It was forty years ago today,
Donella Meadows taught the band to play
They've been going in and out of style
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile.
So may I introduce to you
The act you've known for all these years,
Donella Meadows' Limits to Growth.
.... Well, truthfully, it was forty years ago on March 1, but close enough.
This book, which sold over ten million copies in various languages, was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits. Forty years later, the planet continues to face many of the same economic, social, and environmental challenges as when the book was first published. Suitably, the event has spawned a number of retrospectives. The most fulsome occurred at the Smithsonian where the Club of Rome sponsored Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet. Among the presentations were the following:
Dennis Meadows It is too late for sustainable development
Jørgen Randers Lessons of forty years of promoting limits to growth
Lester Brown World on the Edge
Doug Erwin Biodiversity: past, present and future
Richard Alley Climate change and energy; challenges and opportunities
Neva Goodwin Labor’s declining share and future quality of life
Panel discussion moderated by Eva Pell, Under Secretary for Science, Smithsonian Institution
The full nine hour program -- including 10 minutes watching the audience mill about before the first presentation -- is archived at the above link.
For those who would like their celebration served up in a more time efficient manner, journey on over to Resilience Science where Garry Peterson has two interesting posts: Forty Years of Limits to Growth and Paul Gilding talks about Limits to Growth which includes Gilding's recent Ted Talk.
Malthusians are multiplying like rabbits. They’re everywhere. In respectable Western society you can’t swing a bat without hitting a Malthus-inspired misery guts. Yet while many of them are happy to talk openly about the plague of people making Gaia sick, some don’t consider themselves Malthusians at all. There are old-style Malthusians who doom-monger about frenzied fecundity in the dusty Over There, and newer Malthusians-in-denial who never, ever use the words ‘population’ and ‘control’ in succession, yet who still claim that humanity’s consumption habits threaten to bring about eco-doom.
Either way, the Malthusian attitude – the idea that every problem we face is a product of our temerity to try to live beyond nature’s means – is rampant today, whether it labels itself Malthusianism or something less likely to get people’s backs up. So to help you spot Malthusian thinking in its many guises in the year ahead, as we welcome the seven billionth human being, spiked offers this guide to the myriad of modern-day Malthusians.
The article then goes on to describe a variety of different flavors of Malthusianism: Unreconstructed, celebrity, psycho, feminist and green (complete with cute photos caricaturing the various categories).
Andrew Revkin, in Deconstructing a Bestiary of Malthusian ‘Miserabilists’, delivers an email Q and A which reveals to O'Neil to be considerably more sensible than the populist characterization one constructs from the article. More interesting, to me, however, was Revkin's take on the significance of a particular type of person -- an educated and networked individual -- over population in general in recasting the cornucopian viewpoint.
Q.
What’s your take on my recent dissection of Julian Simon’s “ultimate resource” thesis?
I don’t argue against more minds = more innovation and a faster route out of poverty.
But I also see no implicit “need” for more people (again, I’m not a Malthusian, just noting a potentially extraneous element of the “cornucopian” argument).
What’s needed is more minds that are educated and — in the sense Matt Ridley describes so well — networked.
I’m cheering for more education and access to information, not more (or less) babies except by choices made ideally by informed, educated [couples]. A.
Well, I am not pro-natalist; I don’t think the Earth needs a certain number of people. I am simply opposed to any controls or coercion whatsoever in the realm of reproductive choice. Often the flip side to Malthusianism is natalism, the idea that we need more people in order to do A, B and C. Both of these outlooks are based on a demographic obsession, and my belief is that we should move away from understanding our problems as demographic towards appreciating that they are social.
For those interested, here is Matt Ridley's TED Talk 'When Ideas have Sex'
Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues, in an article in BioScience, have posed a fundamental question: Why is average human well-being improving globally, despite resource depletion and degradation of ecosystems?
The question comes from the juxtaposition of two different data sets. On the one hand, there is good evidence, from the UN human development index (shown at the left) that the average quality of life for individuals, irrespective of where they live, has increased over the past 35 years.
On the other hand, the influential Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and a variety of other studies of the biosphere have concluded that the capacity of ecosystems to produce many services for humans is now low.
These studies are often characterized as suggesting that the humanity's ecological footprint has surpassed the carrying capacity of the biosphere. If this is the case, why is quality of life continuing to rise?
The study assesses four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being.
The findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. A tabular summary of the findings is shown below. For better viewing, click on the figure to expand it to full screen.
The article goes on to argue that, although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services. To this end, they propose four research areas to help achieve this goal: 1) how ecosystem services produce multiple aspects of human well-being, 2) ecosystem service synergies and trade-offs, 3) technology for enhancing ecosystem services, and 4) forecasting the provision of and demand for ecosystem services.
The project has two major components. The first looks at changes to the biosphere in an attempt to identify key planetary boundaries, that is "human-determined values (of key ecological variables) set at a “safe” distance from a dangerous level" such that major tipping points will be avoided and the biosphere will continue to function more or less as it currently does.
The image at the left summarizes the findings from this portion of the study: 1) the group identifies 10 key ecological variables (climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. represented by the slices of the pie), 2) defines a 'safe' level for each variable (represented by the green region) and 3) compares the current measures for each variable (red regions) to the save level. The study concludes that for three variables (climate change, biodiversity loss and nitrogen cycling) we have already crossed the planetary boundary.
Second, Rockstrom argues that humanity is putting the planet into a “quadruple squeeze” through pressures of human growth and inequality, climate change, ecosystem loss, and the problem of surprise – rapid tipping points.
It is interesting to compare this analysis with that provided by Tad Homer-Dixon in The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon contends that five "tectonic stresses" are accumulating deep underneath the surface of today's global order:
energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor societies;
environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth's atmosphere.
Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind's master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself — becomes far harder.
The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities. Interaction among the tectonic stresses and multipliers, according to Homer-Dixon, increases the possibility of unexpected and potentially catastrophic 'synchronous failure', a concept very similar to Perrow's characterization of a system accident.
Comparison shows a substantial amount of similarity in the two. With the exception of Homer-Dixon's emphasis on energy, they focus on the same factors: demographic, economic, environmental/ecological and climatic stresses and the importance of thresholds and surprise. Each, however, extends the analysis of the other in new and important directions. Thus, the Planetary Boundaries provides details on the entire range of key ecological operations necessary for viable operation of the biosphere; a topic not covered in as much detail by Homer-Dixon. Similarly, Homer-Dixon provides substantial additional insight on trends within human social systems that will affect our ability to implement the changes necessary to live within the planetary boundaries. Specifically, he adds the multipliers of globalized transportation and communication networks and the redistribution of power resulting from the proliferation of cheap weapons to the shared concern for economic inequality.
In short, the two present complementary rather than competing accounts.
I'm a big fan of the TED talks and, in particular, Hans Rosling's presentations based on the software (Gapminder) he developed to display and analyze global change through time. In his most recent talk, Rosling makes the paradoxical observation that the world's population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years -- and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth.
I like this talk for two reasons. First, Rosling's earlier presentations tended to focus on changes associated with the emergence of Asian economies and underemphasized the lack of change in Africa. This talk directly addresses that omission. Second, most current discussions of the planet's future focus on the dual challenges of climate change and energy. While these are certainly real issues, they overlook the continuing importance of population growth as a source of environmental strain. Rosling's talk makes the provocative point that the ecological footprint of the least developed nations will necessarily increase through time -- either because of increased numbers or because of the increased levels of economic development necessary for them to transition to a condition of reduced child mortality and, hence, reduced pressure for large families.
However, I'm not as optimistic as Rosling. At the end of the talk he presents the west as becoming the foundation of a new, more equitable, global economic distribution. I'm not convinced that the dominant western nations (read the US) are as willing to embrace that vision as is Rosling's native Sweden. Given that continued global economic growth is environmentally unsustainable, America's two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage philosophy, coupled with the country's military might, could just as easily be used to insure that the US continues to get more than its share.
Energy Bulletin has posted an article by Albert Bates on Ecosystem Modeling. This segment looks at carrying capacity and responses to energy declines. The five types of ecosystem modeling featured are:
1. no discontinuity: the population and carrying capacity increase together; temporary shortages are quickly resolved by resource substitution;
2. sigmoid response: the ecosystem has a clear signal that a limit has been reached, curbs its consumption of resources, and population growth goes down;
3. oscillating overshoot: signals are unclear or confused; the population continues to grow and over-consume, overshooting multiple limits over a relatively short period; each period of overshoot leads to a crash, then a resumption of growth and overshoot;
4. hard crash (for lack of a better term): there are no clear signals of limits, the population continues to overshoot until a crash happens and there is no avenue for recovery;
5. catabolic collapse: This is John Michael Greer's scenario of a long period of decline, a stepwise descent into a lower-energy system. The authors confirm that this is a very likely scenario and has been predicted by other energy experts:
After reading John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent, we added a fifth type to the CAT scenarios — catabolic collapse. Once more, the signals are not recognized because the reality of the problem challenges the core beliefs of the dependent organization, such as a classical economics that admits of no limit in supply as long as there is demand. Greer postulates that overshoot may not follow a straight linear decline but rather may vacillate between plunges and temporary states of repose, using up “banked” resources that are retasked and recycled. The descent curve resembles a stair-step, arguably the experience of the global economy since peak production of liquid fossil fuels and their substitutes was reached in the 2006 to 2008 period.
