Century of Challenge

 As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to an end, humanity is faced with the most challenging century in our history. Our success as a species has allowed us to overpopulate our planet at enormous costs to our environment, our natural resources, our political stability and our companion species. Some if not all of these problems will become crises before this century is over, and our present societal and technological preparedness for them will have to be improved before we can successfully deal with them.

Dr. Henry Kendall, 1990 Nobel Laureate for physics, said, “If we don't halt population growth with justice and compassion, it will be done for us by nature, brutally and without pity.” According to statistics from the World Bank, the world’s population more than doubled between 1960 and 2005: from 3.0 billion to 6.7 billion. That’s an increase of 121% in just 45 years. Using the 2000 population of 6.1 billion as a starting point and extrapolating that rate of increase we can expect the world’s population to increase by more than 260% during this century, reaching a staggering 16 billion people by 2099.

The mainstream media barely mentions overpopulation these days, but a little thought will reveal it as the principal cause of many if not most of our serious concerns for the future. What were considered dire population predictions made in the middle of the last century are coming to pass, and most of the people of today’s world seem to be ignorant of the problem or in a state of denial. Focusing on energy shortages, global warming, or political and economic upheavals while ignoring overpopulation is like trying to cut the tops of the weeds in a garden while leaving the roots.

Today’s attitude toward global warming is very similar to the prevalent attitude toward overpopulation in the middle of the 20^th century: a dogged belief that the problem is some sort of conspiratorial invention or at the very least is being overstated by over-enthusiastic scientists. Facts are dismissed as inconclusive and evidence is evaporated by rationalization.

One idea that is ridiculed by many is the increase in storm strength due to increased temperatures. As can be seen from the graph, data from the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) shows not only a very marked increase in the frequency of hydrometeorological disasters, but a noteworthy increase in geological and biological disasters as well. The increase in biological disasters can very likely be attributed to increased population, and the small increase in geological disasters may be an anomalous “blip”. The dramatic increase in hydrometeorological disasters, however, begs for an explanation, and global warming is the most likely one.

For the last half century, most of the developed world has dedicated vast resources toward improving the quality of our environment with many good results. However, many heavily-populated underdeveloped areas of the world are becoming more and more industrialized, and the world-wide use of the personal automobile is on the rise. According to Chinese government statistics, car sales in China increased by 80% between 2002 and 2003, and China, the world’s most populace country, has become the world’s fastest-growing market for the automobile.

Because much of the undeveloped world has already overextended their agricultural potential, their only hope for development is industrialization. The industrial development itself, the resulting life-style changes, and the increased consumption in this heavily-populated part of the world all add up to much more pollution for an already overloaded environment.

The dependence of modern society on petroleum is astounding. We immediately think of fuel and energy when we think of oil, but it is also essential for the agricultural methods needed to feed a growing population and for the manufacture of most of our consumer goods. According to a 2007 report by British Petroleum the world has enough oil for another forty years. Some consider that date too optimistic, but if the world’s oil supply runs out by 2050, unless there are drastic steps taken the end of the oil age will find us woefully unprepared.

At any rate, before oil runs out, we will reach a tipping point at which oil will begin to become a scarce commodity. A former vice president of British Petroleum, Colin Campbell, believes the production of easily-extracted oil peaked in 2005 and that oil will become scarce as early as 2011. Others predict a later peak, but most of their predictions are for the first quarter of this century. The difficulty in making an accurate prediction is the uncertainty of the increasing demand from developing countries. How severely and in what ways scarce oil will affect our world economy and our societies is a troubling question.

The increasing irresponsibility shown by our politicians and the leaders of our economic institutions is a subject of much of today’s news. The usual approach is to condemn our elected and appointed officials and denigrate their character. The truth of the matter is that a society’s leaders are reflections of the society itself, and, in the west at least, our societies are becoming more and more amoral.

Post-modern thought resists the idea of absolute truth, and suggests that morality is a relative thing, that it has a different meaning for each individual. This line of thought has its underpinnings in modern physical sciences where the uncertainties of the quantum world, the discoveries of mysteries like dark matter and dark energy, and the appealing but uncertain ideas put forth by new theories in physics and cosmology leave the layman unsure of former certainties. Even the number of dimensions of the space we occupy is brought into question. Whatever the cause, amorality is the next logical step from the rejection of absolute truth, and as Darwin might say, morality has survival value for societies and civilizations.

Because of humanity’s need for more space for things like farm land, cities, and roads, we are taking over the habitat of our companion species. Meanwhile, the rate of species extinctions is approaching the same rate experienced during the mass extinctions of 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs and many other species died off. Of the estimated 10 to 30 million different species on earth, scientists tell us that each year as many as 50,000 become extinct. New species are emerging, but not nearly enough to make up for the loss.

Isolated attempts to save the snail darter or the spotted owl do little to seriously impact the problem. A world that depends on bio-diversity to maintain itself must take a serious look at the causes of the extinctions. It seems clear that a change in the way humans use the world’s resources is necessary for a meaningful reversal.

Pessimism gains us nothing; critical thought, however, gains us much. Many strides have already been made that mitigate our world’s situation, and nature will give us the necessary motivation to continue to work for solutions. The human species adapted to the ice ages without so much as a wheel. After the fall of the Roman Empire, humanity survived the political and cultural void of the dark ages. The irresponsible and irreverent generation of the 1920s was able to pull the world through and out of the great depression of the 1930s. As recently as the early 1940s when Hitler’s armies looked unstoppable, the world provided the ingenuity and the young men and women necessary to preserve western civilization. We certainly have reason to hope that humanity will meet these new challenges as well.