The Earth’s Time Bomb…And Ours
For the record…writing this gave me no pleasure, but how can you hope to solve a problem if you minimize its effects or, even worse, deny its existence?
Two recent New York Times pieces were tied together in an odd way. The first was an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, “Even This Year is the Best Time Ever to Be Alive”; the second was an article by three of their reporters, “Donald Trump is Leading a Global Surge to the Right.”
Kristof was trying to demonstrate that even in the face of what seemed a torrent of depressing events, from drought to fire to Gaza to, well, Trump, there were also some amazing developments that made the world a better place: decreased infant mortality; the overthrow of Assad; a sharp decrease in extreme poverty; and a sharp increase in stunning medical advances. In other words, as bad as things seem politically, the human species is better off now than ever in its history.
While Kristof’s data certainly seemed to be good news, there was an underlayer he ignored. Some of those very advances he touted might, without significant changes in the way we conduct our affairs, be the seeds of future devastation.
In 1700, the global population was estimated at approximately 800 million. In the ensuing century, it grew only slightly, not reaching 1 billion until just after 1800. It took more than a century after that for the world’s population to reach 2 billion, in about 1927, although 20 million had died in World War I and 50 million more from the Spanish flu. It reached 3 billion only thirty years later (after some 50 million deaths in World War II), 4 billion fifteen years after that, and on and on until reaching the current level which stands at more than 8 billion. The Earth is projected to add an additional 2 to 3 billion people by 2100.
It would have been impossible, obviously, for anywhere near the current number of humans to have survived two centuries ago. What makes the current number sustainable (sort of) are the enormous advances in technology that Kristof touches on in his essay. A vastly enhanced ability to grow food, purify water, create habitable living space, and cure disease has kept pace with the explosion in the human population, and, to some degree, mitigated the impact of the mass extinction that the planet is currently undergoing, the most significant since the dinosaur era 65 million years ago. A study by the University of Hawaii estimated that more than 150,000 species have disappeared in the past five hundred years, principally from human activity.
If the human population is to continue to successfully grow at the projected rate in the face of such a cataclysmic blow to the ecosystem, it will be dependent on human innovation. The question, however, is whether technology can not only keep pace with population growth but whether it can also prevent human-fueled alteration to the Earth’s environment from destroying the very progress it had previously enabled.
For that to occur, it will take not only technological advances to increase logarithmically—as they likely will—but for human behavior to change as well.
Therein, as Shakespeare noted, lies the rub.
In the 1990s, scientists warned that if drastic action were not taken, the planet’s temperature would increase sufficiently that, by the 2020s, the Earth’s environment would begin to experience irreversible damage—at least as far as people were concerned—including rises in sea levels, increases of storm activity, both in frequency and intensity, melting of ice at poles while areas near the equator became hotter and hotter, an increase in drug-resistant disease, and potentially devastating shortages of food and water.
Their advice was ignored and those changes have begun.
So what happens now?
Which brings us to the second Times article.
It began, “At the start of his second term President Trump has positioned himself at the crest of a global wave of hard-line conservative populism, offering fuel and inspiration to surging nationalist parties in the European Union and beyond.”
In other words, conservatives are abandoning the recent tentative moves toward globalism and regressing to the tribalism that dominated human interaction since human interaction began millions of years ago. (These populist regimes are all, for example, promoting “cultural purity” and are anti-immigrant). One of the prime characteristics of tribalism is the protection of one’s own interests at the expense of others, which is exactly the opposite of what is needed to protect the planet.
There is little disagreement that to arrest the current trends, worldwide cooperation is needed, but achieving that in the face of “me first” conservatism promises to be a tall order—especially with most people preferring to maintain the fantasy perpetrated in hugely popular films like Independence Day that in times of global crisis, people and governments around the world will ignore their differences and act in concert to repel the threat.
We had just such an opportunity in 2020 when the COVID pandemic struck and it did not exactly work out that way.
Given its rapid spread and lethal impact, the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen had the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people across the globe and perhaps decimate entire societies, especially those where the public health apparatus was less advanced. If ever there was a time for governments that were generally adversaries (or even enemies) to temporarily put aside petty squabbles and work together, this was it.
They did not.
Although scientists of different nations often tried to cooperate with one another, and did produce a medical miracle, politicians took a different route. The governments of the three major powers—the United States, China, and Russia—contented themselves with childish bickering about both the disease’s origin and its spread. Political gamesmanship, rather than diminishing, was instead ratcheted up. Internally, each of these countries often behaved shamefully, resisting measures that would prevent the disease’s spread or denying that the crisis was as severe as it was.
Another facet of tribalism is narrow-minded ignorance and there was plenty of that to go around. Politicians often attacked the experts their nation desperately needed to help find answers. In China, one the scientists who first reported the disease took his own life, and in the United States, the leader in the effort to prevent its spread needed a presidential pardon to protect him from retribution. Who knows what happened to anyone in Russia who dared try to tell the truth?
It can be argued, of course, that the political reaction to the pandemic was the exception, not indicative of the overall trend, or that a vaccine was created with stunning speed and saved tens of millions of lives. It would be wonderful if the first were true or if the second, while terrific for individuals, did not add to the threat to the species as a whole.
In either case, the basic problem remains. In the absence of a global commitment to deal with a global crisis, we place ourselves in increasingly precarious straits. That the current political trend is moving in the opposite direction cannot be ignored.
Unless we change the manner in which we approach these issues and each other, we will end up dusting off the long-discredited work of Thomas Malthus, who predicted that increased food production would always be negated by an accompanying increase in population. If the current political trend is not reversed, it means that the growing scarcity of vital resources will fuel an accelerated retreat to self-interest, thus creating a downward spiral that may well prove unsustainable.
Preventing that from happening is the real battle ahead.