The Wrecking Crew - We're All Part of It

While the world wrings its collective hands over how little we must do to thwart climate change, two other sinister threats lurk in the wings - overpopulation and our rapacious excessive consumption of very finite resources, renewable and non-renewable. Any one of those three, on its own, is more than enough to bring humanity crashing down. Let's talk about over-consumption, the existential threat standing in the corner that is usually overlooked entirely.

What better way to begin than to herald a new record. For the first time ever, humanity has consumed 100 Billion tonnes of materials in a single year. And the cherry on the sundae is that recycling rates are falling at the very same time.

The climate and wildlife emergencies are driven by the unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels, metals, building materials and trees. The report’s authors warn that treating the world’s resources as limitless is leading towards global disaster. 

The materials used by the global economy have quadrupled since 1970, far faster than the population, which has doubled. In the last two years, consumption has jumped by more than 8% but the reuse of resources has fallen from 9.1% to 8.6%.

You see, we're not only taking "our" share but we're now pillaging "their" share - the resources every other species needs to survive. That's why, whether it be marine or terrestrial, the overall numbers of our fellow creatures are in a lethal nosedive. In just 30 years we cut their total numbers by more than half, a number of species reduced to extinction. Yeah baby, that was us. We showed them a thing or two, eh?

What's our response to this? I know - veggie burgers. Hell, we'll eat insects if it comes to that. Anything to keep this bacchanal rolling.

Climate change, overpopulation, over-consumption - they're all tightly interwoven. So tightly, in fact, that you can't solve even one of them if you don't solve them all. And we can't even succeed at one - our current preoccupation, climate change.

Anyway, here's the report, released just in time for Davos. In typical form, it's jam packed with bollocks about how "we can still do this," ignoring all the squishiness inherent in our human nature, the "I've got mine buddy. You get yours the best way you know how." syndrome that has played such an instrumental role in the collapse of so many societies over the ages.

And, if you're thinking maybe we can clean this up by going back to "meatless Fridays," think again. Think the "Great Acceleration." Go ahead, open the link. Check it out. Watch the videos, look at the charts (about 49 of them). Then draw your own conclusions.