We agree that population will level off and not continue to grow exponentially. But this does not imply that we will be able to live sustainably on the Earth once population levels off. Dr. Jones postulated that whether population is too high or too low is simply a matter of values, not fact. Let’s look at this statement a little more closely…
In order to determine whether a given population is sustainable, we need to look at the carrying capacity of the Earth: the number of people that the Earth can support indefinitely. This number may go up or down over time, depending on how we use our resources. A good way to understand this is to look at a concept called the Ecological Footprint.
The Ecological Footprint is a model developed by Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel at UBC. Essentially, it is an estimate of the amount of land needed to produce the resources and assimilate the waste generated by the individual or group of people in question. For example, imagine the food that you ate for breakfast/lunch…where did it come from? How much land was required to produce it? How much land is required to assimilate the waste that was produced?
The average Canadian has a footprint of 7.7 hectares. If all the biologically productive land is added up and divided by the population of the Earth, there should be roughly 1.7 hectares per person. If the Earth’s population reaches 10 billion, this will leave 1 hectare per person.
Now, if we take the case of the US, the actual amount of land that is available per capita within the US is 6.7. If the average US citizen requires 10.3 hectares per person, where is that extra 3.6 hectares coming from? The productive and assimilative capacity of other countries. This means that either that resources are being extracted from other countries or waste is being “assimilated” in other countries. In order for developed countries to enjoy the standard of living that we do, others must make do with less. On the one hand, this is a purely ethical issue and you may not personally have a problem with the implications of your actions on other people. However, when we consider that environmental destruction and pollution do not know political boundaries, we might wonder how long it will be until we begin to feel the impacts of our actions at home.
In order for everyone on the Earth to enjoy the standard of living of Canadians, we would need to find more than three more Earths to sustain us. If the population increases to 10 billion, the pressures will increase dramatically.
Let’s take a look at where these pressures will be felt the most…
200 years ago Thomas Malthus developed a theory. Food production grows arithmetically, while population grows geometrically. Therefore population will always outstrip food supply, resulting in a population crash. Since Malthus, many other people, including Paul Ehrlich, have predicted the same thing. As Dr. Jones explained to you, none of these predictions has come true. Instead, food production has managed to stay ahead of population growth. You saw all the graphs of increasing yields of crops etc., but these graphs all ended in the mid 1970's, at the peak of the Green Revolution. But how has this come about, and will the trend continue?
The Green Revolution of the 1970's is over. Increasing amounts of fertilizer no longer provide huge increases in productivity, and can barely maintain existing productivity. To make matters worse, the amount and quality of land available for agriculture is decreasing globally. In developed countries, urban sprawl covers up our best farmland. Add in soil erosion and desertification from poor farming practices.
Part of the increased productivity of the Green Revolution was a result of improved irrigation of marginal lands. But today, our water resources are being depleted. While we tend to think of water as a renewable resource, much of the water that we use comes from underground aquifers that we are draining many times faster than they can be replenished. In many areas, there is not enough water to continue with this irrigation. The Colorado River and four other major rivers no longer reach the ocean for much of the year. Water consumption has tripled since 1950, and is still increasing. Only 2.5% of the water on Earth is freshwater, and most of that is locked up in glaciers. Of this available water, much has been polluted beyond levels safe for human consumption. The World Bank estimates that by 2025, two thirds of the Earth’s population will be living with water scarcity.
Given the state of our water and arable land, it is difficult to predict that our food resources will continue to grow at the rates we saw during the Green Revolution.
But Dr. Jones suggests that real resource scarcity is indicated by the price of resources. So let’s look at the market…
In traditional neo-classical economics, price is a function of supply and demand. As supply increases, price goes down. As demand increases, price goes up. If we were truly running out of a resource, we would see its price increase to a point that it became too expensive for us to use, forcing us to change our patterns of consumption. Unfortunately, this model of economics has not taken account of its context: the Earth’s ecosystem. Specifically, it does not take into account energy and material throughput. By this we mean that it does not take into account the services provided by the Earth or the effects that our actions have on the Earth or on ourselves. Let’s take the price of paper as an example. When we buy a piece of paper, we don't pay for the fish that were killed when soil from the clearcut destroyed their spawning beds. We don't pay for the people who suffer from breathing problems caused by the pollution from machinery involved in logging, trucking, and making the paper. We don't pay for the aquatic organisms killed by effluent from the pulp mill. If all these externalities were included, then the price for the paper would be higher, and we would consume less.
Dr. Jones also stated that in terms of resource scarcity, in the past “we have always found more”. And if it were to happen that we couldn’t “find more” (this is going to happen), then technology would develop to allow us to substitute for the depleted resource.
At
this point we would like to draw upon the second law of
thermodynamics to illustrate why this is a faulty claim. As you are
probably well aware, the second law of thermodynamics states that
entropy increases. As energy and material is used, its quality, or
ability to do work, decreases. This law seriously calls into
question the idea that our resources are infinitely recyclable.
No it doesn't; as we'll see in a later lecture, the second law says nothing
about the number of times we can recycle material, given a constant supply
of solar energy. JDJ
Let’s take Dr. Jones’ example of copper. He proposed that
the only reason that running out of copper would be a problem is if
the shortage impoverished their lives in some way. And if this were
to occur, we could either find a new technological solution to
provide the same service, or focus our efforts on recycling the
copper that has been used. Dr. Jones’ assumption about
recycling can only take us so far: according to the second law, every
time we use or recycle something, it loses quality or, in the case
of material, is dispersed. So while it may be conceivable to reclaim
all the copper that has been used and re-use it in new products, when
we think about how widely used copper could be spread over the Earth,
the idea of infinite recycling becomes rather less feasible.
Further there are many aspects of the Earth’s ecosystem that are not substitutable. Aside from the ethical argument that other species have just as much right to the planet as we do, from a purely anthropocentric point of view, the biodiversity of the Earth provides countless services that we take for granted. For example: photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, ozone protection or pollination. These are services that we currently get for “free” from the Earth. If it were feasible to imagine technological substitutions for these services, the costs associated with providing them are clearly prohibitive.
The Ingenuity Gap
Even if we suppose for a moment that we are not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, there is still one limiting factor on our ability to survive sustainably: human ingenuity. Thomas Homer-Dixon identifies two kinds of ingenuity. The first is technical ingenuity: ideas applied to solve practical or technical problems. Technical ingenuity relies on the second form of ingenuity: social ingenuity. Social ingenuity consists of ideas applied to the creation, reform and maintenance of institutions such as markets, funding agencies, educational and research organizations, and effective government – in other words, social ingenuity creates ideas for how to manage our technical ingenuity in the most appropriate ways. Homer-Dixon postulates that a gap is created between social and technical ingenuity when resources are scarce. He argues that resource scarcity causes individuals in positions of power or elites to engage in profit-seeking behaviour. This behaviour can increase social tension and thereby short-circuit the process of social ingenuity. What we end up with is a situation in which the rich get richer by hoarding resources and the profit generated from them and the poor get poorer because we have severely reduced our ability to create institutions to focus our technical ingenuity in a positive way.
Dr. Jones suggests that problems of pollution are decreasing. This makes sense from one point of view. As societies develop, economic growth increases. Initially, pollution also increases, but as people’s incomes increase, there is greater demand for improved environmental quality. This theory was first postulated by Simon Kuznets in 1955. It can be summed up with the following curve…. So, depending where a society is on the curve will determine what effect their economic development is having on their level of pollution. However, there is a very important aspect missing from this analysis: global trade. Say we are somewhere on this curve where pollution is decreasing. This model does not take into account the fact that much of the pollution reduction in developed countries occurs because the dirtiest parts of manufacturing are done in other, less developed countries. So in fact, while pollution may have been reduced in a local sense (i.e. within national boundaries), it has not in a global sense. A second criticism of this model is that it tends to only be true for localized, easily mitigated pollution problems and so is therefore not applicable across all sectors.
Further, Dr. Jones proposes that we use life expectancy as a measure of the effects of pollution. He argues that as we go from rural to industrial societies, life expectancy increases: an indication that pollution does not really increase with increases in technology. Again, we must return to the idea of the Ecological Footprint. In order for all people on Earth to attain the standard of living and health care enjoyed by developed countries, we would need an additional three Earth’s worth of resources and services. Clearly, this is not sustainable.
Dr. Jones also showed a graph showing that historically people died from causes related to air and water pollution, but now they die from things such as cancer, heart disease, and stroke, all of which tend to strike older people. This argument misses an important distinction between acute and chronic effects of pollution It's easy to see there's a problem when thousands of people start dropping dead from smog. This is an acute effect, one that harms you right away. It's much more difficult to see the chronic effects of pollution. Everyday we are exposed to literally thousands of chemicals in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the products we use. Many of these chemicals are known to cause cancer, birth defects, and countless other health problems. The health effects of the majority of these chemicals have never even been studied. Pollutants do not obey political boundaries on maps. They travel around the Earth in the air, water, food and products that we consume everyday. And pollution is not simply a human problem: even penguins in the Antarctic are exposed to these chemicals. It affects every species on Earth. Orca whales in the Georgia Straight have heavy metal concentrations so high that they are classified as hazardous waste when they die.
Dr. Jones suggested that pollution can be cleaned up with a combination of legislation and technology and in some cases, like the example of the Thames River that he showed you, this is true. But there are two obstacles to these solutions. The first is that pollution is increasingly an international problem and international legislation is very difficult to enact: just look at the Kyoto Protocol. Second, the costs associated with the scale of engineering required to mitigate pollution problems around the world is astronomical and beyond the realm of feasibility.
Dr. Jones concluded from his analysis of the carbon cycle that the most environmentally sound greenhouse gas reduction policy would be to clear cut all the old growth forests. He reached this conclusion based on the idea that the net amount of carbon in the atmosphere would remain the same because old growth forests are “carbon neutral”: they absorb as much carbon as they release. While it is true that old growth forests are “carbon neutral, there are a few reasons why this line of reasoning is not necessarily sound. First, forest soils hold large amount of carbon. When they are clear-cut, a large part of this carbon is released into the atmosphere. Second, Dr. Jones’ argument is based on the assumption that the carbon contained in the clear-cut forest will remain out of circulation in the carbon cycle. But clearly, this cannot be the case. No matter what the trees are turned into, be it paper, furniture, houses or fuel, eventually the carbon will return to the atmosphere in some way and there will be no old growth trees left standing to reabsorb that carbon. Further, the production of many of these products (paper, furniture etc.) contributes carbon dioxide to the environment, resulting in a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
Beyond these assumptions about the carbon cycle, Dr. Jones neglected to point out all of the other values of old growth forests which would be lost if they were clear cut:
Biodiversity
Habitat
Prevention of soil erosion
Dr. Jones provided a host of fantastic ideas for the future of life on this planet, including nanotechnology and the colonization of other planets. We call the feasibility of these ideas into question in terms of the distribution of these technologies across the Earth. Who will be traveling into space? Who will be left behind to struggle on a planet that has been stripped of its resources and polluted to uninhabitable levels? Is there a way to make these technological advances available to all of humanity? If not, what are the ethical implications of our choices to continue our way of life off the backs of others?
Dr. Jones has pointed out how environmentalists have been wrong in some of their predictions about the future. While this is true, it is equally true that science has been wrong and the effects of these mistakes have been far more dire. Let’s take some examples: it was once thought that smoking and DDT were not harmful to human health; that plastic (now known to disrupt human endocrine systems and form a nearly permanent garbage problem) was a miracle invention; that antibiotics (now responsible for the creation of “super bacteria”) were going to save us. Science was wrong. It didn’t and couldn’t have predicted these effects. In order to attempt to prevent causing further problems, we must act with extreme caution when taking action that could have irreversible effects on the Earth’s ecosystem.
So where does all of this leave you as future engineers? Luckily, it leaves many opportunities for you to lead the way into a more sustainable future. In fact, we need you to be a part of the solution. We’d like to introduce one last concept that will be essential in the design of a more sustainable society: lifecycle analysis. Lifecycle analysis involves understanding the whole process of production, consumption and disposal of products. Instead of just focusing on one aspect, lifecycle analysis recognises that all material and energy comes from the Earth and eventually, will return to the Earth. It takes into account all of the costs along the way.
If you want more info on anything we talked about today, contact us or check out these resources:
Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/
Ecological Footprint http://www.ire.ubc.ca/ecoresearch/ecoftpr.html or
http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/rio/focus/report/english/footprint/benchmark.htm
Pembina Institute (Climate Change) http://www.pembina.org/
Ingenuity Gap www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/eps/social/social1.htm
Hussen, A.H. 2000. Principles of Environmental Economics.
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Us: Josha MacNab mailto:jmmacnab@sfu.ca
Jimena Eyzaguirre mailto:jeyzagui@sfu.ca
Sarah Nathan mailto:snathan@sfu.ca
Colm Condon mailto:cdcondon@sfu.ca