population growth: nine assumptions that invite calamity

8/14/2019 Population Growth: Nine Assumptions that Invite Calamity

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Today, with breathtaking coership manage to completel

tories that have been raised

Instead, despite our skyrockcivilizational, and biospheri

We are gambling our civiliunjustified suppositions that

subscribe to their soothingselves to persist upon this pa

ASSUMPTION 1:

Running out offood orparti

that restrict us, and we maysupplies of food or resourceold kind of thinking from th

In today's world, for instanc

before we consume every lathat our industrial and socie

2050

2000

.1960

1830

8000 BC

Human

Population

in billions

Nine Assumptions

That Invite Calamity

placency, most members of our political, news,ignore coverage of the population numbers an

erein (What Every Citizen Should Know About

ting demographic trajectories and their implicatidisaster, we are given daily accounts of political

Unwarranted Assumptions

ations, our futures, and our planet on the widesfollow. For far too long, we have allowed ou

nd comforting seductions. If, however, we alloth, we invite calamity.

cular resources, though important, may not be th

be distracting ourselves if we imagine that theypose real dangers and concerns, in many ways t1960s and 1970s.

, it increasingly appears that "major ecosystems

st renewable resource (Taylor, 2008). Today, ftal wastes, along with the physical damage that

game shows, sports scores, anstock trading indices. Meanw

eyes of the world from one ooverarching events in all of huthat is rapidly and dangerously

their emphases manage to disfrom a catastrophic set of falwhich we unconsciously basetions and decisions.

Therefore our goal in this excenunciate an underlying set ofly imagine or presume to be su

vens" that may instead be poisment of unimaginably-calamito

By articulating nine or ten of t

vens," we begin to see them f

nothing more than simple assucreasingly called into question

What follows, then, is a speci

and complacent suppositions tlessly gamble all that we hold

few dollars more and business-

and journalistic lead-demographic trajec-

ur Planet).

ons for humanitarian,and celebrity gossip,

pread, but faulty andselves to uncritically

our leaders and our-

e first limiting factors

re. Although limitedhey reflect a decades-

will begin to fail long

r example, it may bewe inflict on earths

moment-by-momentile, by shielding the

f the top five or sixman history, and oneunfolding right now,

tract world attentionse assumptions upon

irtually all of our ac-

erpt is to specificallyhat we unconscious-

posedly-reliable "gi-

d to invite an assort-us outcomes.

ese presumptive "gi-

or what they are: as

ptions which are in-y unfolding events.

ic list of these vague

at invite us to reck-dear for the sake of a

as-usual.


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climatic and biological mactous potential.

(a) No other animals on earth supplem

(b) No other animals on earth have E

(c) Nor have any populations of evendaily and ongoing avalanche of societa

ASSUMPTION 2:

We dangerously assume th

matic machinery is simplythat we can always count on

result, we sail along, taking

or granted under nothingnerable, no matter how muc

Imagine, for example, a pers

known universe. Having neve

always e counted on to conti

Presumably, financiers and econom

replaceable. Why then are they so utt

Our trajectory in this graph is unprece

an economic or financial bubble, exce

around.

2050

2000

.1960

1830

8000 BC

in billions

Human

Population

hinery already constitute unfolding and ongoin

We must not forget, for instance, that:

nttheir biological wastes with the additional societal and industria

ERsupplemented their wastes in the wa that we do; and

the worst red-tide dinoflagellates EVER supplemented their cellulaand industrial wastes as our own species is doing today, and on a

t the continued functioning of earths environm

given that it must somehow constitute a for, regardless of how many billions of us try to in

the continued functioning of earths life-support

ore than an assumption that this machinery mupollution, damage, and abuse that we may heap

n who has inherited an astounding automobile, and that it is the on

r known any other condition, the owner might erroneously suppose

nue to function, no matter how much abuse and damage to which it

c apologists take care of their automobiles, coporate jets and mega

erly cavalier when it comes to the only planetary life support machi

ented in human history. It is in fact, more severe and more extre

t that there will be no planetary "do-overs" available if we don't

ASSUMPTION 3:

Economic apologists urge us to g

our civilizations, and earths life s

by urging us to suppose that weinfinite and unending growth andal" forever (a philosophy, of coursserve the interests of greed). Ironic

business-as-usual urge their philosmoment in history that is coloss

any conditions that our species anever faced.

Consider again our graph (left) wittrajectory of world population b

2050, a trajectory that most emph

constitute business-as-usual biolwould be impossible to depict an

extraordinary and less routine thanit depicts. There has never beenman departure from our past numrelationships with our planet and it

excesses of calami-

l wastes the way that we do;

r and metabolic wastes with alanet-wide scale, at that.

ental, biotic, and cli-

of ongoing constantabit our planet. As a

infrastructure entirely

t be magically invul-upon it.

ly automobile in the

that the vehicle could

might be subjected.

achts, which are, after all,

nery in the known universe?

me, but otherwise not unlike,

get things right this first time

mble our futures,

upport machinery

an continue withbusiness-as-usu-e, that happens toally, advocates of

ophy upon us at ally different than

d our planet have

h its skyrocketingetween 1830 and

atically does NOT

ogy. In reality, itthing that is more

the trajectory thatmore radical hu-ers, impacts, and

s environment.


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ASSUMPTION 4:

We also invite catastrophe

have any bearing whatsoevoverpopulation. As chapter

presence of open space s

lamitous misperception.

Similarly, in a vat of wine,of ethanol even as the yeastopen-space that remains

catastrophic 99% die-offs inphysically-occupied less th

available.

We also know that it is routwater masses, and often theeven as the organisms them

available. Finally, a matheof the collapse of its humvironment both underwent ccupied and "vast amounts o

It is interesting to note that tan unexpected similarity toEaster Island (less than 3/10

if we allow ourselves to imagine that "vast am

er on our currently calamitous conditions of pfour and eleven have shown, for example, to i

omehow frees us from the effects of other lim

Recall, for instance, the iwhich the dot denotes 2

cent of the rectangle's tot

As our earlier chaptersmarine environments, ou

late red-tide by organisbrevis manage to calamiters in which they reside

cells themselves physica2/1000ths of 1% of themains theoretically avail

Such outbreaks of red-ti

sential examples of popuresult in catastrophe by rthe environment in whic

side, and in this respect,

they may haveinstructive to tell us

opulations of yeast cells poison their environmecells themselves occupy a volumetrically insig

theoretically available. Also, elsewhere we ha

reindeer herds that underwent collapse while thn 1/10 h of one percent of the open space

ine for the biota of a eutrophic ("over-fertilized"entire pond in which they reside, to anoxia (deplelves occupy only a fraction of the volume that

atical calculation of Easter Island's total area (opn population hints that the island's human re

ollapse even as 99.999 97% of the island's total

open-space" still remained.

he results (2/1000ths of 1%) of the dinoflagellatsimilar analysis applied to the historical human0ths of 1%).

ounts of open space

pulation growth andagine that the simple

iting factors is a ca-

age depicted here in1000ths of one per-

al area.

(and PDFs) note, inbreaks of dinoflagel-

ms such as Kareniaously-poison the wa-even as the K. brevis

lly occupy less thanopen space that re-ble. .

e constitute quintes-

lation explosions thatelease of astes intoh the populations re-

somethingabout ourselves.

t by their productionificant portion of theve seen examples of

e reindeer themselveshat was theoretically

) pond to drive entireetion of dissolved O2)remains theoretically

en space) at the onsetsidents and their en-area remained unoc-

e analysis show suchpopulation living on


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A major difference, of course, is that dinoflagellate impacts arise from wastes released into theirsurroundings, while the impacts of the human population on Easter Island, which was at a pre-in-dustrial stage of development, arose from physical damage to their surroundings involving

deforestation and over-exploitation of island birds, seabirds, and vegetation.

Today, however, our own highly-industrialized populations have: (a) Greatly-amplified physicalimpacts (think of chain saws, logging concessions, asphalt paving, and industrialized fishing

fleets, for example); (b) Our own impacts are a global phenomenon, and, (c) As we have be-come industrialized, we have now joined and enormously surpassed dinoflagellate populations as

a species that produces and releases wastes into our environment.

Thus, in addition to our greatly-amplified physical damage and an enormous world population

(that will see us add our 7 h, 8 h, and 9 hbillions between now and mid-century), we must nowadd our unprecedented production of industrial and societal wastes. Therefore, not only do werelease the normal cellular and biological wastes to which natural systems are generally adapted,

but our species alone SUPPLEMENTS its biological wastes with an unparalleled, ongoing, and ev-er-increasing avalanche of industrial and societal wastes in a way that is:

(a) Unique among all animals on earth,

(b) Unique among all animal species that have EVER lived, and

(c) Is multiple orders of magnitude worse than any catastrophicoutbreak of dinoflagellate red-tide in the history of the earth. .

ASSUMPTION 5:

Recalling an earlier PDF in this series ("razor-thin films"), we mistakenly assume that the seem-ing immensity of earth's atmosphere and seas must make them largely invulnerable to mankind'scollective impacts. In razor-thin films, however, we have seen than earth's atmosphere and seas

are actually astonishingly thin and fragile films. Mathematically speaking, for example, the thinlayer of water that we refer to as an ocean exists only as a thin and precarious surface film that is

only six one-hundredths of one percentas thick as the earth itself.

To illustrate this depth to scale on a classroom globe, we would need a layer of water twelveone-thousandths of an inch deep to proportionately depict the depth of earth's oceans (ibid). Ifwe were to wipe a wet paper towel across a twenty-inch globe, the film it leaves behind would

be too deep to properly represent the depths of earth's oceans. Thus, the apparent immensity ofearth's ocean is actually an illusion arising simply from our own diminutive size.

And we also saw that our ocean of air, earth's atmosphere, can be viewed in a similar way. Ifwe analyze the proportional depth of earth's atmosphere, we find that what appears to be aseemingly endless atmosphere is also little more than another thin and fragile film that

astronauts and cosmonauts have likened to a single layer of skin on an onion.

Next, then, came our discussion of billions of us with our automobiles backed up in crowded

traffic on a busy five-lane highway with hundreds of other cars and trucks and buses spewingnoxious exhausts into earths atmosphere during each and every rush hour, grocery run, postaldelivery, and long-distance trip. To put such behaviors in context, we noted that we are the onlyanimals on earth that do this, and that we repeat this behavior every day, again and again andagain, in Beijing, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Tokyo, Jakarta, Karachi, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, London,

Moscow, and New York City.


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century. These numbers will worsen, and most assuredly will not solve, the many crises that wealready face.

ASSUMPTION 8:

For most of us, our schooling has targeted proficiency in the arithmetic mathematics or grocery-store arithmetic of the 1930s. In contrast, we generally have too little training in the applicationsof, and the counterintuitive and deceptive nature of, exponential mathematics. As a result, we

mistakenly suppose that the consumer mathematics that we are taught in elementary school some-

how enables us to correctly interpret numbers that are growing exponentially.

As former CIA director James Woolsey has noted,

generations living today need to understand that

nature is not always going to behave in linear fashion

[just] because our minds think that way."(As cited by Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded; 2008; emphasis added)

Similarly, our four PDFs addressing EXPONENTIAL mathematics demonstrate that grocery-store analyses of numbers that are behaving

exponentially not only do not work, but actually blind us to both the degree and the immediacy of impending danger.

ASSUMPTION 9 (and MORE):

Finally, we have a tendency to imagine that humans must be somehow exempt from natures rules;that such rules dont apply to humans; that earths ability to accommodate more and more billions

of human beings is somehow infinite; that delayed feedbacks will not cause us to overshoot earthscarrying capacity for our rapacious and industrialized species; as though herds of reindeer andpopulations of dinoflagellates can undergo ecological release and climb-and-collapse crashes, but

that our own species is somehow immune to such outcomes and that, as human beings, we our-selves, both individually and collectively, must be magically endowed with demographic invul-nerability.

(Our economic systems and politicians, for example, never, ever get anything wrong, do they?)

Without the concepts, information, data sets, and examples collated in Wecskaop and excerpted inthis PDF set, we have little hope of avoiding the calamities that our prevailing assumptions andmindsets promise to bring about.

And a quick universalization of these can and must be achieved by radio, television, digital, and

internet venues with a Franklin Roosevelt / Winston Churchill scale of mobilization and response.

Warnings, Inaction, and Delayed Responses

We know that even in the richest and most advanced societies, that we and our leaders commonly

defer action, ignore problems, wager incorrectly, and/or commit assorted blunders, some of which

are colossal. And we keep learning that this occurs with tragic regularity and with ruinous results.

Recalling the effects of hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, for example, is instructive: Despite

scholarly warnings and engineering reports concerning the inadequacies of the city's protective

levees, government officials and politicians failed to remedy the matter for years and years.Instead, officialdom reacted too slowly ornot at all, leaving only luck and inaction to stand against


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catastrophe, so that the city was demolished upon the arrival of 2005s category four hurricaneKatrina. And of course, the history of every society is replete with examples of inaction, ignoredwarnings, and delayed and/or inadequate responses.

In the case of New Orleans, at least, the price to be paid when the warnings were greeted with in-action, inattention, or inadequate responses was comparatively localized. As a result, the Katrinadisaster, as serious as it was, amounted to a localized event. In the case of New Orleans, only a

single city had to pay the price, so that the point to be made is this:

For decades, top scientists have warned us repeatedly, again and again and again, of the potentiallycalamitous implications of our ongoing population/industrialization collisions with earths climaticand biotic machinery. Yet, it seems that too many of our journalists, policymakers, and economic

sectors appear content to count on nothing more than luck, faulty assumptions, and inaction tosave us from the collision that is unfolding before our eyes. In the case of today's demographic

tidal wave, however, the repercussions do not constitute a threat to just a single bridge or a single

city:Instead we are putting at risk the entirety of earths biota

and the natural systems that underpin civilization itself.

Whatever efforts and progress we can cite, fifty years of neglect, specious arguments, and inactionhave brought us to this: As these words are written, we continue to add approximately 800,000additional people to our planet every four days.

And even more ominously, we continue to add a BILLION

additional persons to our population every 12 to15 years.

And all of those homework questions over a span of 38,461 years

dramatically underscore the enormity of each such billion.

As a result, we have addressed carrying capacities, overshoot, limiting factors, delayed feedbacks,inadequate responses, as well as two classical examples of mammalian climb-and-collapse popu-lation studies

which both culminated in 99% mortality of the population undergoing collapse.

In addition, our PDFs have also addressed J-curves, self-intensifying feedbacks, thresholds, tip-

ping points, and unintended consequences. We have seen that bridges, elevators, aircraft, environ-

mental systems, and our planet itself have thresholds, carrying capacities, and limits that cannot betransgressed without inviting calamity. And we have examined lists of ecological services,

concepts of ecological release, and sampled the implications of our ongoing population-environ-

ment impacts upon other species, natural systems, our fellow human beings, and civilization itself.

Default Settings

Let us contemplate, then, several closing thoughts:

There are certain decisions that we should have made three decades ago about our demographics.

If we make no decisions, or if we make the wrong decisions, then our planet has default settingsthat will be applied. And while we are aware that Wecskaop, like any book, could be in error, it is

ar more likely that the growth-forever mindsets, rosy scenarios, specious arguments, faulty as-


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sumptions, and sweet suppositions that are urged upon us by economic theorists and corporateapologists are, like a Wall Street bubble, carrying us toward biospheric and civilizational collapse.

What if, for example, Wall Street's prevailing assumptions, ideologies, arguments, and assurances(which ask us to gamble virtually everything, including the earth's biosphere and its life-supportmachinery) turn out to be as flawed as its performance, policies, and behavior in the economic

debacle that it has just given us as this is written in 2008?

What might be the biospheric and demographic outcomes if the carrying capacity- iology-ecology-demographic policies that are urgedupon us by Wall Street's financial, economic, and corporate elites turn out to be as erroneous as the mistakes that they have just

exhibited in their own areas of claimed expertise?

Wecskaop suggests that a continuation of todays demographic tidal wave almost certainly con-

stitutes the greatest single risk that our species has ever undertaken and proposes that our speciesmust elect to err on the side of demographic caution. If we choose the path of caution and shouldWecskaop then turn out to be wrong, the consequences would not be so terribly bad, for the world

might then, for instance,simply end up with a stable population

like that seen in Spain as this is written.

What are the consequences for humanity and earths natural systems if Wecskaop and our as-sorted PDF excerpts should happen to be in error?

If we heed its concerns, we will stabilize our populations, educate all citizens about our planet,

ensure that vast regions of earth's biosphere are set aside and protected from roads and humanintrusion, and we will direct our monies and our efforts toward making life, education, health care,cities, and opportunities better for populations existing today instead of attempting to frantically

keep up with an avalanche of infrastructure and social needs generated by one additional billion

followed by another and another in the decades ahead.On the other hand, if humanity should decide to rely upon Roger Revelle's or similar sky-high es-timates, or to follow the pedal-to-the-metal, the-more-the-merrier, and the rosy scenarios direc-tions that are urged upon us by assorted corporate, Wall Street, and economic interests, and should

it turn out that those rosy and specious suppositions are in error, the results may include bio-spheric, humanitarian, and civilizational nightmares of an unimaginable scale.

A half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the modern plague of overpopulation.What is lacking, he said, "is universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the

education of billions of people who are its victims (see King, 1966; Bartlett, 2000; Wooldridge,

2007; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2004). Today, Dr. Kings insights are more applicable than ever. If wecontinue to proceed complacently, as we have already done for far too long, it may be thatcivilizations prevailing philosophy will also become its last words and its epitaph: "business-as-usual" -

or perhaps, in Eric Piankas words (2008), we waited too long.

Thomas Friedman recently noted that there is a line between can-do optimism and a keenawareness that the hour is late and the scale of the problems practically overwhelming (Friedman,2008). To achieve the threshold levels of demographic and biospheric literacy envisioned in

Wecskaop and briefly excerpted in these PDFs will require a Franklin Roosevelt / Winston Chur-chill level of mobilization and response that should have begun two decades ago.


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As it is, we close by offerindifferent destinies:

(1) Unlike dinoflagellates,billion, carrying capacities, t

er and deceptive behavior of

(2) In addition, we can be

phe because, after all is saimindless, one-celled dinofla

Although it is true that to succumb tanthropologist Margaret Mead also rin

Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has

A continuatthe great

8000 BC

Human

Population

in billions

two questions that will carry us foward to one

we all understand limits and limiting factors, thhresholds, tipping points, and delayed feedbacks

exponential mathematics, don't we?

ure that our own species will manage to avoid

and done, we are smarter than a herd of reindellates -

aren't we?

o hopeis as dangerous as to succumb to despair (Monbiot, 2g true: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed c

."

ion of todays demographic tidal wave may consst single risk that our species has ever undertak

What Every Citizen Should

2050

2000

.1960

1830

r another of two very

e enormous size of a, along with the pow-

emographic catastro-

er or a population of

06), the words of the fameditizens can change the world.

ituten.

Excerpted from

now About Our Planet

Used with permission


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Copyright 2009. Randolph Femmer.

All rights reserved.

Librarians: The book version of Wecskaop is available fromM. Arman Publishing, Fax: 386-951-1101

Expanded implications of this excerpt are also

addressed in additional PDFs in this collection:

Razor-Thin Films - Earth's Atmosphere and Seas

Numerics, Demographics, and a Billion Homework Questions (see PowerPoint as well)

Conservation planning - Why Brazil's 10% is Not Enough

Eight Assumptions that Invite Calamity

Climate - No Other Animals Do This

Critique of Beyond Six Billion

Delayed feedbacks, Limits, and Overshoot

Thresholds, Tipping points, and Unintended consequencs

Problematic Aspects of Geoengineering

Carrying Capacity and Limiting Factors

Humanity's Demographic Journey Ecosystem services and Ecological release

J-curves and Exponential progressions

One-hundred key Biospheric understandings

Sources and Cited References(pending)

Anson, 2009. What Every Citizen Should Know About Our Planet. M. Arman Publishing.Anson, 1996. Marine Biology and Ocean Science. Balaena Books.Bartlett, 2000;

Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 2004Friedman, 2008.

IOF, 1977.King, 1966;Monbiot, 2006.

Taylor, 2008.Woolsey, J., as quoted by Friedman, 2008.

Wooldridge, 2007;

population growth: nine assumptions that invite calamity

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