The Boot on That Neck? The Boot is Us. The Neck is Earth.

The human race is just 0.01% of all life on our planet but a study finds our tiny, infinitesimal presence has been responsible for eradicating most other living things. The results can be jarring:

farmed poultry today makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The picture is even more stark for mammals – 60% of all mammals on Earth are livestock, mostly cattle and pigs, 36% are human and just 4% are wild animals.

...The destruction of wild habitat for farming, logging and development has resulted in the start of what many scientists consider the sixth mass extinction of life to occur in the Earth’s four billion year history. About half the Earth’s animals are thought to have been lost in the last 50 years. 

But comparison of the new estimates with those for the time before humans became farmers and the industrial revolution began reveal the full extent of the huge decline. Just one-sixth of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain, surprising even the scientists. In the oceans, three centuries of whaling has left just a fifth of marine mammals in the oceans.

What does this mean? To me, it corroborates what I've been arguing for years, namely that climate change, existential as it is, is not the disease but just one symptom of a greater and far more dangerous problem that has a variety of urgent symptoms including overpopulation and rapacious overconsumption of our planet's finite resources. That means the only viable solution lies in shrinking humanity's ecological footprint and all of our economic activity safely within the limits of our global environment.

Here's the thing. It's hard to imagine how we, as a species, will ever again live in sustainable harmony with our ecosystem, our biosphere, Spaceship Earth. There are some difficult facts we have to face and they're brutal. One of them is that mankind hasn't lived within the boundaries of our global ecology since the early 70s when our population hit 3 billion.

We're now at 7.5 billion heading, according to the UN, for 10 billion by 2050. Over the course of the last half-century we have also changed as individuals. We live longer now and, on a per capita basis, our individual consumption which defines our per capita footprint, has increased substantially. Humanity has become the "triple threat" to its own survival and that of every other species as well.

We are now so far into "overshoot" that we would need 1.7 planet Earths to meet human consumption. That multiple is increasing fairly rapidly, year upon year.

The other, even more problematic aspect of overshoot, is that the worse it becomes the more rapidly it degrades the planet's ecological carrying capacity. In the early 70s the planet could support a population of 3 billion. In the meantime we've degraded Earth's systems and resources. The latest research I've come across suggests that, today, our planet might be able to sustain a maximum of 2 billion people, far less than the combined population of China and India.

So, our challenge is to decarbonize our societies and economies, virtually overnight; slash our per capita and overall consumption by more than half, probably much more; and get our overall numbers well below 2 billion and in short order.

How do we tell people they're going to have to make do with about a third as much stuff as they've come to enjoy and expect? How do we tell them to surrender their gas guzzlers? How do we convince them that vacations are now stay-cations? Even if we were somehow brilliant enough to do all of those things, how are we going to trim the roster by almost three out of four people currently on Earth? How do we orchestrate this mass die-off? Who decides who gets a ticket on the lifeboat and who doesn't?

When I see humpback whales cavorting in the Salish Sea or mega pods of white sided dolphins in our harbours, I'm looking at creatures that have fled en masse from an unsustainable world. They're the harbingers of what is coming our way and not in the distant future either.

Meanwhile we have a prime minister whose overarching priority is to pimp high-carbon, toxin-laden bitumen onto the world energy market. Brilliant.

Another Sign? I Sure Hope Not.

Something has changed over the past two years.  My home is bordered along the back by a row of large cedar trees.  When I moved here some 15 years ago one of the delights I discovered was being awakened in the mornings by the chirps and songs of a seemingly massive variety of small birds that nested in those cedars.

Last year that stopped. This year it's been the same.  My neighbour has several feeders in her yard and she says the usual birds haven't been coming to her place either, not even to eat.

Something seems to be happening, but what?

Then I came across an article in The Guardian about a severe and massive decline in flying insect populations in Germany.  A 75 per cent decline. That's pretty drastic.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

“Insects make up about two-thirds of all life on Earth [but] there has been some kind of horrific decline,” said Prof Dave Goulson of Sussex University, UK, and part of the team behind the new study. “We appear to be making vast tracts of land inhospitable to most forms of life, and are currently on course for ecological Armageddon. If we lose the insects then everything is going to collapse.”

Could something akin to that be underway out here on the island? It's hard to imagine. We don't have any industrial agriculture in the vicinity, just rocks and Christmas trees.

That said, the World Wildlife Fund in conjunction with the London Zoological Society and other agencies has been warning us over the last several years how severely human activity is pummeling other forms of life on Earth. The Living Planet Report of 2014 took an inventory of terrestrial animal life on the planet and found we had collapsed the total numbers by 50 per cent since the 1970s, the neoliberal era.  The Living Planet Report of 2015 inventoried marine species over the same time frame and, again, found a loss of 50 per cent.  The Living Planet Report of 2016 updated the loss figures for terrestrial and marine life at 58 per cent since 1970.

There is a confluence of events that occurred in the early 70s. That was when mankind drove the world into "overshoot." That's when our population passed the 3 billion mark and our consumption of the Earth's renewable resources - water, air, biomass - exceeded the planet's carrying capacity. We exceeded the world's capacity to cleanse our pollution and waste output. We began drawing more surface and groundwater than the Earth could replenish. We began exploiting more of the planet than was needed for the survival of other species and their numbers began to plummet.

This research connected the dots, linking climate change to two other existential threats, overpopulation and over-consumption/depletion of natural resources.  From 3 billion in the early 70s, we've grown to 7.5 billion today en route to at least 9 billion, possibly by 2030-2040.  And, while we've done that, our per capita consumption and our per capita environmental footprint has continued to expand rapidly with the emergence of new, massively populated emerging economies in India and China.

And yet, even as these events of the past forty years - just forty years - have unfolded; even as the research has come in revealing how severely we're overtaxing the planet, Spaceship Earth, our one and only biosphere; even as the early onset impacts of our excesses begin to send us reeling; our politicians, including Canada's, still pursue perpetual, exponential growth. They believe their policies are constructive, positive when they're actually nihilistic. And you and me, we're just along for the ride.

The Unholy Trinity

The Unholy Trinity, the Three O's - Overpopulation, Overconsumption and Overshoot - are mankind's plague on the Earth.

Surf's Up, Indonesia

Despite claims that, with just a bit more efficiency, we can grow our species to nine, perhaps even twelve billion, there are already far too many of us attacking, devouring and contaminating our biosphere.  It is unsurvivable.

The Slums of Mexico City

Even as our numbers have soared three-fold in less than a century, so has the average amount of stuff each of us consumes.  Since WWII, the populations of both China and India have added a billion mouths.  It's hard to believe that, at the end of that war, their populations were smaller than that of the USA today.  First they grew to gigantic proportions and then they became emerging economic superpowers, both stimulating their own huge "consumer class" that wanted bigger and better this and that - cars, housing, food, travel - pretty much the same things we've enjoyed all along and pretty much all of it based on ever greater consumption of fossil fuels.  A car in every garage and a prime rib roast on every table.

A Valley of Greenhouses, Spain

Which triggers the final O, Overshoot.  This is where mankind begins to run into walls.  Overshoot is a condition where consumption has outstripped our planet's ability to support demand.  It causes us to do some incredibly stupid things and it leads to a variety of outcomes including collapse.  That is the course our leaders have charted for our children and grandchildren - collapse.  It's not just Harper who is devoted to this outcome.  So too are Justin Trudeau and Tommy Mulcair. They have no interest in abandoning perpetual, exponential growth.

One example of Overshoot is the rapacious destruction of our very finite groundwater resources, our aquifers, mainly for agricultural irrigation.  To grow our population and meet its soaring demands for ever more of everything, we became hopelessly dependent, mortally dependent, on using far more than nature can provide which is why around the world these underground reservoirs are approaching empty and no one has a clue how we'll cope when they're gone.

Other visible telltale signs of overshoot are spreading deforestation, desertification (the exhaustion of once arable land through excessive production using unsustainable amounts of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides), and the collapse of global fisheries as the industrial fleets fish "down the food chain."

Most of that Oil Still Lurks in the Gulf of Mexico

Another aspect of Overshoot manifests in our growing pollution problem. Nature does a terrific job of absorbing and cleansing our waste but that capacity is also finite.  We've passed it and so the excess simply backs up.  There's plenty of that going on and we don't seem to care.

It's so typically human of me to discuss the Three O's in the context of the lethal threat to mankind.  That overlooks what we have done to nature, wildlife, our ecosystems.

China.  No space for nature, no room for life.

The same resources mankind is over-exploiting are also essential to every other form of life on our planet.  They're supposed to have their share too in a viable, sustainable environment.  Only we have decided to take their share and our share and then a good deal more all in service to ever more mouths with ever larger appetites.

The 2014 Living Planet Report revealed that in the 40-years since Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney ushered in the Age of Neoliberalism, we have eliminated half - that's right, half - of the wild life on our planet.  It came out, made a bit of a stir and, within a week, was straight down the Memory Hole.  We're now experiencing rates of extinction several hundreds of times greater than normal and we simply will not recognize the threat to our own survival.  We don't understand that those seemingly insignificant life forms, those minor species, are integral to our own continuation.  We don't get it and we don't care.

The photos used here are from a terrific photo-essay in The Guardian.  Do check it out.  Many thanks to Ray Smith for sending me the link.

The Big Question Now is When?

Several years ago a non-governmental organization, the Global Footprint Network, came to my attention.  GFN's purpose was to monitor the state of the biomass around the world on global, regional and national levels.

GFN publishes an annual report marking what they call "World Overshoot Day." This is the date each year by which mankind is calculated to have consumed an entire year's worth of renewable resources.

As the GFN graphic shows, mankind is now consuming renewable resources at roughly 1.5 times the natural replenishment rate.  Some like to say that we're using one and a half Earths resources.  If we keep on our current growth path, by 2050 we're on course to be consuming almost 3 times our planet's renewable resources.

It's almost too much to believe.  How can we, just one out of hundreds of thousands of species, be consuming far more than the total renewable resources of the planet?  Easy, we're diving into the planet's reserves, mining our children's future, eating our seed corn.

The proof is everywhere.  It's observable, it's tangible, it's precisely measurable. It's visible to the naked eye from space.  It comes in many forms.  One is desertification, the exhaustion of once viable farmland and its transformation into barren desert through a variety of bad agricultural practices and the accumulated effects of excessive amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Another is the resumption of mass deforestation - cutting down forests faster than they can renew.  Again, visible to the naked eye from the International Space Station.

And then there's water, the key to all life on Earth.  ISS crew members can also see rivers that no longer flow to the sea and inland lakes, such as the Aral Sea, that are now drying out.  But the loss of surface water is just part of the story of our hydrological overshoot.  It also takes the form of blue-green algae contamination of our lakes, coastal dead zones and surface subsidence caused by draining our groundwater resources, our aquifers.  Subsidence is not apparent to the naked eye but it is measurable by various satellite systems that can determine not only how quickly the surface is sinking but, from that, the volume of groundwater being extracted.

Overshoot comprises not only resources that we consume, either directly or in the production of products, but also the resources we contaminate, pollute, with the waste from our activities.  We rarely, if ever, think of it but our ecosystem does a terrific job of cleaning up after us.  If it didn't you wouldn't be sitting there reading this.  It is an absolutely life-sustaining function.  The atmosphere absorbs greenhouse gases. Plants absorb carbon dioxide as do oceans.  Rivers cleanse contaminants as they flow to the sea. Microbes in the soil likewise eat waste. Let's not forget earthworms either.

Just as the planet is finite so too is the capacity of the planet's ecosystem to process our waste.  Exceed that limit and we wind up with accumulated waste - pollution.  An excess of agricultural runoff can lead to the destruction of aquatic habitats from blue-green algae blooms.  Freshwater resources can become unfit for human consumption.  The acidification of our oceans is another example. There are several others.



When I first became aware of the Global Footprint Network, World Overshoot Day fell in late October.  That meant we were in overshoot for just over two months per year.  With each passing year, overshoot came earlier and earlier. This year we hit overshoot on August 19th.  What that signifies is that, for about four and a half months out of twelve, we're dipping into our planet's reserves and generating more contamination than the ecosystem can cleanse.

As the graphic above illustrates, as we enter overshoot, exceeding the planet's ecological limits, it results in a steadily degraded carrying capacity.  The Earth becomes steadily less able to meet our needs and clean our waste.  The red consumption line begins to plummet which leads us to yet another term, "collapse."  Our march toward collapse is measured in the steady progression of World Overshoot Day.

Most of what you've read so far I've written before.  I'm rehashing it now because of a recent report issued by the WWF, GFN and Zoological Society of London. The Living Planet Report, 2014, is an eye-opener.  You might prefer to begin with the ecological fact sheet.

LPR 2014 contains a wealth of information but the aspect everyone seized upon was the revelation that, over the past forty years, the Earth - our ecosystem or biosphere - has lost half of the planet's wild life.  Half, in just forty years, the blink of an eye in the history of mankind.

The critical point is not that we've lost half the planet's wild life so much as it is that we're now working our way through the remaining half.  Yet we maintain our slavish obsession with perpetual, exponential economic growth.  We keep questing for more and ever more - more resources, more production, more consumption, more waste.  At the same time mankind's overall numbers continue to burgeon even as our per capita consumption also rises.

Now go back to the first chart.  Find the 1.0 point on the left margin, the y-axis. Carry that across to the red line and then down.  You'll be at somewhere in the early 70s. Keep that in mind.

When I first found the Global Footprint Network several years ago I spent some time reviewing their considerable research and findings.  Back then I was a bit troubled to read that mankind actually reached the Earth's ecological carrying capacity around 1970 when our population stood at about 3.7-billion. Thereafter, as our population grew and our individual consumption also grew, we entered Overshoot or ecological deficit.

The dates line up.  Since we ventured into Overshoot, global wild life has declined by half.  Current species extinction rates are said to be a thousand times normal.  From 3.7-billion in 1970, we've almost doubled our numbers to 7+ billion already and we're said to be heading to 9-billion, perhaps as early as mid-century and upwards of 11-billion by 2100.

As part of a recent course in global food security I read a report by three Chinese experts dealing with what their country faced in the decades ahead.  For me, it wasn't their discussion of food that was telling so much as their projections of Chinese GDP.  They foresaw a China which, in 2000, had a per capita GDP of about $1,800 that would see that figure grow to $16,000 by 2030.  In fact the Chinese are just shy of $7,000 already but to more than double that yet again by 2030?

Where would China find the resources to ramp up its production so enormously in such a brief interval?  How would China cope with the contamination or its already distressed environment and degraded water resources?  Take that exponential growth in GDP and multiply it by the 1.5-billion population China is expected to reach by mid-century and then inject it into a world already deeply immersed in Overshoot and you have a formula for global economic and environmental disaster within just a couple of decades.

As demand for resources skyrockets while supply diminishes, we're bound to experience spikes in inequality both domestically and globally.  It's useful to recall the NASA report last March that found that sudden civilizational collapse was and will be triggered by the combination of two factors, over-consumption and inequality, both of which are with us today in spades.

Going back to the second chart, the Living Planet Report, 2014, reveals, simply from the fact of massive wild life loss alone, that we've already entered the point of significantly degraded ecological carrying capacity.  Spreading deforestation, desertification, the collapse of global fisheries, ocean acidification, etc. merely corroborate this.  Yet, as our biosphere's carrying capacity quite rapidly erodes, we're still increasing our production, consumption and waste, driving our global civilization ever faster toward chaos.

I think I've got a reasonable idea of how this ends.  The far more troubling question is when.

The Anchor Around Our Necks - Neoliberalism

Modern neoliberalism, of the Hayek and Friedman schools, has been defined as "capitalism with the gloves off."  Today it's a term associated with laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation and free trade.

Neoliberalism has made deep inroads into our federal body politic.  Stephen Harper is a disciple.  Our opposition leaders appear less neoliberal than their prime minister but it could be argued that is a matter of degree.

Few dare mention it but the spread of neoliberalism has ushered in the rise of corporatism at the direct expense of social democracy.  Nowhere is this more obvious than at our Head Office, Washington, where the transformation that began with Reagan is manifested in today's "bought and paid for" Congress. There's even a term for what has happened. It's called "political capture." The political apparatus, the levers of power, have been captured by monied interests such that America today is no longer a government "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The United States is becoming an increasingly illiberal democracy which is a fairly widespread trend in the era of neoliberalism. A study to be released by Princeton this fall will contend that America is no longer a genuine democracy at all but an unfreely elected oligarchy.

Our democracies have always witnessed the struggle of capital versus labour and we have attempted to balance those competing forces in the awareness that domination by either would not be in the interests of the nation.  Theodore Roosevelt addressed this in his "Square Deal" speech in 1910.  It was the principles restated by Roosevelt and others that led to the progressive era and, in the second half of the 20th century, to the greatest middle class that has ever been known that, in turn, brought America to the pinnacle of world leadership.  And then, along came Reagan, Thatcher and their man in short pants, Mulroney.

Today we need to consider the utility of neoliberalism and neoclassical economics in our rapidly changing reality.  What worked reasonably well in the past (well enough that we were often willing to look the other way at its excesses) may become unsuitable to the future.  We're already feeling the "early onset" impacts of a number of forces including climate change, over-population, over-consumption, domestic and global inequality, and the depletion of both renewable and non-renewable resources.  Our struggle to externalize these negatives is no longer keeping pace with their growth.

An article from Australia's Business Spectator, addressed Thomas Piketty's views from his book, Capital, in the context of climate change.  It reminds us of how modern neoliberalism poses a grave threat to the continuation of our global civilization.

It seems to me that the main issue in terms of addressing the climate change problem is that, if we agree to reduce emissions now – and there is currently no global agreement in sight that provides for such reduction – people living in the future will benefit, not those living today. But we will, today, bear the costs of reducing such emissions.

Stern in The Economics of Climate Change, better known as the Stern Review, concludes that strong action on climate change is urgently required; Nordhaus’s view is not so much. Nordhaus thinks climate change requires only a modest response now, with more significant action delayed for decades (read more in A Question of Balance and The Climate Casino).

The discount rate accounts for these different approaches. It weighs future people’s benefits against costs borne by people in the present. If a cost benefit analysis uses a high discount rate, it discounts future benefits to a high degree, giving little weight to the interests of future people – on the basis that future people will be cleverer, richer and they’ll work it out (the Nordhaus approach). In contrast, Stern uses a low discount rate, and asks the present generation to make urgent sacrifices for the sake of future people.

...Put another way, these questions highlight why the market may fail to adequately address the climate change problem. As Harvard’s Martin Nowak says: “Even if you want to cooperate with the future, you may not do so because you are afraid of being exploited by the present”.

The prevailing view at the international level about action on climate change seems to be, “Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” And it’s those views about what future generations are worth that will determine climate change policy in 2014 and beyond.

The fallacy inherent in this sort of neo-liberal world view is that it focuses on "what have future generations ever done for me?" instead of acknowledging what we have already set in store for those future generations, what we have deprived them of, and how our reluctance to "sacrifice" will inevitably make their plight that much more miserable.  These same voices that so loudly champion responsibility in others, themselves choose to duck it when it comes to deferred costs that they can treat as externalities.  The conditions we have created have already benefited us enormously.  We've taken the benefits but we expect future generations to carry our burden.

Neoliberalism is a perverse mindset that treats dealing responsibly with current indulgences that have future costs as "sacrifices."  And that, in a nutshell, is why it's a lethal philosophy, attractive as it is to today's political classes.  These types have no answers as to how our society is to get through the challenges we will face for the remainder of this century much less beyond that.  When it comes to the future, they're asleep at the wheel and our kids are sleeping in the backseat.  

By the way, World Overshoot Day 2014 is about a week away.  That will be the date on which the scientists at the Global Footprint Network calculate mankind has consumed a full year's worth of renewable resources.  We're already using up more than 1.5-times our planet's ability to replenish our natural resources something that is manifest in our depletion of fish stocks, and forests; the spreading exhaustion of our farmland; the exhaustion of freshwater resources and the steady accumulation of pollution of our soil, our water and our atmosphere. The rate of this depletion is increasing every year and we're going in the wrong direction ever faster.  Again, your leaders have no answers for this enormous threat.  It defies their chosen worldview.

We may be in the backseat but there's still time for us to wake up.  We just need to find someone better to do the driving.  Time is not on our side.