University Unitarian Universalist Society
Copyright © 1999 by Steve Helle. All rights reserved.
Living Within Limits – Part 1
Thinking Globally
By Steve Helle
Today I am going to begin a series of talks on the general theme of "For the Good of the Whole". The series will discuss topics that generally affect our everyday lives and how we can begin to think of them in terms of their overall affect society and the environment as a whole. The series is going to begin with general topics such as the one we are going to consider today why we need to better utilize our resources so they will remain available for future generations. The second talk will discuss methods of "population control" that are affective while remaining friendly to society. After that we will begin to focus on specific areas that have subtle effects on the environment and society. The first of these will be the "automobile" and (if time and interest is there) we will look at money, land development and maybe others yet to be defined.
I think that almost everyone in this room would agree that "thinking globally" is usually more beneficial to the world than "thinking individually". However, with the exception of a few dreamers and maybe some global planners, not many of us actually "think globally" very often. Why is this?
The answer to this question is revealed in Charles Darwin’s work Origin of the Species. Darwin suggests that all species evolve by perpetuation of characteristics that make individuals more competitive in the world. This pattern accommodates the individual and its offspring, not necessarily the species in general. Therefore, man and other species have evolved to be quite self centered, focusing on themselves their family and immediate surroundings. It is only natural for us to think in terms of how our surroundings affect us and not necessarily of how they affect our community, society or the world as a whole.
The consequences of continuing to think in this very egocentric manner are being recognized by the environmental and ecological community. They include over population, resource depletion, reduction in biotic diversity and pollution. The person that only thinks of himself and his close family will tend to do what is beneficial for him without regard to the consequences on the whole. Thus they will tend to use more resources and invade more land, harming other living and non-living things. In addition, they will tend to procreate, making more and more of themselves. All of this uses up our resources and diminishes the habitat left for other creatures and plants.
This pattern of each generation using more resources while becoming more numerous is essentially a study in "exponential growth" as described in a book entitled Living within Limits by Garrett Hardin, published in 1993 and available through the Oxford University Press. Hardin discusses "geometric" or "exponential" growth patterns in three main areas; population, economics and resource usage.
In terms of human population, he claims that any positive growth rate will ultimately be non-sustainable. No matter how slow a positive growth rate is, it will ultimately culminate in more people than can be supported by the resources available on earth.
Hardin indicated that from the time humans evolved from ape like humanoids to the recent past, the overall growth rate has been on a average of 0.02% per year. At this growth rate a town of 5,000 people would add 1 person each year. A metropolitan area the size of Greater Orlando with approximately 1.5 million people would add approximately 3,000 people per year. At this growth rate, the population of the world would double every 4,000 to 5,000 years.
During the last half of this century the world population growth has been approximately 2%. At this rate the population of the world doubles every 35 years or more than 100 times faster than the previous historical growth rate.
From 1970 – 1990 the world population growth rate actually dropped from 2.0% a year to 1.7 % a year. Is that positive progress? The answer to that is both "yes" and "no". In the 1960’s the world population was about 3.5 billion, so at 2% per year about 70 million people per year were added. In 1990 when the rate dropped 1.7%, the world population was a bit over 5 billion and thus about 85 million people per year were being added. Even though the rate dropped to 1.7% per year the actual number of people added increased from 70 million to 85 million people. According to a recent article in the Orlando Sentinel, person number 6,000,000,000 will arrive on October 12, 1999.
Think about these numbers for a minute. The population of the United States is currently about 250 or 260 million people or roughly 3 times the 85 million annual world population growth. This means that every three years the entire population of the United States is added to the world.
What does society want for those people? Most agree that each new person born into the world deserves a life of happiness and security similar to what might be expected by the average American. However, the average American uses roughly 5 to 6 times the natural resources as the average person in other parts of the world, (which in large part describes our comfortable lifestyle and standard of living). Therefore, America uses approximately 30% of all of the resources that are used throughout the world. If every three years, we add 250 million people living at the lifestyle of the average American, we will drastically increase the resource utilization in the world!! How long can that go on?
Garrett Hardin also talks at length about "exponential growth" as it is used in economics. We all consider this from time to time either when we look at personal finance or even the finances of this church. We look at "investment growth rates" of 4%, 6% or 20% per year. Will that growth rate go on forever? Most people make the assumption that it will. How many times have you heard that if a 20 year old person can put $1,000 a year away and invest it at 8% per year, than by the time that they are ready to retire at age 60 or 65 they will be a multimillionaire. This is all based on exponential growth rate with no upward limits. In large part our whole study of economics is based on this exponential growth with no cap.
Economic growth can be defined as the increased rate of use of money which really means a faster use of resources. Money is a device that puts commonality among materials goods, services and resources. Accordingly, if we have more money, we have more ability to utilize resources.
Virtually all of our resources are contained on one spheroid that is approximately 8,000 miles in diameter called "Earth". Earth is finite with a definite volume, shape and size. Since, it is finite there is an limit to the resources it contains. If resources are finite and economics is a measure of the rate of usage of resources, can economics really be unlimited? Hardin indicates that ignoring limits is a dangerous fallacy with the study of economics, as we know it now.
Hardin indicates that we trick our selves over and over again into thinking that resources are infinite by confusing them with "reserves". For example, in the early 1970’s we had a fuel shortage that caused the price of petroleum products to increase dramatically. The supply of most petroleum products was short and consumers had to wait in long lines at gas stations. This put a great focus on the fossil fuel supplies in the world. It was pointed out by various experts that we only had (and the number varies) from 20 to a couple of hundred of years of petroleum supplies left.
Here we are 25 years later and we have more fossil fuel available to us than ever before. Why? The answer is in realizing the differences between "reserves" and "resources". "Resources" are defined as the total amount of a given useful item (in this case fossil fuel) whether we know about it or not. "Reserves" are defined as the amount of an item that has been discovered or we have reason to believe exists. In the last 25 years we have discovered a larger and larger fraction of the overall "resource" of fossil fuels, which has given us larger and larger "reserves". However, the total amount of the resource (i.e. the total amount of the fossil fuel that exists in the world) has not increased. Science tell us that fossil fuels can only increase very slowly by natural processes that covert organic life into fossil fuels, which takes millions of years.
Any resource that is used faster than its regeneration rate will eventually run out. The time it runs out is very hard to predict because we never really know the total extent of "resources". All we really know is the extent of the "reserves" and this changes with new discoveries.
At the rate that we are now using fossil fuel resources, we still have predictions that they will last any where from a few decades to a couple of centuries. They may last several centuries ahead or maybe a couple of millennia. However, they will eventually run out. If you think about any of these time frames with respect to the overall age of the world or even the million or so years that humans have inhabited the earth, it is only a drop in the bucket. Two millennia (which is roughly the time since Christ supposedly inhabited the world) is only 1/5 of 1% of the million or years or so that humans have inhabited the earth. That 1 million years is only 1/5,000 of the 5 billion years or so that Earth has existed. The point is, that at any positive usage rate, a given resource will be gone in the "blink of an eye".
Hardin actively encourages us to start thinking of economics in terms of limited resources and their quantitative limitations. He defines two concepts of economic study by introducing the following terms; "Cowboy Economics" and "Space Ship Earth Economics". Cowboy economics refers to utilizing the resources (as measured by economic growth) as though there were no limits. This is the way the cowboys that tamed the wild west utilizing resources such as the buffalo, grasslands etc. without regard to limits. The other way of looking at economics, is to look at the Earth as essentially a "spaceship" with limited resources that will run out, unless they are reused and/or regenerated.
It is often argued that that humankind will discover alternatives for fossil fuels before they run out. And we may. For quite awhile during the mid part of this century nuclear fuels were thought to be promising. As a result, nuclear resources are now used to generate a great deal of power throughout the world.
Hardin points out that the real limiting factor in utilizing nuclear power for fuel is that it generates a waste that must be safely handled and monitored for an extremely long period of time. The half life of most nuclear wastes is on the order of 100,000 years. No society has ever managed to last more than a millennia or two. No one government has been able to stay stable for more than several centuries. How can we guarantee that nuclear waste that will be dangerous for 100,000 years will be properly stored and protected? In addition, those nuclear wastes will continue to grow and grow as long as we rely on nuclear power for energy production. Accordingly, nuclear waste management is "exponential growth" problem. For these reasons, Hardin concludes that nuclear power is not feasible as a permanent alternative to fossil fuels.
To me, hydrogen appears to be a promising option to fossil fuels. It is a very clean and efficient fuel and essentially produces little if any by-products that appear to be detrimental. ABC Evening News recently ran a "Closer Look" feature on the use of hydrogen fuel cells for automobiles. Apparently it is quite close to being in practical production with some fuel cell cars being commercially available within 2 to 5 years. The fuel source for the current technology is methanol. Methanol has the ability to be produced from grains which are a renewable resource. However, these grains compete with resources available for food. Sooner or later if our fuel needs and our population continues to grow even this renewable resource will begin to run short. Therefore, methanol has some promise but will eventually have to be controlled in a "steady state supply and usage" mode. However, is impossible to do if you have a continually increasing population and fuel fired economy.
Water is made up of a large portion of hydrogen. I am not educated enough in chemical science to know if it will ever be feasible to economically produce hydrogen fuel from water. However, lets suppose that it does become feasible. There is a great deal more water than fossil fuels in the world. However, water is still finite. In addition, as we use more and more water for energy uses, we will begin to change geography, geology and climate. Also, sooner or later we will run short of water. It might take several tens or hundreds of millennia, however, it will happen. Remember that a hundred millennia is but a spec of time in the overall history of the Earth.
Resources are finite and yet we continue to grow both economically and in population exponentially. What is going to happen to society? In the late 1700’s Malthus concluded that we will eventually crowd ourselves into life long misery. He was thinking of "misery" in terms of food supplies running low, resulting in mass starvation. Eventually, that may occur.
Some optimists among us often think that technology will save us. One area commonly believed to save us is space travel. If we can travel to and inhabit other "heavenly bodies", there should be other resources available to us. Much of our science fiction is based on this, including some written by very well educated and versed scientists such as Isaac Asimov. Asimov’s stories indicate that in 20,000 or 30,000 years the human population will be located at numerous locations throughout the Milky Way and even other galaxies. He also writes, that Earth will have been long abandoned and lost.
Hardin discusses space travel as an alternative with a much more pessimistic viewpoint. He points out that the nearest star is over 4 light years away. He also points out that based on our current technology most space crafts travel at about 25,000 miles per hour. Although this sounds pretty fast, it would take over 100,000 years at that speed to reach the nearest star, which may or may not have inhabitable planets. 100,000 years is approximately 20 times as long as all of written history.
Hardin expects that we will be able to eventually travel faster and faster. Based on the work of other scientists, he estimates that 3% of the speed of light might be an achievable speed. This is some 22 million miles per hour. At that rate of speed we could reach the moon in roughly 30 to 40 seconds, but to reach the nearest star it would take between 1 and 2 centuries.
Now lets look at the practical aspects of having a space ship with a colony on it that would have to go through several generations before it landed. This colony would be restricted to a very finite environment during the trip. Resources would have to be very well conserved and reused to provide a self sustaining environment for several generations. How many of you are even aware of your ancestor’s back 100 or 200 years? This is how long a colony would have to survive just to reach the nearest star.
The colony would have to have zero population growth or else the space ship would not have enough room and its resources would be used up. Therefore, some type of population growth behavior would have to be instituted. Hardin points out that if we are utilizing space travel to allow continued population growth and positive usage of resources on earth, the colonists are going to have to live very strict, contrary rules for 100 to 200 years. After all that, a space ship with only a few dozen, few hundred, or few thousand people transferred to what is hopefully another place.
At our current growth rate of 85 million people per year we would have to launch enough space ships for 250,000 people to leave the earth every day to maintain a steady world population. Is this effort reasonable (or even feasible)? I think that it is easy to see that space colonization is probably not ever going to be feasible to offset population growth and positive resource utilization.
What population can be sustained on the earth? In order to determine that number, we need to consider a concept called "Carrying Capacity". "Carrying Capacity" is easy to understand by considering a pasture with grazing cattle. A pasture of several hundred acres with only one or two cows, will easily produce enough grass to keep the cattle healthy and they will multiply. However, if we put several thousand cattle on that same pasture, the cows would quickly eat up the grasses, and the pasture will become barren. The cows would no longer have enough food and begin to starve. Which in turn encourages other diseases and low reproduction rates, creating the conditions that Malthus called "misery" until the cow population dropped to where the pasture could sustain it again. To make matters worse, the pasture would not be healthy at this point and only able to sustain only a fraction of the cows that it could initially. At some point there becomes a balance where the pasture can support a certain number of cattle without depravation. If the cow population grows beyond that point detriment will occur. This balance point is what is known as "Carrying Capacity".
The earth has a "Carrying Capacity" for humans. In fact there are several "Carrying Capacities" which depend our desired lifestyle and what other creatures and amenities we want to survive with us.
Also, "Carrying Capacity" can change with technology. Certainly, our ability to produce more and more food over the last couple of hundred of years has caused the "Carrying Capacity" of the world to increase. This is what got Malthus in trouble! He did his work about the same time as technology was beginning to create more and more food. Over the last two hundred years we have been able to better support more and more people. As the population grew people lived better and there was a prevailing attitude that Malthus was wrong!! However, Malthus was not fundamentally wrong. He just did not take into account how advances in technology would change the "Carrying Capacity" of the world. The "Carrying Capacity" of the world may very well continue to increase for a period of time. However, since resources are limited and finite, there is an upper limit to the "Carrying Capacity".
"Carrying Capacity" also varies depending on what else we want to live with us. We call this "standard of living" which is kind of a combination of economic well being and our aesthetic surroundings. If we want the world to have the "standard of living" of America, which utilizes resources at approximately 5 times that of the average person in the world, the carrying capacity would be only 1/5 as great if we had the standard of living and resource utilization of the average person on the earth today. If we want to live and develop in sprawled pattern where each family lives in a single family house on a ¼ to ½ acre of land and separated from their places of work and shopping such that they have to drive significant distances, the carrying capacity would tend to be even less. If we were able to live in a much denser environment so that we do a lot of our business by walking, shorter car trips or public transportation will tend to increase the "carrying capacity".
In short, the "carrying capacity" and essentially the final sustainable world population is very much related to how happy and healthy we want to be. Our fundamental decision is; do we want lots of people barely surviving or do we want relatively few people that are comfortable and happy?
With any rate of exponential growth of population, it does not matter what that limit is, because we will grow past it. When we grow past it our lifestyle, standard of living, comfort, happiness will begin to deteriorate. I can not predict how it will happen but it will happen. I can not predict when that will happen but it will happen. Therefore, in order to maintain the dignity, health and survival of the human species we need to limit our population and our resource utilization to a "steady state". In order to do this we have to as individuals begin to think globally for the good for all and not just what we inherently desire for us and our families.
A great deal of satisfaction and good feeling can be gotten by knowing that you are living your life efficiently and happily. It is not necessary to contribute to population growth or resource decrement to accomplish this. Gaining large sums of money is nothing but gaining the ability to utilize resources faster. If you have not yet made a million dollars, maybe this type of thinking can help you feel more satisfied.