Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (91 page)

resulting from changes in ocean circulation resulting in turn from melting
of the Arctic ice cap.

The remaining two problems involve the increase in human population:

11.
The world's human population is growing. More people require
more food, space, water, energy, and other resources. Rates and even the di
rection of human population change vary greatly around the world, with the highest rates of population growth (4% per year or higher) in some
Third World countries, low rates of growth (1% per year or less) in some
First World countries such as Italy and Japan, and negative rates of growth (i.e., decreasing populations) in countries facing major public health crises,
such as Russia and AIDS-affected African countries. Everybody agrees that
the world population is increasing, but that its annual percentage rate of in
crease is not as high as it was a decade or two ago. However, there is still dis
agreement about whether the world's population will stabilize at some
value above its present level (double the present population?), and (if so) how many years (30 years? 50 years?) it will take for population to reach that level, or whether population will continue to grow.

There is long built-in momentum to human population growth because
of what is termed the "demographic bulge" or "population momentum,"
i.e., a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people in today's population, as a result of recent population growth. That is, suppose that every couple in the world decided tonight to limit them
selves to two children, approximately the correct number of children to
yield an unchanging population in the long run by exactly replacing their
two parents who will eventually die (actually, 2.1 children when one consid
ers childless couples and children who won't marry). The world's population would nevertheless continue to increase for about 70 years, because
more people today are of reproductive age or entering reproductive age than are old and post-reproductive. The problem of human population
growth has received much attention in recent decades and has given rise to movements such as Zero Population Growth, which aim to slow or halt the
increase in the world's population.

12.
What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their im
pact on the environment. If most of the world's 6 billion people today were
in cryogenic storage and neither eating, breathing, nor metabolizing, that large population would cause no environmental problems. Instead, our
numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate

wastes. That per-capita impact
—the resources consumed, and the wastes
put out, by each person—varies greatly around the world, being highest in
the First World and lowest in the Third World. On the average, each citizen
of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants
of the Third World (Plate 35).

But low-impact people are becoming high-impact people for two reasons: rises in living standards in Third World countries whose inhabitants
see and covet First World lifestyles; and immigration, both legal and illegal, of individual Third World inhabitants into the First World, driven by politi
cal, economic, and social problems at home. Immigration from low-impact
countries is now the main contributor to the increasing populations of the
U.S. and Europe. By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World
countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and
Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most dis
cussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World
individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living
standards.

There are many "optimists" who argue that the world could support
double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human
numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not
met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its
current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all
Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards. (That factor
of 12 is less than the factor of 32 that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, because there are already First World inhabitants with high-impact lifestyles, although they are greatly outnumbered by Third World inhabi
tants.) Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World living stan
dard while everyone else's living standard remained constant, that would
double our human impact on the world (Chapter 12).

People in the Third World aspire to First World living standards. They develop that aspiration through watching television, seeing advertisements
for First World consumer products sold in their countries, and observing
First World visitors to their countries. Even in the most remote villages and
refugee camps today, people know about the outside world. Third World
citizens are encouraged in that aspiration by First World and United

Nations development agencies, which hold out to them the prospect of
achieving their dream if they will only adopt the right policies, like balancing
their national budgets, investing in education and infrastructure, and so on.
But no one at the U.N. or in First World governments is willing to ac
knowledge the dream's impossibility: the unsustainability of a world in which
the Third World's large population were to reach and maintain current First World living standards. It is impossible for the First World to resolve that
dilemma by blocking the Third World's efforts to catch up: South Korea,
Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mauritius have already suc
ceeded or are close to success; China and India are progressing rapidly by
their own efforts; and the 15 rich Western European countries making up the European Union have just extended Union membership to 10 poorer
countries of Eastern Europe, in effect thereby pledging to help those 10
countries catch up. Even if the human populations of the Third World did
not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its
present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own re
sources as well as those imported from the Third World. At present, it is un
tenable politically for First World leaders to propose to their own citizens that they lower their living standards, as measured by lower resource con
sumption and waste production rates. What will happen when it finally
dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World stan
dards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon
those standards for itself? Life is full of agonizing choices based on tradeoffs, but that's the crudest trade-off that we shall have to resolve: encourag
ing and helping all people to achieve a higher standard of living, without thereby undermining that standard through overstressing global resources.

I have described these 12 sets of problems as separate from each other. In
fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution
more difficult. For example, human population growth affects all 11 other problems: more people means more deforestation, more toxic chemicals,
more demand for wild fish, etc. The energy problem is linked to other prob
lems because use of fossil fuels for energy contributes heavily to greenhouse
gases, the combating of soil fertility losses by using synthetic fertilizers re
quires energy to make the fertilizers, fossil fuel scarcity increases our interest in nuclear energy which poses potentially the biggest "toxic" problem of all in case of an accident, and fossil fuel scarcity also makes it more expen
sive to solve our freshwater problems by using energy to desalinize ocean

water. Depletion of fisheries and other wild food sources puts more pres
sure on livestock, crops, and aquaculture to replace them, thereby leading to
more topsoil losses and more eutrophication from agriculture and aqua-
culture. Problems of deforestation, water shortage, and soil degradation in
the Third World foster wars there and drive legal asylum seekers and illegal
emigrants to the First World from the Third World.

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of
our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years. For example, destruction of accessible lowland tropical rainforest outside national parks is already virtually complete in Peninsular Malaysia, will be complete at current rates
within less than a decade in the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, on Sumatra, and on Sulawesi, and will be complete around the world except perhaps for parts of the Amazon Basin and Congo Basin within 25 years. At current
rates, we shall have depleted or destroyed most of the world's remaining
marine fisheries, depleted clean or cheap or readily accessible reserves of oil
and natural gas, and approached the photosynthetic ceiling within a few de
cades. Global warming is projected to have reached a degree Centigrade
or more, and a substantial fraction of the world's wild animal and plant
species are projected to be endangered or past the point of no return, within
half a century. People often ask, "What is the single most important envi
ronmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer
would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on
identifying the single most important problem!" That flip answer is essen
tially correct, because any of the dozen problems if unsolved would do us
grave harm, and because they all interact with each other. If we solved 11 of
the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all.

Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable
course, the world's environmental problems
will
get resolved, in one way or
another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today.
The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of
our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare,
genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all
of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, popu
lation pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.

Examples of those unpleasant solutions to environmental and popula-

tion problems abound in both the modern world and the ancient world.
The examples include the recent genocides in Rwanda, Burundi, and the
former Yugoslavia; war, civil war, or guerrilla war in the modern Sudan, Philippines, and Nepal, and in the ancient Maya homeland; cannibalism on
prehistoric Easter Island and Mangareva and among the ancient Anasazi; starvation in many modern African countries and on prehistoric Easter Is
land; the AIDS epidemic already in Africa, and incipiently elsewhere; and the collapse of state government in modern Somalia, the Solomon Islands,
and Haiti, and among the ancient Maya. An outcome less drastic than a
worldwide collapse might "merely" be the spread of Rwanda-like or Haitilike conditions to many more developing countries, while we First World
inhabitants retain many of our First World amenities but face a future with
which we are unhappy, beset by more chronic terrorism, wars, and disease
outbreaks. But it is doubtful that the First World could retain its separate
lifestyle in the face of desperate waves of immigrants fleeing from collapsing
Third World countries, in numbers much larger than the current unstop
pable influx. I'm reminded again of how I picture the end of Gardar Cathe
dral Farm and its splendid cattle barn on Greenland, overwhelmed by the
influx of Norse from poorer farms where all the livestock had died or been
eaten.

But before we let ourselves give way to this one-sidedly pessimistic sce
nario, let's examine further the problems facing us, and their complexities.
This will bring us, I feel, to a position of cautious optimism.

To make the preceding discussion less abstract, I shall now illustrate how
those dozen environmental problems affect lifestyles in the part of the
world with which I am most familiar: the city of Los Angeles in Southern
California, where I live. After growing up on the East Coast of the United
States and living for several years in Europe, I first visited California in
1964. It immediately appealed to me, and I moved here in 1966.

Thus, I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39
years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing. By world standards, South
ern California's environmental problems are relatively mild. Jokes of East
Coast Americans to the contrary, this is not an area at imminent risk of a
societal collapse. By world standards and even by U.S. standards, its human population is exceptionally rich and environmentally educated. Los Angeles is well known for some problems, especially its smog, but most of its envi
ronmental and population problems are modest or typical compared to