End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?

End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth? Professor Anthony Barnosky Hadly Hadly overconsumption / population growth / dwindling resources / climate change / disease / contamination / storms / thirst / war … will the struggle to simply stay alive become humanity’s future rather than its past?What happens when vast population growth endangers the world’s food supplies? Or our water? Our energy needs, climate, or environment? Or the planet’s biodiversity? What happens if these all become critical at once? Just what is our future?In ‘End Game’, world-renowned scientists Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly draw on their work to explain the growing threats to humanity as the planet edges towards a resource war for remaining space, food, oil and water. And as they show, these wars are not the nightmares of a dystopian future but are already happening today. They explore the origins of Ebola in densely populated areas of south-eastern Guinea, witness raging fires in Yellowstone and Colorado and explain how drought-induced food shortages are already causing problems in the Sudan, Gaza Strip and Iraq. Finally, they ask: at what point will inaction become the break-up of the intricate workings of the global society?The planet is in danger now, but the solutions, as Barnosky and Hadly show, are still available. We still have the chance to avoid the tipping point and to make the future better. But this window of opportunity is closing fast and will shut within ten-to-twenty years. ‘End Game’ is the call we need. (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) Copyright (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2015 An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.williamcollinsbooks.com) Copyright © Anthony D. Barnosky and Elizabeth A. Hadly 2015 The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780007548156 Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007548163 Version: 2016-04-28 Dedication (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) To our parents, Emma & Michael Barnosky and Jane Grassman Hadly & William McKell Hadly, whose work to make a better world, each in their own way, made us who we are. And to our daughters, Emma and Clara, who carry on with the future. CONTENTS Cover (#u11a6ad2a-6ec1-57ce-b3d4-b891821b3abb) Title Page (#ulink_ed14315d-8b7d-5915-8eda-0e214c972f10) Copyright (#ulink_e5c2b8ce-2d51-5fe4-8a7b-28216758ce1d) Frontispiece (#litres_trial_promo) Dedication (#ulink_db493511-f9df-538d-85d5-199c1abac9c7) Introduction: The Journey (#ulink_ec945626-279c-5e79-b728-474fd866fd99) 1: Past or Future? (#ulink_d87949fe-c0dc-5be4-9f3b-6ca4dd8ac7e8) 2: People (#ulink_a97a6389-1503-52eb-ab1b-1d8a90a242af) 3: Stuff (#ulink_ea67a16c-601f-518a-a459-bf96191ac3a4) 4: Storms (#litres_trial_promo) 5: Hunger (#litres_trial_promo) 6: Thirst (#litres_trial_promo) 7: Toxins (#litres_trial_promo) 8: Disease (#litres_trial_promo) 9: War (#litres_trial_promo) 10: End Game? (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction The Journey (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) This is a story of a journey. Like most journeys, it started out as a personal quest, but for us it has also been a professional one. It began when we were young scientists, driven mostly by curiosity and looking for the next big adventure. We found adventures aplenty, because our jobs as palaeoecologists – people who study how our planet changes through time – took us to remote places all over the world. Along the way we fell in love and got married, and then the personal and professional adventures started inexorably to intertwine. We had one daughter, and a few months later got her a passport and hopped a plane to Australia. Then another daughter, same routine, but this time it was six weeks in Patagonia. By the time our kids were two-year-olds, they’d spent many nights in wilderness tents with us, buried their fingers in koala fur, been carried on our backs as we forded waist-deep rivers and stared down grizzly bears, and fallen sound asleep in their snugglies as we skied back-country trails. By the time they were fifteen, they had their own list of exploits: they’d hunkered down in their own tent as lions paced through camp, taught our graduate students the Latin names of various species, trapped rodents in Patagonia, faced off angry rattlers in the Oregon desert, and watched grapefruit-sized chicken-eating spiders lead around their hundreds of young on a dark Amazonian night. By now we’ve travelled to every continent in the world, save Antarctica; sometimes together, sometimes alone, sometimes with our daughters, sometimes not. All those trips were research expeditions as well as adventures, each of them undertaken to learn something about how nature worked in the places on which we hoped humans had not yet laid a heavy hand. And we did discover answers to some of the questions we were asking – like how animals respond to climate change that isn’t caused by people, what causes mass extinctions, how ecosystems are assembled, and how evolution works at the genetic level to keep species alive. But we also discovered that as the years went by and the personal and professional experiences added up, the questions we were asking ourselves began to change. From the personal perspective, the more different places we visited, the more they seemed the same in a very important respect: the values that people hold dear. Eventually we came to understand that the basic wants, needs and emotions that draw people together are much more deep-seated than those that separate cultures and countries. It didn’t matter whether we were with the native Inupiat in an Arctic fishing village, with an indigenous tribe in the jungle of Peru, with scientific colleagues in India, or with executives imbibing at a fancy hotel in one of the great cities of the world. Everyone seemed united in wanting a healthy, comfortable life, putting family and friends first, and in the joy they took in basic pleasures like a good meal, a good laugh, or a pleasant stroll through a pretty place. And without exception, no matter the religion, the country, the political views or the economic class, everyone wanted the best for their children, and hoped that as their sons and daughters grew up, the world would just get better and better. As we watched our own daughters grow up, listening to their own dreams and hopes, we realised that we were no different from anyone else in those respects. Adventure and curiosity were no longer the be-all and end-all; giving our kids, and everyone else’s, the future they deserve became much more important. And our lives in science began to change. The more we saw, the more our professional perspective shifted. At some point the individual expeditions came to seem more and more like beads on a string, each bead distinct, but when all were taken together, forming a pattern that was hard to miss. And the pattern was that the world was changing before our eyes, much faster than any past changes we were familiar with from our studies of the deep-time history of the planet. Much of our earlier work had revolved around climate change before people got in on the act, so we knew what pace and magnitude of warming temperatures could be considered normal in the planet’s history, and there was no doubt about it: what was happening today was way too much and way too fast. Likewise, we’d worked hard to figure out why species died out in the past, and what normal levels of biodiversity should be, both in terms of numbers of species and their genetic diversity. Again, the losses we were seeing now – from giant otters in Amazon lakes, to wild dogs in Africa, to amphibians in the Rocky Mountains – were way too many. We started to wonder, long and hard, about what exactly was driving the unusual and rapid changes that were happening all over the world. We knew, of course, the broad brush of the answer: people. The ecologists whose articles we had studied and who we now worked with on a daily basis were more senior than us, and had been publishing research about how people were changing the planet for decades. In some cases they had been reaching out and trying to spread that message to the world. But reading it in a scientific journal or book, or hearing about it in a professional presentation, didn’t resonate at the gut level as much as it should have. Yes, we knew we’d been born into a world that held fewer than three billion people, and that as we progressed through our lives and careers, that number had more than doubled. But like most people, we’d also grown up in a world of limited horizons that made it pretty hard to observe first-hand the connection between more people and planet-sized changes – Tony was born into a poor working-class family in small-town Colorado and never saw much else until well into his twenties, and Liz grew up as a military brat, moving from one army base to another every couple of years, each one looking very much like the next, albeit in many different states and different countries. But eventually we began to connect the dots from all the places we’d travelled to in our careers, and we saw the links between the added billions of people in our lifetime, and hunger, poverty and unhappiness. Through the years we also saw how it was getting harder and harder to find places that felt they hadn’t been changed in a big way by people. The haze from faraway cities or power plants or wildfires would often obscure our view, even when we thought we were in the middle of nowhere. On our plane journeys from one part of the world to the next, the features we saw on the landscape below were usually farms and pastures, unless they were barren desert, open ocean or rough mountainous terrain. On night-time flights, the lights from cities and highways seemed to spread out below us everywhere. When we started compiling some numbers, we knew why: almost 50 per cent of Earth’s land has been changed from forests and prairies to farms and pavement. That meant that each person on Earth requires about two acres of land, on average, to survive, given current diets, expectations and ways of doing business. We realised that the ratio of used land to people can’t keep up for very much longer, given how fast we’re adding human bodies to the world, and that we’ve already used up nearly all the good land. As more years went by, we did more research, and we found that the number of humans and their domestic livestock on Earth now is about ten times higher than the planet could support before we – people – discovered how to increase its carrying capacity for big animals, including us, by mining fossil fuels from the ground. We watched HIV/AIDS take the world by storm, and realised that new diseases can, and do, crop up to kill us, and can change things as basic as people’s sex lives. We went into the jungles of Costa Rica and found out that as far as disease goes, HIV/AIDS is not unusual in being transmitted from wild animals to humans, and that such transfer of disease happens more frequently as more people, looking for places to live and make a living, take over rapidly diminishing areas of wild lands. All of these things made us wonder, just what was the future up against? It didn’t help that in recent years we read seemingly ever more often about conflicts and genocides that were springing up around the world, many of them triggered by scarcities in such basics as food, water or oil. We knew about wars from our growing up – in elementary school, duck-and-cover drills, which amounted to hiding your head so you wouldn’t see the nuclear bombs fall before they vaporised you, were an ingrained part of the routine. We dodged that bullet, but not the Vietnam War – Liz’s dad did two tours of duty, and our generation lost friends there. Nobody wants that for their children. And then came the ever-present crises in Africa, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the USSR, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, recurrent Israel–Palestine tensions, and now the rebel Islamic State. Was the world going into a downhill slide? We grasped that, strange as it would have seemed to us when we started out as palaeoecologists, the kinds of data we had spent decades examining held the answer to that question. At that point our lives and careers, as lives and careers do, took an unlikely turn. About the time we were pondering the magnitude of current global changes and how they compared with those past, along came one of the most exciting and revolutionary realisations in ecology in recent years: that what we like to think are gradual environmental changes in fact turn into sudden ones that we don’t expect. In popular parlance, these are tipping points, and they happen because, in all walks of life, gradual change accumulates slowly until it hits a certain threshold, and then all hell breaks loose. We saw that in our own lives, when we fell in love – a gradually developing friendship, and then, boom, things suddenly changed forever, luckily in a good way. The sudden changes can just as easily be bad, though – like the death of a loved one, which also changes lives forever. On a larger scale, ecologists and theoreticians now know that sudden tipping points are not unusual in biological systems of all scales – think about a lake going overnight from clear, clean water to green algae scum, once the water reaches a certain temperature and nutrient load. As we reflected on our palaeoecological research, we realised that we’d actually seen the entire Planet Earth hit tipping points before. Times like sixty-six million years ago, when an asteroid struck the planet and acted as the coup-de-gr?ce in killing three out of every four of the species known at the time. Or twelve thousand years ago, when the one–two punch of natural climate change and growing human populations wiped out half the big-bodied animals on Earth, at the same time that it went from a cold planet largely covered in ice to the warmer one we know today, which then fostered the growth of human civilisation. Those past tipping points made us sit up and take notice. Since it has happened before, could Earth be headed for yet another planetary tipping point? And if so, just what does that mean for our children, and for theirs? Or, for that matter, given the lightning speed at which we have seen the world change, what does it mean for our own future? We’ve now spent a few years, along with many other scientists, trying to answer those questions. And what we’ve discovered has surprised us: first dismaying us, and then giving us hope. The dismay is that if we keep on with the way we’ve been doing things, it is inevitable that the world will soon tip into a permanent state that is worse than what we are used to now. That end game will not be one we want for ourselves, and certainly not one we want for our children. The hope comes from learning that there are feasible ways to change the future, heading it towards an end game with the outcome of a better life, a better world – but only if we, as in all of us, act fast. These things are what this book is about – our journey of discovery about ourselves, and about the planet we love. We hope that reading it will be a journey for you as well, one that ends in your own personal tipping point, where you comprehend that you really do have the power to change the world. 1 Past or Future? (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) Liz, in the Himalayas of Nepal, April 2012 It all happened pretty fast. One minute, I was sitting outside sipping my tea. The next, I was hunkered down in a cold, smoky hut, patching up a Tamang woman’s bloody scalp, which she was lucky to have at all, given the machetes that were swinging around. Like most activities around sundown in that part of the world, it was a race against time, because darkness was coming on fast, and candlelight just wasn’t going to be up to the task. When I had boarded the plane for Nepal a few days before, that kind of adventure was the last thing on my mind. I had set out with one of my Ph.D students, Katie Solari, to meet up with my Indian colleague, Uma, and her Nepali student, Nishma Dahal, in Kathmandu. Our four-woman crew was then going to head into the Himalayas to figure out which species of pika, a fluffy but short-eared cousin of rabbits, occupied which elevations in the world’s highest mountain range. We wanted that information in order to learn how the pikas are responding to the rampant climatic warming that is now heating up that part of the world, as a kind of bellwether for predicting how global warming will change wildlife in general. Pikas, it turns out, are the perfect natural experiment in that regard, because their physiology prevents them from tolerating warm temperatures. As warming climate causes mountain environments to heat up, the pikas move upslope, taking advantage of the fact that for every hundred metres of rise in elevation, temperature falls by a little less than 1°C. Our thought was that by tracking their upslope movement over a series of years, and performing genetic tests on them to see how the animals we trapped were related to each other, we could use the pikas as the proverbial canaries in the coalmine to help forecast Earth’s ecological future. Since we left Kathmandu, we’d been moving upslope at a much faster rate than the pikas, and we were glad of it. After hiking for two days we were above three thousand metres. The high mountain air felt fresh, if a little thin, after our time in the valley, where brick kilns and fires thickened and darkened the air with a blanket of dense smog. That was far behind and below us now, and we revelled in being in one of the world’s treasured landscapes, ascending through hillsides covered with startlingly vivid arrays of red, pink, white and purple rhododendrons. I scanned the forests for signs of the red panda, since we were in one of the last strongholds of the species. What caught my eye instead, though, was that there was no real forest understorey, and although the trees were straight and tall, all but the highest branches were gone, leaving no cover for birds, much less for red pandas. Just before reaching the ridgetop that day we met a striking Tamang girl who invited us to stay at her family’s teahouse overlooking the slopes where the red panda was said to reside. Her smile was warm, the afternoon was cold, and we did not hesitate about taking her up on her offer. We didn’t have any better options anyway. Despite the constant signs of humanity along the trail – trash everywhere, even the steepest slopes levelled into slivers of land to grow a few meagre crops – dwellings were few and far between. Our hosts’ hut was one of only two built on the narrow ridgeline, both doing double duty as homes and as teahouses for people like us. Outside each, the family matriarch was sitting in her Tibetan garb, knitting the woollen hats that are so popular among the trekkers who pass through. I shared my binoculars and field guide with a young boy in my hut’s family; he was tan from being outside, and ready with his smile. He pointed to the birds he knew in the guide, miming the places in the forest where they lived. I scrambled around the rocks near their small cabbage garden, looking for evidence of pikas, but didn’t find any. Nishma translated that the boy had not seen any for a while, and that he thought the weasels had eaten them all in the last couple of years. So I sipped my tea outside, reflecting on the day, waiting for the daily dinner of dal bhat (Nepali lentils and rice). That’s when the shrieks jerked me out of my reverie. All of a sudden mothers, fathers, kids, aunts, uncles and who knows who else – all the residents of the two houses – were pouring down the hill. The boy who had been so interested in my field guide had been caught stealing wood from a pile collected by the son of the other family, who had done all the hard work shimmying up the trees, cutting off branches as he climbed. The fight was on. Both boys swung their kukris (curved machetes) at each other. Their entire families – parents and children alike – joined in the fray, beating each other with sticks, pulling at braids, grabbing at clothes, scratching and screaming. All the while, the kukris kept swinging. At the end, all were bruised, some were bleeding, clothes were ripped and shoes were lost. While another trekker patched up the gash on the head of the matriarch from the other teahouse, the matriarch from ours asked me for medical help. Fist-sized clumps of her hair had been torn out, her face was cut, and large bumps had appeared on her head and brow. As I patched her up, the two families continued to hurl curses at each other. The violence in this spectacular, top-of-the-world setting was jarring – the wood they were fighting over was for our evening’s cook fire. For me, the pieces fell into place. Every day, young Tamang boys travel from higher, barren elevations down to the upper treeline to collect wood. That’s why we noticed as we climbed higher that all the low branches were gone. The trees were being stripped bare where they stood, leaving no cover for the red pandas, which ironically are a major lure for the trekkers, the profits from whom the Tamang rely on for the few things they have that they don’t take from the land – like mobile phones, and the small solar panels to charge them. The problem is, the land is starting to let them down. Or maybe it’s vice versa. For the days we worked in the Himalayas, we, through our Tamang hosts’ cooking, depended on the wood collected from those trees that were being stripped bare, the water that was syphoned from the melting glaciers above, the cabbage and potatoes grown in small family gardens, and the rice and lentils carried up the mountain on their backs. I had climbed above five thousand metres, and thought I had escaped the smog and chaos of the ‘modern world’. But what became all too apparent was that there is now no place clear of humanity’s impact. And that the farther you get from our creature comforts, the closer you live to the land, and the more apparent is our dependence on Earth’s natural resources. Even more of a wake-up call was seeing that where those human impacts get to be too much, you end up in the middle of a machete fight, the result of tensions that boil over as an inevitable byproduct of depleting what you need to stay alive. I was left with an uncomfortable question in my mind. Had I seen civilisation’s past in those mountains of Nepal, or had I caught a glimpse of the future? Judging by the trends of the last few decades, that machete fight, and what led to it, is all too plausibly the world of the future. What is now normal – not only in places we usually think of as economically underprivileged like Nepal, India and Africa, but in fact through most of the world – is a landscape and seascape that has been so changed by humanity that our life-support systems are teetering precariously on the brink of collapse. And in systems as complex as those that keep society ticking along in the way we’re now used to, collapse has a habit of sneaking up so stealthily that you’re blindsided. Suddenly you’re in the middle of a new normal, and suffering devastating consequences that are happening too fast to do anything about. In popular parlance, that’s known as hitting a tipping point. Things may seem to be changing gradually, or at face value even not at all, until you reach some critical threshold, and everything becomes different. Think, for example, of water heating up on the stove. The reason it seems a watched pot never boils is because you don’t observe any major changes until the water reaches a critical temperature, which (depending on the heat of the flame) can take a long time to happen. When the temperature does hit the boiling point (about 100°C, or 212°F, at sea level), however, instantly everything changes. Bubbles roil, and the water changes its state, turning into steam. Boiling water exemplifies what scientists mean when they talk about tipping points: a rapid change from an ‘old’ state of being to a new, very different state, caused by pushing the system past some important threshold value. The actual change from the old state to the new one is called a ‘critical transition’. Tipping points (or, if you want to sound like a scientist, critical transitions) are not confined to boiling water. At just about any scale and in any system you care to name, you can think of one. The egg gradually rolls towards the edge of the counter, until it drops over it and reaches its new state of being broken on the floor. A butterfly metamorphoses from a caterpillar, or a frog from a tadpole. The canoe rocks, then all of a sudden tips over and is upside down. Your car runs perfectly well, then one day it won’t start. Property values build up over decades, then crash in a year. For people too, tipping points are the rule rather than the exception. In fact, if you think about what happens to you and your loved ones, tipping points are the defining moments. A woman is pregnant for nine months, then in the space of minutes a baby is nursing at her breast. Tipping point. The baby grows, gradually learns to talk, walk, play, reason, and then all of a sudden hits puberty. Big tipping point. More gradual change through the teen years, young adulthood, and then that special someone comes along and two previously separate lives join together in marriage – once again, a tipping point. Gradually the two grow old together, accumulating their respective aches and pains as middle age gives way to the retirement years, then a fall breaks a hip. Another tipping point. And finally, of course, the biggest state-change of all, from life to death. The ubiquity of tipping points has prompted a great deal of research among theoreticians of late, which has made it very clear why living things tend to experience major changes in such fits and starts. Basically, it has to do with how many parts something is built of, and how those parts are connected to one another. The more parts there are, and the more intricate their connections, the greater the likelihood that the resulting system will remain stable for long periods of time. But by the same token in such systems, the greater the likelihood that when change does come, either by tweaking lots of parts simultaneously, or by damaging just one super-critical part, it will come fast, and it will hit hard, flipping the system from its ‘old normal’ to a ‘new normal’. These sorts of systems – with many intricately connected parts that influence each other – are called, not surprisingly, ‘complex systems’ in the jargon of science. Living things are extremely complex systems, composed as they are of millions of mutually interacting parts that are connected to each other in spaghetti-tangle ways. The scale of the complexity begins to boggle your mind when you realise that anything alive is actually built of many smaller-scale complex systems, separate entities in themselves, but connected together to form ever-larger and even more complex systems. Starting at the molecular level, for instance, DNA replication itself is a complex system that we are just barely beginning to get a working knowledge of. That, of course, is intimately dependent on the workings of, and at the same time influences, the slightly larger-scale complex systems that we call cells. And so it goes, with connections between cells, organs, individuals, groups of individuals, species, communities, and entire ecosystems. The human body has more cells of microbes than human cells; the complexity of our own body’s ecosystem is not remotely well understood. The most complex system of all is the global ecosystem, which is composed of all life on Earth, and the myriad ways that life forms interact with each other and with the inanimate environment around them (like air, water, soil, and so on). Which means that humans, being life forms ourselves, are not at all separate from the rest of the global ecosystem; on the contrary, we’re intimately embedded in it, just like every other animal (and plant, and microbe – it’s a long list). We count on it for such essentials as a place to live, air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink, and for comfort and solace. But there is no denying that, unlike other animals, our place in the global ecosystem has taken on an unusual role – because we now dominate it. So much so that, just like the flame heating that pot of water towards a boil, we have been inexorably pushing key pieces of our planetary life-support systems towards a tipping point. The tipping point we are pushing towards, however, differs from the boiling of water in an important respect. Once you cool steam, it returns to its previous state, liquid. By contrast, there is no going back once we cross the sort of threshold we’re marching towards, which is more like the one an egg crosses when it tips off the edge of the counter. People who study tipping points for a living have a name for crossing those thresholds of no return – the system is said to exhibit ‘hysteresis’. The resulting irreversible kinds of state-changes become more and more likely as the complex system gets, well, more and more complex. Intuitively, that makes a certain amount of sense. The more parts to a system, and the more interdependencies between those parts, the harder it is to get all the pieces back in the same order if it happens to fall apart – say because a critical part wears out, or because you inadvertently broke it. Think of the watch you took apart as a kid, or the cars we drive today. At the huge scale of the global ecosystem, the number of parts, their diversity of function, and the number of connections between them are so enormous that it is little wonder that hitting a tipping point means big, irreversible changes. That isn’t just theory: the geological and palaeontological record is replete with evidence of past threshold crossings that changed the planet forever. One of the most famous is dinosaur extinction, which happened about sixty-six million years ago. In that case, the global ecosystem was almost literally pushed past a critical threshold by an asteroid slamming into it, with cascading impacts throughout the planet. For tens of millions of years prior to that, the Earth had maintained a supersized version of the food chain, where Tyrannosaurus rex and its cousins hunted prey that in some cases stood as high as a two-storey house and weighed thirteen tons or so. In the course of what may have amounted to a bad weekend, all that was over, and the new state of the world was one where puny mammals, and eventually us, began to rule the Earth. Not all planetary-scale tipping points are caused by something as dramatic as an asteroid strike, but even so, they still show up unmistakably in the geological record. The most recent global state-shift was when the last ice age gave way to the interglacial warm time in which we still live. The glacial state featured ice, miles thick, covering much of the northern hemisphere and mountain glaciers throughout the world, a condition that had prevailed for about a hundred thousand years. Then, over the course of a few millennia, beginning about fourteen thousand years ago, the climate gradually got warmer, without much overall effect, until suddenly, with a last flicker from cold to warm between eleven and thirteen thousand years ago, the new interglacial state arrived, and it was a whole new world, one without massive continental glaciers. That was an important global tipping point for humanity, because it set the stage for our domination of the planet. The cause was a complex interplay between three features of the Earth’s orbit around the sun that vary regularly, but at different paces: how elliptical the orbit is, how much the Earth’s axis tilts, and how the Earth wobbles as it rotates. As those three orbital features came into alignment over thousands of years, not much happened to the glaciers, until finally the Earth was in just the right position to maximise the amount of sunlight striking at critical seasons. With that, a warming threshold was crossed for the planet, the glaciers disappeared rapidly, and new ecosystems assembled virtually everywhere, as plants and animals formerly separated by ice came together. At the same time, humans finally arrived on every continent (except Antarctica), and began to grow dramatically in number, while other large animals died out rapidly. Then, around eleven thousand years ago, the global ecosystem stabilised into its interglacial new normal, where it has been right up until the last couple of centuries. This new normal caused formerly continuous landmasses to become separated by high sea-level stands, and their plants and animals set off on new independent ecological and evolutionary journeys. Now, though, the world has once again begun to change in a way, and at a speed, that signals a new planetary tipping point is just ahead. This time it’s not something from outer space or Earth’s orbit that’s pushing the planet towards a point of no return. It’s us, pushing relentlessly towards thresholds on several different interconnected fronts: population growth, overconsumption of natural resources, climate disruption, pollution, disease, and killing anything that gets in our way. Some scientists think that going too far in any one of those arenas could push Earth past a planetary boundary that would have devastating consequences. Think, then, what would happen if we exceeded critical thresholds in more than one of them at once. Again, both intuition and data predict some very bad effects. Intuitively, two bad things hitting at the same time is clearly going to have much more impact than only one. We can again turn to the past to see that this is indeed the case when it comes to global tipping points. The kind of climatic shift that eleven thousand years ago turned an ice-age Earth into the warmer planet we’re used to had in fact happened many times over the past couple of million years. But evidence about the last ice-age-to-warm critical transition suggests that it was different from any of the others in a very important respect. That last big climate change was also accompanied by the extinction of half of the big-bodied species on Earth – instead of the full complement of about 350 such species, the last global tipping point left us with only about 180. The reason? It wasn’t just hitting a critical threshold in the climate system. It was hitting that climate threshold at the same time that Homo sapiens expanded their populations, colonised the world, and began to hunt and to compete with other large-bodied species. Where climate change hit in places where humans had not arrived there were sometimes a few extinctions, but nothing too major. Where humans arrived on a continent before climate change hit – for example in Australia fifty thousand years ago – they caused more extinctions than happened with climate change alone, but those extinctions were spread out over several thousand years. But where human arrival and climate change hit at the same time – as in the Americas – the number of extinctions was multiplied many times over what you’d expect by simply adding up the anticipated effects of a few extinctions by climate change, plus a few more by human impacts. It is this multiplying effect that may be the big issue if we exceed several thresholds simultaneously, or if exceeding a threshold in one part of the global ecosystem causes a domino effect of exceeding thresholds in other interacting parts of the system. Unfortunately, those simultaneous threshold crossings are all too plausible from a complex systems point of view, because the individual systems of our world – human population growth and consumption, climate change, environmental contamination, and so on – are so interconnected. Just how close are we to hitting those thresholds on the various fronts? Very close indeed. It’s already happening in certain regions of the world – that machete fight in Nepal, and the lack of basic natural resources that caused it, is just one tiny indication. Substitute guns for machetes, and all of a sudden you have a world that is not too different from that portrayed in 1981’s The Road Warrior, the second of the Mad Max movies, in which a leather-clad Mel Gibson defends one of the last remaining supplies of oil in the outback of Australia with his mute sidekick, the perpetually dirt-smudged ‘Feral Kid’. In March 2013 in Egypt, at least briefly, that became reality, as reported by David Kirkpatrick in the New York Times: ‘Qalyubeya, Egypt – A fuel shortage has helped send food prices soaring. Electricity is blacking out even before the summer. And gas-line gunfights have killed at least five people and wounded dozens over the past two weeks’ (30 March 2013). And in developed nations like the United States and the United Kingdom, there are people who are so worried about something similar happening that they have been laying in stockpiles of guns, ammunition, food, and whatever else they think it will take to ensure the survival of themselves and their families if the worst should come to pass. A perusing of survivalist (or ‘prepper’) websites shows just how seriously these people take the threat of disaster, spending millions of dollars on be-prepared merchandise, setting up specialist dating websites and developing products like filters that can make urine taste like bottled water and the $449 ‘Centurian children’s tactical vest’. What the preppers are worried about are the things we are all reading in the news, realities that are pointing in the direction of crossing dangerous environmental thresholds, which would lead to huge societal problems, if not outright collapse. Climate change has already begun to ramp up storms so much that in 2005 the sea swallowed New Orleans. Waterfalls poured into the tunnels of New York City’s subway system in 2012. Massive droughts sparked crop losses and wildfires over huge areas of the United States and Australia in 2012 and 2013. Shortages of things we once took for granted are now becoming commonplace, to the extent that even big business is getting worried. Coca-Cola, for example, cited water availability as one of the key challenges to its continued success in its 2010 report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Environmental contaminants are so rampant that fish are growing two heads in some places, and that’s just from the obvious pollutants. Sneaking in under the radar are things like hormones (such as endocrine disruptors), which we have unwittingly been spreading everywhere, recently implicated in causing such things as children hitting puberty earlier, increased heart disease, obesity and type II diabetes. Even small-scale oil and chemical spills, such as those occurring regularly in the North Sea, can dramatically impact local marine diversity. And global mercury levels in the ocean surface have tripled since Industrial Revolution levels, trickling into our seafood, which when eaten can result in developmental disorders in children. Just how close we may be to a global tipping point becomes apparent when you take a helicopter view and see what is happening at the scale of the entire planet. The statistics look pretty stark. The deforestation that caused that machete fight in Nepal is all too common worldwide – as has already been noted, more than 40 per cent of the world’s forests have been cut down, and we’re continuing to clear-cut an area about the size of Greece every year. Nearly 50 per cent of all of Earth’s land has been paved, bulldozed, dammed or turned into agricultural fields and pasturelands. That means we humans have caused more sledgehammer, chainsaw-style change on Earth than took place at the last global tipping point, when only about 30 per cent of the planet’s surface was totally transformed, back then by retreating glaciers. We’ve used almost all the arable land that exists for agriculture, and we’ve fished 90 per cent of the big fish out of the sea. If those obvious transformations aren’t enough, we also have to add tremendous amounts of energy into the global ecosystem to keep society operating at its present level, and the way we have traditionally done that, by burning fossil fuels (the stored remnants of previous life on the planet), is beginning to bite us from behind, by raising Earth’s temperature abnormally. If we keep going at the rate we have been, it will become hotter in the next six decades than it has been for some fifteen million years. The increase in temperature will be so fast that many of Earth’s species won’t be able to keep up, and in some places where lots of people currently live it will be too hot for any mammal – including us – to survive outside. That, of course, presumes that we don’t run out of the easily obtainable oil first, which would escalate what happened in Egypt in 2013 by increasing energy prices across the world. Of course there are alternative sources of energy, but the world hasn’t been pursuing them too actively. You get the message – there’s lots of global change under way. The underlying driver of it all is that there are just so many people now, all needing their slice of the pie. And we keep on coming. As of 2014 we were adding eighty-two million people per year. That is three orders of magnitude higher than the average yearly growth from ten thousand years to four hundred years ago (which averaged sixty-seven thousand people per year). Most of the population growth has been in the last century, over which time the number of humans has nearly quadrupled. Just since 1950, we’ve increased our numbers almost threefold, and since 1969, we’ve doubled ourselves. The problem is that each of us requires our own portion of air to breathe, a place to live that is comfortable and dry, enough water to drink and food to eat, and myriad ways to amuse ourselves. And we produce a lot of waste – waste from our bodies, waste from our structures and vehicles, waste from our fun. As a result, each of us ends up requiring a lot of ‘stuff’ – the average American, for example, uses up about ninety kilograms of things each day. Some people, particularly those in developed countries, use more stuff than others, to be sure, but nevertheless, every one of us has needs and wants that we attempt to meet by tapping into the global ecosystem, which means that each of us leaves a usage footprint – in truth, an environmental footprint – that is much bigger than the actual footprint we leave in the sand. The average size of each individual’s environmental footprint is truly staggering. For instance, it takes (on average) about 1.7 acres of land per person per year to sustain us in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed. The ‘average’ person uses about 4.6 barrels of oil per year (although the figure varies enormously: if you live in Singapore, you use eighty-one barrels; in the US or the Netherlands, twenty-two barrels; in China, three barrels; in Nepal or Bangladesh, about a fifth of a barrel). The average American’s water footprint is about 665,000 gallons per year – enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. Multiply such numbers by the over seven billion people now in the world, and you begin to see the magnitude of the problems. Then take into account that the population is continuing to grow, albeit at slower rates than in the last fifty years. Even conservative demographic projections indicate that we’ll add two to three billion people to the world in just the next thirty-five years, each one of whom will require their own quota of ‘stuff’. The multiplying factor is that if economic conditions continue to improve in developing and populous areas like China, India and Africa, the average environmental footprint per person is likely to grow even larger. That will accelerate us even faster towards those dangerous thresholds of global-scale impacts like climate change, environmental contamination and ecological losses that eventually manifest as societal problems, even if we are able to stall population growth. Not to mention that in the demographic revolution under way, the population is ageing. All of us collectively are living longer, hanging around on Earth, consuming more food and energy and stuff as we age. The twenty-first century will belong to the old. Currently, less than 10 per cent of the world’s population are under four years old, while about 13 per cent are over sixty. The over-sixty crowd is going to almost double by 2050. In developed countries like those in western Europe, the age imbalance is even worse: by 2050, more than 30 per cent of the population will be over sixty. Who is going to produce all the stuff those old people need, and how will they be taken care of? This is in contrast to the developing world, particularly Africa, where the majority of the population is under the age of fifteen, and only 3 per cent are over sixty-five. What jobs will those young people have, and how will they spend their time? Given the upward population trends and the corresponding downward trends in the health of the global ecosystem, it is not hard to see that if we simply continue doing business as usual, some very serious problems we already have will only get worse. Even now, about 80 per cent of the world’s population (5.6 billion people) live below poverty level. A third (2.6 billion people) of us lack basic sanitation services. Over a billion have inadequate access to water. One out of every eight (870 million people) lack enough food. A billion have no access to even basic health care, at the same time that increased global travel and commerce are fostering and spreading new diseases that affect us and the plants and animals on which we depend. That’s where we are today. What happens if population pressures finally hit a threshold that tumbles the dominoes of food, water, energy, climate, pollution and biodiversity, which in turn break up the intricate workings of the global society? That would be a global tipping point, which would change the world from what is now one of relative comfort, to one where those machete fights in the Himalayas, or the Road Warrior-style gun battles at Egyptian petrol queues, rapidly spread throughout the planet. Lack of access to resources creates instability. Those scenarios aren’t way off in the future. They’re already here, in many communities, in both developed and developing nations. Conflicts over water, for example, are already brewing all over the world, both within and across national boundaries, including in the western United States; between the United States and Mexico; between Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Guinea; within China; between Syria and Israel; and between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The terrorist group Islamic State has captured dams and other infrastructure in Iraq in order to control access to water and electricity and to use catastrophic dam failure by bombing as a weapon of coercion over those downriver. In modernised Bangalore – known as the Silicon Valley of India – people have to lock up their water-storage tanks to guard against theft, and water is delivered to the taps so infrequently and irregularly that entrepreneurs are developing mobile phone apps to alert people when it is on the way, so they can rush home in time to fill their containers. Power there fails frequently, especially when the reservoirs that generate electricity run dry. Pakistan has long walked a tightrope of delivering enough water to its farms and people while still holding enough in reservoirs to provide the hydroelectric power it largely relies on to generate electricity. The situation often comes down to choosing between a drink of water and turning on the lights. In 2012 the sweltering summer – unusually hot and dry even by Pakistan desert standards – brought the situation to a head. Water had to be diverted from power generation to keep people alive, leading to a shortfall of nearly 45 per cent of the national demand for electricity, and eighteen to twenty hours per day of power outages. The results were massive violent demonstrations and riots, and as a US National Research Council report on the social stresses of climate change put it, ‘burned trains, damaged banks and gas stations, looted shops, blocked roads, and, in some instances, targeted [attacks] on homes of members of the National Assembly and provincial assemblies’ (John D. Steinbruner et al., Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis, National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2012). The drought and hot weather had been going on since 2010, and caused international tensions as well as unrest within Pakistan’s borders. The Pakistani Foreign Minister blamed India for illegally diverting water from the Indus River system before it could reach Pakistan, while the Pakistan Commissioner of the Indus River System Authority put the blame on climate change, primarily caused by the developed countries of the West. The same US National Research Council report pointed out that Egypt could easily erupt into violence and social unrest within a decade, posing a huge security concern for the rest of the world, as increasing drought from climate change begins to dry up the Nile. Water from the Nile is now required to irrigate fields that provide half of the wheat that is essential to feeding eighty million Egyptians (the other half is imported). The problem is that the river flows through Sudan and Ethiopia before it gets to Egypt, accumulating nearly half of its volume upstream of Egypt’s borders, and there are no international agreements about apportioning water between the three countries. What happens if Egypt’s wheat fields turn into parched ground? Millions of people, already living on the edge and ready to erupt into violence – as the Arab Spring and the 2013 petrol-station gunfights in Egypt showed – get hungry and mad. Food prices rise and the economy goes downhill as more Egyptian pounds are diverted towards importing food. Unemployed, hungry people take to the streets, and leaders become powerless in the face of angry mobs. Meanwhile, border tensions with Sudan escalate, and the terrorist groups that have long called Sudan home take advantage of the social unrest to expand their influence. Egypt, desperate for water to irrigate its fields, attacks Sudan. In response, terrorists get their hands on a nuclear device. Suddenly the Middle East is at war, and the flow of oil from Saudi Arabia – the biggest oil producer in the world – is disrupted. The United States, still reliant on the Middle East for about 13 per cent of its oil, jumps into the fray to protect its national interests. And so it escalates further. The world is plunged into a crisis so all-consuming that any efforts to mitigate the longer-term global pressures – climate change, pollution, environmental contamination – go out the window, and our global die is cast for the future. The world becomes no longer as good as it is now. Instead, it becomes a world where the survivalists would rightly say, ‘I told you so.’ Similar scenarios could play out in many parts of the world. The specific triggers differ from place to place – in New York, for instance, the straw that breaks the camel’s back could be another inch of sea-level rise due to melting glaciers combined with more frequent superstorm Sandy-type deluges, whereas in Paris or Rome it could be environmental refugees who further strain already over-stressed societal support systems. But the common thread everywhere is basic human needs meeting diminishing resources. That’s when a final push – which in times of plenty might have little impact – can cascade into crisis that sends the world over the edge, and that’s where fear for the future can begin to look very genuine. How palpable that fear should really be is what the rest of this book is about. And since the chief driver is how many of us there are on the planet, let’s start with that. 2 People (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) Liz, Tony, Emma and Clara, on the road to Kurnool, India, February 2007 It was late afternoon, the sun getting low in a hazy sky, and our car was the only one on a narrow ribbon of asphalt stretching off into the distance, dusty brown fields on either side. Our Indian driver’s response to seeing the line of bandits blocking the road – stringy-muscled, sun-browned men in all manner of well-worn baggy pants and ill-fitting, mismatched shirts, kids in raggedy shorts and T-shirts, even a few women in their saris – was born more out of the last couple of days’ frustrations than out of any ill will. His eyes darkened and narrowed a little, he muttered what may have been the Telugu equivalent of ‘Dammit, not again!’ and then he jammed the accelerator to the floor. Our Indian colleague Uma yelled, ‘Lock your doors!’ Just as we braced for impact, imagining who knows what carnage, the bandits dropped the rope they were stretching across the road, dived every which way to avoid being run over, and with a couple of big bounces we were over the line of rocks they’d placed in our path. One second, we were worried about being robbed; the next, we were feeling a little as if we were the bad guys, with angry, scared faces flying past the car windows, baskets rolling towards the barrow pit, and us leaving it all behind as we sped down the road. That was the third time we had had a run-in with bandits in two days, which is why our driver was getting fed up with it. The first time he was downright scared, like the rest of us. Travelling with two daughters you’re supposed to be watching out for – Emma was fourteen at the time, and Clara was ten – adds to the anxiety in those kinds of situations, but as a two-career couple, both needing to do the fieldwork our jobs demanded, we had only two basic parental options. One of them, leaving the girls back in California while we were off gallivanting in India for a month, wasn’t something we were prepared to do. So there they were, with us, our Indian host Uma (the same Uma who was trekking up the Himalayas with Liz in the previous chapter) and our driver, the girls watching the adults to figure out the protocol in this foreign land, as the car was brought to a stop by people banging on the windows and shouting something or other in threatening voices. The odds were decidedly unbalanced from our perspective: a bunch of stern-looking fellows demanding money versus our group of two men, two women and two girls; them on their home turf, us strangers in a strange land; and none of us but our driver able to speak the language (even Uma did not speak this region’s language – there are over a hundred languages in India, after all). As this was the first attempt at highway robbery since we had set out from Bangalore, our driver took the negotiation tack, something along the lines of (as was later loosely translated for us) ‘You really don’t want to mess with these foreigners, the cops would be all over you.’ Whatever he said, it seemed to work, a small donation ensued, the brigands backed off, and we continued down the road. We hadn’t travelled much further, maybe a couple of hours, when once again we saw congestion up ahead, this time caused by a throng of women moving from car to car. Dressed in spotlessly clean saris of dazzling colours – the pinks, yellows and blues a startling contrast to the stark countryside – they were laughing, singing and playing tambourines, the bangles on their arms sparkling in the sun and adding their own chime to the rhythm. As we got closer, though, we sensed that something was a little off. The tambourine players seemed to be intentionally creating a distraction; then a different group of saris would swoop around the car that had been brought to a halt. And all of the sari-wearers’ shoulders seemed a little broader, and their hips a bit narrower, than they ought to be. When we got closer still, we saw that the elegantly made-up faces and sari-clad bodies were in fact those of men. One more thing to explain to our daughters: it was a gang of transgenders (known as ‘hijras’ in India) who were holding us up. Honestly, there’s not much to do in that situation but laugh, part with some money, and go on your way. Even Uma was surprised. We had landed in Bangalore a few days before, and were journeying from there to some caves we needed to explore in the off-the-beaten-path Kurnool district, about a hundred miles south of Hyderabad. As we set out, our heads were still reeling a little from jet lag and the culture shock that inevitably hits a Westerner on their first trip to India. In Bangalore the sensory chaos was awe-inspiring, at times overpowering: what seemed like infinite numbers of sputtering, belching and roaring motorcycles, yellow tricycle taxis, cars, buses, trucks, bikes and pedestrians, with a few cows thrown in for good measure, jockeying for a space on the road or on the vehicles, no apparent rules, apparently every man and woman for themselves. The tempting fragrances of baking naan and exotic spices somehow found their way through the wood-, coal- and petrol-fumed air. Women completely shrouded in black burqas clustered in front of a shop window displaying sexy red underwear on otherwise naked mannequins. Well-dressed businessmen and fashionable ladies in all sorts of colourful attire milled through elegant shops and high-end restaurants, while beggars conducted their forlorn business right outside. Feral dogs roamed the alleys even in the centre of town. And as we walked down the streets – a mishmash of pavement and dirt – there was ubiquitous chatter, none of it understandable to us, coming from faces that radiated every expression from bright smiles, to curiosity, to in a few cases a touch of hostility. After that full-on immersion in the human condition, the road trip – highway robbers and all – felt downright relaxing, except for what seemed to us several near misses of head-on collisions, but which our driver assured us were all in a day’s work for him. Even the best roads have few signs, and many are barely wide enough for one vehicle. Passing means finding any wiggle room you can, sometimes pulling in your wing mirrors. As we drove we were barraged by pedestrians, oxen carrying their loads, crammed buses with people hanging out of the windows, sitting on the roofs or holding on to the rear bumpers, and the extraordinary Indian trucks, which are lovingly and beautifully decorated, often with little blinking Christmas-tree lights, tasselled front-window curtains, or hand-painted slogans like ‘India is Great’ in bold blue letters on a bright orange and yellow background. We finally navigated to the caves, after driving through a village street so narrow that we could touch the walls of the houses on either side if we stuck our hands out of the window – and where surprised faces looked up from washing, cooking, napping and all manner of everyday activities to see the rare sight of a nice car with a family of foreigners basically driving through their living quarters. We were in a little-populated area by Indian standards, but still, there wasn’t a square inch of land that did not have a heavy human footprint. And we had long ago left power and running water behind. The purpose of our journey was to find some rich fossil deposits in those caves that would tell us something about what India’s wildlife and the rest of the ecosystem were like before the country’s human population grew to its present density – among the highest in the world, with close to 1.3 billion people packed into an area about a third the size of the United States, where only 316 million people live. The part of India we were in was particularly interesting to us in that regard, because humans (or our closely related progenitors) had occupied that landscape for more than a hundred thousand years. The fossils were there, as was an enormous python Emma revealed in the beam of her flashlight – it probably fed on some of the millions of bats whose eyes shone down from the roof of the cave. But truth be told, we were a lot more concerned with the tens of millions of people we had been seeing all around us. Because we knew that by the time Emma and Clara were our age, the average population density of the whole world’s habitable land will be about equal to India’s now. We wondered, what might we expect to see in a world like that? Paul Ehrlich presented one vision in his classic book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Perhaps more than any other single effort, that book brought human population growth into the public consciousness, in no small part because it painted a near-future world that looked like a slum in one of India’s most densely populated cities: I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Although Paul (and his wife Anne, a powerhouse of facts, figures and logic also known for her own work on population growth) fully recognised that there is much more to India than that first impression, his point was a simple one: that night in Delhi was what he thought the world could look like if its population continued to grow as it had been doing in the years leading up to 1968. In fact, he thought there was a very real possibility that population growth would drive the world into despair before the year 2000 – let’s call that Ehrlich’s Hell – in large part because of the difficulties in producing adequate food and other resources. To everyone’s great relief (Paul’s and Anne’s included), Ehrlich’s Hell didn’t happen, at least not globally, and at least not yet, for reasons we’ll talk about towards the end of this chapter. It hasn’t even happened in India – cities like Bangalore are vibrant, thriving places; crowded yes, but exciting and full of opportunity too. The basic point made in The Population Bomb, though, and which Paul and Anne continue to make, remains a fact. There are biological limits for the human species, just as there are for every other species, our incredible technological achievements notwithstanding. And the world is moving towards those limits all too fast. Here are the sobering realities. After we had colonised all the continents except Antarctica, the prehistoric human population averaged somewhere around ten million. It took thousands of years, until the early twentieth century, to grow to two billion, which is the number of people the Earth is thought capable of supporting without further major technological interventions. With those interventions, our population has almost quadrupled just since our great-grandparents’ time, to more than seven billion of us today. If we humans, averaged worldwide, continue to grow our population at the rate we’ve done over the last decade, our numbers will rise to over twenty-seven billion by the year 2100. Few, if any, people who make their living studying biology think that can actually happen, as we’ll elaborate upon in later chapters. For one thing, there is not enough land to grow food, or enough fish in the sea, to feed that many people. For another, wars, disease and other catastrophes would almost certainly knock the human population back to significantly smaller numbers long before we hit twenty-seven billion – that is, sometime in the next few decades – as past history is all too clear in showing us. The infamous Black Death of the fourteenth century killed an estimated 30 to 60 per cent of Europe’s population; the one–two punch of the First World War and the 1918 flu pandemic may have wiped out as much as 9 per cent of all the people in the world; and the Second World War felled as much as 4 per cent. Basically, as we tried to keep growing to twenty-seven billion, we’d be packed so tight that we would be like too many rats in too small a cage, and nature’s version of population control would kick in. Ehrlich’s Hell would almost certainly spread far and wide. What does look inevitable, though, based on just about any reasonable population-growth model out there, is that we’re destined to see a world with somewhere between nine and ten billion people by the year 2050, as we’ll explain in a little more detail below. That virtual certainty means the world you’ll be living in by mid-century is going to be very different from the one you are used to now. The big picture is that we have to pack a couple of billion more people into the relatively small proportion of Earth’s land that is available for occupation. That’s actually only about 20 per cent of the planet’s land surface, which is what’s left over after you subtract the 40 per cent we need to grow food and the 40 per cent that is such inhospitable terrain – rugged mountains, barren deserts, glaciers – that it can’t be heavily populated. The upshot is that if you like rural living, kiss it goodbye; those wide-open spaces peppered by just a few houses will be no more. City life will even more resemble living in a sardine can. As Paul Ehrlich put it: ‘People, people, people, people’. To set what is going to happen in perspective, just think about current population densities. In 2013 India packed in (on average) about four hundred people per square kilometre, compared to the United Kingdom’s 260, and the United States’s thirty-two. By 2050, on average we’ll see India’s population density everywhere we can easily live. Of course, most people are crammed into cities, where population densities are off the charts compared to averages for a whole country. Greater Los Angeles has 1,400 people per square kilometre, greater Beijing 3,200, greater London 5,600, the New York metropolitan area 10,600, and Delhi twelve thousand. All you have to do is walk down a main street in any one of those cities – or worse yet, try to drive down one of them – to get a sense of what such population densities really mean for a way of life. Yet children growing up now are likely to look back when they are adults, and remember the cities of today as being sparsely populated. The United Nations estimates that by the year 2050, 70 per cent of humans, up from today’s 50 per cent, will be urban dwellers – that is, 6.4 billion city folk versus the present 3.3 billion. Almost double the number of shoulders to jostle you as you try to walk down the pavement. If you’re from a developed country, as most of you reading this book probably are, and especially if you already live in a city and are pretty happy there, most things you’ve heard about population growth may well make it sound like somebody else’s problem. After all, in developed countries, we like to think we’ve got fertility rates pretty much under control (although that’s actually not the case in the United States, as we’ll see). You probably already know that it’s in poor countries that the population is growing fastest, and sad as it is to hear about deteriorating conditions on the other side of the world, you may think that things aren’t apt to change all that much where you live. But if you reflect a little more deeply on that assumption, you’ll realise you are already experiencing the impacts of population growth. Here is one example from our own lives. It is a first-world problem, for sure, but it is illustrative in showing how growing numbers of people influence nearly everything. Emma and Clara have grown up a lot since they travelled to India with us. They’ve both finished high school and have gone off to college, but the angst of their college application process is recent enough that it still lingers in our minds. We are not alone there: college application angst infects millions of American households each year. But the elevated stress of that whole process is a new thing, because competition for college slots is just so fierce these days. Back when we were of high-school age, you threw in one or two applications, maybe three if you were really motivated, and you didn’t worry too much, because, assuming you had decent grades and hadn’t done anything too egregious, your chances of getting into where you applied were pretty good, even in top-tier universities. We’ll use Stanford University as an example, simply because we live next door to it and Liz works there. About 22 per cent of 9,800 applicants were admitted in 1970. Back then, we (and certainly not our parents) never thought to track those percentages (or of applying to Stanford, for that matter). But today, things have changed. High-school students and their parents are well aware that in 2013, only 5.7 per cent of nearly thirty-nine thousand applicants were admitted to Stanford, and in 2014 it was even worse: 5.1 per cent of 42,167 applicants. That’s not confined to top-tier universities; it’s a global trend. In fact, what’s going on with Stanford applications is mild compared to what’s happening at top-level universities in highly populous places like India, which are routinely turning away 98 per cent of their applicants. The Indian Institute of Technology usually receives up to five hundred thousand applications, and accepts only 2 per cent of them; Shri Ram College of Commerce, part of the University of Delhi, has just four hundred slots for twenty-eight thousand applicants – only 1.4 per cent. Those kinds of numbers are what cause stress levels in American households with high-school-age children to go through the roof each college-application season. Families (at least, the relatively few who can afford it) spend thousands of dollars to increase their children’s SAT and ACT scores by a few points, and then hundreds more dollars for them to apply to a dozen or more colleges, all carefully vetted and sorted into the categories of ‘reach’, ‘target’ and ‘safety’ schools. The reality is that the chances of getting into your top choice are slim at best, and random chance often dictates acceptance even into the safety schools. The net effect is that among high-school students (and their parents not infrequently get in on the act as well), competition can be fierce for grades, recommendations, internships, sporting teams and those other coveted achievements that make a college application stand out. All this stress goes right back to the fact that there are so many more people in the world nowadays. Despite universities increasing their class sizes to provide places for more students, there just isn’t enough money, available classroom and lab space or land to make it possible for universities to accept much higher percentages of the applicant pool. More people apply each year in part because there are simply more students of college age each year. Over the same time that applications to places like Stanford quadrupled, global population doubled (3.7 billion in 1970, compared to 7.1 billion in 2013). On top of that, proportionately higher numbers of all those new families worldwide moved into socioeconomic categories where a shot at a university education seemed worth taking – that’s a good thing, but it still brings the overall chances of acceptance down. And, in the face of higher odds, more American students apply to multiple colleges to hedge their bets, further increasing the applicant pool for many colleges simultaneously. Our point: intense competition for limited resources is the ubiquitous effect of population growth. Of course, supply-and-demand problems are not confined to higher education – we used that example to illustrate that even in areas where you don’t normally think about the problems of population growth, it looms large. There are plenty of other examples of how increasing demand for limited space or goods has begun to change things in your own lifetime, especially if you have lived for a few decades. The traffic is worse. Housing prices have gone up. It is harder to find a job. The list goes on and on. All of these things you may view as pretty subtle impacts of population growth, but one impact that is not subtle at all is immigration. It’s in the news all the time these days, in country after country. Worldwide, at least every thirty-two seconds a migrant crosses some border between nations, and that’s only the ones we know about. Immigration is where population growth in those poor places that you may regard as someone else’s problem really hits home. More migrant workers are coming in, taking jobs and requiring basic social services that somebody has to pay for. Throngs of people are bowing to Mecca each evening outside Catholic churches in Italy and France. Children are streaming across the Mexican–American border each night, despite expensive fences and patrols attempting to keep them out. Those things are happening because in poor parts of the world, where population is growing fastest, the growth outstrips local resources, and little vignettes of Ehrlich’s Hell emerge. Poverty, disease and death become the definition of normal in those places, and not surprisingly, the people suffering living there want to escape to new territory that offers a better way of life. So they come to your town. The population is growing so fast in poor countries for what is actually a positive reason – death rates have been coming down. Population growth is a function of both the number of births and the number of deaths. If the numbers balance, the population remains constant; if there are more births than deaths, the population grows; and with more deaths than births, it declines. From the purely biological perspective, in order to keep your species going, you need to have at least two children per family to replace the parents when they die; most species hedge their bets by having a few more than two offspring per set of parents, and humans up to now have been no different. In historically poor places like India, Nigeria and Pakistan, to name just a few, until very recently living conditions were so bad that the only way for a family to be sure to have at least a few children reach adulthood was to have a lot of them. The very good news for many of those places is that they are now gaining access to basic levels of health care and more reliable food supplies, with the wonderful result of reduced childhood mortality; more children have been growing up to have families of their own. For instance, in India, mortality of children under five years old has fallen from about 120 deaths per thousand births in 1990, to about seventy deaths per thousand births in 2010. But old lessons die hard. Even though survival rates in such places are now higher than they used to be, the ingrained cultural tradition is still to have lots of kids, because people still expect to lose many. Since more children are surviving to have their own babies, population growth rates skyrocket. This lag-time effect means that half of all the population growth between now and 2100 is expected to take place in only eight countries, seven of which are regarded as poor by developed-nation standards: Nigeria, India, the United Republic of Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Uganda and Ethiopia (listed in order of their contribution to world population growth). In the number-eight spot for countries contributing most to population growth is one that is not poor by any stretch of the imagination: the United States. These, and other countries like them, now have fertility rates that are too high, that is above two. The ‘fertility rate’ is basically the average number of children born per woman; two is the magic number if you want the population to level off rather than continue to grow indefinitely, because at that number each set of two parents on average replace themselves with two kids; hence a fertility rate of near two is called the ‘replacement value’. To be precise, the actual replacement rate is a little higher than two, presently 2.1 in industrialised countries and 2.3 on a worldwide average, because not all children survive to reproduce, but we round it to two for ease of discussion. Given current demographics, if all of the countries that now have fertility rates above replacement (like those eight listed above) see a decrease that quickly brings them down to replacement, by 2050 we’d end up with a global population that stabilised at a little over ten billion people, and then remained constant after that. Just half a child over replacement rate, and we’re at more than sixteen billion by 2100. Half a child under replacement rate would allow us to stabilise at around our present seven billion by 2100 – but even in that optimistic scenario we still hit nearly ten billion around the year 2050, before population finally begins to fall. So any way you cut it, we’re adding close to three billion people to the planet over the next three decades. If you are interested in what goes into these models, and country-by-country data, the information is readily available from the 2013 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division publication World Population Prospects: The 2012 Revision, Highlights and Advance Tables, and Volume II, Demographic Profiles, which provide most of the population numbers we use in this book. Obviously, the population-growth impacts in poor countries, where the numbers of people are increasing very, very fast, are going to be different from the first-world impacts we’ve been talking about for developed countries. Today poor places – like India, Pakistan and especially many African countries – already find it hard to provide adequate food, water and health care, and basic services like electricity, toilets and sewage-treatment plants, and these problems will only get worse. Take the best-case scenario of one of these growing-population countries, India. India is on track to decrease its birth rate to the replacement level of around two children per couple by 2050. Even so, between now and then births will add four hundred million people to the country, increasing its native-born population from the present 1.2 billion to about 1.7 billion. This is roughly double the number of people India added from 2000 to 2010, which contributed to dramatic changes in the country. Those changes are hard to miss. In 2012, on a return trip to Bangalore, it was obvious that the city had extended its urban sprawl radically compared to how it was when we visited in 2007. Where there had been open ground, new neighbourhoods, businesses and highways had sprouted. So had the number of shanty towns. Vehicles of every kind filled the streets, and people were ubiquitous, day and night. Seemingly everywhere you looked there was scaffolding made from bamboo-like tree branches, with barefoot workers hoisting buckets by rope, building supersized components of new concrete structures that were transforming the skyline. This, remember, in what is already the most densely populated large country in the world. That was the on-the-ground expression of some rather startling statistics – while overall India’s population increased by about 17 per cent from 2001 to 2011, Bangalore’s population grew by a whopping 47 per cent. Even its urban sprawl, which tripled the area covered by the city (from 226 square kilometres in 1991 to 716 square kilometres in 2010), has not been enough to prevent a huge increase in population density in the last decade (from 2,985 people per square kilometre to 4,378 in 2010). This trend to urbanisation as population grows is because people born into poor rural areas tend to move to the city in search of a better life, a pattern that repeats over and over in history, and which, as we noted above, the United Nations predicts increasingly for the future. In India, Bangalore is a particularly good city to come to if you’re looking for work: it is one of the country’s intellectual, economic and entrepreneurial engines. But not all cities experience equal immigration and growth as population increases. Delhi’s growth (21 per cent) was just a little over India’s as a whole (17 per cent) for the period 2001–2011. At the same time the area around Mumbai saw its population increase by only 4 per cent; however, all of that increase was in its suburbs, which grew by 8 per cent, whereas the city centre actually lost about 5.8 per cent of its population. This illustrates another point: when cities get too crowded, the only way they can grow is out. Mumbai now packs in more than twenty thousand people per square kilometre over an area of about five thousand square kilometres – equivalent to a square of real estate that measures a little over seventy kilometres on each side. And of course, if they don’t have adequate infrastructure, as is the case with Mumbai and many other cities, living conditions are not very pleasant. The lesson here is that as population grows, people flock disproportionately to the most desirable places, which, in the absence of equally fast growth of infrastructure, causes some major problems. In Bangalore, for example, the influx of people has outpaced both the infrastructure and the availability of natural resources, making it routine for electricity and water to be available for only parts of the day in those areas of the city that even have access at all. Yet that lack of supply leads to higher prices, so even as the quality of life goes down, the cost of living goes up. In the state in which Bangalore is located, Karnataka, the cost of keeping the lights on, and supplying the population with fuel and food, has more than doubled since 2005. This reflects a general trend in the ten most populous states in India. The flip side is that if cities do develop adequate infrastructure to handle high population densities, the cost of living goes sky high because of limited supply of homes and office space in the face of high demand, and the costs of maintaining all that infrastructure. Manhattan, for instance, has a population density of 18,500 people per square kilometre, not too far below that of Mumbai. A nice place to live, for sure, if you like city living, but at $3,973 per month, the average apartment there will cost you about $2,800 more per month than the nationwide average for the United States. New York City as a whole, with 10,600 people per square kilometre, is the fifteenth most expensive city in the world. Greater London is even more pricey: with 5,600 people per square kilometre, it was the most expensive city in the world in 2014. Such figures drive home the point that it costs a lot – and to many people, is prohibitively expensive – to live in a city that is both densely populated and has a well-functioning infrastructure, although of course the correlation between population density and cost of living is modified by a host of other factors, such as governmental system, proximity and access to natural resources, town planning, and so on. The general lesson of rapid growth of a city’s population outstripping its capabilities to provide adequate infrastructure applies worldwide. In China, Beijing provides another cogent example. In the decade 2000–2010, China’s population grew about 6 per cent, reaching a little over 1.3 billion people. In the same decade, Beijing’s population increased 30 per cent, from about fourteen million to twenty million. The difference in percentage-growth is because, just as happened in Bangalore, many, many people migrated from the countryside to the city. As a result, Beijing too is experiencing problems: a water supply that can only support 60 per cent of the city’s residents, inadequate housing and public transportation, lack of access to medical care and education, and air pollution so bad that on many days the only way to see what the sunrise would look like is to look at a stock picture on a big video screen in Tiananmen Square. As far as nations with growing populations go, India and China are probably the lucky ones, because the end of their population growth is in sight. Given the pace at which birth rates have been decreasing in those countries, both are on track to see growth of their populations stop by mid-century, and then at least remain stable and possibly even decline. And both are large nations that are rapidly advancing their economies, technology and social systems with at least some foresight of population-growth impacts, and with the full awareness of their governments that slowing population growth is a priority. Not so with many countries that are in much worse shape economically, and with even less adequate natural resources. According to the most recent demographic projections, it seems a fait accompli that by 2050, ‘Five least developed countries – Bangladesh, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda – will be among the twenty most populous countries in the world.’ By 2100, three more least developed countries will climb into the top twenty list for most populous – Niger, Sudan and Mozambique. In fact, it seems to be a general rule that the poorer the people, the faster their population grows. This correlation holds both within countries, and from nation to nation. In India, for instance, birth rates among higher economic classes are pretty much at replacement value; the growth that is still occurring is in the poor rural population. And at the global scale, it is the poorest countries that are the population-growth hotspots. The UN Population Division projects that most of the forty-nine least developed countries are on track to see their populations triple or more between 2013 and 2100, and several are heading for a fivefold increase, including Burundi, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, the United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia. You might have noticed that countries in Africa seem to be showing up with high frequency on these lists, and indeed Africa is the place that promises to launch a tidal wave of global change from its rapidly growing masses. Which brings us back to the impacts on developed nations. Sudan and South Sudan are regions that provide a window into where the world would be headed if population growth in Africa plays out as predicted. The two countries’ combined populations grew from 8.3 million in 1950 (Sudan 5.7 million; South Sudan 2.6 million), to 45.5 million in 2010 (Sudan 35.6 million; South Sudan 9.9 million), to 58.5 million in early 2014 (Sudan 47.5 million; South Sudan eleven million). That sevenfold increase of numbers of people in the region has been accompanied by a twenty-two-year-long civil war that in 2011 finally split what used to be one country into two; genocide in Darfur that has gone on since 2005 as Janjaweed (the ‘devils on horseback’) militia and Sudanese forces maraud through villages on ethnic-cleansing missions; and widespread hunger, disease and death. These are life-and-death problems for the countries’ inhabitants – in South Sudan alone, in February 2014 a third of the population, nearly four million people, were desperately hungry, nearly a million people had been displaced from their homes, many thousands had been killed, and government forces and rebels were razing towns for what seemed no good reason. That translates to some very noticeable global impacts. The cost of humanitarian aid to South Sudan quickly rose to over ?800 million, and the conflict drew in neighbouring countries, in this case army and rebel fighters from Uganda. At an even larger scale, war-torn, unstable countries become breeding grounds and safe havens for international terrorist groups, which is exactly what happened as far back as the 1990s in the Sudan region, and which continues to be a problem there today. The link between rapid growth, local wars and escalating global conflict is one of the most important population-growth impacts. We devote Chapter 9 to that topic, but a pertinent issue to mention at this point is that with rapid population growth usually come important changes in the so-called population pyramid. The ‘population pyramid’ refers to the number of people in infant, child-age, teenage, young adult, older adult and geriatric age groups. Rapid population growth bulges the teenage and young adult categories, which means there just get to be too many curious, energetic young people with no productive way to channel their energy. You can see that bulge in recent trouble spots such as Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where about 20 per cent of the population is fifteen to twenty-four years of age. In much of Africa, about half the population is aged fifteen or below, and just 3 per cent are sixty-five or older. Contrast that with more stable countries, like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway or Japan, which have only about 17 per cent of their populations under the age of fifteen, and 16 per cent aged sixty-five or older. The problem with swelling the ranks of young people relative to the rest of the population, especially in poor countries, is that unemployment increases disproportionately among young people as well. Indeed, unemployment among young people was one of the key drivers that led to the Arab Spring uprising that toppled rulers throughout the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt in February 2011. The same problem was still causing huge protests that threatened Mubarak’s successor Mohamed Morsi in early 2014, when eight out of every ten jobless Egyptians were under the age of thirty. The projections of the population pyramids for these and other poor countries, even assuming they drop their current higher-than-replacement birth rates to replacement values, suggest that the fifteen-to-twenty-four age category will continue to remain at around 20 per cent of the population well into mid-century. Which means that millions more unemployed, high-energy and highly intelligent young people will be either expressing their dissatisfaction and destabilising society in their own countries, or looking for opportunities elsewhere. The resulting societal volatility in the poor countries with an oversupply of young people is further fuelled by the paucity of experienced, older and wiser leaders. At the same time, the population pyramid of the richer countries will be turning itself upside down. An inevitable side-effect of slowing population growth rates is going through a period when old people outnumber the young. This is because during baby boom years, as happened in the United States right after World War II, lots of young people are added to the population. If they don’t have babies in equally copious numbers, the older people end up outnumbering the children coming up the ranks behind them, with obvious societal impacts, not least of which is that as the baby boomers grow older, there are fewer and fewer younger relatives to care for them in their old age. In addition, the workforce of people in the young to middle-age categories becomes comparatively small, hampering society’s ability to fund and staff programmes that give senior citizens the level of care and comfort they need. Such impacts can turn society upside down – for example, in Japan, more adult nappies are sold than baby nappies, a consequence of people in the fifteen-to-twenty-four age category making up only about 10 per cent of the demographic, compared to those over sixty-five, who comprise 23 per cent. Remember, most of these population-growth impacts we’ve pointed out are a best-case scenario, which assumes that fertility rates will, within the next thirty years, fall to replacement value in all countries in which they are not already there. In this book, we’re not even going to try to imagine just how bad things will get if we don’t drop fertility rates to replacement level, fast – except to say, we suspect we’d really get to see what Ehrlich’s Hell looks like. A key point to remember, though, is that no matter which of the population trajectories we actually follow – getting to replacement rate fast, half a child below replacement rate, half a child above replacement rate, or business as usual – we’re still going to hit between nine and ten billion people by 2050. That’s the reality we’re stuck with in trying to make a viable future, and all the other issues we cover in this book are underpinned by it. The trillion-dollar question, then, is whether it is actually possible for the human population to top out at no more than ten billion by 2050. The answer, fortunately, is a resounding yes. There are three ways to get there. One of them is a way nobody wants – some sort of global catastrophe that wipes out a large portion of the human population. We’ll elaborate on the possibility of this in later chapters – things like pandemics, or war. But the bottom line is that a global catastrophe would be the most tragic sort of population control, filled with pain and loss, dystopia for most of us. There are better ways. China hit on one solution: the one-child policy, which was officially announced in September 1980 in response to population growth that had been encouraged after a famine cost at least thirty million Chinese lives a generation earlier. The law imposed severe penalties in the form of fines, taxes, or even property loss, for families that exceeded their allotted single child, and rewarded families that stayed below the limit. Two generations later, the success of this approach in terms of limiting population growth is undeniable – China’s population is poised to peak around 2030, after which demographic models indicate that it will fall quickly back at least to the level it was in the 1990s, about a 30 per cent decrease with respect to its peak population size. The social success is arguable. By the standards of most countries, injecting that amount of government control into the bedroom would at best be wildly unpopular, and would be viewed by many as downright draconian. It also introduced some real problems that have to be grappled with now and in the future, among them a disparity in the numbers of young men (too many) versus young women (too few), as a result of a cultural preference for boys which often led to infanticide for girl babies; the abandonment of unwanted children; and ‘Little Emperor Syndrome’, which refers to the fact that a generation of Chinese have grown up in the absence of siblings, with the result that many exhibit poor social skills, feel entitled, and are risk-averse. In addition, China is already experiencing the topsy-turvy population pyramid that other countries will soon be seeing, with simply too many old people to be cared for by the much fewer younger ones. The third way to bring down birth rates rapidly is the one that has enjoyed the most widespread success, with the main social consequences being positive. It is, in fact, the one that has been employed in most places in the world that are now at or below replacement fertility rate. It’s deceptively simple: make sure girls have access to decent education and job opportunities, and that contraception is readily available to those who want it. Time after time, this approach has resulted not only in bringing fertility rates under control, but in raising the standards of living for families and communities. Education is particularly important: the good things that correlate with educating girls and women not only include many fewer births, but also healthier mothers, better survival of infants and children, decreased risk of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV/AIDS, and much better earning power. The economic rewards alone are big: just one year of primary school tends to add 10 to 20 per cent to a woman’s earning power later in life, and a secondary-school education gives her 15 to 25 per cent more. Which of course also means her family enjoys that much better quality of life. More than that, the country does too. Studies show that by empowering women through education, national economies benefit. It was just such an approach that turned what is now one of the most densely populated countries in the world away from the brink of disaster. The tiny island nation of Mauritius, located about two thousand kilometres off the eastern coast of Africa, packs in more than six hundred people per square kilometre, a density one-third higher than India and four times higher than China. At about the same time that China was recognising its population-growth problem and instituting its one-child policy, Mauritius was recognising that its ballooning population was straining resources too. The local elimination of malaria, higher living standards and improved health care had brought down death rates, while birth rates continued to increase at a fast pace. Both countries integrated access to contraceptives into their health-care systems, but Mauritius emphasised education instead of laws that limited family size, including making school free by 1976, which made it much easier for families to choose between sending their sons or daughters out to work or continuing their education. But already by that time, as Ramola Ramtohul wrote in an article entitled ‘Fractured Sisterhood: The Historical Evolution of the Women’s Movement in Mauritius’, ‘Mauritius had a generation of young women, especially among the upper classes, who had had access to quality education and thus had a different outlook on life’ (Afrika Zamani 18 & 19:71–101, 2010–2011). The result: a more than 60 per cent decline in fertility rate over the years 1965 to 1980, and a 75 per cent decline by 2010. Along with this came increasing prosperity for the country’s people as a whole – from a low-income agricultural economy in 1968 to a diversified middle-income economy over the ensuing decades. In fact, for the past few years Mauritius has ranked first among Africa’s countries (and forty-fifth worldwide) in terms of economic competitiveness, a measure that includes such things as infrastructure, education, financial market development, technology and market size. That recipe for success is translatable to other countries that today stand where Mauritius did half a century ago, but it requires one more essential ingredient: tolerance for diversity of cultural traditions, and openness to new ways of doing things. Mauritians had those things built in through their history, with a succession of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonisers, who over the course of a few centuries melded with Africans (originally brought in as slaves), Indians (brought in as indentured servants when the slave trade was abolished) and Chinese settlers. Once colonial rule was removed, the resulting ‘rainbow nation’ included four ethnic and four major religious groups that had found ways to peacefully co-exist and work together to make things better. That kind of tolerance and cooperation will be absolutely essential if the Mauritius success story is to be replicated elsewhere; religious intolerance and ethnic rivalries end up being deal-breakers. The drop in fertility rates in countries like China, Mauritius, India and others was unforeseen by Paul Ehrlich when he wrote The Population Bomb, and is one reason his prediction of widespread doom by the year 2000 did not come to pass. When he wrote the book, fertility rates in such countries were near six children per woman or higher; less than a decade later, the carrot or stick approach began lowering that precipitously, with the effect that by the year 2000, the average fertility rate in those countries had fallen to 2.5 or fewer children per woman. The lesson there is that it is very possible to bring population growth rates under control fast, especially when it is done with the carrots of education and economic betterment, in ways that make the majority of people happy and more productive. The other very important thing that The Population Bomb underestimated was human innovation. The prediction of doom was strongly influenced by the food crisis that was looming in 1968 – people in poor countries had been dying of starvation on a massive scale over the previous few years. But with the recognition of world hunger as a problem, innovation and cross-nation cooperation kicked in, taking the form of the Green Revolution, which ramped up food production many times over in just two decades, and thereby staved off mass starvation for a billion or so people. Later, along came computers, the internet and mobile phone technology, which now make possible a global conversation about any world crisis, and harness what could be called a global brain – at last count more than six billion connected people – to formulate and implement feasible solutions. So we bought some time through the last bit of the twentieth century. What about now? One more lesson comes out of the nearly four decades we’ve had since 1968 to observe how population growth and the human spirit actually work: despite the fact that things didn’t crash by the end of the twentieth century, we are not out of the woods by any means. We now know with reasonable certainty that in just the next half a lifetime, some ten billion people will be on the planet, seething masses overwhelming the capacities of poor countries and banging at the doors of rich ones. As a result, cities will at least double in size, the old will outnumber the young in many communities, and many more places will see their social, political and economic systems put in a pressure cooker. Mind you, this is the best-case scenario – where we rapidly bring fertility rates down to replacement rate in all the nations where that is currently not the case. Even this optimistic scenario means that population growth is about to tip humanity into a future that will be as different from the present as the India we experienced in 2007 was from our home in the United States back then. Whether that future ends up looking like Ehrlich’s Hell remains to be seen – it still could, if we make the wrong choices. But one thing is for sure: sustaining at least the quality of life that the world provides to people today is not going to happen if we ignore how an extra three billion of us are going to impact the planet. It’s not just our numbers we have to worry about – it’s also what each of us needs and wants. 3 Stuff (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf) Tony, near midnight, southern Colorado, around 1960 My heart was pounding just about as loud as his fist on the door. Bam! Bam! Bam! ‘I want my money! I want my money!’ Bam! Bam! Bam! I was a little kid, maybe eight years old, eyes shut tight, hunkered down in our tiny house, a well-worn clapboard whose once-white paint had seen better days and was peeling here and there. Inside was hideous grey wallpaper with big maroon flowers in the cramped living room, a linoleum-floored kitchen with a chrome-legged, red-topped Formica table, one institutional-green bedroom for my parents, and a dingy pink room where I slept. One of the windows in that room had a prime view of the dirt alley where ragweed liked to grow, and the other opened right onto the slab-concrete front porch, which sat there like a pitiful stage in full view of one of the town’s busiest streets. My bed was right next to the porch window, wide open that hot summer night, so the slamming door of a ratty pick-up truck less than twenty feet away had awoken me, followed by the angry stomping of feet up the two porch steps. At that point all that was standing between me and the drunk man pounding on our door was a flimsy curtain and a rusting screen. I fully expected his fist to come smashing through at any second. I lay there as still as I could, tried not to breathe too loud, and hoped for the best. I had had a lot of practice in hoping for the best, because we were poor. I never got the full story on why that man was beating on our door in the middle of the night, but as near as I could work it out, he thought he was owed some money, and whether or not he was, we just didn’t have any to give him. That year was a particularly bad one, I think – probably the same year when there was a month or two when we had to choose between getting our electricity or our gas shut off because we couldn’t afford to pay for both, and when some meals came from hunting rabbits or doves on the outskirts of town. The point being, I didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. But I certainly knew a lot of kids who did. And like anyone who is forced to do without, I came to equate having nice stuff with having a better life. For whatever reason, that seems to be human nature, which is in large part why, fast-forward nearly fifty years, our family is now like millions of other middle-class families in industrialised nations. We have a decent house, with climate control and a nice irrigated yard, a couple of cars, computers, mobile phones, and what sometimes seems like an uncountable number of gadgets, the purchase of which makes us feel good, at least for a while. And, like most parents, we’ve done our best to make sure our children have all those things that we thought would make us happy when we were little. In a word, we’ve attained what a billion or so people consider normal. Normal for places like the United States, the European Union and a few other small pockets throughout the world, anyway. Most of the human race now exists on less than $10 a day, and about a billion scrape by on less than $2 per day. Poor as we were by American standards when I was growing up, I now know that even back when that guy was beating on our door, we were well off in comparison to most people in the world. And I’d wager that, just like me when I was young, the vast majority of those people are looking for that sense of accomplishment that comes from bettering their situation, and especially from working to make sure their kids have a better life. Happily, the opportunities for advancing the next generation are growing in many countries that harbour huge numbers of poor people, among them the most populous nations on Earth – places like India and China. Which means that, if human nature follows the same course in such places as it has in already-developed nations, in many, many more households over the next thirty years the presents will pile high as the old stuff is replaced with the newer models. The emotional satisfaction that ever-growing pile will bring to billions is hard to deny, both in principle and in reality. Although material goods are certainly not the route to true happiness, in today’s world, like it or not, they do in large measure help define social status, self-worth, and are often the currency with which to outwardly express affection, even love – diamonds are forever, so they say. And some material things – like our electronic communications network, planes, cars and so on – are in fact necessary to maintain the global connections that society now so depends upon. All of which leads to a major conundrum, because the material stuff we value so much does not appear out of thin air. Ultimately, each and every thing we manufacture ends up eating a little bit of Planet Earth, and the pie is going fast. The best estimates, from a group called the Global Footprint Network, indicate that presently we are using up the planet at a pace that would require one and a half Earths to sustain us over the long term. Assuming no changes in how we do business, and taking into account the growing numbers of people in the world and the entry of more and more of them into better economic situations, we will require the equivalent of two Earths to sustain us by the year 2030, and three Earths by 2050. Actually, if everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American – that is to say, the lifestyle we live, and that many of you reading this book live – we’d need five Earths to keep us going. The problem, of course, is that there is only one Earth. None of us are actively trying to trash the planet. We are simply enjoying the stuff we have, and in some cases actually need, in today’s world. Mobile phones are a prime example. Most of the people in the world now carry around these electronic wonders, facilitating everything from the casual chat to getting water (as we mentioned in the first chapter), mobilising social movements in places like Thailand and the Middle East, and negotiating global crises. The fact that more than 6 billion mobile phone connections now link us is remarkable, in that it potentially connects most of the human race in a way that could be harnessed to solve global problems – a sort of global brain, if you will, where each phone is like a neuron that can transfer information from one part of society to the next. But all those phones have to be produced out of raw materials, some of which you’ve probably never even heard of, but which are already in short supply. Take the ever-more ubiquitous smartphone as an example. Lots of people, us included, don’t leave home without one of them, and it’s not inaccurate to say there is a large sector of society that regard them as indispensable. No need to memorise, just Google it. Just using one popular model as an example, as of March 2014, around half a billion had been produced and sold worldwide. Include all smartphones, and the number increases to more than 1.4 billion in use, a number that grew by 44 per cent in 2013, with many more poised to be manufactured over the coming years. Mind you, there were no smartphones before 2007, so we’re still in the early days. Even so, the world is starting to feel the impact, although all you feel immediately is a bit of pleasure as you heft that sleek new phone in your hand, and as you stroke from app to app on that wonderfully responsive touchscreen. What you’re actually stroking is rare earths. Producing that touchscreen requires somebody, somewhere, digging in a mine to extract minerals that will ultimately yield elements like yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, cerium and neodymium. Rare-earth elements are not exactly rare, but are so named because there are few economically viable ore deposits that yield them, and they are found in only a few countries. For that reason, among others, world production of rare earths has shifted from country to country over the years, as one area gets mined out or as political and economic winds shift. India and Brazil used to be leading producers sixty years ago. Then the Mountain Pass mine in California took over as the top dog in the 1960s and 1980s. Today it’s mostly all about China, which produces over 90 per cent of the rare earths necessary for manufacturing not only mobile phones, but also critical components in the motors and batteries for electric and hybrid cars, windmill turbines, and a variety of other things that are becoming increasingly important to society. Which brings us back to tipping points, in two guises. The most obvious one is that any time a single country holds a monopoly on a needed commodity, problems can arise. In 2011, China produced a whopping 97 per cent of the rare-earth elements needed by the world. That has fallen to about 80 per cent since then, as mines in other countries came on line, but much of the ore from those mines ends up passing through China for processing anyway. This single-country bottleneck means we only have to look a couple of years down the road to see trouble. In 2010, world demand for rare-earth elements was about 136,100 tons, but global production was only 133,600 tons (remember, almost all from China). The 2,500-ton shortfall was covered by stocks already on hand from previous mining. By 2015, global demand is estimated to reach between 160,000 and 210,000 tons per year. Over the same time, China estimated that its internal demand would require 130,000 tons per year, which led to it restricting its exports, beginning in 2010. That caused some upheaval – it drove up prices for rare earths, meaning that United States and European manufacturers were forced to pay three times as much as their Chinese competitors, causing a dispute that landed at the World Trade Organization. The outcome of that dispute aside (China lost, but as of 2014 was appealing), one simple fact remains. Within just the next two years, without a major recycling campaign, a lot more mines are going to have to be opened up to cover the anticipated shortfall of at least thirty thousand tons. While most experts agree that the reserves in the ground will probably meet demand for the next decade or two – it’s uncertain after that – bringing a new mine on line and getting its products into the supply chain takes five to ten years, meaning that at least temporary shortfalls are already on the horizon. The political and economic ramifications include things like price spikes and trade wars. In the best case, you can think of such marked and political fluctuations as very rapid changes in global dynamics that are potentially reversible, much like the boiling-water-to-steam kind of tipping point described in Chapter 1. For instance, with rare earths, five to ten years down the road, prices and availability could stabilise for a while if more mines are able to be brought on line, but in the interim, a period of volatility could make for some rough going for society. In the worst case, control of a needed resource by a single country makes for a new world order – a tipping point that is essentially irreversible over human lifetimes. Ramping up rare-earth production also brings us to a second kind of tipping point – adding all those new mines means that we inevitably destroy what was there beforehand, and often make the surrounding areas unfit places to live. One of the most infamous mines-gone-bad examples is China’s Ba0tou district in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia. Satellite images of the area bring to mind gigantic blobs of decaying grey-brown intestines splayed around waterways, and populated areas and waterways that show up as blood-red spatters and rivulets. (These remarkable NASA Earth Observatory Images can be viewed at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77723.) The intestine-blobs are open-pit mines, the largest of which are more than half a mile deep (a thousand metres) and cover more than eighteen square miles (forty-eight square kilometres). Some of the blood-red rivulets drain into and out of black-coloured ponds that hold the waste water and muck from the mines. The water isn’t actually black (or blood-red) – that’s just the satellite-image colour enhancement. The real water is in fact much more colourful – oranges, yellows, browns and greys – a Technicolor swirl that is typical of soups of toxic waste. On the ground, the situation is every bit as bad as the satellite images suggest, according to reporters who have visited and interviewed residents. You can get an idea of the scale of the problem when you realise that processing one ton of rare earths yields about two thousand tons of toxic waste. As a result, in the Baotou area, newspaper accounts say that the well water, which people drank before they knew any better, ‘looked fine, but it smelled really bad’, as related by a local farmer, Wang Jianguo, in a Guardian news story by Jonathan Kaiman (‘Rare Earth Mining in China: The Bleak Social and Environmental Costs’, 20 March 2014). The reason for the bad smell was that the water was laced with carcinogens and other toxic substances. The article that reported Wang’s words went on to say: ‘In the 1990s, when China’s rare earths production kicked into full gear, [Wang’s] sheep died and his cabbage crops withered. Most of his neighbours have moved away. Seven have died of cancer. His teeth have grown yellow and crooked; they jut out at strange angles from blackened gums.’ Some local sheep (those that survive) grow ‘two rows of teeth, some so long that they couldn’t close their mouths’. Those kinds of examples are not confined to China by any means, nor are they confined to rare-earth mines – in the United States, for instance, just head west on Interstate 90 from Butte, Montana, towards Anaconda. In Butte you’ll see the Berkeley Pit, the mile-long, half-mile-wide, third-of-a-mile-deep remnant of an open-pit copper mine. The Pit is now partially filled by a lake, which is actually a potent broth of arsenic, cadmium, zinc, copper and sulphuric acid. Keep driving west out of Butte and you’ll begin to see stunted trees, then none at all, the result of soil contamination from noxious fumes and dangerous particulates that used to belch out of the copper smelters at Anaconda. Copper has not been mined in Butte or smelted at Anaconda for decades, yet a huge landscape, and its ability to support people and animals, and grow plants, has been changed forever. We’ll talk more about the tipping points triggered by environmental devastation in Chapter 7, but the key point here is simply this: keeping all those mobile phones rolling off the assembly lines, as we’ve done up to now, is taking an ever-growing toll on Planet Earth. The copper in your smartphone probably comes from Chile, the gold from Peru, the silver from Australia, and the platinum from South Africa. It could also have coltan from Africa. Each of those places, and many more, now has its own versions of Baotou or Butte, and the number of those tipped-to-devastation landscapes is growing by the day. Mining the raw materials that go into the stuff we like is just the first part of the impact story. The next part is turning the raw materials into the final product and getting it to your doorstep. That takes, in a word, energy, in the form of electricity or heat to power various manufacturing processes, and petrol, diesel or jet fuel to transport components through all the places linked in a product’s supply chain: for instance, the supply chain for smartphones can include about seventeen countries. All that energy means that the material goods we’re so fond of contribute mightily to changing Earth’s climate. We’ll say more about climate change and its part in the tipping-point recipe in Chapter 4. But for now, suffice to say that there is a tight bond between climate change and our current love affair with stuff, because every new item that is produced adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It’s those greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide but also nitrous oxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons – that are essentially giving Earth a fever, causing not only more killer heatwaves, but also more droughts, floods, ocean acidification and so on. Greenhouse gases come from burning the fossil fuels we use to manufacture and transport all our material goods, a mode of energy production that people have exploited since the Industrial Revolution began some three centuries ago. And what that means in terms of manufacturing and transporting goods is that each and every thing you buy is part of the climate-change problem, as well as part of the raw materials problem. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/hadly/end-game-tipping-point-for-planet-earth/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.