Lessons from the past
Although the impending challenge is beyond the bounds of human experience, societies have dealt with the consequences of unsustainable development in the past (Diamond 2005). The importance is not just that it happened but how events unfolded, how societies responded and what people thought.
Although global populations increased exponentially from perhaps 200 million at the time of Christ (Goudie 1986), Europeans surpassed carrying capacity several times in recorded history, experiencing major demographic crashes in the 5th and 14th Centuries. Local depletion of resources affected the early city states of the ancient world and there is evidence for a major crisis at the end of the Roman Empire. The Little Ice Age and the Black death corrected an over-shoot in the Middle Ages. The Black Death in 1348 claimed one out of four lives.
Then as now, imbalances of populations and resources were resolved by imperialism. Alexander the Great extended Hellenistic influence around the Mediterranean and Roman caesars expanded their empires into Gaul and Britain. With these new resources, a period of relative stability and economic prosperity followed. However, expansion only bought time. As the centuries passed, civilization filled the known world leading Tertullian (ca 200 AD) to express the thoroughly modern sentiment that:
The current wave of imperialism and industrialization enabled relatively sustained prosperity and unprecedented population growth which persists despite interruptions by an economic depression, global conflict, and widespread famine in developing nations.“Everything has been visited, everything known, everything exploited. Now pleasant estates obliterate the famous wilderness areas of the past. Plowed fields have suppressed the forests; domesticated animals have dispersed wild life. Beaches are plowed, mountains smoothed, and swamps cleaned. There are as many cities as in former years there were dwellings ... Everywhere there are buildings, everywhere people, everywhere communities, everywhere life. ... We weigh heavily upon the world; its resources hardly suffice to support us. As our needs grow larger, so do our protests that already nature does not sustain us. In truth, plague, famine, wars and earthquakes must be regarded as a blessing to civilization since they prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race “ (from Herlihy 1980).
Our fortunes seem to be changing and we face prospects not unlike those of the 5th and 14th Centuries. Not surprisingly, our attitudes recapitulate those of the past although telescoped by rapid demographic and technological change. Some find it hard to accept that our view of nature simply reflects how we live rather than careful intellectual analysis of accumulated knowledge. But contemporary conservation issues have been argued in about the same way throughout recorded history (Glacken 1967, Hughes 1975, 1980, Herlihy 1980). Notions such as sustainable development and deep ecology are reincarnations of ancient natural philosophies.
Lessons from the future
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror – Marshall McLuhan
Although somewhat constrained by fundamentalism, the behaviour of individuals, businesses and government is fuelled by profit and steered by beliefs of what the future holds.
In a stable world without limits to growth, a reasonable expectation of the future is captured by a projection of current trends. Some accommodation of feedback forces can be attained by understanding basic drivers of change. This is the field of systems dynamics, which has proven useful for understanding the behavior of a variety of systems - industries, cities, ecosystems, and global populations and resources.
The Club of Rome study on Limits to Growth was first published in 1972 and subsequently updated (Meadows et al. 1972, 1992, 2004). This work is considered obvious by some, naïve by others, and of Neo-Malthusian political stripe by a handful of people who think they understand what that means. Yet, the understanding of the 1 970s, as embodied in this world dynamics model did predict peak oil and a crisis of world food, environment, and economy in the early decades of this century. At the time these projections were made little was known of emerging technologies to produce food and ameliorate environmental damage. But any possible under-estimation of these possibilities was certainly matched by the unexpected industrial impacts on global climate.
The Limits to Growth Model aimed to construct a comprehensive understanding of the world economic system rather than to predict the future but it is instructive to determine whether it is consistent with empirical trends. Turner (2008) evaluated projections arising from three scenarios: 1) business as usual, 2) comprehensive technology, and 3) stabilized world blending technological innovation and social policy. World3 projections for the base scenario compared favourably with publicly available global data for the period 1970-2000. The comprehensive technology scenario was overly optimistic and the stabilized world scenario deviated on a number of key measures. This simply means that little has been done to address the basic drivers of change. Current concerns about peak oil, climate change, environmental disturbance, and water resources suggest that the overshoot and collapse dynamics projected by mid- century should not be dismissed despite the many attempts to discredit the model and the modellers.
With reference to the emerging climate crisis, Randers (2008) gives reasons why society may respond too conservatively and too late to avert global collapse (defined as a decline in average welfare following an overshoot of sustainability). However, he expects that the collapse will be reported as a case of poor global management and therefore remain fiction even if it were fact.
Ecology for bankers
May et al. (2008) turned their ecological insights to the global economy in a paper entitled Complex systems: Ecology for bankers. It grew out of collaborative work by the US National Academies/National Research Council and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (Kambhu et al., 2007). Their key message is that catastrophic systemic failure can be triggered by seemingly small events.
Ecologists speak of the Enrichment Paradox of interactive trophic systems (plant – herbivore, predator – prey) in which either high productivity of the producer or a high efficiency of the consumer destabilize systems by creating increasingly wilder population fluctuations. Agricultural technology does both – it increases the speed and efficiency of production and the capacity to extract resources. If the analogy applies, successes in the short term will turn a smooth equilibrium (1) into a stable limit cycle (2), and in the extreme to a precipitous crash (3).
Beyond the challenge of predicting global food supplies and environmental impacts, is the uncertainty of where and how populations will stabilize. Global projections of a stabilized population of 11 billion by about 2050 are widely accepted but this number could be as low as 5 or as high as 14 billion by 2100.
Modern humans are considered to be fundamentally different than other organisms in that population growth is possibly controlled by social mechanisms rather than food supply. Development and the higher standard of living and associated relaxed interdependence of generations are presumed to be the stabilizing force. Wealthy and happy populations have lower birthrates and per capita impacts on environment, or so it is hoped. Failure to meet development goals, then, might lead to an overshoot of population followed by a decline from the familiar causes that have operated since ancient times; namely, conquest, war, famine and pestilence -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
-- Global Commons
Beyond the challenge of predicting global food supplies and environmental impacts, is the uncertainty of where and how populations will stabilize. Global projections of a stabilized population of 11 billion by about 2050 are widely accepted but this number could be as low as 5 or as high as 14 billion by 2100.
Modern humans are considered to be fundamentally different than other organisms in that population growth is possibly controlled by social mechanisms rather than food supply. Development and the higher standard of living and associated relaxed interdependence of generations are presumed to be the stabilizing force. Wealthy and happy populations have lower birthrates and per capita impacts on environment, or so it is hoped. Failure to meet development goals, then, might lead to an overshoot of population followed by a decline from the familiar causes that have operated since ancient times; namely, conquest, war, famine and pestilence -- the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
-- Global Commons
