Overshooting Earth’s Boundaries: An Interview with Bill Rees
worldsensorium.com
worldsensorium.com
It was half full.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0a834e8c-en/index.html?i...
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2...
The limits within which disequilibriums utterly undo the recognizable modern world are very close and indeed some have possibly been passed already.
Mass death measured in 10s of millions and consequent even more massive migration is likely within our lifetimes and not particularly unlikely within the next 10 years.
The last few years have awoken many Americans to the fact that their particular locale is not, as many assumed or had the luxury of not considering at all, immune from or refuge from the direct and indirect consequences of such disequlibirum.
Will rich programmers be the first to die, or have our lives destroyed, or our communities?
Mostly not.
But we'll get there too.
If the biosphere is the problem, then we should work to improve and expand the biosphere. Set aside land but also create new habitable land by greening deserts, expanding islands and pushing back shoreline to reclaim land. We've done this before, we're currently doing and we should do more of it.
If habitable space for human occupation is the trouble then we should come up with novel ways to occupy the same valuable land with more people and provide more space to each person. We do this by constructing tall buildings, we should do more of that instead of having absurd limitations on building height in many areas. We should also innovate and build more things underground, the first obvious thing to move underground is transportation but there's no reason we couldn't locate buildings that consume a lot of square footage there too and in so doing free up the surface level e.g. sports arenas and convention centres.
We could also innovate in the areas of mining and agriculture. Agriculture especially is currently very wasteful. It takes place in a completely uncontrolled environment that results in many inefficiencies. With sufficient power from a nuclear plant that activity could be moved indoors with a combination of natural and artificial light and heat enabling that land to be used year round for crops, increasing yields by extending daylight hours and reducing evaporation of water and wasted water that sinks too low into the ground or runs off which would greatly reduce water consumption and prevent wastage and side effects of fertilizers. It would also greatly reduce the need for pesticides while reducing loss of crops to pests. For mining there are proposed technologies such as extracting minerals from sea water or ocean bed mining.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Sometimes referred to as Sinclair's Law. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
Attributed to many people, including Kenneth Boulding, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/11/exponential/
1. They will be adapted to living in close contact with humans.
2. They will be dietary opportunists (since they must have had a latent ability to eat an extinct species' diet once it got freed up)
3. They will be small, since large animals can't live in the tiny, divided-up parcels of land that we create with roads and fences.
Therefore they will be what we consider pests! Enjoy living in your rat and roach infested world, fellow humans, you've selected them to inherit the earth from wolves, lions and eagles. :/
While in a reductionist sense of course there’s no third option. But there’s also a huge amount of efficiency to be had and therefore a great deal of “neoliberal” growth to be had coupled with reduction of environmental impact before we hit limits that are truly hard. There are signs that population growth is slowing, and in some places reversing. While I generally agree with regulation and management of externalities I think a good outcome is achievable by simply adjusting how we measure growth away from pure economic activity and frame it in value and efficiency metrics.
I believe we will find a path that leads to this state within the boundaries of our environment and in a sustainable way. But it will be a rough road.
What has to change is the growth objective function. There is value improvement without economic growth. For instance an iPhone that is the same price and sold in the same quantity but has improved significantly is more valuable and useful than the prior model. Likewise as efficiencies in production kick in prices and economic activity overall can decrease while improving value. I think an efficiency and value metric rather than pure economic activity growth metrics would benefit us all and accelerate a sustainable development model, even one that’s neoliberal
Prior to ~100K years ago, humans didn't innovate. The toolkit was unchanged for > 1M years (at least the toolkit discovered by archeology). Then something changed, and the toolkit updated much more frequently.
Then the neolithic revolution, we "transcended" local food supplies via agriculture.
Then the "industrial revolution" (yes, it is debatable as a concept, but clearly the ability to sustain exponential growth in tech changed sometime after 1500) let us push past the bounds of muscle power.
So if we get another "revolution" that lets us somehow trancend the next thing, we might be ok.
OTOH, there are the classic experiments with bacteria in a closed petri dish, they eat everything and die.
So yes, there are real boundaries. Question is if we can innovate around them.
>the "industrial revolution" ... [transcended] muscle power
Except neither revolution really "transcends" the earlier limits, they just apply an ugly hack and then blithely ignore the accompanying consequences.
With agriculture we ignore (effectively "null pricing") the destruction of ecosystems. With industry we ignore the pollution from mining and burning.
It's precisely these side-effects (from earlier, supposedly "transcendent" innovations) that now pushes us beyond safe terrestrial boundaries.
We could strip mine the planet (subject to limits on waste heat), all eat bio-engineered yeast or whatever.
We couldnt even, without external dependencies, support humans artificially in biosphere wtf makes you think we could do it on a planetary scale...
We might very well be capable of providing a minium set given enough energy at our disposal. Life might not be pretty etc. in the such a case, but that isn't the point here.
Also you presented it as 'we could just strip mine the world' lol, not exactly a nuanced take