20/7/2924
Thoughts on Limits to Growth
In the last 200 years, the Earth’s major ecosystems have been radically disrupted by human activity. Several physical limitations underlie continued expansion of modern civilization: the nature of all organisms as they have evolved; the global footprint of humans; material shortages of ‘natural resources’; and the accumulation of ‘waste’ products.
- The inability of humans to restrict their conscious behavior to control the intrinsic, evolutionary, organic character to reproduce and grow.
This limitation is based on humans’ nature as an organism. Within an evolutionary process, all organisms grow and reproduce until a limit is reached. Limits were remote when humans relied almost exclusively on solar energy. However, beginning in the 19th century, these limits were broken by the triad of science, technology, and fossil fuel energy, which stimulated multiple discoveries and innovations that satisfied unfulfilled human desires to grow and live longer lives. The success of breaking millennially old, natural ecological limits has blinded humans to the detrimental and long-term limits effects that have accompanied the benefits.
- The inability to continue to provide the natural resources required to support the demands of a human population of over 8 billion people.
Eight billion people and their domesticated animals are the result of the benefits of modern science, technology, and the application of fossil fuels. The exponential growth of human population has resulted in demands for the Earth’s natural resources that are greater than the Earth can reproduce. {See the Global Footprint Network.)
- The inability to supply the mineral materials used by modern civilization.
The minerals that humans have exploited as resources in modern economies are powered by coal, petroleum and natural gases. The energy from burning them has been used to make products and services from scores of other minerals of the natural world. More material sources of energy and an expanding panoply of new minerals have been found useful. New economies “cherry-picked” the easily available useful minerals. And science and technology have continuously found more useful minerals and substitutes for older ones. However, minerals are never reproduced at the rate they are used because they were geologically produced and consumed in human time. In a similar way, organic materials have been used as resources which are used faster than they are produced—some to extinction.
- The inability of the Earth to absorb the radically new waste products of an industry-based society.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are the prime examples of waste from manufacturing processes that indirectly limit the conditions under which humans exist. Similar examples include soil erosion and fertilizers in streams and open waters. Most recently, plastics and many chemicals have even found their way into the human body. The volume of all sorts of discarded goods as well as materials used in building construction end up as waste that is scattered over the landscape or dumped in the sea. In earlier times most waste was organic and decayed within the lifespan of humans.
Comments
No single limit is isolated from the others. They are complexly inter-related. Growth of populations and the manufacture of goods and services are accompanied by depletion of natural resources and the disposal of unwanted matter used in providing those goods and services. And overall, recognition that the triad of science, technological innovation, and use of geological sources of energy provide limits as well as the benefits of modern living.
Humans evolved, like other animals, on Earth where natural ecological processes changed relatively slowly, even during ice ages and volcanic explosions when other hominid species died out. Consciousness allowed humans, very gradually, to develop ways of altering the natural world that allowed them to grow and reproduce. But always, growth was limited to the use of solar energy.
As science and technology were coupled with fossil fuels, products and services began an exponential growth whose limits have largely remained hidden. Only within the last century have a very few people recognized that radically new limits are closing in on modern civilization. Climate change and its new patterns have alerted a few more people to the perils of exceeding natural limits.
Many of those few, hope to find ways to overcome some element of those limits—to provide ‘solutions.’ For example, today, the major suggested ‘solutions’ are to use renewable energy, which is dependent on new manufacturing, storage, and distribution facilities. These all rely on continuing the triad of science, technology, and fossil fuel energy, which are the basic cause of environmental problems. The goal ultimately seems to preserve or expand modern civilization and ignore other limits to ‘growth and progress’.
However, even fewer people want to address the environmental limits by changing human behavior and consciousness. Cultural inertia is a major factor in addressing desires for political and economic power, property, profit, productivity, and publicity. These conditions all have powerful advocates, who want to continue their behavior with no thought to the environmental consequences of their behavior.
And, of course, it is impossible to ignore the organic imperative to grow and reproduce.
In response to everything that I have written above, I rely on Paul Chefurka’s metaphor:
Eat, Drink, and Be Mindful!
See alurquhart.com if you wish to follow more of what I have written.