Anne H. Ehrlich

Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis

Earths resources are consumed by one of its 5-30 million species homo sapiens or man at a rate disproportionately greater than any other species. Mans impact on the biosphere is measured in terms of net primary production (NPP). NPP is the amount of energy remaining after the respiration of primary producers (mostly plants) is subtracted from the total amount of biologically fixed energy (mostly solar). Human output is determined by 1) the direct NPP used for food fuel fiber or timber which yields a low estimate 2) all NPP of cropland devoted to human activity and 3) both 1) and 2) and land conversion for cities or pastures as well as conversion which results in desertification and overuse of lands. This last output determination yields a high estimate. Calculations are made for global NPP and each of the 3 estimates of low intermediate and high human output. Data are based on estimates by Ajtay et al. Armentano and Loucks and Houghton et al. and on the Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) summaries. Petagram (Pg) is used to calculate organic matter; this is equivalent to 10 to the 15th power grams or 10 to the 9th power metric tons. Carbon has been converted to organic matter by multiplying by 2.2. Matter in kilocalories has been converted to organic matter by dividing by 5. Intermediate or conservative estimates have been included. The standard of biomass is 1244 Pg and an annual NPP to 132.1. The NPP of marine and freshwater ecosystems is considered to be 92.4 Pg which is a low estimate. The low calculation of human (5 billion persons) consumption of plants at a caloric intake of 2500 kilocalories/person/day is .91 Pg of organic matter which equals .76 Pg of vegetable matter. The global production of human food is 1/7 Pg for grains and for human and livestock fed or .85 Pg of dry grain material and .3 Pg in nongrain dry material with dry grain material and .3 Pg in nongrain dry material with a subtraction of 20% for water content. 34% or .39 Pg is lost to waste and spoilage. Consumption by livestock forest usage and aquatic ecosystems is computed. The overall estimate for human use if 7.2 Pg of organic matter/year or 3% of total NPP/year. The intermediate figures take into account cropland pastureland forest use and conversion; the overall estimate of human use is 42.6 Pg of NPP/year of 19.0% (42.6/224.5) of NPP (30.7% on land and 2.2% on seas). The high estimate yields human use of 58.1 Pg/year on land or 40% (58.1/149.6) of potential land productivity or 25% (60.1/149.8 + 92.4) of land and water NPP. The remaining 60% of land is also affected by humans. The figures reflect the current patterns of exploitation distribution and consumption of a much larger population. These patterns amount to using >50% of NPP of land; there must be limits to growth.

Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided

Environmental problems have contributed to numerous collapses of civilizations in the past. Now, for the first time, a global collapse appears likely. Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich and poor choices of technologies are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity.

Greenhouse economics: learn before you leap

In virtually no area of the human enterprise is there more uncertainty than in matters of national defense. How well armed, trained, allied, clever, and persevering an aggressor might be is often uncertain. Moreover, the nature of an attack the direction of and with what weapons and strategy a strike might be made is normally deliberately concealed. In response to this great uncertainty, the United States has military bases around the world, nuclear submarines patrolling the remotest parts of the oceans, missiles poised to strike against any land or airborne target, and military satellites orbitin g the entire planet. Thousands of highly trained intelligence officers filter through the minutia of activities of perceived enemies and prepare elaborate contingency plans. The U.S. has carefully negotiated, verifiable international arms control treaties. Finally, it has developed the most advanced and sophisticated weapons and communications technology in the world to serve these functions. The cost of this form of military security currently consumes about a third of the United States’.federal budget. Indeed, the U.S. has spent in the last decade alone more than 1.5 trillion (1012> dollars to build up an arms apparatus against an enemy whose chance of attacking the U.S. in the last quarter century was never rated higher than about 3%. Now consider the stance of the current U.S. administration on global warming. Nearly every sector of the American economy could be adversely affected by climatic change, and nothing short of our national security and quality of life may be at stake. Most climatologists believe the chances of unprecedented climate change are at least 50%. Yet, offering as justification the uncertainty in timing and location of ‘the strike’, the Bush administration is doing virtually nothing to prepare a defense against this threat.

Introducing the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century: Information for Policy Makers

The Anthropocene is recognized (though not yet formally defined) as the time when human impacts are widespread on Earth. While some of the impacts are essential to supporting large human populations and can be sustainable in the long run, others can irretrievably damage the life support systems upon which the global society has come to depend, or spark rapid changes to which societies cannot adapt fast enough. Among these dangerous trends are increasing climate disruption, extinctions, loss of non-human-dominated ecosystems, pollution, and population overgrowth. Interactions between these five trends exacerbate their potential to trigger harmful global change. Reducing the resultant risks requires effective cooperation between scientists and policy makers to develop strategies that guide for environmental health over the next few decades. To that end, the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21st Century was written to make accessible to policy makers and others the basic scientific underpinnings and widespread agreement about both the dangers of and the solutions to climate disruption, extinctions, ecosystem loss, pollution and population overgrowth. When it was released in May 2013, the document included endorsements by 522 global change scientists, including dozens of members of various nations’ most highly recognized scientific bodies, from 41 countries around the world. Since then, endorsements have grown to more than 1300 scientists plus more than 1700 others – business people, NGO representatives, students, and the general public – spanning more than 60 countries. Now also available in Spanish and Chinese, the document has proven useful in helping to stimulate national and international agreements. Further information about the genesis, uses, the signatories, and how to endorse it can be found at http://consensusforaction.stanford.edu/. Such communication between scientists, policy makers, and the public at large will be essential for effective guidance to address global change as the Anthropocene progresses.

World Population Crisis.

While population growth may seem to be an abrupt departure from the Bulletins usual themes of international conflict and the threat of nuclear war the population issue has considerable relevance to these themes. Rapid population growth rising competition for resources and increasing environmental deterioration are intertwined factors in the human predicament that feed the political tensions and conflicts of the late 20th century. Humanity is now able to support itself only by consuming its capital of fossil fuels minerals agricultural soils and fresh water. While exploiting this capital subsidy civilization is continually downgrading the systems that supply its income. Population growth clearly will soon carry homo sapiens past the limits of Earths short-term human carrying capacity and a population crash will ensue. That growing numbers of people are deleterious can be seen in the increased costs of supplying them with goods. Each additional person on average must be cared for by using lower quality resources that must be transported further and by food grown on more marginal ground. Although population growth rates are highest in poor countries overpopulation and continuing population growth in rich countries are the prime threat to global resources and environmental systems because individuals in rich countries use more resources. The population component is often ignored in discussions of the human predicament because evolutionary success has meant outbreeding your friends and neighbors. There is no longer any substitute for analysis; the world can no longer afford to believe such myths as that economic growth can be infinite contraception is immoral and more nuclear weapons will prevent nuclear war. Education must be focused on teaching people the physical and biological constraints on human activities.

Transformational change: creating a safe operating space for humanity

Many ecologists and environmental scientists witnessing the scale of current environmental change are becoming increasingly alarmed about how humanity is pushing the boundaries of the Earths systems beyond sustainable levels. The world urgently needs global society to redirect itself toward a more sustainable future: one that moves intergenerational equity and environmental sustainability to the top of the political agenda, and to the core of personal and societal belief systems. Scientific and technological innovations are not enough: the global community, individuals, civil society, corporations, and governments, need to adjust their values and beliefs to one in which sustainability becomes the new global paradigm society. We argue that the solution requires transformational change, driven by a realignment of societal values, where individuals act ethically as an integral part of an interconnected society and biosphere. Transition management provides a framework for achieving transformational change, by giving special attention to reflective learning, interaction, integration, and experimentation at the level of society, thereby identifying the system conditions and type of changes necessary for enabling sustainable transformation.

Solving the human predicament

The authors offer an ecological frame of reference for political action to change the economic and social trends now deepening the human predicament: overpopulation and continuing population growth, overconsumption by rich societies, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and inequitable distribution of wealth within and between societies. Certain points often overlooked include: the demographic contribution to environmental deterioration; climate disruption, global toxification, and a decay of biodiversity and ecosystem services; and economic growth of the rich, which hurts everyone in the long term. Perpetual economic growth is biophysically impossible; the culture gap impedes solutions; and all the factors are intertwined. Potential solutions include: empowering women and providing family planning services to all sexually active people; reducing overconsumption and helping the poor; overhauling education systems, including universities; adapting to changes that are inevitable; and improving food production and distribution systems. Hope comes from growing worldwide grassroots movements.

The culture gap and its needed closures

The development of an enormous culture gap, in which no individuals of advanced societies possess even a billionth of the non‐genetic information possessed by their entire society, has threatened a global collapse of civilisation. Critical parts of that gap must be rapidly bridged so that problems such as climate disruption, toxification of the Earth, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the decay of the epidemiological environment can be satisfactorily attacked. The essential need is to alter human behaviour to put society on a route to sustainability; one cheering development is a growing interest in the Millennium Assessment of Human Behaviour (MAHB), whose goal is to do just that.

Population, development, and human natures

At the dawn of this new millennium, the human enterprise is quickly becoming a globally unified one. Yet numerous obstacles and pitfalls remain in the path of a full and fair unification. A substantial fraction of the world’s population is well-off and increasingly connected through trade and communications systems. But an even larger fraction is struggling to make ends meet and is only sketchily connected to the globalizing economy. And a significant portion are barely surviving, with virtually no connection to the rest of the world. The majority of human beings live in regions where development still falls far short of even modest aspirations, while the already affluent minority strives for even more affluence. The critical challenge of the decades ahead will be to incorporate the lagging four-fifths of the world’s still-expanding population into the global economy while preserving the life support systems that make our planet habitable. In this paper we want to make three basic points about this dilemma. First, the problems of development are intertwined with human population size, population growth rates, and patterns of consumption, including the technologies used to provide that consumption. Second, progress in development will be negatively affected by those variables, primarily through their impacts on humanity’s natural capital—the ecosystems that supply civilization with a flow of indispensable goods and services. And, third, the failure of human cultural evolution in the areas of sociopolitical organization and ethics to keep pace with the evolution of technological capability constitutes a major impediment to the achievement of a sustainable civilization. While these are major obstacles to successful development, they also offer significant keys to finding answers. Taking a global view, it is clear that the ‘population‐consumption problem’ can adversely affect all people, and especially those in developing countries. This is perhaps most obvious in the area of climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1996). There is a high positive correlation between both the numbers of people and their consumption levels and the fluxes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, although there is substantial variation in consumption levels and GHG fluxes among societies (Yang and Schneider, 1997‐1998; Hoffert et al. 1998). Furthermore, expansion of population and consumption is

The Environmental Dimensions of National Security

While the attention of national leaders in both East and West is focused mainly on the balance of their conventional and nuclear military forces - “star wars”, and military turmoil in the Middle East and Central America - they are allowing the very basis of national security to evaporate. Politicians, from habit and ignorance, view the political and economic differences between American and Soviet societies as of paramount importance. In an historical context, those differences are no greater than those, say, between Romans and barbarians fifteen centuries ago. Yet some American and Soviet politicians apparently are willing to blow up the world over their differences. Fortunately, Roman emperors did not have access to nuclear arms in 376–476 A.D. as the barbarians overran the empire. If they had, the Soviet Union and the United States probably would never have existed.