A version of this essay was published in the Tampa Bay Times on Sunday, May 19, 2013, P1-2. This essay may be reproduced, reprinted and republished.
Saving Our Planet:
Why Climate Change Has Not Inspired Action
Edward Renner
While Climate change has entered the national
conversation, it has not received popular support nor resulted in a cooperative
international approach. New measurements show that the climate-changing gas
carbon dioxide is at the highest atmospheric concentrations -- 400 parts per
million – in at least three million years. And yet a recent Gallup poll shows
that only a minority believe that global warming will “pose a serious threat to
them or to their way of life during their lifetime.”
One possibility is that the focus on climate change has
let us, as individuals off the hook because there is not, really, anything that
each of us can do personally that will make a difference. Yet, we know that
something very significant is happening to the environment about which
something must be done.
With such a disconnect, and so little political will,
action seems impossible. But there is a way. If we would shift our focus from
climate change to the concept of Carrying
Capacity, then are there many necessary things we can do ourselves, over
which we have direct control, including holding our elected officials and
global corporations accountable for specific changes in public policy.
What is Carrying
Capacity?
Carrying capacity is a well-established biological
concept: It is the maximum
population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely,
given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the
environment.
As a practical metaphor,
a row boat can hold a limited number of people. Add one too many and the boat
will sink and everyone drowns. Likewise, the planet can support a limited
number of people. Add too many and its capacity to support life will collapse.
Of course the planet is far more complex than a rowboat.
But only in two very simple ways:
First, the impact on the planet of adding one more person
to the population of the US is the same as adding 10 people to the population
of Mexico. This is because the average American uses more resources and makes
more waste than the average Mexican. Similar to the row boat, it is not the
number of people that is important, but their combined weight. For the planet,
this is the Effective Population; it
is the number of people multiplied by their average impact which is the total
burden of the human footprint on the planet.
Second, nature is not a static situation like a row boat
floating in still water. Nature is a dynamic system in which all the elements
influence each other over time: When a growing population cuts down trees to
clear land to grow food, the result is soil erosion decreasing the amount of
food to feed the increasing number of people who are cutting down the trees. In
a similar way, the row boat, when exposed to stormy weather rocks and dips in
ways it did not when in still water.
In the past, individual societies have collapsed when
they exceeded the biological capacity of their local geographic area. When an
area and thus society collapsed, other areas and societies emerged. Today,
however, human activity is damaging the carrying capacity of the entire planet,
and there is no other place to go. On August 22 we will have used as much
resources and created as much waste as the planet can replace and absorb in a
year. At that rate, it takes 1.4 planets to support our current life style.
We are depleting the planet of its resources to support
human life. That is the issue.
Clearly, there is a theoretical limit to how long the
effective population can continue to increase all the while reducing the
biological capacity of the planet necessary for living. Growth is finite.
The Tipping Point
When collapse occurs in nature, there is a “tipping
point” in which the accelerating demands produce a rapid decline in capacity.
The process is similar to the over-crowded row boat which, with the addition of
a small amount of extra weight, starts to take on water, which, the moment that
happens, causes the boat to take on even more water, and it quickly sinks. Once
the tipping point is crossed, neither the boat nor nature can continue to support
life. For thousands of years this has not been an issue for the planet.
However, it is an issue for those of us alive today. We are the ones who will
be responsible for bringing our planet to the tipping point.
In nature, the rapid collapse occurs due to “Forcings.”
These are incremental changes of one element that forces additional depletions
in all of the other elements, which in turn trigger even greater reductions in
each of the other elements. This leads to an accelerating Titanic-like downward
spiral toward total collapse.
The failure of national governments, dysfunctional
internal political process and regional and ethnic conflicts are early warning
signs of impending collapse.
Avoiding the
Tipping Point
Fortunately, unlike the ways of nature, carrying capacity
is something we can do something about. We have knowledge and control over all
of the elements responsible for staying within the carrying capacity of the
planet. We can measure the biological capacity of the planet to provide the
resources we use and to absorb the waste we create. We already know how the
growth of the effective population is exploding at the same time as our
resources are shrinking. Although we do not know exactly where the tipping is, we
do know that it is within the lifetime of the majority of people alive today.
Given a six thousand year human history on the planet, that is all we need to
know. The choice is ours.
If, between now and 2015, just 3% of the effective population
would reduce their total footprint by 25%, and by 2020 the percent doing so
doubled to 6%, and by 2030 double again to 12.5%, and by 2040 to 25%, and by
2050 to 50%, then the total footprint of the effective population would be
reduced, and the danger of crossing the tipping point would be averted. The
collective effective footprint of the human population on the earth would start
to decrease at around 8 Billion, even though the actual population is projected
to reach 9 Billion by 2050.
An Interactive Graphic
To see the effect of
different levels of participation or different percent reductions enter
alternative numbers from 0 to 100 without the % sign in the highlighted chart.
A negative number in the "% Reduction" column will illustrate the effect of
continuing to increase the size of our footprint.
|
Half the population eventually reducing their impact by
25% over the next 37 years is not an unreasonable possibility. The largest
population growth is in underdeveloped countries with relatively small per
capita footprints. The largest footprints are in developed countries which have
the capacity to make the necessary adjustments.
The impact of total distances traveled and the efficiency
of transportation, the amount and sources of energy used, and what we eat and
how it is produced can each be divided into sub-categories, which can be
further broken down into the hundreds of specific everyday actions over which
we have personal control, such as using fewer plastic water bottles, driving
one less mile or eating less meat.
A small percentage of people making regular small
contributions, and encouraging progressively more people to join with them, can
have a large cumulative effect.
However, while these individual efforts are all
necessary, they alone are insufficient. Rather, they must be our daily reminder
that public policy issues, such as effective mass transit to replace personal automotive
commuting, the infrastructure of alternative energy sources and national
policies independent of the short-term self-interest of big agriculture, big
oil and multi-national corporations are essential.
This challenge is of particular relevance to those of us
living in the US, because we are putting in jeopardy our way of life, far more
so than China who is our major competitor. We are the biggest offender in the
world of per capita over use of natural resources. We have more to lose than
any other nation if, collectively, the human race exceeds the carrying capacity
of the planet.
We have become distracted from the necessity for
institutional and political accountability by the emphasis on the abstract
threat of climate change over which we have little direct personal control. Climate
change is simply the most important of Nature’s mechanisms for causing
forcings. In contrast, carrying capacity can be documented down to the number
of gallons of gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel refined; the tons of
fertilizer and pesticides used; the number of wind farms created; and, the BTUs
of coal and oil that must be remain in the ground. These are all subject to public
political control, and the policies required to regulate these events are
known.
What is absent is the social and political awareness to
shift our focus away from the abstract event of climate change, and our
necessary but insufficient personal responsibility for it, to the collective
and essential government and corporate accountability for specific and
measurable policies and practices of not using more resources and producing
more waste than the planet can replace or absorb in a year.
This, we know how to do.
The political, economic and social discussions we need to
have are not whether we need shift the burden from primarily a personal
responsibility to one of greater government and corporate accountability, but
rather the most feasible ways to do so.
_______________________________
Edward Renner is a Professor in the Honors College of the University of South Florida. He may be reached at kerenner@usf.edu. An introduction to his University level course, Forums for a Future, is available in pdf format from USF at http://tiny.cc/7ij7fw, or free in iBook format from iTunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/invitation-to-forums-for-future/id533089665?mt=11.The environmental data is from the Global Footprint Network data base: http://www.footprintnetwork.org
