Friday 15 January 2021

 

                        The Emperor Has No Clothes

 

“I do not wish to seem overdramatic, but

I can only conclude from the Information

that is available to me as Secretary-

General, that the Members of the United

Nations have perhaps ten years left in

which to subordinate their ancient

quarrels and launch a global partnership

to curb the arms race, to improve the

human environment, to defuse the population

explosion, and to supply the

required momentum to development

efforts. If such a global partnership is

not forged within the next decade, then

I very much fear that the problems I

have mentioned will have reached such

staggering proportions that they will be

beyond our capacity to control.”

 

U THANT, Secretary-General of the United Nations, 1969[1]

 

It amazes me how we can go about our day-to-day business without seeing the reality unfolding around us. Much like the villagers in the fable about the emperor who paraded past his subjects naked, we share a collective delusion, not that our king is attired in fine raiments, but that all is well on our planet. Things seem to be working in our current reality, so we don’t pay attention to what is happening in the larger context of our lives. This is really no surprise; most of us are busy with our daily lives and many of us have electronic media as our frame of reference and have lost touch with changes in the natural world. And we have created such a complex civilization that the consequences of most of our actions (eating, building a house, using gasoline) are far outside the sphere of our daily lives.

How is it that so many of us are oblivious to unraveling of the planet’s life support systems and the resulting loss of life happening on the planet and its inevitable impact on us? One big reason for our mass denial is the same reason that people get lured into investing money into untenable financial schemes: Everything looks fine on the surface until the whole system collapses. We ignore the well-known adage: If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

A global Ponzi scheme:  Recently, people like Mathew Stein, an MIT-educated engineer and author, have likened our use of the planet’s resources to a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme, the initial investors are paid off not from a return on their investment, but with the money paid in by subsequent investors. Likewise, we are extracting resources at a rate that exceeds what our planet can sustain. In a Ponzi scheme, there comes a point where there are no more funds to pay forward to the last investors and the whole scheme collapses, leaving the last investors empty handed. With the environment, we are using today what future generations would have needed. We are depleting fisheries, aquifers and destroying rainforests faster than they can regenerate and adding pollutants faster than the planet can absorb them. It may very well be that the toddlers of today will grow up to be the ones left empty-handed.

            In 2013, a group of 520 scientists from 44 countries signed a statement that: “By the time today’s children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that the Earth’s life support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged… unless we take concrete, immediate action to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.”[2]       

Sometime around the mid-1980s something very important happened without any note by the public: our consumption crossed the threshold beyond what the planet could sustain-- thus putting us into ecological debt. This happened when only half as many people lived on Earth. [3]

http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Picture-41.png
http://donellameadows.org/archives/a-synopsis-limits-to-growth-the-30-year-update/

A decade before we reached this tipping point, in 1972, the Club of Rome-- a group of business men, politicians and scientist from around the world--commissioned a group of MIT systems scientists to explore scenarios for human development within the Earth’s environmental constraints. They wanted to know what future we were creating for ourselves and the planet and what our options were. Their findings were published in “The Limits to Growth.”[4]

Their computer models predicted that we were in danger of overshooting our resources if we continued on our current course. But the models predicted that in 1972, we were still within the carrying capacity of the planet, so there was time to correct our trajectory. These systems analysts were like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable who shook the villagers out of their collective denial by exclaiming, "But he hasn't got anything on!" But instead of being shaken into reality, they were dismayed to be discredited as naysayers and their computer models as a doomsday delusion. When the results of “The Limits to Growth” were published, its authors expected the information would be welcomed as a tool for averting the environmental collapse to which mankind was headed. It seems, instead, that denial is our preferred response to the reality of what lies before us. In the words on Donella Meadows, one of the MIT scientists:

When The Limits to Growth was first published in 1972, most economists, along with many industrialists, politicians, and Third World advocates raised their voices in outrage at the suggestion that population growth and material consumption need to be reduced by deliberate means. Over the years, Limits was attacked by many who didn’t understand or misrepresented its assertions, dismissing it as Malthusian hyperbole. But nothing that has happened in the last 30 years has invalidated the book’s warnings.

 

… On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Limits to Growth, the team updated Limits in a book called Beyond the Limits. Already in the 1990s there was compelling evidence that humanity was moving deeper into unsustainable territory.[5]

 

Thirty years after Limits to Growth, Donna Meadows wrote: Humanity has squandered the opportunity to correct our current course over the last 30 years, they [the authors] conclude, and much must change if the world is to avoid the serious consequences of overshoot in the 21st century.

It is time to lift our heads and take stock of our situation before we are blindsided by the serious consequence of our overdraft on the earth’s resources. In a culture that lives by our credit cards, we may be shocked to find that there is no overdraft protection against our heedless consumption of our planet’s limited resources.

It seems inconceivable, wandering through a shopping mall or sipping a latte at a coffee shop, that we could be facing the disintegration of this way of life and face scenarios that until now we have never experienced on the shores of our nation. It is hard to conceive of the disappearance of the material comforts we have grown accustomed to, collapse of the ecosystems and biodiversity around us, and continued declines in the economy and employment.

What if supermarket shelves didn’t carry what we need to eat? What if there was no gas at the gas station? No water came out of the tap? What would it be like to live in a culture where fear and desperation replaced kindness and generosity? Writer, Roy Scranton, envisions food riots, hurricanes, climate refugees, soldiers shooting looters; and plagues.

Plotting our course from the 1970s into the new millennium, the authors of the Limits to Growth, see this:

…a few decades into the 21st century, growth of the economy stops and reverses abruptly.

As natural resources become harder to obtain, capital is diverted to extracting more of them. This leaves less capital for investment in industrial output. The result is industrial decline, which forces declines in the service and agricultural sectors. About the year 2030, population peaks* and begins to decrease as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services. [6]

 

* The authors of the study predicted the world population to reach 7 billion by 2030, but we passed that landmark in 2011.

Read that last, dispassionate sentence again and take in what it is saying and picture what that will look like: About the year 2030, the global population peaks and begins to decrease as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services. As Mathew Stein puts it succinctly: On a planet where the estimated long-term carrying capacity is on the order of 1 to 2 billion people, if we can't control our own population growth, nature will do it for us.[7]

Lest we be smug about lowering our birthrate and the actual number of births in the United States,[8] [9] consider this: we would need more than 4 planets to support the world population if everyone lived at US standard of living (though only 2.5 if we all lived to France’s standard).[10]  (If you want to calculate your global footprint go to: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/)

            It is not only that the number of humans on the planet has increased so dramatically that is leading to environmental and ecological collapse, but how much we modern humans use. For example: in 1950 the average-sized house was 983 square feet[11].  Now it is over 2,400 square feet. The first televisions were 9 to 14 inches across—about the size of a laptop monitor[12]—now they are in excess of 60 inches.[13] After a period of gasoline rationing in the 1970s and a push to decrease use of gasoline by instituting stricter standards for fuel economy in cars, Americans did an about face with the birth of the SUV. Car manufactures did an end-run around fuel economy regulations by building passenger cars on truck chassis, which were not subject to the same regulations.[14]

Tied to the growth agenda: For centuries we have based our economic welfare on growth, which necessitates a growing market (i.e. population base) and depends on increasing use of resources. For centuries growth has depended on moving into new areas to exploit untapped resources. But we are running out of new frontiers. Every aspect of our culture is tied to growth. We depend on it for jobs as our means of supporting ourselves and the governments depend taxes on our income to provide the services and protection that keep us safe and comfortable. In a closed system of finite resources, we can neither accommodate unending population growth, nor do we have the infinite resources to supply the goods for unending growth. For decades—perhaps centuries--we have been on a trajectory from which there is no graceful exit.

We have unwittingly contrived this environmental Ponzi scheme in which we borrow from the future to pay for our current standard of living and cover the depletion we’ve created. There will come a point where there are no more resources to borrow from to keep our illusion alive and our house of cards will collapse. Or, what resources are remaining will be too capital intensive to access.

When is this predicted to happen? In the “business as usual” scenario in “The Limits on Growth,” the downturn in industrial production is forecast to begin its decline NOW. Data from the last forty years closely follows the same curves predicted in the original “standard run” of The Limits on Growth[15].

 

 

Source: Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. 2004.

            As the authors point out in the 30 year update to Limits on Growth, if you cover the right side of the graph—what has happened so far in our lifetimes—everything looks good with continued growth and no indications of downturns ahead, except for increasing pollution and diminishing resources.[16]

In an age of polarized political parties, we alternately elect leaders from increasingly wider ends of the political spectrum, like a pinball; or more aptly a top that gyrates more wildly as it loses momentum and comes closer to losing its balance. We want to believe politicians that promise they can cure the suffering economy; surely if a tack left towards more government spending and higher taxes on the wealthy doesn’t lead to economic recovery, then a tack to the right with decreased government spending and “trickle down” taxation will revive our ailing economy. We are so busy spinning the winches as we tack back and forth that we don’t take the time to assess the course we are on, nor see the dark squall ahead.

 Connecting the dots: Though the evidence of our situation surrounds us, few seem to put the facts together and connect the dots. The accumulated impacts are not reported in dramatic headlines and are easily ignored in the course of daily life. I have paid attention the recurring themes over my lifetime, like “the population bomb” and the “hot house effect” of the 1970s and seen the changes in the environment around me.  I have watched plants and birds disappear from my island home: five species of bird have gone extinct in my lifetime and I have seen plants become endangered and disappear in the wild. The information acquired from numerous classes in environmental planning and conservation helped me piece together a clear picture of where we are and realize that despite the message that all is well, that indeed, the future is not going to be a continuation of the comfort and prosperity I have experienced in my lifetime. Here are some of the facts that have accumulated in my mind over the last few years:

 

• The background extinction rate is now 1000 times higher than it has been over the course of evolution as the result of habitat destruction, invasive species, over-population, pollution and overharvesting.

 

• By analyzing the population trends of 3,000 different species from 10,000 populations, scientists estimate that in the last 40 years, half of the Earth’s population of wildlife has been driven from existence by humans.[17]

• Each day at least 80,000 acres (32,300 ha) of forest disappear are destroyed. [18]

• Almost 50% of the tropical rain forests have gone…[in the last]…40 years[19]

•Aquifers around the globe are being drained. In the United States, we are now drawing about 1,000 km3 of this ancient water every year. From 2000 to 2008 the use jumped 25 percent. This “represents a serious problem.”[20] The Ogallala Aquifer irrigates 27 percent of the crops irrigated in the US and would take thousands of years to replenish.

• Some common song bird populations in the U.S. have declined 80 percent since 1967, while populations of 19 other birds have dropped 50% as we encroach on more and more of their habitat. In Europe populations of common birds are likewise in steep decline. And 19 species of seabirds have declined 70% since the 1950s. [21]

Our ocean fisheries, which supply over three billion people with food, are a resource invisible to most of us; hidden beneath the surface of the sea. We don’t see their depletion as we would deforestation or desertification. But their destruction in recent decades is stunning and threatens one of the planets major food resources,[22] “…driven by unchecked global fishing pushed by geopolitical rivalry, greed, corruption, mismanagement and public indifference.”[23]

• “Two-thirds of the world's fish stocks are either fished at their limit or over fished…[as] … increased human demand for fish and subsidies for fishing fleets have resulted in too many boats chasing too few fish.” [24]

• Roughly 90 percent of the large commercial fish (swordfish, marlin, tuna, shark, etc.) have disappeared from the oceans over the last 50 years[25] and it is projected that current trends will result in the collapse of all commercial seafood species in the oceans by the year 2048.[26]

 "We have rapidly reduced the resource base to less than 10 percent—not just in some areas, not just for some stocks, but for entire communities of these large fish species from the tropics to the poles." [27]

• Stocks of jack mackerel, a fish of the southeastern Pacific, have decreased to 10 percent of what they were 20 years ago. It is used, among other things, for food in aquaculture. In a perverse equation, it can take over five pounds of jack mackerel to raise one pound of farmed salmon. “….the plight of the humble jack mackerel foretells progressive collapse of fish stocks in all oceans.”[28]

• The population of Pacific Bluefin tuna, prized for sashimi, has plummeted to four per cent of its original population[29]

A planet in peril: In the past, collapses were of individual cultures and there were always new frontiers or resources to exploit. The collapse confronting us now will affect the entire planet. There are no new frontiers or resources left to offset it.

            As we go about our lives of increasing comfort and luxury, we are unwittingly leaving a legacy of environmental, financial and political ruin for the next generation. In the words of Matthew Stein and Kathleen Dean Moore: Are we too stupid? Too short-sighted? Too busy? Too comfortable? Too selfish to give up some of our material wealth and wasteful habits for the sake of not only our children, but the vast array of life created over billions of years of evolution?

            Matthew Stein points out that, “It has been estimated that…by diverting just 1/6th of the world’s current military expenditures to supporting and implementing the sweeping changes needed to shift our world’s course from collapse to sustainability. [30]

“You will sacrifice out-of-season fruit shipped from across the equator, winter vacations in Florida, spring skiing in Vail, irrigated crops and lawns, rapid travel, airport security lines, seatbacks in an upright position, long commutes, poisonous potatoes, perfect apples, [and] constant TV…”

Kathleen Dean Moore Great Tide Rising

            How do we, as individuals, proceed, based on this knowledge that things could get pretty rough in the not-so-distant future? Do we do as the king did in Andersen’s tale, who, “…shivered, for he suspected they [the villagers] were right [that he was naked]. But he thought, ‘This procession has got to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.”[31]

“ All we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and ecosystem and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren,” says Gus Speth, the former head of the Yale School of Forestry, “is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today.”[32]

            One respondent to an article posted on the website for the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, cited a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is pertinent to our future: “One should…be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”[33]

We have passed the point as U Thant stated in the quote at the beginning of this essay, where we have control over course of events. “It won’t be addressed by buying a Pirus…or turning off the air conditioning.” [34] Yet there is much we can do to influence the quality of our interior lives. “The choice is a clear one. We can continue to act as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.”[35]

“If the bad news we must confront is that we’re all gonna die, the wisdom that might help us deal with that news [that we are headed towards the collapse of our planet’s ecosystems] arises from the realization that it was going to happen anyway.”[36]

The news of an imminent end often puts things in perspective for people, giving them a chance to take stock of their lives and shift their priorities and focus in their remaining time. It heightens our appreciation of the preciousness of being alive. What would you do differently if a doctor told you that only had a few months to live? Carry on in denial? Seek oblivion? Do what you love? Spend time with people you love? Shift your priorities? Take care of unfinished business? Make amends? Simplify your life and let go of the extraneous?

Taking action: It feels important to me to fortify my integrity by aligning my actions with what I value, because the dissonance of not acting in alignment with my beliefs destroys my peace of mind. I hope that integrity will help me navigate the tough choices ahead of us. These actions are, not coincidentally, are the very things that could tip the scales in favor of averting environmental collapse.

 • Treat the Earth, its resources, and other life forms with reverence and respect.

• Take the time to consider the impact on your actions on the Earth and our fellow beings.

            Where does this steak come from?

            Whose home was the tree that 2 x 4 came from? That decking

                        from a tropical rainforest?

            What conditions were this garment made under?

• Take only what you need; stop and consider if you truly need something or merely want it.

• Vote for people that reflect your values

  Buy less, consider doing without. (Discover the freedom that can be found in simplifying.)

• Buy locally grown food. (Since the 1950s we have started spending vast amounts of fuel on transporting food around the planet.)

• Stop to question if you really need more. Our culture is in runaway consumption. As singer-song writer, Jackson Browne cautions: “…the ads take aim and lay their claim to the heart and the soul of the spender.”  (Experiment with seeing this drive as merely a mental habit that does not need to be obeyed for our well-being.)

Practice what all the world’s wise men have taught over the millennia:

• Be kinder to each other.

• Share with others: take your excess to the thrift store; give to causes

            you believe in.

• Savor the preciousness of every moment.

• Pay attention when greed is steering your actions.

            We can’t know the outcome of our current predicament; it depends on peoples’ actions. Will people choose to change course? Will we continue, as we have thus far,  to “…pursue short-term goals of consumption, employment, and financial security to the bitter end, ignoring the increasingly clear and strong signals until it is too late?”[37]

            Can we do otherwise? We are locked into a system of consumption and growth. What we eat, what we do for work, where we live, and how we spend our spare time are all woven into the web of overconsumption: from the out-of season grapes from Chile and the bottle of sparkling water from France, to our job in retail, our house in the suburbs, and that vacation in Hawaii. Certainly, nothing will change if people aren’t aware that there is an urgent problem.

            It is astonishing to think that in the 4.5 billion years of this planet’s existence, we happen to be alive at this singular time when we, as a species, maybe  destroying not only our own existence, but those of many other species a well—something no other living organism has ever done before. How we live through this time is our choice.

 

Endnotes


[8] http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aabirthrate.htm

[9] http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/babyboom_2.htm

[13] http://www.techdigest.tv/2008/01/average_tv_size.html

[14] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/how-the-crossover-conquered-americas-automobile-market/374061/ <accessed April 7, 2016>

[16] Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. 2004. page 170

[17] Damian Carrington, Earth has lost half of its wildlife in the past 40 years, says WWF, The Guardian, Tuesday 30 September 2014.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf  <accessed May 30, 2016>

[18] From: http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0801.htm ,accessed 3-9-2016.>

[20]  Leonard F. Konikow, Groundwater Depletion in the United States (1900–2008). U.S.Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Scientific Investigations Report 2013–5079.

U.S. Department of the Interior.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2013/5079/SIR2013-5079.pdf <accessed June 7, 2016>

[21] From: “Allowing Natural Death”

[22] http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/50260/icode/ <accessed 3/14/2016>

[25] Erik Stokstad, Global Loss of Biodiversity Harming Ocean Bounty, Science  03 Nov 2006:

Vol. 314, Issue 5800, pp. 745

[26] Erik Stokstad, Global Loss of Biodiversity Harming Ocean Bounty, Science  03 Nov 2006:

Vol. 314, Issue 5800, pp. 745

 16 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0515_030515_fishdecline.html

[30] Matthew Stein blog  featured  on the Huffington Post website12 Tips for the Sustainability Shift

08/07/2008 05:12 am ET | Updated May 25, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-stein/making-the-shift-to-susta_b_115827.html

 [31] http://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html <accessed 3/9/2016>

 [32] Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change . Counterpoint, Berkeley. 2016. P.312

[33] From: http://steadystate.org/limits-to-growth-forty-more-years/comment-page-1/#comment-7545

'The Crack-Up' 3-part series 1936  Esquire

 [34] [Roy Scranton p. 236 “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 ed. Edition

by Deborah Blum (Editor), Tim Folger (Editor), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2014—originally from the New York Times]

[35] .”  [Roy Scranton p. 237 “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 2014 ed. Edition by Deborah Blum (Editor), Tim Folger (Editor), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 2014—originally from the New York Times]

[36] Roy Scranton, Tricycle blog, October 22, 2015, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: What do we do when failure is inevitable?

[37] Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update. Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. 2004. p. xvi

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