The Small Town Project

Time to introduce a new site! After 18 months, Growth is Madness!, introduced below, began to take too much time away from writing for larger publications. To be able to focus on the latter, I’ve now settled into johnfeeney.net. It features a sampling of my writing, updates, information on speaking and interviews, and resources for those wishing to dig deeper into the core ecological issues confronting us. Stop by!

http://www.johnfeeney.net/

From Peter H. Raven’s 2002 Presidential Address, American Association for the Advancement of Science:

Over 400 generations (10,000 years), our human population has grown from several million people to approximately 6.1 billion… We continue to depend on a series of ancient, genetically and socially determined habits and attitudes, many of which seem to have been more suitable for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We must adopt new ways of thinking that will serve our descendants well in a world that is crowded beyond imagining… unless, of course, we destroy ourselves.

The world has been converted in an instant of time from a wild natural one to one in which humans, one of an estimated 10 million or more species, are consuming, wasting, or diverting an estimated 45% of the total net biological productivity on land and using more than half of the renewable fresh water.

I encourage you to read Raven’s full address. Dovetailing well with the last article I posted here, it provides an informative survey of the ecological state of the world as of 2002, a vision for the future, and of the role of science in achieving that vision.

Having been exploring many of the topics on which Raven touches, I found especially interesting his discussion of the “false prophets and charlatans” who write books and appear in the media to tell us everything is okay. They include Bjørn Lomborg assuring us climate change is not human-caused, and Julian Simon who insisted further population growth should be welcomed.

Revised, 4/8/06, 4/9/06

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The cataclysmic consequences of unsustainable development pose a challenge to the world that will make the war on terror seem a mere distraction.

One possible outcome of unchecked population growth. Image source: e-text population material

So begins a recent article summarizing what Jeffrey Sachs, director of the UN Millennium Project, told participants in a keynote address at the fourth biennial State of the Planet conference at Columbia University. The story didn’t make front page news, but it’s a sign the environmental plight we’re facing is beginning, at least, to emerge into the mainstream media. The message is that there is less time than most assume for the human species to address a collection of factors wreaking havoc on the environment. Those factors are headed by the interaction of population growth and growth of per captia resource consumption.

Understanding exponential growth
Let me explain. Lots of things are characterized by exponential growth. In the absence of intervening factors all animal populations (including humans), for instance, grow exponentially. Economic growth, as well, is often exponential. Population growth and economic growth combine, moreover, to drive the growth of our consumption of natural resources which, therefore, becomes exponential as well.

But how is exponential growth important? Well, when something grows exponentially, its growth will often look relatively unremarkable for a period of time. At a certain point, however, its geometric progression means that the growth suddenly becomes explosive — far more so than one would have guessed just a short time before that point.

An old French riddle makes this clear: Suppose you own a pond, at one end of which is a lily pad. The lily plant is growing and you know it will double in size each day. If it grows without interference, you know it will completely cover the pond in 30 days, blocking sunlight, causing a die-off of all life in the pond. You know that at some point you’ll have to devote a few days to dealing with the lily plant, and decide to wait to do so once until it has covered half the pond. How much time have you left yourself to save the pond from destruction?

To answer that, you have to know on what day the pond will be half covered. Contrary to intuition, that will be the 29th day. On the 30th day the plant will double in size, completely covering the pond. Therefore, you have left yourself only one day to save the pond! Could you have seen that coming just from watching the plant’s growth and using common sense to guess when you would really need to intervene? Not likely. Notice that on day 24 only 1.56% of the pond was covered. On day 28 the pond is 25% covered. Even that might not be particularly alarming. It would only become alarming if you should project accurately ahead to realize the lily’s growth had taken off like a rocket and had now exceeded your ability to intervene in time to save the pond.

Where we stand today
Sadly, when we look today at the human ecological footprint a good deal of evidence suggests we’re approaching day 30 faster than most people would think. World population growth and our rate of resource consumption (driven largely by economic growth) have been following an essentially exponential path. In recent years cultural and other factors have slowed the rate of population growth, but the growth is still exponential. [1] We’ve come to the kind of explosive growth seen in the last few days of the pond above.

The result has been unprecedented environmental destruction. We’re seeing climate change, depletion of the oceans’ fishes and coral reefs, profound effects of deforestation, a 1,000 fold increase in the normal rate of species extinction to a current conservative estimate of about 27 species per day (based on 1,000 species per million lost per year, and a conservative estimate of 10 million species), the global spread of chemical toxins throughout the environment, and many other environmental stresses. To make matters worse, we are also at a point of increased risk of disease purely as a result of our increased numbers in a time of great mobility.

The environmental stresses listed above are signs we have now overshot the earth’s carrying capacity. The addition of several billion humans and counting, and its impact on environmental systems nudges us steadily and quickly toward an ecological breaking point.

The need for coordinated worldwide efforts at analysis and intervention is now something we are foolish to ignore. Unfortunately most people are oblivious to the problem because they’re applying only common sense. If one merely looks around without doing some research or without a keen appreciation for exponential growth, the state of the “pond” might not yet appear so alarming. It might look like day 28, for instance. But what’s going to happen in just a “day” or two? To see this more clearly we need only look at a graph of human population growth over history:

Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Clearly, we are in the explosive growth phase! And with each step in that population growth comes the expected increase in environmental impact. That means we have little time left to take steps to avoid what may be profoundly regrettable worldwide societal and environmental consequences. Scientists have been warning us of the problem of population growth and the associated growth in our ecological footprint for some years now. They continue today. We are at a crucial time in human history.

What if we ignore this?
What if we don’t intervene? As Al Bartlett explains so clearly, population growth will stop. Exponential growth (or any kind of growth) cannot continue forever on a finite planet. At current or even slower rates, if nothing happened to stop it, humans would soon cover the planet with people jammed toe to toe. But things will happen. We are part of, and depend for our very lives on the ecosystem in which we live. Stress it too far and we will lose its support.

Population growth will stop, then, in one of two ways. Either nature will take over and choose its own methods for stopping population growth or we can act first and choose our own methods. Which would be preferable? Nature’s methods are not pleasant. They include such things as famine, disease, and war. We see this in animal species. They can result in die-offs of large numbers of a population, returning it to previous, sustainable levels.

If we wait to let nature take its course, moreover, we must contemplate the level of environmental loss we will by then have witnessed.

We have options
There’s another way. As humans we have the unique cognitive capacity to choose our own, less painful methods for ending population growth. We need to address important correlates of population growth such as poverty and the lack of opportunities for women in developing countries. As Meadows et al make clear, poverty causes population growth which causes poverty. We need, as well, national media campaigns and family planning programs.

Population growth in the U.S. is especially destructive to the worldwide environment as our per capita consumption of natural resources is among the highest in the world. So, with regard to environmental impact, adding one new U.S resident is like adding several people to a typical third world country. To respond to this, some experts believe the U.S. needs to implement some level of immigration reform. Understandably, this is a controversial point. At the time if this writing the contoversy is being played out on Capital Hill as lawmakers struggle with the immigration issue, and in the streets as massive numbers of marchers express opposition to proposed legislation.

Others contend that programs to reduce fertility rates here slightly should alone be sufficient to stabilize the population soon enough to avert disaster. This could likely be brought about through a diversion of less than 1% of the military budget to media campaigns and family planning services. In any case, at present we are barely addressing the problem in any way. We’re doing a smidgen more to address consumption levels, but woefully little there as well.

It’s easy enough to see that to reduce resource consumption we need to do more in familiar areas such as energy conservation while we commit much more to clean, renewable energy sources. Less obvious to most, and sounding like blasphemy to many, is the suggestion that we need to move away from the endless-growth imperative which dominates the corporate world. It’s a prime driver of our increasing ecological footprint. Our best bet may lie in aiming for for a healthy steady state economy.

We can do our part locally by ceasing activities such as the building of subdivisions which only accommodate population growth while encouraging our automobile dependency. If we do not take such actions now, if large scale programs are not soon initiated on national and global levels, our children and grandchildren may well be faced, at the least, with a markedly lower standard of living than we now enjoy. Perhaps more likely, they will be forced to deal with profoundly troubling social and environmental events resulting from ecological collapse. That is precisely the alarm Jeffrey Sachs is sounding. In his words, such a collapse is “the central challenge we face on the planet.” It’s time we recognize it.

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For an authoritative, highly readable discussion of the ideas in this essay, I recommend the book Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

[1] On a positive note, the populations of some European countries have very recently come close to stabilizing or have actually stabilized. It’s a good step, but no credible projections see any similar stabilization for world population any sooner than about 2075. By then, world population is likely to have grown from the current 6.5 billion to about 8.9 billion according to the United Nations’s best guess, their medium scenario (large PDF). (It could range as high as 10.6 billion. or as low as 7.4 billion according to the high and low scenarios respectively.) Note that those projections are, of necessity, based on an assumption of no ecological collapse intervening before 2075. No meaningful projection could otherwise be made. The risk of such a collapse is a matter apart from the U.N.’s projections. The projections, moreover, may be optimistic.

“Growth is madness!” Image source: Rama

In the first two parts of this article we began to connect sprawl with its primary root causes: population growth and growth in per capita land consumption. Population growth, of course, drives much more than sprawl. It has combined in recent decades with increased per capita resource consumption (of which per capita land consumption is a part) to bring about the worst human-caused environmental losses ever seen. Why then have the U.S. and other countries not taken decisive steps to address population growth and resource consumption levels? [1]

A corporate culprit
The answer is complex, but we can zero in with confidence on portions of it. The common phrase, “follow the money” is apt when looking for some of the key social forces enabling growth of population and growth of resource consumption to continue unabated in many countries. (more…)

Having attended the recent League of Women Voters (LOWV) sponsored debate on growth in Mount Vernon, I thought I’d simply list a few key points concerning what I heard there.

1) Though Don Cell’s piece in the Sun leading into the debate may have given some the impression the event would feature pro-growth and anti-growth panelists, it really featured proponents of two different kinds of growth: conventional suburban growth (Rick Elliot and Richard Snavely) and thoughtful growth informed by principles of New Urbanism (Dick Peterson). The remaining panelist (Gretchen Sutherland) voiced support mainly for a new road between the Stonebrook development and the North side of town.
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Image source: The Sustainable Scale Project

Part I of this article offered a snapshot of Boulder’s open space acquisition program. I suggested that an understanding of any such effort to fight sprawl ultimately connects with larger issues such as population growth and per capita resource consumption. The work of Boulder residents, Al Bartlett and Bob Cohen provides a look at these issues, their interconnections and how they deepen our understanding of sprawl and other needless and destructive “development” such as that which we see today in Mount Vernon and Lisbon.

Let’s learn from a sprawl fighting pioneer
I mentioned in a recent post Al Bartlett’s famous talk, Arithmetic, Population and Energy. (Go there to learn about the talk’s history.) It’s one of the best sources for a clear, concise introduction to the problem of continued growth. In this case, the growth in question is both population growth and growth in our per capita resource consumption. They are, after all, the two leading culprits in the growth problems we face. Working together, they magnify the problems with which we’re dealing. And lest we lose sight of the focus of this website, we have to recognize that population growth and growth in per capita land consumption (an example of increasing per capita resource consumption) are the primary root causes of sprawl.
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Open space acquisition gets the job done. Image source: City of Boulder

Some weeks ago I promised an article on the “big picture.” I had in mind something highlighting the links between needless sprawl, broader problems such as environmental degradation, and the primary root causes of these problems: population growth and excessive per capita consumption of finite resources.

A trip to Boulder, Colorado last week did much to bring the big picture into perspective. I went there, in part, to observe directly the current results of city’s open space acquisition program. Initiated by local citizens in the early ’70s, and continuing today, it has ringed the city with open land, closed to development. I was curious to see how, some 35 years from its inception, it relates to the town and surrounding communities. Just as importantly, I was eager to meet two residents who have long been involved in addressing not only Boulder’s growth issues, but also all the broader issues discussed here as well.

Doing what it takes
Comparing today’s Boulder and its neighboring communities with the way they were 25 years ago highlights the benefits of a good open space acquisition program while simultaneously demonstrating the insatiable appetite of suburban sprawl. The suburbs and towns north of Denver have sprawled beyond belief in the last few decades. Twenty five years ago the drive from Denver to Boulder meant about 30 minutes through undeveloped, open land. Signs along the highway pointed to Boulder’s small town neighbors such as Broomfield and Louisville, but they were little seen from the road, existing as separate, distinct small towns unto themselves. Today they’ve sprawled to the highway, crossed it, and now appear as one nearly continuous suburban belt from Denver, almost to Boulder. Striking, however, is the expanse of open land you see when you come over the rise outside Boulder. The city’s open space acquisition program has preserved just enough land That Boulder retains an identity separate from the fast growing neighbors now surrounding it.
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I’ve just returned from a trip to Colorado where I had a first hand look at the results of Boulder’s pioneering open space aquisition program and spoke with two residents who have grappled for years with the issues we deal with here. I’ll be posting a multi-part article about that in the coming days. For now, given the recent passing of Coretta Scott King, it seems appropriate to post a few words on overpopulation from Martin Luther King Jr.:

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

Image source: hubbertpeak.com

I recently offered suggestions for what to read if you read only one book or one article on the topics covered here. But some may prefer listening to reading. Well, for you I suggest Albert Bartlett. I quoted Dr. Bartlett a few days ago, and have done so previously. But I’ve not introduced his work here in any detail. Time to fix that.

Al Bartlett, physics professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, and a former national president of the American Association of Physics Teachers, is one of the clearest thinkers on issues of population growth, sustainability, and resource consumption. He makes his points with solid logic, often bolstered by simple arithmetic, such that they’re nearly irrefutable.
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The Zovanyi article I featured in the last post has a brief passage on the language those in “growth management,” and increasingly those in the growth industry itself, use to justify continued needless and harmful growth:

Spokespersons for the growth management movement affix a number of adjectives to growth in order to justify its continuance. They speak of “inevitable, normal, reasonable, proper, realistic, sensible, responsible, and legitimate growth.” They also refer to “balanced growth,” arguing that a balance can be achieved between ongoing growth and environmental protection without compromising either.

Don’t question it; it’s “inevitable.”
These kinds of terms aim to legitimize growth, assuaging our concerns about the harm it does. Most of them are misleading or, when paired with “growth,” become oxymoronic. “Inevitable growth,” for instance, is usually a complete fabrication. It suggests growth simply can’t be stopped. That’s obviously ridiculous. And given the current state of our natural environment, “responsible growth” is an oxymoron.
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