I have written several articles on the topic of human population, and our impact on the planetary ecosystem. Even so, I am compelled to continue beating the drum on this topic.
I often say there are too many of us, and we are doing too much stuff. I suppose many of you are thinking, “Hoo Boy!!! This is another one of those environmental nuts.” Fair enough. I hope you are correct… that I am just an overly dramatic nut case… and I’m just flat out wrong. I really do hope for that.
Actually, there are many very well known people raising the alarm on climate change. There are probably even more who either disagree with the notion of an imminent environmental crisis or are altogether unaware of the issue. Most of the people raising the alarm suggest we have only a few years, 50 at most, to change our behavior in order to avoid catastrophe. I don’t share that notion. I think we passed the point of no return, long ago. As I said, I hope I’m wrong.
I first adopted the idea that mankind is living in an unsustainable way about 1970. In the beginning, even though I recognized there was problem, I didn’t grasp the seriousness of the problem. Over the years I have seen this problem get much worse. So I started trying to figure out when human civilization exceeded sustainability.
The title of this article suggests why it is so difficult for us to see the nature of this problem. Even most of the people who are loudly raising the alarm don’t really understand how dire our situation is. I still applaud their efforts. Not only because my ideas may be somewhat offbase, but even if I have it spot on, their efforts will, at the very least, mitigate our pain, the pain of our progeny, and the pain of all the other animals with whom we share this planet. So… more power to the people raising the alarm!
I look to historical data to help me understand the nature and magnitude of our problem. As I said, there are too many of us, and we are doing too much stuff. There is actually lots of data illustrating the “too many of us” part of this problem, so I will illustrate that piece of the puzzle first. I’ll get to the “too much stuff” part later.
Too Many of Us
This too many of us problem is illustrated very well in a graph produced by Max Roser and published on ourworldindata.org.
This chart is kinda difficult to read at this scale, so click on the image to enlarge it.
Even without being able to read the details, the critical thing to notice about this chart is that is starts out almost flat on the left side. Then on the right side it abruptly turns nearly straight up. All this illustrates that for at least ten thousand years (actually much more), the human population grew extremely slowly. Somewhere around 1850 the population started growing exponentially. It took tens of thousands of years to grow from just a few thousand to one billion. Then it took less than 200 years to grow that ONE billion into EIGHT billion.
For me, this is more than enough to illustrate that we have “crossed the Rubicon.” There are just too many of us!
But Wait!!! There's more!!!
Doing Too Much Stuff
This issue is more difficult to explain. I have not found a chart or thought of how to make a chart that illustrates the problem as well as the World Population chart illustrates that problem. Making it even more difficult, the too much stuff problem is actually several problems, including…
- Resource Consumption
- Waste Production (including ordinary trash, highly toxic waste, and very long lasting nuclear waste)
- Environmental Pollution
One might say, that waste production and environmental pollution are the same thing. The difference I see is that we try to hide or bury trash and toxic waste. Environmental pollution is the stuff we put out into the environment in which we must live. For example, burnt fossil fuel exhaust.
In 1973 I was taking an anthropology class at Barstow Community College. We were assigned to make a book with images taken from magazines. Each pair of opposing pages were to have images illustrating differing perspectives on the same general topic. I dug that book out of my archives so I could use some of the images to illustrate my thoughts about the “Doing Too Much Stuff” problem. The images express my ideas better than any words can.
Before I start, I must apologize for desecrating dozens of National Geographic magazines to make this book. Also, I am afraid none of these images credit the photographers who took them.
One more thing, in my book the image pairs were side by side. On Medium the space is limited, so I will put them one above the other.
There are actually many more pairs of images. But this seems like enough.
The title of this article is, “Everything was just fine when I got here…”
Well… was it??? We begin discovering the world as it is at the time we are born. As we grow up, it is quite natural to assume that things seem to be working pretty well. In fact, every year there are a few more new gadgets that make life a little easier, or a new life-saving medicine. Many of us rarely contemplate what it was like before we were born, and if we do, it is very natural to think of our modern lifestyle as an improvement from simpler times. When we look back in history, that is usually the history we are taught in school… the Civil War, the American Revolution, Columbus, the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt. All of that spans about 5000 years. That is less than 2% of the time since homo sapiens first walked the planet. In the first part of this article I showed a graph illustrating the growth of human population. The part of that graph that shows extremely rapid population growth spans only the last 170 years, 0.05% of the time since homo sapiens first walked the planet. That graph looks like a 5-alarm fire to me, and that is just the “too many of us” part of this problem. The “doing too much stuff” problem is likely even more dire. I will say it one more time… I sincerely hope my conclusions about all of this are wrong.
Before I conclude, I want to say something about the many laudable achievements of mankind. Most of us are good people with good intentions. We have achieved some truly remarkable things. Many of them are very good things!
I would love to hear what you have to say about all of this.
