continually improved knowledge of organisms, but they will clearly succeed for the long run only when appropriate social conditions have been put in place, and we find substitutions for the destabilizing aggression that we and our ancestors have been practising for tens of thousands of years. By putting the problem of biological extinction in a well-developed social context, we will at least be able to do the best of which we are capable, and the investigation of the possibility for becoming better than ourselves should be the purpose of this workshop.
PROGRAMME
Monday, 27 February 2017
Word of Welcome ~ Chancellor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, PAS and PASS
Greetings from Pontifical Academy of Sciences ~ President Werner Arber
Greetings from Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences ~ President Margaret Archer
Goals and Objectives ~ Sir Partha Dasgupta (Cambridge University) and Peter Raven (Missouri Botanical Garden)
Extinction: What it Means to Us: Lord Martin Rees (Cambridge University)
History of Life on Earth in Light of the Great Extinctions of the Past ~ Neil Shubin (University of Chicago)
Life on Earth: Numbers of Species of Different Groups; Current Extinction Rates ~ Stuart Pimm (Duke University) and Peter Raven
Causes and Pathways of Biodiversity Losses: Consumption Preferences, Population Numbers, Technology, Ecosystem
Productivity ~ Partha Dasgupta (Cambridge University) and Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University)
Life in the Oceans, Present and Future ~ Jane Lubchenco (Oregon State University)
The Consequences of Biodiversity Loss for Human Well-being ~ Charles Perrings and Ann Kinzig (Arizona State University)
General discussion: What do we know about biodiversity and rates of extinction?
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Causes of Past Societal Collapses ~ Georgina Endfield (University of Nottingham)
Agriculture: Past Agricultural Revolutions, Prospects for Future Sustainable Productivity (biotechnology) and Their Possible Effect on Biodiversity ~ Prabhu Pingali (Cornell University)
Global Footprint ~ Mathis Wakernagel (Global Footprint Network)
Population: Current State and Future Prospects ~ John Bongaarts (Population Council)
Global Climate Change: History and Projected Future Rates under Different Models and the Effect of Climate Change on
Biodiversity; COP-21 and future options ~ Tim Lenton (University of Exeter)
How do We Stem Biodiversity Loss? – Natural Capital Project ~ Gretchen Daily (Stanford) and Steve Polasky (University of Minnesota)
How do We Stem Biodiversity Loss? – Smart Cities ~ John Hoal (Washington University in St. Louis)
How do We Stem Biodiversity Loss? – Smart Villages ~ Sir Brian Heap (Cambridge University)
Wednesday, 1 March 2017
The Drivers of Extinction: Africa ~ Calestous Juma (Harvard University)
The Effect of Biodiversity Losses on People: Moral and Ethical Dimensions ~ Cardinal Peter Turkson (Promoting Integral Human Development)
Summary and Conclusions ~ Peter Raven and Partha Dasgupta
PARTICIPANTS
Prof. Werner Arber, President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences; Biozentrum, Department of Microbiology, University of Basel, Switzerland
Prof. Margarete Archer, President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; Director, Centre for Social Ontology, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. John Bongaarts, Vice President and Distinguished Scholar, Population Council, New York, New York, USA
Prof. Gretchen Daily, Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Bing Professor in Environmental Science
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Prof. Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge, and Professor of Environmental and
Development Economics, University of Manchester, UK
Prof. Paul Ehrlich, President, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Prof. Georgina Endfiled, School of Geography, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Prof. Brian Heap, Scientific Advisor at the Smart Villages Initiative, Research Associate at the Centre for Development
Studies, University of Cambridge, UK
Dr. Joahn Hoal, Professor of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
Prof. Calestous Juma, Practice of International Development, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Prof. Anne Kinzig, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Prof. Tim Lenton, Chair in Climate Change/Earth System Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Prof. Jane Lubchenko, Distinguished University Professor and Adviser in Marine Studies, US Science Envoy for the Ocean, US
Department of State, Oregon State University, USA
Prof. Charles Perrings, Environmental Economics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Prof. Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Prof. Prabhu Pingali, Director of the Tata-Cornell Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative; Professor of Applied Economics and
Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Prof. Steven Polasky, Regents Professor and Fesler-Lampert Professor of Ecological/Environmental Economics, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA
Prof. Veerarbhadran Ramanathan, University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, USA
Prof. Peter Raven Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA
Prof. Martin Rees, University of Cambridge, Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK
Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, Chancellor, The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican City
Prof. Neil Shubin, Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Prefect, Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, Vatican City
Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Global Footprint Network, Oakland, CA, USA
Prof. Stefano Zamagni, Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Bologna, Italy
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