The Importance of Turning Back: 8 Billion Humans, Part 2

11/24/22 – The improbability of protecting biodiversity in a world of 8 billion humans

Hello everyone:

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you partaking, and Happy Thursday to everyone else. I’d like to pause here to say Thank You to my readers for your interest and thoughtfulness. It means so much to me that this work, which I love, has found a broad audience. I’m especially grateful to my paid subscribers, who are supporting my dream of making the Field Guide a full-time job. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This work means the world to me.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Sven Hedin, the noted 19th/20th century Swedish explorer, made several incredibly difficult journeys through Central Asia. As best as I can recall from reading his memoir, My Life As An Explorer, many years ago, his 1901 expedition from the deserts of Western China headed southward across the high passes of the Tibetan Plateau with a hundred horses, yaks, and camels and twenty men. Altitude, cold, hunger, and exhaustion killed nearly all the animals and at least a few of the men, all to support his quest to be the first European to map the region and visit the sacred (and forbidden) city of Lhasa.

When caught by authorities outside of Lhasa, they insisted he return the way he came. To avoid that fate, and to continue his intended journey to cross the Himalaya into India, he told a lie. I cannot journey back in my footsteps, he said, It is against my religion. Being more dignified souls than Hedin, they agreed, steered him around Lhasa, and sent him on his way.

I was reminded of Hedin on a long walk as I thought about this week’s writing. We need a smaller, less disruptive civilization, but what could be more anathema to Western/Anthropocene society than the prospect of reversing direction? Why should we shrink from the glory of constant growth? How can we retreat from what, despite the long trail of carcasses behind us, we are sure has been an unrivaled success?

Nothing that the Western tradition has long thought placed us above and apart from the rest of life – complex consciousness, language, play, grief, tools – makes us special, but we do seem remarkably alone in our desire and capacity to reimagine the world. Like Sven Hedin, we are the single-minded mapmakers on a destructive journey.

Geography, geology, oceanography, biology, and so many more ways of seeing the planet now form layers of understanding in our multi-dimensional map of our pale blue dot. Indeed, some of us now think of the planet as a platform from which we’ll launch into the cosmos we’re also beginning to map. But if the cost of mapping must be the decimation of what we map, then the price is too high. Hedin’s single-mindedness (reflected also in a lifelong love of German culture that extended, sadly, to the Third Reich) is a reminder of our own. And we know too much now of the multitude of intelligences that share this planet with us to really believe that single-mindedness is a worthy existence.

another intelligence living and mapping the world

I ended last week noting that the question of correctly sizing a sustainable population is a very different question than How many people can we fit on the Earth?, which is really asking how much of the planet we can sacrifice to squeeze in more babies. (I’ve addressed that question here.) If, as I believe, many of the rights provided by the just and fair civilization we aspire to should be extended to ecosystems and species, then population shifts from a God-given right for humans to an ethical decision rooted in what’s best for the greater living community.

Before we get too dreamy-eyed thinking about that sustainable human civilization, though, it’s important to understand why we can’t get there with the numbers we have now (or will have in the decades to come).

Let’s go straight to the heart of the dream. What if, as I fervently hope, we learn to value ecology over economy, eliminate most fossil fuel use, eat mostly plants, farm responsibly, eliminate production of toxic plastics, develop a circular economy, regenerate landscapes, restore at-risk species, and create an equitable global society which neither rewards wealth nor punishes poverty? Would 8 billion humans (or more) be okay if we treated both the Earth and each other with a full measure of respect?

Apparently not. Remember that we’re already consuming 75% more of Earth’s natural resources than it can regenerate in a year (that’s the 1.75 Earths I mentioned last week). So the full task, as we check off everything on the make-a-new-civilization list, is to 1) radically reduce global consumption while 2) raising the standard of living for the billions living hungry, impoverished lives, and 3) to do so while population ratchets up to 10 or 11 billion by 2100 and while 4) climate change and battered ecosystems increasingly destabilize nations already ill-equipped for the task.

It's a hell of a to-do list. And a moving target.

Even if we managed to bring human consumption down from 1.75 Earths to 1 Earth’s worth of resources, though, what does our using 100% of the planet’s biocapacity leave for the rest of life? Not enough, as it turns out. The Global Footprint Network reminds us that

to secure 85% of the world’s biodiversity requires humanity not to use more than half of the Earth, according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson. In other words, human demand now exceeds 3-fold a rate that is compatible with lasting conservation, including stabilizing our climate.

Half an Earth? That’s the sensible limit on our devouring of biocapacity? You can see where the math leaves us, assuming it’s correct. We need to reduce our footprint by more than two-thirds to reach a reasonable compromise on biodiversity.

When were we last consuming a mere 100% of Earth’s biocapacity? Around 1970, when population was 3.7 billion, less than half what it is today. Which nation’s citizens today live, on average, a 1.0 Earth lifestyle? Those of Chad and Benin do, while the average resident of India has a 0.8 Earth footprint. According to Earth Overshoot Day, only 11 countries are currently at or below the 0.5 Earth threshold: Yemen, Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor-Leste, Angola, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Rwanda.

It is hard to reconcile what little I know of the standard of living in these countries with the high-tech, low-impact, sustainable middle-class future world being envisaged by policy makers and climate/biodiversity campaigners, not least because some of these countries (D.R.C. and Pakistan, especially) will experience huge population growth in the next few decades.

An important point here is the relevance of “per capita footprint.” Pakistanis and Rwandans, for example, each emit and consume far less than individual Germans or Americans, and this basic truth is often used to criticize concerns that wealthier countries have about population growth in the poorer ones. As valid as that criticism is, it needs a few important counterarguments for context: 1) it’s vital that wealthy nations continue reducing their own populations at the same time they provide family planning assistance to poorer ones; 2)  as far as the planet is concerned, our total ecological burden is far more important than our per capita footprint; 3) in many cases, the biodiversity loss that will accompany population growth in these less affluent countries will make life harder for the next generation; 4) naturally, poor people and impoverished nations have no intention of remaining poor, and so if conditions allow they will increase both their per capita and total footprint even as they increase their population; 5) residents of poorer, crowded, climate-impacted nations will increasingly look for emigration options to wealthier countries, where they will live a higher-consumption, higher-emission lifestyle.

Pakistan // U.S. State Department

My point with this essay is not to say that we cannot find our way to a responsible civilization living amidst a healthy green Earth. My point is that it will be extraordinarily difficult, and it will come at a very high price, and that the difficulty and price will worsen in direct relation to the size of our population. A bottleneck is coming for life on Earth, caused (from the perspective of other species) by a rapacious ape who has consumed and bred more than the land could support. What we do today and tomorrow, and what our children and their children do to keep the bottleneck as wide as possible, will define what that greener future looks like.

It is a difficult future to imagine – both the problems and the solutions – but imagine it we must.

I am reminded here of the poet May Sarton’s wisdom: “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”

I don’t have a clear view of the path, but sometimes we have to plunge ahead regardless of how hard it is to see ahead. Here are some of the tools we know will move us in the right direction:

Provide fully-funded and unfettered access to family planning services around the world. 286 million women have an unmet need for proper contraception, and half of all pregnancies in the world are unplanned. Universal family planning, which must voluntary and respectful of human rights, would ideally include a full suite of contraceptive care and pregnancy/newborn care. Fully-funded contraceptive care in low- and middle-income countries would only cost $12.6 billion per year. Add in the maternity and newborn care and the price is a mere $68.8 billion per year. (For comparison, Qatar spent $220 billion – bribes not included – on preparing for the World Cup.)

Provide full educational opportunities to girls and women everywhere. The Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai cites the climate benefits of education here, but she might as well be talking about biodiversity too:  

When girls are educated and when they stay in schools they get married later in their lives, then they have less children and that helps us to reduce the impacts of climate change that the population increase brings…If every girl was able to exercise her sexual and reproductive health and rights through quality education and had access to modern contraception, it could reduce total emissions.

In fact, as Project Drawdown calculated, the funded provision of voluntary family planning and universal education would reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 70 gigatons by 2050.

End the fiction of constant growth. The Earth has limits, and the balance of life on the planet will be ruptured for millennia if we don’t live according to those limits.

Reduce meat consumption. If we all become vegetarian, the benefits would be astonishing. The agricultural footprint would shrink to roughly a quarter of its current size. As this 2016 BBC article explains, a quarter to a third of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and much of the nearly 70% of agricultural land used for raising animals would be available for restoration of forests, grasslands, and other rewilding work. Note, though, that nearly all the emissions benefits would come from eliminating red meat from the global diet; chicken and eggs produce only a tenth of the emissions.

Stop wasting food. A third of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten.

Clean energy for everyone. We need a global, affordable array of efficient, nonpolluting energy sources powering clean electric heating/cooling heat pump technology. Fossil fuels need to disappear and be replaced by renewables, including perhaps nuclear fusion. But all that energy will come at too high a price if it further diminishes biodiversity through massive increases in mining.

Increase the quality, quantity, and density of urban areas. High-quality dense but livable housing has a much smaller ecological and carbon footprint than suburban sprawl. We need to build (and renovate) better insulated buildings connected by reliable and affordable public transit in walkable neighborhoods.

Active participation by everyone, from policy-makers to families. Individuals can make a real difference at both the local and global level. Perhaps the biggest impact you can make is donating to effective organizations working on the front line of the climate, biodiversity, and family planning efforts.

We can do so, so much better than we’re doing now. And that’s what we must do. But for it to be enough – the clean energy, the biodiversity-supporting agriculture, the reduced consumption, the circular economy, all of it – we’ll need to end population growth and reduce total numbers significantly. What a sustainable population might be is another question, one which will be defined less by economic theory or the familiar rules of ecology than by 21st century Anthropocene realities. The more barren the Earth becomes, the fewer people it will support.

One final note: All experts agree that a population decline is coming. Current estimates suggest a peak of 10-11 billion late in this century before a long, slow decline begins. It’s happening already in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. That is excellent news, though it scares a lot of people who work in government. The problem is that we need the decline to begin yesterday. Or rather, life on Earth needs that decline. The faster the better.

The long, hard fights by environmental groups, scientists, activists, and forward-thinking policy-makers are all for naught if every gain is soon overwhelmed by the pressures of continued growth and high consumption. Human population has doubled over the past 50 years while wildlife populations have dropped by 70%. Another million species could disappear in the next thirty years. As Jane Goodall said at the 2020 World Economic Forum,

We can’t go on like this. We can’t push human population growth under the carpet. I would encourage every single conservation organization, every single government organization to consider the absurdity of unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources.

If we want to rebuild society into a healthy population on a healthy planet, we have to recognize the improbability of doing so with any number close to 8 billion. And we have to acknowledge that the ecological impact of another 2 to 3 billion humans will be devastating.

Which means that, unlike Sven Hedin, we need to admit the necessity of turning back. The false religion we’ve made out of constant growth has led us astray, and at an extraordinary cost.

I want to close on a positive note. Amazing work on all fronts is being done every day, and on this day of Thanksgiving we should be giving thanks for those environmental groups, scientists, activists, and forward-thinking policy-makers. And we should be grateful to each other for our care, concern, and love of an astonishing world that has nurtured us.

I’m certainly grateful for your attention and subscription to my work here.

Please read on below for a lovely list of good biodiversity news.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

I’ve mentioned this before, and promise to write more about it, but for now please read up on the most promising piece of U.S. biodiversity policy since the Endangered Species Act: the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA), which will funnel $1.4 billion dollars per year to states and tribes for managing threatened species. States and tribes are more than ready to put the funds to work to support their Wildlife Action Plans (click to find your state’s plan), which map out their most important conservation efforts. RAWA is bipartisan: conservatives are excited to avoid listing more species on the restrictive Endangered Species List, and progressives are excited to finally be putting in long-term, strategic, large-scale wildlife protections. This could be enormously important. But it hasn’t passed the Senate yet, so contact your Senators to ensure they’re aware and on board.

Read all the excellent biodiversity reporting from the Age of Extinction section at the Guardian and the Down to Earth series at Vox.

Want to know more about wildlife conservation? Here's a really thoughtful reading list from NEWT (Northeast Wilderness Trust) on the anniversary of their 20th year in the conservation business. Of the 20 readings listed, 10 are in the books/articles/essays category and 10 are the studies/research category. Which means there are familiar favorites like Braiding Sweetgrass from Robin Wall Kimmerer and Half-Earth from E.O. Wilson mixed in with lesser-known but equally essential reads like Abundant Earth from Eileen Crist and a paper in Nature that outlines priority conservation areas around the globe.

Say hello to the Global Ecosystem Typology from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It’s a new planetary-scale tool for systematically describing and assessing ecosystems. Why is this important? Because 1) we should have had something like it a long time ago, considering that our impacts on ecosystems are global, and 2) now it will be possible to create standardized assessments of, and remedies for, human impact that will help guide the global biodiversity framework for the U.N.’s Convention on Biological Diversity.

The Nature Conservancy is buying insurance for Hawaiian coral reefs. It’s a pilot program that, if it works, will fund repair of the reefs in the weeks immediately after hurricanes damage them.

Europe’s cities are becoming more crowded, and that’s good news. Building fully-serviced, walkable neighborhoods means less pressure on the land surrounding those cities, even as the urban areas become more densely populated. The carbon and ecological footprints of urban dwellers are generally much smaller than those in the suburbs.

From Mongabay, the latest in a long string of successful eradication of rats and other invasive species from remote islands. The response of native ecosystems to the eradications is strong and beautiful. This story focuses on atolls in French Polynesia, but similarly wonderful results have occurred on sub-Antarctic islands and elsewhere.

From the Times, a major long-term reforestation success in Nepal. 40 years ago, the national government handed over control of deforested areas to the local communities who have, ever since, worked to regenerate and protect them.