This essay is mainly a long excerpt from Part III of my book: Land & Culture. 2013. Eco-Justice Press, Eugene, Oregon. I no longer hold out hope that actions will prevent the collapse of modern civilization.

A PERSON IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

In this essay I try to understand how I, and other Americans, are tied into the much more extensive and pervasive cultural and natural ecosystems of modern America.

            My particular connections to Nature and Culture

I have been largely unaware of the indirect impact that I have had on the natural world. For example, in my lifetime I have owned twelve automobiles and eight houses. Without thinking about this ownership, these purchases have linked me directly with broad patterns of consumption of natural resources used in the manufacturing and construction processes.

I have had several bank and retirement accounts, certificates of deposit, and mutual funds. Rarely have I thought that these financial activities connect me directly with the world of corporate investments and capital markets except as the market rises or falls.

My travels by car, train, and airplane directly tie me to energy consumption as does the heating and cooling of air and water in my daily household life. And rarely do I question that my comfort or ease of movement has resulted in costs to Nature.

My long association with universities has provided me with gainful employment; yet through their connections with state and local governments and students’ tuition they are tied to major natural and cultural ecosystems, which impact much broader natural and ethereal environments.

My patterns of consumption for food, clothing, shelter, and health care also bind me to extensive agricultural, industrial and commercial networks. And internet technology ties me to ever expanding global networks, whose impact on the natural world has scarcely begun to be assessed.

I participate in all of these activities, rarely paying attention to the impact that they have on the complex material and ethereal world. Having grown up and lived in a period of great material abundance and prosperity in the United States, I have viewed the world with an unexpressed optimism that those conditions would continue with but minor tinkering by political and economic powers. I mostly participate in that tinkering by voting for elected officials and by choosing what I buy. In other words, I have largely accepted, unthinkingly, the worldviews which I absorbed growing up as an American in the 1930s and‘40s. However, now I have discovered that tinkering is not enough and I have had to completely rethink the ways in which I and others in American society act out our lives.

When I attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, I gradually became intellectually aware that those common, basic worldviews were no longer adequate to maintain healthy and prosperous societies. Concern for the consequences of a rapidly burgeoning population and of increasing demands for consumption have compelled me to radically rethink the ways I view the world. I find that the dominant worldviews of the Western World as they have developed in the past two centuries are no longer adequate to confront the coming ecological crises, indeed, they will exacerbate them.

Contemporary Worldviews and Their Origins

As I see it, contemporary worldviews have resulted in an overwhelmingly successful materialization of the imaginative ideas of humanism, scientism, and productive capitalism. Coupled successfully with new technologies, human orderings of the cosmos have, during the last four hundred years transformed fleeting apparitions in the minds of a few Europeans into 1) broadly accepted categories of what is the nature of Nature and 2) has resulted in a collection of humanly-fashioned material objects, which blanket the earth’s surface. Individual human beings in most regions of the Earth have come to experience a physical world that is largely of human making just as they have increasingly learned and become socialized into a cosmos of European derivation.

Two New Worlds

The simultaneous discovery by Europeans of two New Worlds—the continents beyond Europe and the ideas and techniques of modernization—resulted in the diffusion of a European worldview as well as access to previously unimagined physical resources. These ideas and their newly created resources have been diffused widely, if unevenly throughout the world. At first, the new ideas became embedded in Northwest Europe, gradually spreading elsewhere in Europe and, with European settlers and colonists, elsewhere in the world. Now, all nations are caught up, to a greater or lesser extent, with the ideas of European origin. The result has been the physical transformation of nearly all of the earth—its land, air, and waters.

Starting with the fifteenth century explorations of the coast of Africa by the Portuguese, continuing with the search for easily obtainable wealth of other older civilizations in Asia, and exploding with the scramble to gain control of the New World of America, Europeans began to impress their ideas tangibly on lands and peoples which they saw primarily in terms of wealth or resources for the taking. The power of the Europeans was, in the long run, overwhelming and all of the results discussed by Schmookler ^[1] emerged. In some cases native inhabitants were killed, died of disease, or retreated to yet more remote places. In others, the Europeans simply assumed political and economic control. In yet other cases, the indigenous populations adopted the ways of the powerful Europeans and joined in processes of the materialization of capitalism, science, and humanistic ideals. And these ways were increasingly coupled with 1) industrial technology, which for human ends enslaved the immense biological energy locked up in coal, oil, and gas, and 2) communication technology, which spread European ideas even further and with increasing rapidity.

In Europe during the 16^th through 18^th centuries, the processes by which new scientific, social, and economic institutions emerged were so effective that earlier institutional environments were replaced or subsumed by new institutions. These institutions and their members acted out their roles, creating new material worlds both in Europe and wherever else in the world they became established. Newly reorganized spaces and artifacts transformed or replaced older less well-expressed or maintained organized forms of matter and energy both in Europe and its overseas colonies. Diffusion of new, applied technology and of newly forming values brought a new organization of space, the dimensions of which were scarcely imaginable at the beginning of the modern era. And the newly organized material spaces steadily pushed back Nature—wilderness or the neutral stuff from which resources were formed.

In the early 17^th Century, Francis Bacon, in his book, The New Atlantis,^[2] viewed the application of science and technology as the means to create a Utopia of a good material life. His views formalized, elaborated, and suggested how to institutionalize emerging scientific thinking. European science that fledged in the written correspondence of a few individuals, developed with a scattering of scientific and natural history societies, and emerged with systematic publication of papers in formal publications.^[3] In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, of course, science became institutionalized in universities, governmental and private research organizations and corporations. Ever since Bacon’s day, utopian views of science have grown, today becoming one of the most widely accepted secular views of the world.

In the early 20^th Century, Lewis Mumford described a more fully elaborated Utopia which he said was based on three ideals or worldviews, calling them ‘Idolas of the Modern Age.’^[4] First, there was the utopian idola of consumption, privilege, and possession—maybe today exemplified by the mini-mansions in exurban areas and their lesser version of large homes in the suburbs. Second, there was the idola of an engineered and laissez-faire economy that supported manufacturing and the selling of goods, still well represented today by chambers of commerce, Wall Street, associations of manufacturers, and many in government. The third idola described by Mumford was a view of urban agglomerations (megalopolitan regions) within nation states, where consumption would be reconciled with production by creating structures that would ease the movement of goods and services. This idola became material with the highways that increasingly connected all parts of the country. With the coming of digital technology, these structures of interaction have leapt the bounds imagined by Mumford. They now exist in cyberspace, with its near complete lack of ties to places and must be considered more recent utopian vision. Consumption and privilege, a capitalistic industrial and commercial economy, and free movement of goods, services, and ideas still underlie most views of a good place—Utopia.

Americans are embedded in a complex democratic/capitalistic society with strongly entrenched worldviews and institutions which reflect these early 20^th Century visions of Utopia. Growth and Progress as utopian ideas were based on increasing consumption of ‘goods’ in an urbanizing world. They supported the material betterment of millions of people. Attitudes and behaviors associated with contemporary American society were appropriate to the prosperity and increasing life spans of Americans in the 20^th Century. However, it is increasingly apparent that along with more and more “goods” have come more and more ‘Bads’—pollution, rapid entropy, biological extinctions, and climate changes—at the expense of Nature and human health. In the terms that I expressed in Part I, social institutions, supported by dominant Western worldviews of what is a good life—a Utopia, have rapidly initiated values and techniques to create the ‘goods’—the values and artifacts—that facilitate “progress.” Growth and more goods may have improved the human condition for those with access to them; however, they have largely come at the expense of the natural world through the increased consumption of raw materials, especially of combustible energy sources. We are now becoming aware of dystopias—bad places—that question our older utopian ideals.

As Mumford wrote in 1922:

“The more that men react upon their environment and make it over after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in Utopia; but when there is a breach between the world of affairs, and the overworld of Utopia, we become conscious of the part that the will-to-Utopia has played in our lives, and we see our Utopia as a separate reality.”^[5]

Today we can see that ‘the world of affairs’—the real world—may come into conflict with ‘our ‘long-standing will-to-Utopia.’ The material world of Nature no longer reflects the ideals of our ethereal world.

Alternate worldviews that value non-human nature have existed; but they have been largely overwhelmed by the “idola of the Modern World.” The vast material transformations of today are the result of these utopian ideas and values and their associated institutions. Materialization of these idolas has been so successful that valuing the natural world has played but a minor role until very recently. (The preservation of national parks and wilderness areas was an exception but only as it considered Nature separate from everyday life.) However, these utopian worldviews are no longer sustainable as they conjure up parallel dystopian places. Bill McKibben alerted us to the possibility that no part of the natural world has escaped the hand of humans. ^[6] Heralding these dystopian views were George Perkins Marsh who wrote Man and Nature in 1864^[7], the 1955 symposium, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, and Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. Since that time, the trickle of dissenting views has grown to a great flow of “environmentalists” and “environmental” organizations.^[8]

The ethereal world in which major institutions perpetuate the worldviews of their participants is made material through technologies, grammars, and by new vocabularies. The desired artifacts and physical alterations of the material world may be seen as Goods—a physical expression of our utopian ideals. But as the volume of Goods increases exponentially and Goods incorporate more of Nature, we have become increasingly aware of the intrusion of Bads on our lives. Some institutions have been organized to give voice to people who are concerned with the intrusions of Bads on their lives. (Figure 7) Early examples were the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. Since the 1970s a whole range of institutions, often labeled as environmental groups, have developed 1) technologies to mitigate the impact of goods and 2) systems of thinking about the relation of humans and nature, e.g. ecology and sustainability.

Today, the recognition of Bads and the rapid encroachment of the human world on wilderness are often expressed in terms of contests between older utopian views of the modern world and the rapidly emerging views of the “environmental movement.” At present, concern about human induced climate change is possibly the most contested issue. Commonly, these contested worldviews are seen as being polar, e.g., economic growth versus environmental protection. And the worldviews of pre-modern societies are scarcely considered important.

Growth in the Modern World

I believe that the scale of the conflicts between the Ethereal and Natural worlds has not been adequately understood. Most of our institutions and their members have grown up with modern utopian views which were adequate for the world of the early 20^th Century. However, the scale for which they are adequate has changed so radically that extreme disruptions of both human societies and the natural world are bound to result unless new utopian views arise and materialize. I will look at the changing scale of three major events that show the need to develop new worldviews: 1) population growth, 2) increasing use of material ‘resources’, and 3) the loss or destruction of Nature.^[9]

Population growth. The impact of the sheer number of people now living on the earth presents the heaviest pressures on the natural world, especially as people make increasing demands on material resources that have been created, discovered, and exploited. Yes, indeed, I am a Malthusian of sorts. I firmly believe that we are deluding ourselves with the optimistic assumptions that either that the world population growth will peaceably level out and stabilize in the near future or that the planet’s carrying capacity will expand to meet the increasing needs of all of the Earth’s new inhabitants.

I want to look at worldwide population growth at several scales to help make my point. First look at the long course of humans on earth. I care not whether we start with Australopithecines, Homo erectus, or Homo sapiens—two million years ago, 350,000 years ago, or 30,000 years ago. For the sake of the diagram that I show in Figure 8, let’s look at the growth of population from 10,000 years ago to 2000 a.d.

Before this period and extending into the distant past humans continued to gain culture—language, religion, art, dance, rituals, and small social groupings, but because of limited numbers and limited technology the breaking into the earth itself did little to disrupt the evolutionary and major ecological systems of the earth. I do not want to glorify the human experience of the thousands of years before the agricultural revolution. However, it was a period when human societies little intruded the natural ecosystems except by the use of fire.

The conquest of the Earth by farmers, herders, warriors, explorers, traders, adventurers, missionaries, capitalists, mark the events when humans became aware of overcoming space, territory, and environmental resistances through the use of machines, which were, according to Lewis Mumford, at first based strictly on organizing human labor and only later dependent on inventions made of earthly matter and fueled by the Earth’s stored energy.^[10] Human populations responded with exponential growth that continues today. ^[11] With ever increasing power, machines have been so successful in disrupting the very fabric of the land, air and waters of the earth that with some truth it may be said that no part of the Earth is now completely natural. The chroniclers of the last 3000 years, including even those of the last fifty, could not foretell that the success of the civilizations that they have described so well might create landscapes that are so changed as to become nearly unrecognizable even to many alive today. New sources of energy which have been discovered in the last 150-200 years have supported the explosion of human populations and the development of institutions devoted to concentrating the solar power that had long been stored in fossilized organic matter.

But let me return to my autobiography and the population changes that have occurred within my family. I gain perspective about the importance of an historical and environmental view of the world by using the recent genealogy of my branch of the Clan Urquhart as my base. My great-great grandfather Donald was born in Scotland in 1800 and died in 1860, His son John was born in 1820 and lived 76 years until 1896. My grandfather Robert was born in Ontario, Canada in 1868 and died in 1950. My father Orin was born in 1901 in Oregon and died in 1991. I was born in 1931 and if I live as long as my parents will live at least until 2021. My daughter Sarah was born in 1964 and with the same genetic life expectancy could easily live until 2050.

Seven generations of Urquharts (of which I have known four) have lived since 1750. These more than two hundred years are but a blip in the existence of humans on the earth, yet they have seen a seven fold increase in populations—from about one billion to over seven billion, today. ^[12](Figure 9)

The world’s population had not quite reached its first billion when Great-Great Grandfather Donald was born; and even then the population was twice that of but 200 years earlier and about four times greater than the 250,000 inhabitants of the Earth in 800 a. d. By the time that my Great Grandfather John migrated from Scotland to Nova Scotia and on to Ontario, maybe 40% more people were alive than when his father was born. Those 400 million are more people than the total of all who lived on earth before the 15^th Century. No wonder my relatives migrated from the overpopulated, marginal lands of the Scottish highlands. And still another 400 million people were alive on earth when my grandfather worked his way from Canada to Wisconsin and then across the United States, finally settling in Oregon shortly before my dad, Orin, was born in 1901. By the time my younger sister was born in 1927, there were two billion people on earth—twice as many as when Great-Great Grandfather Donald was a boy. And there was another 100 million when I was born in 1931. And 3.7 billion were living when my daughter, Sarah, was born. Today, the world population at 7 billion is nearly double that.

One hundred and sixty years of change is also reflected in the demographic transition of the Urquhart family. In Scotland, later in Canada and the U.S. the Urquharts had experienced steadily improving health and longevity: 60 years for Donald, 76 years for John, and 82 years for Grandfather Robert, 90 years for my father. And the birth patterns also reflected their times. Great Grandfather John had 9 children, Grandfather Robert had six children, my father had three children, I had one child, and daughter Sarah has had no children. (My slightly older sisters, however had nine children between them, reflecting the post World War II births of the “baby boomers.”) Thus the Urquharts paralleled the Euro-American population movement through the demographic transition into nearly stable populations.

When as a young college student in the 1950s I was shocked to read that demographers projected that the world’s population might actually reach 3.6 million by the end of the 20^th Century. (In 2000 there were 6.3 billion, an underestimation by 75 %.) I also read in a textbook, China, Land of 500,000 Million,^[13] of an alarmingly overpopulated nation. (China now has over 1.3 Billion people.)

Consistently longer term demographic projections of the world’s population have been drastically wrong. Even today, with better statistical information, long term population projections must be viewed with skepticism and a full awareness of their limitations. Population projections are not predictions. They are abstract, aseptic, generally upbeat, and made with little concern about global or regional economies. Nevertheless, population is going to continue to increase in the near future because of the very large numbers of women of child-bearing age.

In 2011, the population topped seven billion and was still increasing by about 94 million each year, which was the population of the entire world just before Athens rose to greatness. Projections for the year 2050 range from a low of 7.5 billion to a high of 10.5 billion people. (Figure 10) From the birth of my Great, Great Grandfather Donald through the probable lifespan of my daughter Sarah—250 years—the population of the earth will probably have increased over tenfold. Since the birth of my father in 1901 until 2050 the population will probably have increased by nearly seven times. And in my lifetime the population of the earth may increase by more than four times.

Since 1900 the population increase has been supported by increased food supplies, expanded measures of both public and private health care, and greater access to broad ranges of goods and services. All of these interrelated activities have at their base the command of massive amounts the earth’s natural materials at a scale unimaginable in all prior human time.

Use of Nonfuel Mineral Resources. Not only has the population of the world grown from less than one billion in 1750 to over seven billion in 2011, but the consumption of mineral resources has also increased dramatically. The graph prepared by the Global Rockhound Community shows the use of raw, non-fuel mineral resources in the United States from 1900 to 2006.

Especially noteworthy is the greatly increased use of construction materials such as stone, sand, and gravel since the end of the Second World War. Although much smaller in volume, the production of metals has also dramatically increased, again especially since the 1950s. For example, worldwide copper mine production from 1900 to 2008 roughly parallels that of the consumption in the United States of all non fuel minerals. (Figure 12) Similar trends show for worldwide steel production. (Figure 13) The history of primary aluminum production since 1950 is similar to that of most other major metals. The recent rapid increase in aluminum production has primarily been in China. (Figure 14) The mining of rock phosphate has also increased greatly since 1950, dwarfing the production of other fertilizers. (Figure 15)

And mineral resources such as rare earth oxides, which were little used before 1965, have been brought into production, especially with the rapid growth of the communication and computing industries. (Figure 16)

Energy resources. Energy minerals have grown concurrently with the increased consumption of non-fuel minerals. During the last twenty-five years, the production of energy has paralleled the increase in population, increasing more rapidly between 1945 and 1980. (Figure 17)

Beginning with the use of coal to power steam engines in the late 19^th century, demand for fossil fuel energy has grown. Especially in the last sixty years the consumption of petroleum and natural gas has surged. (Figures 18)

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/1/22/04219/1102

In the United States the rapid growth of primary energy consumption of petroleum and natural gas preceded the growth worldwide. (Figure 19)

Per capita consumption of new mineral materials. It is one thing to indicate the rapid increase in new mineral materials but yet another to show the impact each of us has on the consumption of new earth resources. The great magnitude of per capita consumption was first brought home to me in the Global Report to the President that was commissioned by President Jimmy Carter and appeared in 1980. ^[14] The diagram that appeared in volume III indicates that in 1975 each U.S. citizen required about 40,000 pounds of new material annually, that the energy produced by the consumption of petroleum, coal, natural gas, and uranium was the equivalent of the energy that might be produced by 300 persons working continuously for each U.S. citizen, and that the U.S. consumption of all new minerals was about four billion tons. (Figure 20)

Using statistics from the US Geological Survey, the US Energy Information Administration, and the US Census Bureau, the Mineral Information Institute (an affiliate of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration)^[15] has compiled comparable tables of per capita consumption of new minerals for each year since 1995. The peak year of consumption in the United States was 2006, just before the collapse of the housing industry and the start of the general economic recession. Over 7 billion tons were consumed in that year—3 billion more than thirty years earlier. During his lifetime a child born in 2006 might be expected to consume over 3.7 million pounds of new mineral materials. (Figures 21) US citizens consume more per capita than citizens of all other countries; however the worldwide per capital consumption continues to grow even as the world’s population has burgeoned.

Since the 19^th century and particularly in the last sixty years, the Earth has been viewed as an unending provider of material resources. The costs of resources have been seen simply as the cost to discover, extract, transport, and use the resources, as well as the cost of financing the necessary transitions. In industrial societies natural resources are cultural evaluations that see Earth’s materials almost exclusively in terms of their economic value to humans. Only recently have serious attempts been made to place these economic evaluations into the broader context of the Earth’s natural ecology.

Loss, Degradation, and Pollution of Natural Ecosystems.

Human use of nature has greatly modified natural ecosystems. In the last section, I wrote about major extractions from natural systems, commonly referred to as natural resources. But only in the recent past have humans become greatly concerned for the wastes created in the processes of extractions; waste products were disposed in lands and waters with low value to the contemporary society. Little used lands, streams, lakes and the oceans were simply dumping sites. With increasing populations and need for more land and water for human use, many of these sites have come to be seen as polluted. The term pollution like the term natural resource is a cultural evaluation and not an intrinsic characteristic. Pollution and habitat changes have led to extinctions or great diminishment of biotic species. Many articles and books that describe these changes have appeared in the last thirty to forty years. I find that William Meyer’s book, Human Impact on the Earth,^[16] is especially good at presenting ideas about pollution, extinction, and resource extraction in an easily readable form. It is largely based on material from the book, The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years,^[17] which looked at many ‘environmental’ problems in a more detailed fashion. Walter Dodds’ Humanity’s Footprint: Momentum, Impact, and Our Global Environment^[18] is a recent, readable discussion of human impact of the Earth.

Extensive bibliographic material as well as significant commentary on environmental changes is found on many sites on the internet. I believe the sites for Paul Chefurka and Bruce Sundquist to be extremely useful. ^[19] Resource depletion has a very long history. Humans have long disturbed natural ecosystems, sometimes in major ways. For thousands of years fire has been used to stimulate or discourage plant growth in hunting and land clearance for agriculture and pasture. Agriculture has transformed wild lands wherever crops have been grown. As population has increased, especially in the last three hundred years, new fields have been created to the extent that almost all suitable cultivable cropland is used. The amount of crop land has remained at about 18 million square hectares since about 1980. (Figure 22) With modern population growth and limited availability of good, arable land, the per capita cropland is declining. (Figure 23)

At the same time, forested land has decreased from 54 million square kilometers in 1700 to 46 million square kilometers in 1993. (Figure 24)

As population grew, pressure to use marginal lands increased. Soil erosion on these marginal lands has also increased especially in the dry land fringes of the Earth. The amount of soil erosion that has actually occurred is extremely difficult to determine because there are no good base lines to use in comparison with present conditions of the soil. Erosion of soils has also accompanied forest clearance, whether for new cropland, pasture, or wood products. Current estimates of human induced soil degradation show 1,966 million hectares have been affected, often on the best soils for agriculture.^[20] Figure 25 shows the soil erosion in the United States as of 1992.

As cropland approached its maximum extent, more and more fields were irrigated in attempts to increase crop yields. Between 1950 and 2003 the amount of irrigated land grew from 94 to 277 million hectares. This expansion has resulted in the drying up of streams in some areas and the lowering of ground water tables in others. Salinization has also become a major problem associated with irrigation. Combined with the rapidly increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides demanded by the ‘green revolution’ of agriculture, irrigation waters contain chemicals which leach into adjacent streams and groundwater, lowering their quality.

Domestic and industrial uses of water have also increased. In many regions, the availability of fresh water is a major problem. With increased population the global per capita availability of fresh water is now decreasing. (Figures 26 and 27)

With industrialization people have moved to cities. Because many cities were originally founded to serve as commercial centers for surrounding farmlands, modern urban uses have often expanded onto good cropland.

I will not discuss other pollutions of air, water, and land because many recent studies now highlight these Bads. The sources cited above refer to many of these studies; more recent examples may be easily found on the internet. Among the many studies, those relating to climate change have demanded most attention in the last decade because of the dramatic effects that atmospheric pollution will have on global natural ecosystems that directly affect human life. Carbon dioxide, in the past 200 years, has increased at a rate 10 to 100 times greater than at any time in the last 500 years. It and other greenhouse gasses can be directly linked to the burning of fossil fuels. (Figure 28)

The increase in pollution of the atmosphere, the oceans, and fresh water, the consumption of mineral resources, and the results of the industrialization of agriculture and animal production, as well as the commercialization of forestry and fishing can all be related to changes in the rate of energy use, especially the consumption of fossil fuels.^[21]

Ecological Thinking about Energy and Human Activity.

Of particular importance in linking human activities with disturbances of natural ecosystems are two lines of thought:

1.) The accounting of ecologic change in terms of transformations of fossil fuel energy from natural sources to human use;^[22] and

2.) The comparison of the ecological reserves of the earth with the demands on these reserves of services—the ecological footprint.^[23]

Each of these approaches offers a way to measure human activities and natural ecosystems with a common unit—the first in terms of emergy and the second in terms of global hectares.

Accounting for the transformation of energy for human use.

While searching for a better way to understand the flows of energy in natural ecosystems, Howard T. Odum realized that social and economic systems as well as natural ecosystems could be evaluated in common energy terms. Every process and activity on Earth manifests energy, mostly ultimately derived from the sun. Odum named and described a unit of energy that could be applied to all kinds of products and services, whether natural or human. He called that unit ‘emergy’ (spelled with an ‘m’ and measured in solar calories or solar joules). Emergy is “the available energy of one kind that was previously used up directly and indirectly to make a product or service.” ^[24] Emergy is the memory or history of energy used in making a product or service, but is no longer available.^[25] For example, solar energy is used in producing green plants; some of the energy of those green plants may by converted to wood or peat, which may, by geologic processes, be converted to coal, petroleum, or gas, futher concentrating and localizing the stored energy. Further transformations may may concentrate the stored energy in producing electricity in a power plant. That electricity may then be used in further concentration of energy, originally derived from the sun, in the production of many products and services. Emergy was used at each stage of the transformation. In ecological terms, solar energy is used by producers, which in turn are transformed by series of consumers into intermediate products and services, and in the process, further consuming and concentrating energy.

By using the concept of emergy, all energy used in making a product or service–both available energy and emergy used in prior transformations–may be accounted for at all stages in the transformation of products or services, not simply the available energy used in the latest stage of transformation. As transformations take place in the creation of new products or services, energy is used up and can be remembered as emergy in the transformed product of service. Odum calls the “calories of available energy of one form previously required directly or indirectly to generate one calorie of another form of energy transformity.”^[26] As energy is used in each stage of processing, transformity increases. With greater transformity in creating a product or service, less energy remains available for further work; the remaining energy is of higher quality. This higher quality energy may be used to create yet higher quality products and services or may be needed as feedback to further concentrate lower quality energy sources.

The real energy costs of a product at any stage of its transformation may be accounted for by using the concepts of emergy and transformity, measured in units of solar power. All products and services contain concentrations of energy and can be compared on the basis of their transformity, or embodied energy as well as the energy that remains concentrated in the product of service. Emergy and transformity measure work at all scales on a common basis. Thus, emergy can be seen as “real wealth” generated and transformed by nature (and humans), not merely the available energy expended at particular late stages of production for which money has been transferred.

Real wealth (intrinsic energy value) comes directly and indirectly from natural resources and should be measured in emergy, not energy nor money. The real costs of food, clothing, housing, health services, and information need to include emergy that was used in all stages of production. Money, by contrast, is a human creation and is not related directly to emergy, which is a measure of nature. If money is not paid for energy derived from the real wealth of a natural system, its contribution to the human economy of nations, institutions, humans, and information will not have been adequately considered. The monetary cost of natural resources enters the market economy mostly through expenditures for discovery, extraction, transportation, and transformation not from its real value as natural capital. Indeed, Odum states that “market values are the inverse of real wealth contributions from environment and cannot be used to evaluate environmental contributions or environmental impact.” ^[27] In market based economies, value is attached to products and services in which energy has already been highly concentrated. The energy already used in their production—emergy—has been ignored. The greater the transformity in the production, the more concentrated the energy. Emergy, or real wealth, is largely excluded from market value; and the true value of basic natural ecosystems, which supply the energy for all transformations, is largely ignored.

Figure 29 diagrams the interface between Nature and Economy—where monetary value meets real value. The left hand side of the diagram represents Nature, including 1) the sources of both renewable and non-renewable energy and materials, 2) their combination in natural ecosystems and 3) their cultural evaluations as natural resources. The source of renewable natural energy is primarily solar power. Non-renewable fossil fuels and raw minerals constitute natural storage. Both renewable energy and non-renewable energy and materials combine in natural ecosystems, some of which are valued by humans as natural resources.

Some natural resources are converted to crops, fisheries, timber, grazinglands, mines, etc. becoming economic resources. Economic resources are the natural part of the interface between Nature and economy. Money from the sales of the processed products of economic resources flows in from the market economy. And the purchase of goods and services to process the economic resources flows out to the market economy. The exchange of money for sales and the purchase of goods and services is the human part of the economic interface.

Flows of energy and money at the interface of natural ecosystems and the main economy

Money is not exchanged for the actual energy of the natural ecosystems that are consumed in the main economy. Emergy, which is present at all stages of the transformation from its natural sources to its consumption in the main economy, is not accounted for in economic terms until it is seen as an economic resource, i.e. transformity is not considered. The monetary costs of energy first appear only at the interface between Nature and a market economy.

The crux of the idea that I want to emphasize here is that the basic value of natural resources are left out of most economic considerations. Real value, measured by emergy, is excluded from consideration of market value. We have lived in a period of resource abundance where the value of natural resources does not reflect the emergy that they bring through their transformation. As the patterns of global energy production have shown, ever more fossil fuels have entered the systems of resource processing—agriculture, forestry, mining, etc. However their fundamental contribution—natural capital—prior to extraction and processing has been given little, if any, economic value. In essence, in most economic considerations the energy contained in the resource has been thought to be free. But it is not free; it is in limited supply, especially in readily available concentrated forms. Most energy sources that have fueled modern economic growth are non-renewable, of limited extent, and their real value as natural capital has not been adequately considered.

Other than the economic uses in which money is exchanged, nature and the human economy also interface indirectly. Clean air, clean water, wilderness, and wild products rarely enter the market economy directly and remain undervalued until they are in short supply, are lost, or become polluted. The costs of pollution, extinctions, and exploitation of natural systems are largely excluded from market values and costs. Not to include the real wealth that clean air and water bring to society makes sense only in a world of unlimited land and energy and natural systems that can easily absorb the damage that results from their use or pollution. To ignore the cost of absorbing waste products, particularly of CO₂, underlies solutions to reversing climate change. Today we must recognize that energy and material systems are in limited supply. The Earth’s resources are not infinite. The costs of maintaining energy and natural systems need to be included in the main global economy.

The energy that is stored geologically in fossil fuels cannot be replaced in human time. As energy source materials become in shorter supply, more concentrated forms of energy will be used as feedback to transform less concentrated forms of fossil fuel into more usable forms. Diverting highly concentrated energy from producing high value products and services will make them even more expensive. Economies of growth have been underlain by large stocks of real wealth. But when real wealth is only accounted for in terms of its price in the human money economy, little thought is given to its real costs in terms of emergy. Increased demands coupled with the decline in the reserves of minerals and energy fuels, can only mean that the underlying real wealth of modern society must eventually decline.^[28]

By using the concept of emergy, the difference between the real value of energy and the market value of energy within the main market economy becomes apparent. Emergy represents the true energy costs that have supported growth economies. When an accounting of the true costs of concentrated forms of fossil fuels and minerals is made, it becomes obvious that economies based on growth must expect radical disruptions when the natural sources of energy and material resources decline. This accounting will become increasingly apparent as highly concentrated fossil fuels become less available.

Ecological Footprint.

Another form of accounting for the relationship between human activities and natural ecological systems has been developed by The Global Footprint Network.^[29] They have devised a method for comparing the human Ecological Footprint with the Biocapacity of the Earth’s ecosystems.

“The Ecological Footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and sea areas an individual, a region, all of humanity or a human activity requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the carbon dioxide emissions, and compares this measurement to how much land and sea area is available.”^[30]

Biocapacity, or the ability of an ecosystem to produce useful biological materials and to absorb CO₂ emissions, is calculated with the total area of bioproductive land or water available, weighted by the productivity of the land, in yields per hectare. Biocapacity represents the ability of the biosphere to produce crops, livestock (pasture), timber products (forests) and fish as well as to uptake additional carbon dioxide in forests. In short, it measures the ability of terrestrial and aquatic areas to provide ecological services.^[31] (Figure 30)

(Demand) Ecological Footprint = Population x Consumption/person x Resource + Waste Intensity

(Capacity) Biocapacity = Area x bioproductivity

Overshoot = Ecological Footprint – Biocapacity

Figure 30

The calculation for a Global Ecological Footprint, i.e. the ecological footprint for the Earth, measures both the demand for ecological resources and the capacity of several types of productive land to support human demands. Both demand and capacity are measured in terms of the global average areas: the global demands needed to support specific human activities and the global bioproductivity of particular types land. These measurements are expressed in units called global hectares, which are defined as “hectares of bioproductive area with world bioproductivity.” The ecological footprint, or demand, is computed by combining population, consumption per person, and intensity of resource use and waste emissions.

Global biocapacity measures bioproductivity of ecological resources and waste assimilation in global hectares by dividing the total amount of a resource consumed in a land use category by the yield per hectare, and by dividing the waste of CO₂ emitted by the absorption capacity per hectare.^[32] Using a common unit, i.e. global hectares, allows for different types of land to be compared using a common denominator. Equivalence factors are used to convert physical hectares of different types of land and water into the common measure of global hectares.^[33]

Ecological Footprint Standard 2009 addresses the uses of source data, derivation of conversion factors, the establishment of study boundaries, and the communication of findings.^[34] By using these standards, The Global Footprint Network organization has determined global, national, and regional ecological footprints. They found that the global ecological footprint first exceeded the biocapacity of Earth in 1975. By 2007 the total global ecological footprint was 18.00 billion global hectares. The global biocapacity was then only 11.9 billion global hectares. This meant that there was an ‘overshoot’ of approximately 50%, i.e. that humans demanded a bioproduction equivalent to that of 1.5 Earths to support their patterns of consumption. (Figure 31) In the United States, the ecological footprint of the average resident was 8.0 global hectares, i.e. an overshoot of eight times the biocapacity of the global average.

By far the greatest change between 1961 and 2007 was the decreased ability of the Earth’s ecosystems to sequester carbon dioxide emissions. The Carbon footprint increased 11 fold in the twenty six years between 1961 and 2007. (See the blue area in Figure 31)

The great advantage of using the Global Footprint methodology is that it uses a common measure—global hectares—to express both the history of human demands on Earth ecosystems and the biocapacity of those ecosystems. It does not measure carrying capacity but instead compares each year’s existing demands with that year’s productivity. Both demand and productivity are adjusted for the conditions found for any particular year. Because each region or nation has a different mix of bioproduction types as well as different human consumption demands, the distinction among nations, regions, and different sets of regions or nations can be shown. ^[35]

Section summary. Odum’s development and application of standard measurements of energy—emergy and transformity—from source to particular product of service, especially at national or global scales, provide insights into the interface between energy and the human economy. This allows real wealth—natural capital—to be included in economic studies, which at present, is not.

The research of The Global Footprint Network has been able to compare the production demands of humans with the biological production of natural ecosystems by using a common unit of measure—the global hectare. The units of measure of Odum and The Global Footprint Network allow the interconnections of human society and natural ecosystems to be compared in ways crucial to better understand present world economies and ecologies.

Projections

Monitoring Ecological Changes. Monitoring the limits of natural systems is being studied by many organizations. In particular I recommend looking at the web sites of The Stockholm Resilience Centre,^[36] The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ^[37] The Biodiversity Indicators Partnership,^[38] The Worldwatch Institute,^[39] The National Environmental Accounting Database,^[40] and The World Wildlife Fund.^[41] Projections of needed changes in policies and behaviors rest upon the observations, compilations, and assessments of such organizations.

Early projections. In the 1950s M. King Hubbert showed that oil production would peak within a few decades^[42]. In 1968, Paul Erhlich predicted economic downturn would be caused by overpopulation and resource shortages.^[43] In the 1970s, Rufus Miles,^[44] N. Georgescu-Roegen,^[45] and Earl Cook^[46]wrote of the problems of continuing economies based on growth. Such studies have since multiplied. Computer models of the interactions among human demands on resources have shown the probable results of continued demands of growth based economies. Especially noteworthy were early models of Howard T. Odum in Environment, Power. and Society published in 1971. He noted that as long as energy and material reserves continue to freely feed economic production, assets and information will continue to increase; but as reserves of nonrenewable resources are depleted or are found to have a high cost, the assets and information, i.e. products and services, will also decline but with a lag time as their storage in the main economy is used up.

A more sophisticated model was developed by Donella and Dennis Meadows et al. in their 1972 study, Limits to Growth.^[47] An updated version of their model appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine. (Figure 32)

These projections show a downturn in products and services, population, and food per capita within the coming decades of the 21^st Century.

Suggestions to continue or reverse current trends. Other models of the future show continued expansion of energy supplies. They rely on conversion to renewable energy, the continued discovery of cheap energy resources, or upon technological innovations that greatly reduce the costs of concentrating lower grade energy sources; still other studies rely on developing fusion or fission energy safely and economically.

If successful alternatives to fossil fuel energy are created by new or improved technologies, yet other technological break-throughs will still be needed. Energy comes in may forms, each appropriate for particular types of uses. New or alternative forms of energy must also be suitable for a wide variety of products and services: heat, transport, lighting, manufacturing, communication, etc. Other material resources will also require new technologies to use lower grade sources or to find and use replacements.

Even if cheap energy supplies are found in whatever form, their use will continue to disrupt natural ecosystems. With continued or increased streams of products and services that are based on concentrated energy from whatever source, additional technologies will be required to absorb waste products that result in biological extinctions and the pollution of land, water, sea, and air. However, if the world’s population and standards of living continue to increase, successful new technologies will only delay the timing and nature of the disruptions of the natural world. I firmly believe that no series of technological solutions can be developed that can simultaneously find new, inexpensive energy supplies, find substitutes for depleted mineral resources, and at the same time reduce the ‘Bads’ of continued growth.

One of the more detailed plans to develop alternative sources of energy as well as policies to conserve energy has been presented by the World Wildlife Fund. ^[48] Its goal is to reach 100% renewable energy supplies by 2050 and simultaneously to reduce the total world demand for energy. Its proposals require major, immediate changes in both public and private policies worldwide. Without projecting a particular future, many other studies also suggest ways of modifying current policies and behaviors that would damage natural ecosystems less while permitting social stability. Possibly most of these studies would fall under the category of searching for sustainability. And as was indicated in a 1996 study:

“Cultural sustainability depends on the ability of a society to claim the loyalty of its adherents through the propagation of a set of values that are acceptable to the populace and the provision of those sociopolitical institutions that make the realization of those values possible.” ^[49]

The most basic policies needed to maintain sustainability have been outlined by Richard Heinberg.^[50] His five axioms of sustainability are:

1. Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse.
2. Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.
3. To be sustainable, the use of renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is less than or equal to the rate of natural replenishment.
4. To be sustainable, the use of non-renewable resources must proceed at a rate that is declining, and the rate of decline must be greater than or equal to the rate of depletion.
5. Sustainability requires that substances introduced into the environment from human activities be minimized and rendered harmless to biosphere functions.

Other policies needed to attain sustainability have been spelled out in some detail. They embrace both socio/political and natural/ecological aspects.^[51] The Earth Charter^[52] recognizes the necessity for changing minds and hearts and the roles of all institutions. It outlines the action needed to “bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.” Elizabeth and Howard Odum have presented a long list of policies that would be needed to adjust to the declining availability of energy and mineral resources—their policies for a ‘prosperous descent,’. ^[53] They suggest such things as maintenance and replacement rather than new construction; lowering the rate of depreciation; providing incentives for eliminating luxury use of energy; redefining progress as adaptaion to earth restoration; decentralizing organizational hierarchies and populations; using emergy as a basis for trade rather than free exploitation of resourcesl; using capital investments for downsizing, and on and on. Their list gives an idea of the radical changes that would be needed to attain a society/economy based on sustainable energy sources.

Heinberg’s axioms of sustainability, the Odum’s the World Wildlife Energy Report, and The Earth Charter require huge changes in policies and behavior if they are to be successful. However their suggestions are unlikely to succeed because they require governments at all levels and people in their private lives to change long-standing, deeply ingrained attitudes and behaviors. They fail to show how existing attitudes and behaviors can be changed. By inference, their basic assumption, as with many optimistic studies, is that an awareness of the need to change will be adequate for individuals, institutions, and governments to rise to the challenge to alter long standing policies and behaviors.

        Resistances to change.

The major problem for the future of the world’s natural ecosystems and the development of sustainable societies is the continued strength of belief in economies that are based on growth. And the support of growth economies is based on the use of high grade energy. Continued use of massive amounts of energy and the other resources it processes means that the “Bads” of extinction, pollution, and rapid entropy will continue until the energy sources decline. And overshoot of the ecological footprint of humans on global biocapacity, already a fact, will continue to increase into the near future.

M. Wackernagel and W. E. Rees sum up the difficulties of changing individual and societal beliefs and behaviors that fail to recognize their impact on natural capital.^[54] Their article is the best discussion of the extraordinary difficulties in changing today’s global ecological footprint to match the biocapacity of the Earth. The following discussion paraphrases Wackernagel and Rees’ outline.

Individuals and society cannot perceive slow changes that have global impact; even for some observable ecological changes, they are uncertain about their causes. Most contemporary decisions exclude ecological reality. Contemporary cultural and spiritual traditions contribute to an exploitative relationship between society and nature, the belief that more, now, is better, and that industrialization is good for all parts of society. Modernity expresses a split between body and mind, nature and culture. And faith in human ingenuity overrides ecological knowledge.

Wackernagel and Rees indicate that barriers to understanding ecology have been erected by the belief that money is the dominant measure of wealth and that resource prices are society’s main indicator of resource scarcity not biophysical abundance. Monetarized values nearly exclusively determine market prices, not ecological necessities of life-support. Science, which is excellent at analyzing clearly defined problems, is weak in understanding the complex problems of integrated global systems. Yet science remains the principal way of understanding nature. And scientifically based technology is believed to be able to overcome even ecological problems and sustain growth.

Society and individuals believe that they live in open systems with little or no restraint from nature; and most decision makers live in their own world, blind to even their own personal impacts on nature. Beliefs that societies should follow individual practices also often lead to resource depletion.

The separation of the fundamental bases of human existence, e.g. food, clothes, shelter, and services from the basic resources from which they are derived, leads to ecological ignorance. The derivation of much information from electronic means blunts the connectivity of persons and the living world. And the globalization of economies tends to lessen the importance of local economies and ecologies and increases the disparities in valuation of natural resources inherent in international trade. Furthermore, property rights of individuals and nations are valued over conservation of nature and sustainability of communities.

All of these beliefs and behaviors create formidable obstacles to the understanding of problems of both local and global ecosystem exploitation and degradation. To eliminate these constraints would require extraordinarily great changes in contemporary views of the world. I do not anticipate any of these changes to occur soon; and I remain pessimistic about major reforms in my lifetime.

             Radical futures.

No one can predict with any accuracy how the conflicts between humans and natural ecosystems will play out. Societies, economies, politics, and natural ecosystems interact in unknown ways because of their extraordinary complex inter-relations. Nevertheless, the changes that inevitably will occur will be radical as long as the dominant world outlook continues to emphasize economies of growth and increased standards of living. No historic parallel exists for the economic growth of the last several decades. The consequences of a decline in growth economies also has no historical model. A good road map for decline does not exist.

The problems of resource growth and environmental pollution are global and demand international cooperation if they are to be solved. The continued insistence of growth and improved material standards of living, if pursued by even one or two major industrial nations or regions, e.g. The US, China, India, western Europe, can enlarge the global ecological footprint no matter what other nations do. Regional or national shortages of energy, water, food will create tensions among the various parts of the world. With shortages, infrastructure of roads, electric grids, and sanitation systems will occur. Education, social, and health services will radically change. I largely agree with Paul Chefurka, who presents his View from 50,000 feet,^[55] a listing of major changes to the world in the next 75 years that is headed by his belief that

“Climate change will not be ameliorated by international agreement. This is due to the cooperation problems identified in the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game, national and corporate self-interests, …and the complete lack of any realistic substitute for fossil fuels.”

Can you imagine the future if this view is realized?

Many questions quickly come to mind:

Will conflict over resources result in war?

Will social and economic inequities increase?

Will some regions of the world or some energy rich nations further their dominance by physical and economic force?

Will it become more difficult to maintain high quality services such as education for all?

Can health care be made available for everyone?

Can democracy and capitalism survive or will they continue to respond to short term conditions?

Can population pressures respond to local or regional shortages without massive migrations?

Will climate change cause massive dislocations of agriculture and people who live in coastal areas?

Will resistance to modernization, let alone to ecosystem disruptions caused by globalization, become increasingly destabilizing world peace?

The list of possible questions is unending and the problems that will arise are unpredictable. But major, unforeseen changes will inevitably come before the end of the century. The social, economic, religious, and political values that currently hold sway are not now up to the task of facing a world of declining energy, increasing pollution, and climate change. The utopian world of material wealth created by continued growth will be replaced as radical changes “rock the world.”

             My Place in the World Ecosystem

As an individual, I have maintained my place within the great flow-through of material and energy resources in American society. As an average American, I consume about 40,000 tons of new mineral supplies each year. Using Howard and Elizabeth Odum’s figures, a person in the United States in the 1970’s was supported by the energy of 250,000 calories coal equivalent each day. That amount must have increased in the last three decades. As an average American, I consumed 22.7 barrels of oil and emitted 5 metric tons of energy-related CO₂ in 2010. According to the Mineral Information Institute’s calculations, on average, directly and indirectly, every American consumes enough fossil fuels to generate the equivalent of 300 people working around the clock every day of the year.^[56](Figure 20) And if everyone on the planet lived as I do, the world would have to have 4.3 times the biocapacity it has in 2007 to keep up with demands of our global ecological footprint.^[57] And the footprint would be even larger—8 times the biocapacity of the Earth—if everyone lived like an average American. Thus it is obvious that as an American, I greatly exceed my share of fossil fuels, other minerals, CO₂ emissions, and the carrying capacity of the Earth.

In my over eight decades on Earth, I have participated increasingly in interconnected global ecosystems. The networks of goods and services that reach me are ever more complex. I am ignorant of all but the last one or two stages of the intricate pathways and transformations of the goods and services that I consume. And I certainly have no good idea of the tranformities that have been made since the resources I consume were extracted from nature. In a similar manner, I am largely unaware of the pathways that my ‘waste’ products take beyond the local dump, sewage plant, or exhaust pipe. Greatly altered ecosystems radiate from me and every other modern person in complex ways of which we are ignorant or, at the very least, ignore. In other words I live, like most Americans, in a highly artificial world of altered ecosystems that are changing at a rate greater than ever before in the history of human kind.

I now live in a world of greater cultural making with both more goods and Bads than did any of my ancestors. The accumulated contents of my house, the artificial landscapes within which I have spent most of my life, the water I drink and the air I breath are all part of humanly disturbed ecosystems just as are the waste products of my modern life style. The greatest impact I have had on natural ecosystems has probably been indirectly through the support that I have received as a student and as a teacher.^[58] But also important is the energy that went into maintaining my health—including one major surgery and several minor procedures—and my retirement, which is based on a pension and monetary investments in major corporations, financial institutions, and other organizations. And I am overwhelmed to think that about 300 fossil fuel slaves have supported me every day at least for most of my life especially when compared to the slave free lives of my ancestors.

I find it almost impossible to reconcile the objective facts of the energy and minerals that I have consumed as a modern American with the objective facts of the immense alterations of the natural ecosystems that have resulted from that consumption. I have enjoyed the fossil fuel slaves who have afforded me health, education, food from all over the world, and ease of movement in my daily life as well as with seven trips to Europe, three to Africa, eighteen to Latin America, twenty to the eastern North America, eleven to the American southwest, and many more to California and within the Pacific Northwest. Certainly my travels mean that I have given far more than my share of CO₂ to the atmosphere and climate change. I have supported through my taxes (and military service) the non-productive costs in energy and matter of the Korean War, the Viet-Nam War, the Afghanistan War, two wars in Iraq, as well as participation in other military actions.

I have tried to balance my direct and indirect attacks on the Earth’s natural ecosystems, not by radically changing my participation as a fossil fuel slave holder but as a teacher. Throughout my career, I taught geography that emphasized the ways natural and cultural systems operated at the scale of whole human beings. Many of my courses required field observation of local landscapes by the students. I hoped that at this scale my students could begin to directly understand their relationship to the material world. My concern in geography extends from the scale of houses and yards to the entire surface of the Earth. I have been concerned with the distribution and origins of both natural and cultural phenomena that form the landscapes of neighborhoods, urban and rural countrysides and of the major regions of the world. When ‘environmental’ concerns became part of the thinking of many Americans, I shifted my academic emphases to both the good and the bad of the ways humans made their landscapes and impacted the natural world. I also began research and taught classes on the history and contemporary views of environment and ecology.

I have been part of several groups of people whose ideas about the relations of humans to nature overlap my own. Most important of these groups was one developed by several faculty members who organized support for learning about environmental issues at the University of Oregon. We first developed several classes, a small library, and a center where students who were interested in environmental issues could meet. Later, we developed a highly successful interdisciplinary masters degree program whose students met regularly with faculty members and fellow students to discuss their classes, environmental politics, and how to increase awareness of the importance of environmental studies in its many dimensions. The master’s degree program has been followed by an undergraduate degree program and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. These were my efforts to counter the environmental problems humanity must increasingly confront.

Reflecting on over three decades of teaching and two in retirement, I feel that I took far more from natural ecosystems than I gave. I only hope that some of my students still think about the ways humans have altered the Earth both for good and bad.

My many year attempts to preserve open space and an ecological study area along the banks of the Willamette River illustrate the barriers to understanding, even by the educated leaders of a progressive city and university, of the importance of natural ecosystems to the everyday life of their citizens and students. Economic dreams of building a ‘research park’ were only slightly modified by building ‘set-backs’ and height restrictions, bones thrown to satisfy environmental concerns.

Other of my efforts at changing the negative impacts on local ecosystems have been intense at times, but with little positive effect. I have felt very frustrated by the overwhelming resistance to channeling the politics of growth away from short term concerns of a money economy to long term concerns about maintaining or creating sustainable natural systems in my neighborhood, city, and state. I have found that in any contested political issue involving land use, short-term economic concerns outweigh those about natural ecosystems. If these attitudes are so strongly embedded at the local level, I find it difficult to see them change regionally and nationally. And when millions of people on Earth simply search for enough food to eat and places to shelter, it is understandable that they are little concerned with preserving natural ecosystems.

I am part of modern, American ways of consuming. But I also see nature in terms of ecosystems that interconnect throughout land, sea, air, biota, and human cultures. I deeply feel that my consumptive behavior contrasts greatly with my ideas about the ecosystems in which I am embedded. Thus I find myself in a classic double-bind in which most of my behaviors directly contradict the beliefs I have about how humans must live to sustain life on the planet. I and many of my friends continue in our modern lives even as we are aware of the great environmental disruptions we cause. We cannot escape from the society and culture in which we are embedded. We have lived ‘high on the hog’ even as we are aware that such ways of living exploits the natural world that must support humanity in perpetuity. And it is unlikely that people of my generation will have to adjust to the impending decreasing flow of energy through the American society. What I can do, however, is set forth some goals that might offer some perspectives for the future.

           My Utopian Goals

With an unknowable future, but convinced that radical changes are inevitable, I resort to thinking in very general terms—Utopian, if you will. Maybe sustainability is the best term that is used today to describe an ultimate goal. And many specific policies and attitudes must be changed to reach that goal. However, my Utopian goals lie somewhere between specific policies and the ultimate goal of sustainability. These goals are the result of thinking about my overall philosophy expressed in terms of the relationship of Nature and Culture as mediated by a person, of studying the history of population growth, consumption of resources, and alteration of ecosystems, and finally of the personal way in which I am actually a part of the process of evolution.

My first goal: The earth must reduce its population if it is to be sustainable. To reach this goal, other than by Malthusian events, the world’s inhabitants must learn to see that they are intimately and systematically (ecologically) interconnected culturally, physically, and spiritually with nature and all other people on Earth. To learn that lesson everyone must realize that natural resources support his/her life. Maybe the most important way of gaining that knowledge is by living locally, using local resources which are consumed, renewed, and preserved locally as much as possible. These resources need to be thought of in terms of the lifetimes of overlapping generations. This is the local challenge.

Second: Highest priority must be given to providing everyone with adequate food, adequate housing, adequate health care, and adequate ways of finding pleasure in participation in body/mind and non-consumptive activities such as conversation and discussion, athletics, and arts of all forms. To reach this goal, consumption must be oriented first to providing necessities and reduction of luxuries, especially those that demand the use of much energy to build or use. And redistribution of regional surpluses must rise above regional selfishness. Economies can no longer afford to be based on growth. They must be based on support of life for everyone. This is the national and global challenge.

Third: Community must take precedence over individualism. However, to give emphasis on community does not mean that individual human rights should not be honored. Respect for individual integrity, expression, and belief must not be restricted except as they restrict the integrity, expression, and beliefs of others. Groups, like individuals, should not have their integrity, expression, and beliefs limited except as they limit other groups or individuals, or the sustainability of the natural ecosystems of which they are a part. This is the personal challenge.

If we humans are to arrive at lower populations, less consumption, and a much lower level of energy use, we must gain a conscious awareness of our intimate interconnections within nature. If we do not, we will find ourselves the unwitting victims of the unique hubris of thinking that we live in a world of our own creation. My hope is that the genius in each of us will lead to the creation of institutions and places that respect nature and honor the consciousness of humanity’s place within the intertwining complexities of both natural and cultural ecosystems. Then, our continuing place within the ongoing creative transcendence of the evolutionary processes will be assured for at least a while longer.

Footnotes (The references refer to bibliography in Nature & Culture.)

1. (Schmookler 1984) ↑

2. (Bacon 1915) ↑

3. (Urquhart, Diffusion of Scientific Societies 1985) ↑

4. (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 1922) ↑

5. (Mumford, The Story of Utopias 1922) ↑

6. (McKibben 1989) ↑

7. (Marsh 1965) ↑

8. When I first started teaching ‘environmentally’ related classes only a handful of ‘environmental’ books could be found on the shelves in bookstores and libraries. Today whole sections of bookstores are devoted to ‘environmental’ books. ↑

9. I leave to C.A. Bowers in his extensive writings the devaluing and destruction of the “cultural commons. ↑

10. (Mumford, The Myth of the Machine Vol.1 1967) ↑

11. At the beginning of the Christian era the world’s population was a mere 150 to 200 million. ↑

12. My great, great, great, great grandfather, John was born in 1739 when the world’s population was approximately 650 million—equal to the total amount of increase in the world’s population in the nine years before the beginning of 2012. In 1800 the population of North America was about 7 million. In 2010 it was 351 million, a 50 fold increase. ↑

13. (Cressey 1955) ↑

14. (Barney 1980) ↑

15. ( Mineral Information Institute 2011) ↑

16. (Meyer 1990) ↑

17. (Turner 1990) ↑

18. (Dodds 2008) ↑

19. (Chefurka 2012) (Sundquist 2012) ↑

20. (Wali 1999) ↑

21. A summary of many of the changes may be found in ↑

22. (H. T. Odum, Systems Ecology 1983) and http://www.emergysystems.org ↑

23. ( Global Footprint Network 2012) ↑

24. The ‘m’ in emergy replaces the “n” in energy and stands for memory. He measures emergy in terms of solar energy: solar emcalories or solar emjoules. ↑

25. (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)p 69 first appearing in (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power and Society 1971) ↑

26. (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)p 73 ↑

27. (H. T. Odum, Environmental Accounting, Emergy and Decision Making 1996) p.60 ↑

28. (H. T. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature 1982)p 262 ↑

29. ( Global Footprint Network 2012)http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑

30. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑

31. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑

32. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/glossary/ ↑

33. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/frequently_asked_technical_questions/#gen3In 2007 the equivalence measures were as follows (Global hectares/hectares): Cropland and Built up Areas—2.51; Forest land—1.26; Grazing land—0.46; and Marine and Inland waters—0.37. 1.00 being the global average of productive land and Cropland being 2.51 times more productive than the global average for all categories. Deserts, glaciers and….. are not counted as productive lands ↑

34. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/application_standards/ ↑

35. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/Ecological_Footprint_Atlas_2010.pdf ↑

36. http://www.stockholmresilience.org ↑

37. http://www.millenniumassessment.org ↑

38. http://www.bipindicators.net ↑

39. http://www.worldwatch.org/ ↑

40. http://www.emergysystems.org ↑

41. http://wwf.panda.org Especially note the 2012 Living Planet Report. ↑

42. (Hubbert 1949) ↑

43. (Ehrlich 1968) ↑

44. (Miles 1976) ↑

45. (Georgescu-Rogen 1977) ↑

46. (Cook 1976) ↑

47. (Meadows 1972)http://wvoutpost.com/2012/04/05/mit-researchers-predict-global-economic-collapse-by-2030/ ↑

48. http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/climate_carbon_energy/energy_solutions/renewable_energy/sustainable_energy_report/ ↑

49. (Robinson 2001)pp.46-48 ↑

50. (Heinberg 2010) ↑

51. (Robinson 2001) ↑

52. (Earth Charter Initiative 2012) ↑

53. (H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century, The Hierarch of Energy 2007)pp 289,291 and (H. T. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down, Principles and Policies 2001) ↑

54. (Wackernagel 1997)This article is the best discussion of the difficulties in changing to sustainability or reducing the global ecological footprint to match the biocapacity of the Earth. For me it forms the bases for my pessimism about reform in my lifetime. My discussion paraphrases Wackernagels and Rees’ outline. ↑

55. (Chefurka 2012) /50000_Foot_View.html ↑

56. ( Mineral Information Institute 2011) ↑

57. ( Global Footprint Network 2012) personal ecological footprint ↑

58. (Odum 1996) calculated the emergy and solar transformity of each hierarchical level of education attained in human growth and development in the United States. (fig.12.5). The transformity of a highly educated person is extraordinarily great. ↑