Why Our Solutions are Not Working
Andre Fougeron, 1953: Atlantic Civilisation
To prevent a catastrophe, Civilization must immediately, drastically, and thoroughly decrease its impact on the planet and allow the biosphere to rehabilitate. We will have to deliberately and simultaneously take several steps, each one of them unprecedented—reduce population, reduce material consumption, reduce the inequality of wealth and power, and restore natural ecosystems. This will take a way of thinking, being, and behaving on the planet that is novel to complex civilization. Lamentably, the solutions proposed by most experts and laypeople – (1) fertility declines through modernization, (2) economic growth, (3) technological innovations, and (4) a revolution of consciousness will be insufficient, at least in terms of averting the involuntary dieback this century. These are conclusions that flow from the analyses in this website.
Radical Mind Shift, for instance, has examined how modernization and secularization, as part of a historical phenomenon called the Demographic Transition, have decreased the fertility rate as a side effect. As fertility rate goes, so goes the population. When the fertility rate drops below the number needed to replace a generation—estimated to be, depending on the country, somewhere between 2.1 to 2.3 children per woman—the actual population begins to drop, as is already happening in Japan, Russia, Germany and some fifty other countries in the world.[i] There are numerous complications to this simple math, of course. On the one hand, gender equality, urbanization, education, and careers do seem to steer women towards having fewer children. On the other hand, an increase in any one of these also tends to increase the amount each parent and child consumes in his or her lifetime. As it turns out, the educated and urbanized have more than compensated for their reduced fertility with an increase in per capita material consumption. And as a result, they have impacted the planet even more, far more actually, than the poor and fertile masses.[ii]
Despite the fact that fertility across most of the globe has plunged, demographers project that it will still take most of this century (and perhaps the next) before world population actually stabilizes to some new high of ten to eleven billion.[iii] By then, demographers calculate, another three-and-a-half billion people will have joined the human family, and economists expect that Civilization will not only be producing and consuming three-plus billion people’s worth more of material goods and services, but even way more than that, because they project that each person will be wealthier on average. Sadly, the Earth seems already wearied of our numbers. It may not be up to meeting the demographers’ and economists’ expectations. If not, we will face an involuntary dieback.
In critiquing the solutions of experts, policy leaders, and media pundits, Radical Mind Shift has examined the economy’s impact on the human predicament. Global capitalism has been very good at producing lots of high quality consumer “goods” and services, mostly for the same billion people who already have more of these than they know what to do with. These products have come at great environmental and existential cost. Hundreds of millions of people work long, monotonous hours in jobs better fit for automatons than for humans, hoping to crawl their way up the ladder of prosperity. Trillions of tons of combined resources have been squandered to ultimately make landfill more than anything else. Most every crucial resource has passed “peak.” The Earth’s biosphere has been gravely degraded.
Meanwhile, despite all the suffering and destruction we have caused, it has not been enough to provide for even the basic needs of a substantial portion of our human family. Billions are malnourished and ill. They look at the prosperous few through the television screen like children with their faces pressed to the candy store window. A great bifurcation has split our human family, creating cyborgs who contemplate colonies on other planets and barefoot skeletons dying in dusty deserts. The solution proposed by the proponents of global capitalism is more capitalism. Create the conditions in poor countries that will foster economic growth. By following the lead of the First World countries, according to this view, the indigent, too, can move up the economic ladder from the rungs of poverty to those of prosperity. This is where the human predicament runs head on with reality. All indications suggest that the Earth cannot support still more growth. Capitalism, as it has been practiced for the past centuries, is not a sustainable system.
That is not to say that in the sustainable world of the future humans will not continue to produce and trade and consume or even that there will not be some variant of a global market. Given our penchant for creature comforts and given our facility for trading for items we cannot acquire locally, a complex economic system will surely be part of any human society. In question is what kind, or kinds, of systems. Clearly, the types of capitalism we have been practicing for the past centuries have been failures, if our measure of success is sustainability and some level of equity, that is, as the Brundtland Report put it in 1987, systems that provide a reasonable quality of life for everyone “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.[iv] Any economic system (or set of systems) that is sustainable and more equitable will likely look far different than the one that presently dominates the globe. Chances are, though, that we will not change them in time to prevent the dieback of our species. At the moment, we are still stubbornly adhering to “business as usual.”
Similarly, we have a paradoxical relationship with technology. As the world that technology has built unravels around us, we are compelled to rely on it even more. We have succeeded so brilliantly and become the dominant megafaunal species in great part by increasingly melding machine to human, by solving problems through the innovation and application of technology, co-evolving with it, anatomically, neurologically, and behaviorally, by becoming, in a word, cyborgs. Technology helped lift us from survival as a nervous grassland ape to ruling as Earth’s dominant predator. Some of our greatest technological triumphs have involved either increasing the efficiency with which we use resources or synthesizing novel substances that substitute for scarce resources.
However, for the unprecedented problem of the human dilemma—a twinned problem of biologic overpopulation and a cancerous, predatory mutation of capitalism—technological innovations have often done us more harm than good. Any savings we have derived from its benefits has been negated by comparable increases in consumption (Jevons paradox) and by unforeseen and undesirable consequences (blowback). Refrigerator coolants, nuclear fission, plastic water bottles, and hybrid crops have both their uses and their blowback. It will take time, but we will probably determine which innovations are truly helpful in the long run and which we must discard as mistakes. Again, sadly for us, this will not happen in time to avert a dieback and the collapse of the civilization we know and love, for the changes we are instituting scarcely deviate from “business as usual,” that is, from the very ways we have been doing things to get us in this predicament. The innovators of technology tend to be simultaneously brilliant and caught up in the paradigm of technological optimism. Many are being molded by the world’s greatest minds at the world’s best universities to engineer our way into a better future. Genetic engineering, synthetic biology (also called extreme genetic engineering), geo-engineering, and nanotechnology all promise extraordinary outcomes. They also come with unknown and potentially extraordinary consequences. Just because we can do something, does not mean we should. Nevertheless, history suggests that they will be developed and turned into products as soon as they are profitable.
ENDNOTES
[i] The higher the pre-reproductive mortality rate and the greater are other factors (such as non-reproductive women), the more children are needed for replacement. In the First World, 2.1 is considered the replacement total fertility rate. In the Third World, that number presently stands at 2.3. Some countries, such as Germany, maintain growth rates due to immigration.
[ii] Of course this has occurred within a world-system dominated by capitalist modes of production. Within a different paradigm, the results might be quite different. That is, urbanism, education and careers do not necessarily have to lead to high material consumption.
[iii] There are three main reasons for this slow demographic response, and one factor that will work as a counteracting force. First, because of the pace at which culture changes, it may take another generation (twenty-five years) before the average world fertility rate gets down to replacement level. At that point, the world’s youngest will represent the largest single age group (the wide base of the population pyramid in the figure below), the largest age group in human history, and likely the largest that will ever inhabit this planet. Second, due to what is called population momentum, it will then take another three generations (75 years) for this large age bracket to age through the “pyramid,” although at that point the age structure diagram will resemble more a cube-shaped skyscraper than a pyramid. And third, because the average life span is continually increasing, it will take even longer for population to actually stabilize, that is, for there to be about the same number of people in each age bracket. Offsetting these somewhat will be a continued reduction in the global fertility rate below replacement. The greater and faster the reduction, the less time it will take for our population to stabilize and the lower will be the peak population.
AGE STRUCTURE DIAGRAMS
[iv] A partial quote of a definition of sustainability by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in their 1987 report called Our Common Future (more well known as the Brundtland Report). Although this is an anthrocentric definition, the only way to meet the needs of future generations would be by leaving much of the biosphere intact.
