The Earth is a Harsh Mistress

April 23, 2009 2:30 PM

Lester R. Brown, of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, has an article in May's Scientific American magazine: "Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?" In the article he addresses three major food-security threats: increased demand, due to the burgeoning population and diversion of staples for energy production; water shortages due to "mining" of fossil aquifers; and topsoil depletion as a result of over-farming. The result? Civilization's demise, not through superpower conflict, but through chaos and failed states.

His preferred solution — which is also the title of an EPI book (previously on MeFi) — is a dramatic "Plan B" for civilization, involving population stabilization, poverty eradication, and water, soil and forest preservation.

Both his conclusions and his plan are not without criticism. Some question what's behind the looming shortages in the first place, while others have faith that technology will provide the solutions.

posted by Kadin2048 (42 comments total)

Well it will certainly be fun to watch and find out!
posted by norabarnacl3 at 2:45 PM on April 23, 2009

Just stop having kids. That's one silver bullet solution to our environmental problems that the green movement doesn't mention.
posted by mullingitover at 2:51 PM on April 23, 2009 [3 favorites]

It would largely depend on how you define "civilization."
posted by lekvar at 2:54 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

You know who else had a dramatic plan for civilization?

But Mr. Brown and mullingitover are correct. The population bomb is ticking away and there are no pleasant ways to defuse it.
posted by Joe Beese at 2:57 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Just stop having kids. That's one silver bullet solution to our environmental problems that the green movement doesn't mention.

Some of them do.
posted by Electric Dragon at 3:00 PM on April 23, 2009

Ok, what happened to my link? Here it is.
posted by Electric Dragon at 3:01 PM on April 23, 2009

Population is a total red herring. You could stand 10 billion people in a 100 sq. km. area. The problem is one of production, distribution and disposal of all our stuff.
posted by No Robots at 3:03 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

You could stand 10 billion people in a 100 sq. km. area.

That is true but is not a serious argument. Clearly the "population problem" has nothing to do with standing room. A much more serious argument that has been advanced against the population problem is that well off populations tend to stabilize or even decline. While I'm not sure that the data we have so far on that is universally generalizable, it still merits consideration. However, it is subject to resource constraints, as there clearly is not enough "stuff" to go around right now to bring everyone in the world up to our standard of living. I have heard arguments that we are already in overshoot, and that nothing can stop an eventual collapse.

Will we be able to get the majority of the global population to a stable point where population growth levels off while simultaneously keeping consumption to sustainable input flows? Only time will tell.

I am, however, not all that hopeful.
posted by adamdschneider at 3:11 PM on April 23, 2009 [3 favorites]

Y'all oughta cheer up and show some Malthusiasm for a change.
posted by mannequito at 3:14 PM on April 23, 2009

Look, Malthus has gotta go. Buckminster Fuller demonstrated in detail that resources are more than adequate to provide everyone with decent material conditions.
posted by No Robots at 3:16 PM on April 23, 2009

What was the Easter Islander who cut down the last tree thinking?

1. This tree is on MY land and the chiefs don't have any right to tell me what to do with MY tree.
2. Science will find a replacement for trees.
3. It is only a theory that this is the last tree, and the matter needs more research.
posted by benzenedream at 3:20 PM on April 23, 2009 [12 favorites]

If there are any among the assembled company that have not read Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend that you do so.

For another interesting take on this same question try "The Bottleneck" by Edward O. Wilson in Scientific American, February 2002.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:24 PM on April 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

[Paraphrased from a radio interview with Jared Diamond]
posted by benzenedream at 3:25 PM on April 23, 2009

You would be hard pressed to argue with just aout anything EO Wilson says, but I recall that in one of his books he notes that ur biggest threat would be the growing lack of drinkable water world-wide.

Some guy recently suggested that the earth could renew itself, rather easily, if some 80% of the world's human population "went away." Science may provide food in various ways through uses of technology, but a huge expanding world population will use and destroy resources that are non-renewable and there is bound to be a massive increase in pollution, as, for example, the cars now being produced and bought in China and India, added on to what the Western world consumes and pews out.
posted by Postroad at 4:05 PM on April 23, 2009

I tend to take these kinds of apocalyptic predictions with a grain or two of salt, because I've been hearing them my entire adult life. For instance.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:14 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Buckminster Fuller demonstrated in detail that resources are more than adequate to provide everyone with decent material conditions.

This is true, but I doubt many would submit to allowing that to happen, especially here in the United States of Too Much. In order to make such a thing work would require a restructuring of our society and expectations on a massive scale, and I don't think most who have become addicted to the teat of American consumerism will readily wean themselves.

Not my personal viewpoint, but it's what I hear all around me these days. I mean, what were all those ballsucking tea bagging tax day protest parties all about, if not protesting even the smallest measure of having a central authority suggest that we all might be better off if those who make a lot give up a little to share with those who have too little?

Yes, I know, most of it is right-wing pouting about having lost the election. But that doesn't support my point.
posted by hippybear at 4:17 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

From Bob Parks(and if you don't subscribe, you should)

Ehrlich thought a group of five metals would increase in price
as they became scarce. Simon thought the price would drop as new sources
were found. In a famous bet Simon won hands down and Ehrlich paid off.

Simon once asked me why physicists never agree with him. I said it’s because they understand exponentials.

As for how long it will take, here is a table:
Yearly increase in population (percent)
Years until the entire earth is covered with people (oceans included) (2 sq ft per person)
Years until the entire volume of the earth is people (at 4 cubic feet per person)

Pct  Surface Volume
1%    1312    2827
2%     659    1420
3%     442     952
4%     333     717
5%     268     577
6%     224     483
7%     193     416

So ol' Bucky Fuller may not have been talking about for all time or maybe he had a secret plan.
posted by hexatron at 4:19 PM on April 23, 2009

PEPOL HAV BEEN TALKING ABOUT RUNING OUT OF STUF AS RESENTLIY AS A FEW YEARS AGO AND WE ARENT AL DED YET SO THEY MUST BE RONG!!
posted by sourwookie at 4:33 PM on April 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

Fuller said quite plainly that we had only a short time to get our shit together, that there was a point of no return, and he said it a long time ago.
posted by Restless Day at 4:36 PM on April 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

mullingitover: "Just stop having kids. That's one silver bullet solution to our environmental problems that the green movement doesn't mention."

Eh.. this doesn't add up. It's not the number of people so much as the lifestyle people choose to live. With the right techniques this planet could support many more people and still be healthy. We are just living in an environmental dark age still.
posted by stbalbach at 4:41 PM on April 23, 2009

You could stand 10 billion people in a 100 sq. km. area.

Good God, can you imagine the decibel level from all their crappy music? You'd be able to hear them all at once. And their inappropriately loud ringtones, too!
posted by Michael Roberts at 4:44 PM on April 23, 2009

Funnily enough, I've just finished writing a long feature about urban farming, which involved some research of food security. We in the West can support ourselves far better than we do at the moment, taking some of the pressure off available land in the developing world. The downside is that this would reduce export earnings for some countries in the developing world, and they might be tempted to grow cash crops rather than feed their people. So the raw maths of food supply and demand only explains so much - what matters is reducing global inequality, and promoting social justice and democracy. (Democracies are less likely to use land for tobacco and carnations when people are starving.)
posted by WPW at 4:49 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

which 80%?
posted by double block and bleed at 4:53 PM on April 23, 2009

sorry, I'll try that again:

Which 80%?
posted by double block and bleed at 4:54 PM on April 23, 2009

Um, doesn't the average number of children a family has decrease sharply once a certain level of development is reached?

Aren't countries like Italy and Japan currently below the replacement level in new births?

Isn't the population boom in part the crossover between:
1. cultural norms encouraging lots of children with the assumption that a fair percentage will die
2. improved public health saving those same children, resulting in larger average families.

Isn't the concern in most of Western Europe more about a population leveling off, resulting in a disproportionate amount of old people?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:16 PM on April 23, 2009

Garrett Hardin was all over this back in 1968 with Tragedy of the Commons, and was kind enough to off himself after he had finished just to prove his point.

However, it's fairly likely that we'll soon have energy break-even with this latest generation of fusion reactors, meaning that large scale desalination/sanitation/whatever utilities will likely be a ubiquitous reality within a few generations (I'll ballpark it at 50-60 years, as the DEMO tokamak is set to be functional as of 2040 and it will take an additional 30 years to make its way to LDCs). To cover the gap in the meantime, someone should shut the Pope up and make a large investment in latex.
posted by The White Hat at 5:24 PM on April 23, 2009 [2 favorites]

Environmentalists like Lester Brown don't fear that the world will run out of food and that civilization will collapse, they hope that the world will run out of food and that civilization will collapse. Obsessing about imaginary apocalypses reflects the bourgeoise wish for the annihilation of its own class -- or more personally, each individual bourgeoise wishes for the annihilation of his own "self", with its burden of moral choice and onerous responsibility for creating an existence. For such as these, the belief that the world is doomed is a comfort. In asking us to picture an earth devoid of humanity, cracked, shriveled, and dry, they give us a snapshot of their own souls, poor bastards.
posted by Faze at 5:26 PM on April 23, 2009 [5 favorites]

The White Hat: "To cover the gap in the meantime, someone should shut the Pope up and make a large investment in latex."

THIS
posted by mullingitover at 5:32 PM on April 23, 2009

leotrotsky's got it right.

Slowing population growth rates are a threat to developed and developing countries around the world. Not just in Europe. For example China is about to face the consequences of the 1 child policy as they're headed for a scenario where 1 working person's productivity has to potentially support up to 6 retired individuals (2 parents, 4 grandparents).
The economies, political structures and social networks of almost all developed countries can only function if there's an ever increasing population so that retired and otherwise dependent individuals never outnumber the actively working.
In Germany the retirement age has already been pushed back but that just takes away jobs from the next generation resulting in no net improvement.
Cutting pensions, social services etc also doesn't help since it negatively impacts a population's buying power, which leads to shrinking profits and increasing unemployment negating any benefits almost immediately.
I'm not sure if anything can be done to prevent further erosion of the systems in place other than pushing for continuing population growth which would of course amount to ecological suicide.

I'm not a believer in doomsday scenarios but history teaches us that declines and erosion of structures can happen slowly. The roman empire didn't really end with a bang. Many aspects of life under the empire simply gradually vanished. Some probably so slowly that people barely notice within the course of a lifetime. What change one generation would notice would probably be laughed off by the next for whom the current situation is already normality. Of course things would not happen the same way for us. There is significantly more knowledge and know-how spread across a larger number of people today. So a path of decline today would probably look significantly different from anything that has occurred before.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 5:51 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Faze, that seems like an uncharitable way of saying, "Gosh, that's so gloomy. They must be gloomy people. I'm happy. I believe in happy outcomes." It doesn't actually prove anything one way or another.

Either you think the Earth can support an infinite number of people, or you believe that only a finite amount (with varying lifestyles) may be sustainably supported. Those who believe in the first case cannot be reasoned with; in the latter, it's just quibbling about the numbers.

If you agree with the latter sentiment, then it comes down to realizing that, once that number is hit, the population growth must be zero. If we are already above that number, then not only must population growth must be negative, but we must also check to make sure we have not acted too late and consumed too much, or our new carrying capacity will have dropped.

Naturally, carrying capacity is about as useful as BMI is to weight loss. It's a single number that isn't designed to be accurate so much as it is built to account for a number of factors and generally give you the idea that, yeah, at 350lb, "big-boned" does not cut it as an excuse anymore. We can fudge it up and down from "can everyone live like SUV-driving, steak-eating Americans?" to "we're wearing clothes made of corn shucks, living in a mud hut, and we're all on the edge of malnutrition." You can get a lot more people if you go with the latter option. Even as the birth rates in some countries drop as they reach levels of affluence, everyone in China suddenly wants a car, just like us.

Sustainability isn't merely about trying to directly convert sunlight into food calories with as much efficiency as possible, it's about that fun chart a few days back showing how many years we could expect to still be able to mine, say, antimony. It's about waiting for our aquifers to run dry. This is not about a soft and fuzzy nature thing. Screw the penguins. It's about trying to run the planet like it was Biosphere 2, and finding our oxygen levels dropping.

We have no new land to spread out into (and I've gone on enough about the utter non-solution of "space, the final frontier"). We have nothing magical coming down the pipe. Even if people would accept new food solutions from Monsanto, it's not enough. We will have to turn back the population growth, smartly and with great alacrity, or we'll have some very hungry times. Worse yet, we have to manage it while caring for our elderly, both physically and financially.

Otherwise, the whole thing just starts to look like a Ponzi scheme written with "be fruitful and multiply" on the contract.
posted by adipocere at 5:54 PM on April 23, 2009 [4 favorites]

EnvironmentalistsAmericans like Lester Brown Faze don't fear that the world will run out of food and that civilization will collapse, they hope that the world will run out of food and that civilization will collapse are willfully ignorant and refuse to look at reality. Obsessing about imaginary apocalypses the psychological motivations of environmentalists reflects the bourgeoise their wish for the annihilation of its own class their own responsibility -- or more personally, each individual bourgeoise wishes for the annihilation of his own "self", their own personal culpability in the current destructive world system, with its the attendant burden of moral choice and onerous responsibility for creating having contributed to an existence of poverty and misery for billions of people in the Third World. For such as these, the belief that the world is doomed is a comfort inconceivable, because they haven't opened their eyes. In asking us to picture an earth devoid of humanity, cracked, shriveled, and dry, their flippant rejection of the facts, they give us a snapshot of their own souls and mentality, poor bastards.

There, fixed it for you.

Seriously, Faze, you seem like a smart guy. Why must you ignore/reject facts in favor of some kind of B.S. pop psychoanalysis or whatever this is? Respond to the facts and the arguments, don't stoop to broad generalizations and nasty assertions.
posted by natteringnabob at 5:57 PM on April 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

Recent episode of NOW on PBS, on the melting glaciers around the world kinda bummed me out
posted by Restless Day at 5:59 PM on April 23, 2009

Hairy Lobster: "a path of decline today would probably look significantly different from anything that has occurred before."

There are 25,000 nuclear weapons now, for one thing.
posted by Joe Beese at 6:16 PM on April 23, 2009

In asking us to picture an earth devoid of humanity, cracked, shriveled, and dry, they give us a snapshot of their own souls, poor bastards.

I hear this a lot. It has the stink of received wisdom and is a poor excuse for actual discourse.

As for that old metals bet, Simon would have lost like a motherfucker a couple years back. Volatility increases as scarcity looms, and as always in markets, timing is everything. It was a stupid bet and Ehrlich should never have made it.
posted by adamdschneider at 8:01 PM on April 23, 2009

Harping about population control is no more than an attempt to find a cheap no-brainer way out of massive social, political, economical, scientific and philosophical problems.
posted by No Robots at 9:35 PM on April 23, 2009

Yeah, dude, we get it.
posted by adamdschneider at 10:04 PM on April 23, 2009

To provide some context - world food production per capita index 1963-2005.
posted by sien at 11:19 PM on April 23, 2009 [3 favorites]

A salient article from the always-interesting Oil Drum.
posted by adamdschneider at 2:45 PM on April 24, 2009

adamdschneider, that was actually previously on the blue. Problem is that we're still in the "growth as normal" stage, which isn't really the significant point they'd made.
posted by FuManchu at 6:36 PM on April 25, 2009

Surely not that specific article. Your link is from November, but as far as I can tell the link and the article it refers to are both current.
posted by adamdschneider at 6:51 PM on April 25, 2009

Oh, right, it's not the same article. But the points made are exactly the same, aren't they? Maybe the previous one was just a working paper of the later one. The graph certainly looks better this go-round.
posted by FuManchu at 10:13 AM on April 27, 2009

Interestingly, the title of this thread is the same name of a fictional book in Ken Macleod's SF novel, 'The Star Fraction'. Just saying.
posted by axon at 5:49 AM on May 10, 2009