The Small Town Project

The White House needs a subscription to Scientific American. The gap between science and society is profound and extraordinarily dangerous. — Jeffrey D. Sachs

In the recent essay, Will We Avert Ecological Collapse?, I led off with mention of Jeffrey Sachs’s keynote address at the State of the Planet conference at Columbia University. As as follow up, and because it’s really a great overview of the ecological challenges we face today, along with discussion of what we need to do to meet those challenges, I recommend listening to (or reading) Sachs’s actual address. This is the sort of material that can give you a general idea of the ecological issues we’re dealing with and the actions we need to take, without digging seriously into the scientific literature or reading whole books on the subject. (Though if a book is what you want, I can’t recommend highly enough Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update!)

It’s worth staying with the address till the end. Sachs does not deal with the the question of population growth, for instance, until late in the talk. When he does, however, he is forthright and, in my view, accurate.

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.

The city council of Colorado Springs chose this week to head farther down the unsustainable path of growth. They needed to fill the council seat vacated by Richard Skorman, a council member considered to be an “open-space advocate” and, as best I can tell, perhaps the only council member regularly to question conventional endless growth policies. They heard three minute presentations from applicants and voted on their choice. Rather than choosing someone with views similar to Skorman’s they selected someone whose views are expected to be completely in line with the current pro-growth council.
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I recently received an email from Mark Retzlaff of the Portland Peace and Justice Center concerning their Sustainable Energy in Motion Bicycle Tours.

As I understand it, the Peace and Justice Center is currently an evolving idea. They hope to have a phsyical space in the future. But their first program is well underway . (more…)

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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Below is a recent letter to the editor of the Denver newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. It’s from Dave Gardner of Save the Springs in Colorado Springs. It’s an excellent response to the typical growth industry rhetoric, this time concerning “listless” population growth. It reminds me of our recent mayor’s comments to the Sun that Mount Vernon had been “stagnant” until he began pushing for residential development, leading to today’s “vibrant housing market” giving us “the kind of growth we need.”

I recommend Save the Springs as a great informational resource for those interested in pursuing further a rational approach to growth.

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DEPENDING ON POPULATION GROWTH FOR PROSPERITY IS A DEAD-END

This is a letter I sent to the Rocky Mountain News in response to a story about Colorado population statistics. The first paragraph was published in the News on January 2. I thought you might like to read it in its entirety. Feel free to pass it on to anyone who could benefit from some critical thought about population growth and economic development.

In his story about population growth (Colorado ranks 11th in growth, 12/22/05), reporter John Aguilar did our citizens a disservice by labeling our state’s most recent 1.4% annual growth rate as “another year of listless population growth.” [EMPHASIS ADDED] Give Mr. Aguilar a calculator, please! If our population growth were to remain at this listless level (its expected to rise), our state’s population would double to over 9 million by 2055, and would hit 18 million around the turn of the century. A more likely scenario? This doubling will happen in just 38 years if we keep up the average growth rate of the past five years. That would mean 37 million people in the state of Colorado by 2119, and 74.5 million just 38 years later. That will require us to do much more than suck Lake Powell dry. We cannot build enough dams or seed enough clouds to supply water to that population. This listless rate of population growth is taking us nowhere we want to go!

An interesting quote in the story came from state demographer Elizabeth Garner: “There just haven’t been the jobs to bring people here. This underscores the simple truth that we cannot create or recruit jobs in a vacuum. If we steal jobs from other states, we are stealing residents from those states, too. People will move to where the jobs are. So job recruiting and creation is actually causing our state’s population to swell. We should be careful what we wish for. If we are to act responsibly toward the future of our children and grandchildren, we should base our prosperity on more innovative means of economic development. Traditional, archaic economic development will ultimately cost our state billions and billions of dollars due to its impact as a population-growth machine on our natural resources, environment and infrastructure.

Dave Gardner
Founder & Chair, SaveTheSprings

A sustainable approach to our environment & quality of life - for current & future generations
Visit us at www.savethesprings.org

For lots of topics, there’s often more information on the Web than you can ever hope to round up through conventional methods. Blog “carnivals” provide an easy, one-click way to approximate such a roundup. A blog carnival is like a travelling magazine or digest offering an array of articles, grouped under some theme, each “issue” hosted by a different blogger. There are carnivals of topics ranging from healing to literature.

And there’s the Carnival of the Green. It features a weekly collection of “green” topics from around the blogosphere. I’m happy to report that a post from the Small Town Project is included in the current carnival, hosted by Suhit Anantula.

Each carnival lists the host for the next installment. Or get the whole list from City Hippy, one of the carnival’s founders. For a clearing house of blog carnivals try Blog Carnival.

Happy new year!

I was browsing through the New Yorker this evening and noticed two ads which I suspect would not be there if it weren’t for impending peak oil. The first is from Chevron (p. 9), urging us to conserve energy. It includes this note of concern:

Because of surging economies in the developing world and continued growth among the industrialized nations, global energy use is soaring. As a result, supplies are tight. Prices are rising. And energy users are calling for viable alternatives.

Methinks Chevron is worried. I wonder how long it will be before we see “peak oil” or a similar term show up in an oil company ad.

Three pages later is a Ford ad touting their planned production of 250,000 hybrids a year by 2010 – something one would think they and other companies wouldn’t bother with if they didn’t need to do something to save oil, and fast.

Don’t get me wrong. I support these steps toward energy conservation. But we need to look, as well, at some hard questions, not the least of which is why on earth we would build suburbs with peak oil looming. That is one mammoth misstep in any community’s planning in 2005, and is a step we need to rethink before we regret it.

4/12/06 - Note: Since writing the following essay, I’ve read additional credible sources which dismiss “peak oil” as a flawed notion. Some experts believe we will not encounter serious problems with regard to oil supplies before the end of this century or even later. Ironically, that may make oil even more of a problem. As Jeffery Sachs’s pointed out in a recent address to the fourth biennial State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, continued ready availability of oil only gives us more opportunity to damage the earth’s ecological systems through fossil fuel consumption. As Sachs put it, “We’re going to be using lots of fossil fuels and putting an enormous amount of carbon in the atmosphere with all of the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, so we have to find a way to de-carbonize our energy.”

That said, I believe this two part essay still gives an adequately balanced overview of the peak oil discusssion. If I feel otherwise in the future I’ll post revisions or a new essay.

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She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns — Joni Mitchell

It’s suicidal to build suburban subdivisions with peak oil looming. Image source: amazon.com/Richard Heinberg

In Part I of this essay, we reviewed the range of opinion on peak oil. In the long term, the end of easy and cheap oil, will be a huge issue. Fossil fuels are finite in supply, and peak oil, no matter its form or intensity, will necessitate worldwide fundamental changes in energy production and usage. That much is beyond debate.

We boiled the peak oil debate down to a couple of safe assumptions: Peak oil will have at least moderate economic consequences, and at least a moderate impact on our lifestyles. So while its historic impact will be tremendous, we can hope to luck out and see our lives as individual citizens affected only modestly. For our purposes on the Small Town Project, we needn’t go beyond this “moderate” assumption.
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