Our apocalyptic odds

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/14/our_apocalyptic_odds/


Ring a ring o’ roses, A pocketful of posies. A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down.

For this happy English nursery rhyme, children hold hands to form a circle, and then dance around, singing. Nice for a birthday party. At the end, they all fall down, laughing. However, many people believe this happy, innocent little song easily remembered by young children refers to the dreaded plague that killed hundreds of thousands all over Europe; at times, two-thirds of a community would perish. The “A-tishoo! A-tishoo!” may refer to the sneezing during the pneumonic phase of the disease that can develop after the initial, bubonic phase, known for its feared red spots and boils. The first phase alone led to tens—even hundreds—of thousands suffering an awful death. The frightening, painful deaths of the plague victims in the Middle Ages and in subsequent epidemics (notably the one in London in 1665) soon disappeared from the collective memory.

The worldwide wave of concern caused by the book “The Limits to Growth,” a mere forty years ago, wherein the Club of Rome warned that our earthly resources are limited, seems to have suffered the same fate. It was soon forgotten. But if that concern was justified, by pushing it out of our mind, haven’t we lost much valuable time that could have been used to tackle the problem? The Club of Rome’s warning in 1972 did not have the immediate consequences of the plague; its consequences are longer term and will be felt by future generations, but they will have a much larger impact: the suffering and death of hundreds of millions of people. Of billions perhaps. What have we been doing since 1972? How can we have forgotten? Instead of reducing our numbers and resource use, we have stimulated them—deliberately. Since the 1970s, our reproductive rates have reached unprecedented heights, and per capita consumption has multiplied, particularly in the West. During the last ten thousand years, our numbers, demands, and reproductive rates have never been so high. Who worries?

We are now entering the second wave of concern about resource limitations, one to which concerns about energy supply and climate warming have been added. Other concerns haven’t penetrated the media that deeply yet, and discussing the increase in our numbers seems to be a taboo subject that has met with resistance. Meanwhile, the tone of the debate is more positive and optimistic than it was during the 1970s. For example, worldwide, ways of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide expelled into the air to fight climate warming are widely being discussed: how this can be done by more economical energy use, by replanting forests, or by burying the carbon dioxide. And we seem satisfied by the forecasts that our numbers will stabilize around 2050, not realizing that our resource use and its consequent waste production are not connected into a perfect cycle, but are linear. Stabilizing the world’s population while maintaining resource use at such an incredibly high level cannot but lead to rapid exhaustion and overpollution. We are getting closer and closer to those limits, and during the last thirty years the network of interactions has tightened into a fyke. Our higher numbers and demands give us less time to maneuver away from disaster.

In “The Limits to Growth,” Dennis Meadows and others concluded from one calculation that the number of humans could crash suddenly rather than stabilize gradually. But none of the other calculations showed this effect; their results suggested that the numbers of humans on Earth had to be reduced gradually, and with them, the overuse of natural resources. It seemed that this single result was anomalous and could be ignored, although its cause remained unclear.