Please answer the question and discuss, each question need 4-6 sentence. there are two part。

the picture is question and plz finish reading the course materials first。

https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/articles/2017/01/24/five-things-to-know-about-californias-drought-after-big-storms

C H A P

T

E R 16

The World as a Polder: What Does
It All Mean to Us Today?

Introduction The most serious problems If we don’t solve
them… Life in Los Angeles a One-liner objections

The past and the present Reasons for hope

he chapters of this book have discussed why past or present societies
succeed or fail at solving their environmental problems. Now, this fi-
nal chapter considers the book’s practical relevance: what does it all

mean to us today?
I shall begin by explaining the major sets of environmental problems

facing modern societies, and the time scale on which they pose threats. As a
specific example of how these problems play out, I examine the area where I
have spent most of the last 39 years of my life, Southern California. I then
consider the objections most often raised to dismiss the significance of en-
vironmental problems today. Since half of this book was devoted to ancient
societies because of the lessons that they might hold for modern societies, I
look at differences between the ancient and the modern worlds that affect
what lessons we can draw from the past. Finally, for anyone who asks,
“What can I do as an individual?” I offer suggestions in the Further Read-
ings section.

It seems to me that the most serious environmental problems facing past
and present societies fall into a dozen groups. Eight of the 12 were signifi-
cant already in the past, while four (numbers 5, 7, 8, and 10: energy, the
photosynthetic ceiling, toxic chemicals, and atmospheric changes) became
serious only recently. The first four of the 12 consist of destruction or losses
of natural resources; the next three involve ceilings on natural resources; the
three after that consist of harmful things that we produce or move around;
and the last two are population issues. Let’s begin with the natural resources

T

that we are destroying or losing: natural habitats, wild food sources, biologi-
cal diversity, and soil.

1. At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else con-
verting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands
and pastures, roads, and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses
have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the
ocean bottom. As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, more than half of
the world’s original area of forest has already been converted to other uses,
and at present conversion rates one-quarter of the forests that remain will
become converted within the next half-century. Those losses of forests rep-
resent losses for us humans, especially because forests provide us with tim-
ber and other raw materials, and because they provide us with so-called
ecosystem services such as protecting our watersheds, protecting soil
against erosion, constituting essential steps in the water cycle that generates
much of our rainfall, and providing habitat for most terrestrial plant and
animal species. Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of
past societies described in this book. In addition, as discussed in Chapter 1
in connection with Montana, issues of concern to us are not only forest de-
struction and conversion, but also changes in the structure of wooded habi-
tats that do remain. Among other things, that changed structure results in
changed fire regimes that put forests, chaparral woodlands, and savannahs
at greater risk of infrequent but catastrophic fires.

Other valuable natural habitats besides forests are also being destroyed.
An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands than of its forests
has already been destroyed, damaged, or converted. Consequences for us
arise from wetlands’ importance in maintaining the quality of our water
supplies and the existence of commercially important freshwater fisheries,
while even ocean fisheries depend on mangrove wetlands to provide habitat
for the juvenile phase of many fish species. About one-third of the world’s
coral reefs—the oceanic equivalent of tropical rainforests, because they are
home to a disproportionate fraction of the ocean’s species—have already
been severely damaged. If current trends continue, about half of the re-
maining reefs would be lost by the year 2030. That damage and destruction
result from the growing use of dynamite as a fishing method, reef over-
growth by algae (“seaweeds”) when the large herbivorous fish that normally
graze on the algae become fished out, effects of sediment runoff and pollu-
tants from adjacent lands cleared or converted to agriculture, and coral

bleaching due to rising ocean water temperatures. It has recently become
appreciated that fishing by trawling is destroying much or most of the shal-
low ocean bottom and the species dependent on it.

2. Wild foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a
large fraction of the protein consumed by humans. In effect, this is protein
that we obtain for free (other than the cost of catching and transporting the
fish), and that reduces our needs for animal protein that we have to grow
ourselves in the form of domestic livestock. About two billion people, most
of them poor, depend on the oceans for protein. If wild fish stocks were
managed appropriately, the stock levels could be maintained, and they
could be harvested perpetually. Unfortunately, the problem known as the
tragedy of the commons (Chapter 14) has regularly undone efforts to man
age fisheries sustainably, and the great majority of valuable fisheries already
either have collapsed or are in steep decline (Chapter 15). Past societies that
overfished included Easter Island, Mangareva, and Henderson.

Increasingly, fish and shrimp are being grown by aquaculture, which in
principle has a promising future as the cheapest way to produce animal pro-
tein. In several respects, though, aquaculture as commonly practiced today
is making the problem of declining wild fisheries worse rather than better.
Fish grown by aquaculture are mostly fed wild-caught fish and thereby usu-
ally consume more wild fish meat (up to 20 times more) than they yield in
meat of their own They contain higher toxin levels than do wild-caught
fish. Cultured fish regularly escape, interbreed with wild fish, and thereby
harm wild fish stocks genetically, because cultured fish strains have been se-
lected for rapid growth at the expense of poor survival in the wild (50 times
worse survival for cultured salmon than for wild salmon). Aquaculture
runoff causes pollution and eutrophication. The lower costs of aquaculture
than of fishing, by driving down fish prices, initially drive fishermen to ex-
ploit wild fish stocks even more heavily in order to maintain their incomes
constant when they are receiving less money per pound of fish.

3. A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diver
sity has already been lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what re
mains will be lost within the next half-century. Some species, such as big
edible animals, or plants with edible fruits or good timber, are of obvious
value to us. Among the many past societies that harmed themselves by ex
terminating such species were the Easter and Henderson Islanders whom
we have discussed.

But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the re-
sponse, “Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy

useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?” This
response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild
species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in
many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of
lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans,
just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding
together an airplane. The literally innumerable examples include: the role of
earthworms in regenerating soil and maintaining its texture (one of the rea-
sons that oxygen levels dropped inside the Biosphere 2 enclosure, harming
its human inhabitants and crippling a colleague of mine, was a lack of
appropriate earthworms, contributing to altered soil/atmosphere gas ex-
change); soil bacteria that fix the essential crop nutrient nitrogen, which
otherwise we have to spend money to supply in fertilizers; bees and other
insect pollinators (they pollinate our crops for free, whereas it’s expensive
for us to pollinate every crop flower by hand); birds and mammals that dis-
perse wild fruits (foresters still haven’t figured out how to grow from seed
the most important commercial tree species of the Solomon Islands, whose
seeds are naturally dispersed by fruit bats, which are becoming hunted out);
elimination of whales, sharks, bears, wolves, and other top predators in the
seas and on the land, changing the whole food chain beneath them; and
wild plants and animals that decompose wastes and recycle nutrients, ulti-
mately providing us with clean water and air.

4. Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by
water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil
formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested
land. Because those soil erosion rates are so much higher than soil forma-
tion rates, that means a net loss of soil. For instance, about half of the top-
soil of Iowa, the state whose agriculture productivity is among the highest
in the U.S., has been eroded in the last 150 years. On my most recent visit to
Iowa, my hosts showed me a churchyard offering a dramatically visible ex-
ample of those soil losses. A church was built there in the middle of farm-
land during the 19th century and has been maintained continuously as a
church ever since, while the land around it was being farmed. As a result of
soil being eroded much more rapidly from fields than from the churchyard,
the yard now stands like a little island raised 10 feet above the surrounding
sea of farmland.

Other types of soil damage caused by human agricultural practices in-
clude salinization, as discussed for Montana, China, and Australia in Chap-
ters 1, 12, and 13; losses of soil fertility, because farming removes nutrients

much more rapidly than they are restored by weathering of the underlying
rock; and soil acidification in some areas, or its converse, alkalinization, in
other areas. All of these types of harmful impacts have resulted in a fraction
of the world’s farmland variously estimated at between 20% and 80% hav-
ing become severely damaged, during an era in which increasing human
population has caused us to need more farmland rather than less farmland.
Like deforestation, soil problems contributed to the collapses of all past so-
cieties discussed in this book.

The next three problems involve ceilings—on energy, freshwater, and
photosynthetic capacity. In each case the ceiling is not hard and fixed but
soft: we can obtain more of the needed resource, but at increasing costs.

5. The world’s major energy sources, especially for industrial societies,
are fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. While there has been much discus-
sion about how many big oil and gas fields remain to be discovered, and
while coal reserves are believed to be large, the prevalent view is that known
and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last for a few
more decades. This view should not be misinterpreted to mean that all of
the oil and natural gas within the Earth will have been used up by then. In-
stead, further reserves will be deeper underground, dirtier, increasingly ex-
pensive to extract or process, or will involve higher environmental costs. Of
course, fossil fuels are not our sole energy sources, and I shall consider
problems raised by the alternatives below.

6. Most of the world’s freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being uti-
lized for irrigation, domestic and industrial water, and in situ uses such as
boat transportation corridors, fisheries, and recreation. Rivers and lakes
that are not already utilized are mostly far from major population centers
and likely users, such as in Northwestern Australia, Siberia, and Iceland.
Throughout the world, freshwater underground aquifers are being depleted
at rates faster than they are being naturally replenished, so that they will
eventually dwindle. Of course, freshwater can be made by desalinization of
seawater, but that costs money and energy, as does pumping the resulting
desalinized water inland for use. Hence desalinization, while it is useful lo-
cally, is too expensive to solve most of the world’s water shortages. The
Anasazi and Maya were among the past societies to be undone by water
problems, while today over a billion people lack access to reliable safe drink-
ing water.

7. It might at first seem that the supply of sunlight is infinite, so one

might reason that the Earth’s capacity to grow crops and wild plants is also
infinite. Within the last 20 years, it has been appreciated that that is not the
case, and that’s not only because plants grow poorly in the world’s Arctic re-
gions and deserts unless one goes to the expense of supplying heat or water.
More generally, the amount of solar energy fixed per acre by plant photo-
synthesis, hence plant growth per acre, depends on temperature and rain-
fall. At any given temperature and rainfall the plant growth that can be
supported by the sunlight falling on an acre is limited by the geometry and
biochemistry of plants, even if they take up the sunlight so efficiently that
not a single photon of light passes through the plants unabsorbed to reach
the ground. The first calculation of this photosynthetic ceiling, carried out
in 1986, estimated that humans then already used (e.g., for crops, tree plan-
tations, and golf courses) or diverted or wasted (e.g., light falling on con-
crete roads and buildings) about half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity.
Given the rate of increase of human population, and especially of popula-
tion impact (see point 12 below), since 1986, we are projected to be utilizing
most of the world’s terrestrial photosynthetic capacity by the middle of this
century. That is, most energy fixed from sunlight will be used for human
purposes, and little will be left over to support the growth of natural plant
communities, such as natural forests.

The next three problems involve harmful things that we generate or
move around: toxic chemicals, alien species, and atmospheric gases.

8. The chemical industry and many other industries manufacture or re-
lease into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals, some
of them “unnatural” and synthesized only by humans, others present natu-
rally in tiny concentrations (e.g., mercury) or else synthesized by living
things but synthesized and released by humans in quantities much larger
than natural ones (e.g., hormones). The first of these toxic chemicals to
achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, whose ef-
fects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson’s
1962 book Silent Spring. Since then, it has been appreciated that the toxic ef-
fects of even greater significance for us humans are those on ourselves. The
culprits include not only insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, but also
mercury and other metals, fire-retardant chemicals, refrigerator coolants,
detergents, and components of plastics. We swallow them in our food
and water, breathe them in our air, and absorb them through our skin.
Often in very low concentrations, they variously cause birth defects, mental

retardation, and temporary or permanent damage to our immune and re-
productive systems. Some of them act as endocrine disruptors, i.e., they in-
terfere with our reproductive systems by mimicking or blocking effects of
our own sex hormones. They probably make the major contribution to the
steep decline in sperm count in many human populations over the last sev-
eral decades, and to the apparently increasing frequency with which couples
are unable to conceive, even when one takes into account the increasing av-
erage age of marriage in many societies. In addition, deaths in the U.S. from
air pollution alone (without considering soil and water pollution) are con-
servatively estimated at over 130,000 per year.

Many of these toxic chemicals are broken down in the environment only
slowly (e.g., DDT and PCBs) or not at all (mercury), and they persist in the
environment for long times before being washed out. Thus, cleanup costs of
many polluted sites in the U.S. are measured in the billions of dollars (e.g.,
Love Canal, the Hudson River, Chesapeake Bay, the Exxon Valdez oil spill,
and Montana copper mines). But pollution at those worst sites in the U.S. is
mild compared to that in the former Soviet Union, China, and many Third
World mines, whose cleanup costs no one even dares to think about.

9. The term “alien species” refers to species that we transfer, intentionally
or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to another place where
they are not native. Some alien species are obviously valuable to us as crops,
domestic animals, and landscaping. But others devastate populations of na-
tive species with which they come in contact, either by preying on, para-
sitizing, infecting, or outcompeting them. The aliens cause these big effects
because the native species with which they come in contact had no previous
evolutionary experience of them and are unable to resist them (like human
populations newly exposed to smallpox or AIDS). There are by now literally
hundreds of cases in which alien species have caused one-time or annually
recurring damages of hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of
dollars. Modern examples include Australia’s rabbits and foxes, agricultural
weeds like Spotted Knapweed and Leafy Spurge (Chapter 1), pests and
pathogens of trees and crops and livestock (like the blights that wiped out
American chestnut trees and devasted American elms), the water hyacinth
that chokes waterways, the zebra mussels that choke power plants, and the
lampreys that devastated the former commercial fisheries of the North
American Great Lakes (Plates 30, 31). Ancient examples include the intro-
duced rats that contributed to the extinction of Easter Island’s palm tree by
gnawing its nuts, and that ate the eggs and chicks of nesting birds on Easter,
Henderson, and all other Pacific islands previously without rats.

10. Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere,
where they either damage the protective ozone layer (as do formerly wide-
spread refrigerator coolants) or else act as greenhouse gases that absorb
sunlight and thereby lead to global warming. The gases contributing to
global warming include carbon dioxide from combustion and respiration,
and methane from fermentation in the intestines of ruminant animals. Of
course, there have always been natural fires and animal respiration produc-
ing carbon dioxide, and wild ruminant animals producing methane, but
our burning of firewood and of fossil fuels has greatly increased the former,
and our herds of cattle and of sheep have greatly increased the latter.

For many years, scientists debated the reality, cause, and extent of global
warming: are world temperatures really historically high now, and, if so, by
how much, and are humans the leading cause? Most knowledgeable scien-
tists now agree that, despite year-to-year ups and downs of temperature that
necessitate complicated analyses to extract warming trends, the atmosphere
really has been undergoing an unusually rapid rise in temperature recently,
and that human activities are the or a major cause. The remaining uncer-
tainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g.,
whether average global temperatures will increase by “just” 1.5 degrees
Centigrade or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those num-
bers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global
temperatures were “only” 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.

While one might at first think that we should welcome global warming
on the grounds that warmer temperatures mean faster plant growth, it
turns out that global warming will produce both winners and losers. Crop
yields in cool areas with temperatures marginal for agriculture may indeed
increase, while crop yields in already warm or dry areas may decrease. In
Montana, California, and many other dry climates, the disappearance of
mountain snowpacks will decrease the water available for domestic uses,
and for irrigation that actually limits crop yields in those areas. The rise in
global sea levels as a result of snow and ice melting poses dangers of flood-
ing and coastal erosion for densely populated low-lying coastal plains and
river deltas already barely above or even below sea level. The areas thereby
threatened include much of the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and the seaboard
of the eastern U.S., many low-lying Pacific islands, the deltas of the Nile and
Mekong Rivers, and coastal and riverbank cities of the United Kingdom
(e.g., London), India, Japan, and the Philippines. Global warming will also
produce big secondary effects that are difficult to predict exactly in advance
and that are likely to cause huge problems, such as further climate changes

resulting from changes in ocean circulation resulting in turn from melting
of the Arctic ice cap.

The remaining two problems involve the increase in human population:

11. The world’s human population is growing. More people require
more food, space, water, energy, and other resources. Rates and even the di
rection of human population change vary greatly around the world, with
the highest rates of population growth (4% per year or higher) in some
Third World countries, low rates of growth (1% per year or less) in some
First World countries such as Italy and Japan, and negative rates of growth
(i.e., decreasing populations) in countries facing major public health crises,
such as Russia and AIDS-affected African countries. Everybody agrees that
the world population is increasing, but that its annual percentage rate of in
crease is not as high as it was a decade or two ago. However, there is still dis
agreement about whether the world’s population will stabilize at some
value above its present level (double the present population?), and (if so)
how many years (30 years? 50 years?) it will take for population to reach
that level, or whether population will continue to grow.

There is long built-in momentum to human population growth because
of what is termed the “demographic bulge” or “population momentum,”
i.e., a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age
people in today’s population, as a result of recent population growth. That
is, suppose that every couple in the world decided tonight to limit them-
selves to two children, approximately the correct number of children to
yield an unchanging population in the long run by exactly replacing their
two parents who will eventually die (actually, 2.1 children when one consid-
ers childless couples and children who won’t marry). The world’s popula-
tion would nevertheless continue to increase for about 70 years, because
more people today are of reproductive age or entering reproductive age
than are old and post-reproductive. The problem of human population
growth has received much attention in recent decades and has given rise to
movements such as Zero Population Growth, which aim to slow or halt the
increase in the world’s population.

12. What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their im
pact on the environment. If most of the world’s 6 billion people today were
in cryogenic storage and neither eating, breathing, nor metabolizing, that
large population would cause no environmental problems. Instead, our
numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate

wastes. That per-capita impact—the resources consumed, and the wastes
put out, by each person—varies greatly around the world, being highest in
the First World and lowest in the Third World. On the average, each citizen
of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources
such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants
of the Third World (Plate 35).

But low-impact people are becoming high-impact people for two rea-
sons: rises in living standards in Third World countries whose inhabitants
see and covet First World lifestyles; and immigration, both legal and illegal,
of individual Third World inhabitants into the First World, driven by politi-
cal, economic, and social problems at home. Immigration from low-impact
countries is now the main contributor to the increasing populations of the
U.S. and Europe. By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important
human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of
population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World
countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and
Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most dis-
cussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact,
as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World
individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living
standards.

There are many “optimists” who argue that the world could support
double its human population, and who consider only the increase in human
numbers and not the average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not
met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times its
current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all
Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards. (That factor
of 12 is less than the factor of 32 that I mentioned in the preceding para-
graph, because there are already First World inhabitants with high-impact
lifestyles, although they are greatly outnumbered by Third World inhabi-
tants.) Even if the people of China alone achieved a First World living stan-
dard while everyone else’s living standard remained constant, that would
double our human impact on the world (Chapter 12).

People in the Third World aspire to First World living standards. They
develop that aspiration through watching television, seeing advertisements
for First World consumer products sold in their countries, and observing
First World visitors to their countries. Even in the most remote villages and
refugee camps today, people know about the outside world. Third World
citizens are encouraged in that aspiration by First World and United

Nations development agencies, which hold out to them the prospect of
achieving their dream if they will only adopt the right policies, like balancing
their national budgets, investing in education and infrastructure, and so on.
But no one at the U.N. or in First World governments is willing to ac-
knowledge the dream’s impossibility: the unsustainability of a world in which
the Third World’s large population were to reach and maintain current First
World living standards. It is impossible for the First World to resolve that
dilemma by blocking the Third World’s efforts to catch up: South Korea,
Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mauritius have already suc-
ceeded or are close to success; China and India are progressing rapidly by
their own efforts; and the 15 rich Western European countries making up
the European Union have just extended Union membership to 10 poorer
countries of Eastern Europe, in effect thereby pledging to help those 10
countries catch up. Even if the human populations of the Third World did
not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its
present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own re-
sources as well as those imported from the Third World. At present, it is un-
tenable politically for First World leaders to propose to their own citizens
that they lower their living standards, as measured by lower resource con-
sumption and waste production rates. What will happen when it finally
dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World stan-
dards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon
those standards for itself? Life is full of agonizing choices based on trade-
offs, but that’s the crudest trade-off that we shall have to resolve: encourag-
ing and helping all people to achieve a higher standard of living, without
thereby undermining that standard through overstressing global resources.

I have described these 12 sets of problems as separate from each other. In
fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution
more difficult. For example, human population growth affects all 11 other
problems: more people means more deforestation, more toxic chemicals,
more demand for wild fish, etc. The energy problem is linked to other prob-
lems because use of fossil fuels for energy contributes heavily to greenhouse
gases, the combating of soil fertility losses by using synthetic fertilizers re-
quires energy to make the fertilizers, fossil fuel scarcity increases our inter-
est in nuclear energy which poses potentially the biggest “toxic” problem of
all in case of an accident, and fossil fuel scarcity also makes it more expen-
sive to solve our freshwater problems by using energy to desalinize ocean

water. Depletion of fisheries and other wild food sources puts more pres-
sure on livestock, crops, and aquaculture to replace them, thereby leading to
more topsoil losses and more eutrophication from agriculture and aqua-
culture. Problems of deforestation, water shortage, and soil degradation in
the Third World foster wars there and drive legal asylum seekers and illegal
emigrants to the First World from the Third World.

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of
our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would
suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like
time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years. For example, destruction of
accessible lowland tropical rainforest outside national parks is already vir-
tually complete in Peninsular Malaysia, will be complete at current rates
within less than a decade in the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, on Suma-
tra, and on Sulawesi, and will be complete around the world except perhaps
for parts of the Amazon Basin and Congo Basin within 25 years. At current
rates, we shall have depleted or destroyed most of the world’s remaining
marine fisheries, depleted clean or cheap or readily accessible reserves of oil
and natural gas, and approached the photosynthetic ceiling within a few de-
cades. Global warming is projected to have reached a degree Centigrade
or more, and a substantial fraction of the world’s wild animal and plant
species are projected to be endangered or past the point of no return, within
half a century. People often ask, “What is the single most important envi-
ronmental/population problem facing the world today?” A flip answer
would be, “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on
identifying the single most important problem!” That flip answer is essen-
tially correct, because any of the dozen problems if unsolved would do us
grave harm, and because they all interact with each other. If we solved 11 of
the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was
the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all.

Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable
course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or
another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today.
The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of
our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare,
genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies. While all
of those grim phenomena have been endemic to humanity throughout our
history, their frequency increases with environmental degradation, popu-
lation pressure, and the resulting poverty and political instability.

Examples of those unpleasant solutions to environmental and popula-

tion problems abound in both the modern world and the ancient world.
The examples include the recent genocides in Rwanda, Burundi, and the
former Yugoslavia; war, civil war, or guerrilla war in the modern Sudan,
Philippines, and Nepal, and in the ancient Maya homeland; cannibalism on
prehistoric Easter Island and Mangareva and among the ancient Anasazi;
starvation in many modern African countries and on prehistoric Easter Is-
land; the AIDS epidemic already in Africa, and incipiently elsewhere; and
the collapse of state government in modern Somalia, the Solomon Islands,
and Haiti, and among the ancient Maya. An outcome less drastic than a
worldwide collapse might “merely” be the spread of Rwanda-like or Haiti-
like conditions to many more developing countries, while we First World
inhabitants retain many of our First World amenities but face a future with
which we are unhappy, beset by more chronic terrorism, wars, and disease
outbreaks. But it is doubtful that the First World could retain its separate
lifestyle in the face of desperate waves of immigrants fleeing from collapsing
Third World countries, in numbers much larger than the current unstop-
pable influx. I’m reminded again of how I picture the end of Gardar Cathe-
dral Farm and its splendid cattle barn on Greenland, overwhelmed by the
influx of Norse from poorer farms where all the livestock had died or been
eaten.

But before we let ourselves give way to this one-sidedly pessimistic sce-
nario, let’s examine further the problems facing us, and their complexities.
This will bring us, I feel, to a position of cautious optimism.

To make the preceding discussion less abstract, I shall now illustrate how
those dozen environmental problems affect lifestyles in the part of the
world with which I am most familiar: the city of Los Angeles in Southern
California, where I live. After growing up on the East Coast of the United
States and living for several years in Europe, I first visited California in
1964. It immediately appealed to me, and I moved here in 1966.

Thus, I have seen how Southern California has changed over the last 39
years, mostly in ways that make it less appealing. By world standards, South-
ern California’s environmental problems are relatively mild. Jokes of East
Coast Americans to the contrary, this is not an area at imminent risk of a
societal collapse. By world standards and even by U.S. standards, its human
population is exceptionally rich and environmentally educated. Los Angeles
is well known for some problems, especially its smog, but most of its envi-
ronmental and population problems are modest or typical compared to

those of other leading First World cities. How do those problems affect the
lives of my fellow Angelenos and me?

The complaints voiced by virtually everybody in Los Angeles are those
directly related to our growing and already high population: our incurable
traffic jams; the very high price of housing (Plate 36), as a result of millions
of people working in a few centers of employment, and only limited resi-
dential space near those centers; and, as a consequence, the long distances,
of up to two hours and 60 miles one way, over which people commute daily
in their cars between home and work. Los Angeles became the U.S. city
with the worst traffic in 1987 and has remained so every year since then.
Everyone recognizes that these problems have gotten worse within the last
decade. They are now the biggest single factor hurting the ability of Los
Angeles employers to attract and retain employees, and they affect our will-
ingness to drive to events and to visit friends. For the 12-mile trip from my
home to downtown Los Angeles or its airport, I now allow an hour and
15 minutes. The average Angeleno spends 368 hours per year, or the equiva-
lent of fifteen 24-hour days, commuting to and from work, without consid-
ering time spent driving for other purposes (Plate 37).

No cure is even under serious discussion for these problems, which will
only get worse. Such highway construction as is now proposed or under way
aims only at smoothing a few of the tightest points of congestion and will
be overwhelmed by the increasing number of cars. There is no end in sight
to how much worse Los Angeles’s problems of congestion will become, be-
cause millions of people put up with far worse traffic in other cities. For ex-
ample, my friends in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, now carry a portable
small chemical toilet in their car because travel can be so prolonged and
slow; they once set off to go out of town on a holiday weekend but gave up
and returned home after 17 hours, when they had advanced only three
miles through the traffic jam. While there are optimists who explain in the
abstract why increased population will be good and how the world can ac-
commodate it, I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people any-
where in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased
population in the area where he or she personally lived.

The contribution of Southern California to the ongoing increase in the
world’s average per-capita human impact, as a result of transfers of people
from the Third World to the First World, has for years been the most explo-
sive issue in California politics. California’s population growth is accelerat-
ing, due almost entirely to immigration and to the large average family sizes
of the immigrants after their arrival. The border between California and

Mexico is long and impossible to patrol effectively against people from Cen-
tral America seeking to immigrate here illegally in search of jobs and per-
sonal safety. Every month, one reads of would-be immigrants dying in the
desert or being robbed or shot, but that does not deter them. Other illegal
immigrants come from as far away as China and Central Asia, in ships that
unload them just off the coast. California residents are of two minds about
all those Third World immigrants seeking to come here to attain the First
World lifestyle. On the one hand, our economy is utterly dependent on
them to fill jobs in the service and construction industries and on farms. On
the other hand, California residents complain that the immigrants compete
with unemployed residents for many jobs, depress wages, and burden our
already overcrowded hospitals and public education system. A measure
(Proposition 187) on the 1994 state election ballot, overwhelmingly ap-
proved by voters but then gutted by the courts on constitutional grounds,
would have deprived illegal immigrants of most state-funded benefits. No
California resident or elected official has suggested a practical solution to
the long-standing contradiction, reminiscent of Dominicans’ attitude
towards Haitians, between needing immigrants as workers and otherwise
resenting their presence and their own needs.

Southern California is a leading contributor to the energy crisis. Our
city’s former network of electric streetcars collapsed in bankruptcies in the
1920s and 1930s, and the rights of way were bought up by automobile man-
ufacturers and subdivided so as to make it impossible to rebuild the net-
work (which competed with automobiles). Angelenos’ preference for living
in houses rather than in high-rise apartments, and the long distances and
diverse routes over which employees working in any given district com-
mute, have made it impossible to design systems of public transportation
that would satisfy the needs of most residents. Hence Los Angelenos are de-
pendent on motorcars.

Our high gas consumption, the mountains ringing much of the Los An-
geles basin, and prevailing wind directions generate the smog problem that
is our city’s most notorious drawback (Plate 38). Despite progress in com-
bating smog in recent decades, and despite seasonal variation (smog worst
in the late summer and early autumn) and local variation (smog generally
worse as one precedes inland), Los Angeles on the average continues to rank
near the bottom of American cities for air quality. After years of improve-
ment, our air quality has again been deteriorating in recent years. Another
toxic problem that affects lifestyle and health is the spread of the disease-
causing organism giardia in California’s rivers and lakes over the last several

decades. When I first moved here in the 1960s and went hiking in the
mountains, it was safe to drink water from streams; today the guaranteed
result would be giardia infection.

The problem of habitat management of which we are most conscious is
the fire risk in Southern California’s two predominant habitats, chaparral (a
scrub woodland similar to the macchia of the Mediterranean) and oak
woodland. Under natural conditions both habitats experienced occasional
fires from lightning strikes, like the situation in Montana forests that I dis-
cussed in Chapter 1. Now that people are living in and next to those highly
flammable habitats, Angelenos demand that fires be suppressed immedi-
ately. Each year, the late summer and early fall, which are the hottest and
driest and windiest time of year in Southern California, are the fire season,
when somewhere or other hundreds of homes will go up in flames. The
canyon in which I live has not had a fire get out of control since 1961, when
there was a big fire that burned 600 houses. A theoretical solution to this
problem, as in Montana forests, might be frequent controlled small-scale
fires to reduce the fuel load, but such fires would be absurdly dangerous in
this densely populated urban area, and the public would not stand for it.

Introduced alien species are a big threat and economic burden to Cali-
fornia agriculture, the current leading threat being the Mediterranean fruit
fly. Non-agricultural threats are introduced pathogens threatening to kill
our oak trees and pine trees. Because one of my two sons became interested
as a child in amphibians (frogs and salamanders), I have learned that most
species of native amphibians have been exterminated from two-thirds of
the streams in Los Angeles County, as the result of the spread of three alien
predators on amphibians (a crayfish, bullfrog, and mosquitofish) against
which Southern California amphibians are helpless because they never
evolved to avoid those threats.

The major soil problem affecting California agriculture is salinization as
a result of irrigation agriculture, ruining expanses of agricultural land in
California’s Central Valley, the richest farmland in the United States.

Because rainfall is low in Southern California, Los Angeles depends for
its water on long aqueducts, principally from the Sierra Nevada mountain
range and adjacent valleys of Northern California, and from the Colorado
River on the eastern border of our state. With the growth of California’s
population, there has been increasing competition for those water supplies
among farmers and cities. With global warming, the Sierra snowpack that
provides most of our water will decrease, just as in Montana, increasing the
likelihood of water shortages in Los Angeles.

As for collapses of fisheries, the sardine fishery of Northern California
collapsed early in the 20th century, the abalone industry of Southern Cali-
fornia collapsed a few decades ago soon after my arrival, and the rockfish
fishery of Southern California is now collapsing and has become subject to
severe restrictions or closure within the last year. Fish prices in Los Angeles
supermarkets have increased by a factor of 4 since I moved here.

Finally, losses of biodiversity have affected Southern California’s most
distinctive species. The symbol of the state of California, and of my univer-
sity (the University of California), is the California Golden Bear, but it is
now extinct. (What dreadful symbolism for one’s state and university!)
Southern California’s population of sea otters was exterminated in the last
century, and the outcome of recent attempts at reintroduction is uncertain.
Within the time that I’ve lived in Los Angeles, populations of two of our
most characteristic bird species, the Roadrunner and the California Quail,
have crashed. Southern California amphibians whose numbers have plum-
meted are the California Newt and the California Tree Frog.

Thus, environmental and population problems have been undermining
the economy and the quality of life in Southern California. They are in large
measure ultimately responsible for our water shortages, power shortages,
garbage accumulation, school crowding, housing shortages and price rises,
and traffic congestion. In most of these respects except for our especially
bad traffic jams and air quality, we are no worse off than many other areas
of the United States.

Most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainties that are legiti-
mate subjects for debate. In addition, however, there are many reasons that
are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental prob-
lems, and that are in my opinion not well informed. These objections are
often posed in the form of simplistic “one-liners.” Here are a dozen of the
commonest ones:

“The environment has to be balanced against the economy.” This quote
portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve envi-
ronmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environ-
mental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts
the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of
money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing
those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run
as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it

is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses
after they have developed. Just think of the damage caused by agricultural
weeds and pests, non-agricultural pests like water hyacinths and zebra mus-
sels, the recurrent annual costs of combating those pests, the value of lost
time when we are stuck in traffic, the financial costs resulting from people
getting sick or dying from environmental toxins, cleanup costs for toxic
chemicals, the steep increase in fish prices due to depletion of fish stocks,
and the value of farmland damaged or ruined by erosion and salinization. It
adds up to a few hundred million dollars per year here, tens of billions of
dollars there, another billion dollars over here, and so on for hundreds of
different problems. For instance, the value of “one statistical life” in the
U.S.—i.e., the cost to the U.S. economy resulting from the death of an
average American whom society has gone to the expense of rearing and
educating but who dies before a lifetime of contributing to the national
economy—is usually estimated at around $5 million. Even if one takes the
conservative estimate of annual U.S. deaths due to air pollution as 130,000,
then deaths due to air pollution cost us about $650 billion per year. That il-
lustrates why the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, although its cleanup measures
do cost money, has yielded estimated net health savings (benefits in excess
of costs) of about $1 trillion per year, due to saved lives and reduced health
costs.

“Technology will solve our problems.” This is an expression of faith about
the future, and therefore based on a supposed track record of technology
having solved more problems than it created in the recent past. Underlying
this expression of faith is the implicit assumption that, from tomorrow on-
wards, technology will function primarily to solve existing problems and
will cease to create new problems. Those with such faith also assume that
the new technologies now under discussion will succeed, and that they will
do so quickly enough to make a big difference soon. In extended conversa-
tions that I had with two of America’s most successful and best-known
businessmen and financiers, both of them eloquently described to me
emerging technologies and financial instruments that differ fundamentally
from those of the past and that, they confidently predicted, would solve our
environmental problems.

But actual experience is the opposite of this assumed track record. Some
dreamed-of new technologies succeed, while others don’t. Those that do
succeed typically take a few decades to develop and phase in widely: think of
gas heating, electric lighting, cars and airplanes, television, computers, and

so on. New technologies, whether or not they succeed in solving the prob-
lem that they were designed to solve, regularly create unanticipated new
problems. Technological solutions to environmental problems are routinely
far more expensive than preventive measures to avoid creating the problem
in the first place: for example, the billions of dollars of damages and cleanup
costs associated with major oil spills, compared to the modest cost of safety
measures effective at minimizing the risks of a major oil spill.

Most of all, advances in technology just increase our ability to do things,
which may be either for the better or for the worse. All of our current prob-
lems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The
rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating
difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems:
that’s why we’re in the situation in which we now find ourselves. What
makes you think that, as of January 1,2006, for the first time in human his-
tory, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated prob-
lems while it just solves the problems that it previously produced?

From thousands of examples of unforeseen harmful side effects of new
technological solutions, two must suffice: CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and
motor vehicles. The coolant gases formerly used in refrigerators and air
conditioners were toxic ones (like ammonia) that could prove fatal if those
appliances leaked while the homeowner was asleep at night. Hence it was
hailed as a great advance when CFCs (alias freons) were developed as syn-
thetic refrigerant gases. They are odorless, non-toxic, and highly stable un-
der ordinary conditions at the Earth’s surface, so that initially no bad side
effects were observed or expected. Within a short time they became viewed
as miracle substances and adopted throughout the world as refrigerator and
air-conditioner coolants, foam-blowing agents, solvents, and propellants in
aerosol cans. But in 1974 it was discovered that in the stratosphere they are
broken down by intense ultraviolet radiation to yield highly reactive chlo-
rine atoms that destroy a significant fraction of the ozone layer protecting
us and all other living things against lethal ultraviolet effects. That discovery
provoked vigorous denial by some corporate interests, fueled not only by
the $200 billion value of CFC-based industrial efforts but also by genuine
doubts because of scientific complications involved. Hence the phasing-out
of CFCs has taken a long time: not until 1988 did the DuPont Company
(the largest manufacturer of CFCs) decide to stop manufacturing them, in
1992 industrialized countries agreed to cease CFC production by 1995, and
China and some other developing countries are still producing them.

Unfortunately, the amounts of CFCs already in the atmosphere are suf-
ficiently large, and their breakdown sufficiently slow, that they will con-
tinue to be present for many decades after the eventual end of all CFC
production.

The other example involves the introduction of the motor vehicle.
When I was a child in the 1940s, some of my teachers were old enough to
remember the first decades of the 20th century, when motor vehicles were
in the process of replacing horse-drawn carriages and trams on city streets
of the United States. The two biggest immediate consequences experienced
by urban Americans, my teachers recall, were that American cities became
wonderfully cleaner and quieter. No longer were streets constantly polluted
with horse manure and urine, and no longer was there the constant din of
horse hoofs clicking on the pavement. Today, after a century’s experience of
cars and buses, it strikes us as ludicrous or inconceivable that anyone could
praise them for being non-polluting and quiet. While no one is advocating a
return to the horse as a solution to smog from engine emissions, the exam-
ple does serve to illustrate the unanticipated negative side effects even of
technologies that (unlike CFCs) we choose to retain.

“If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource
meeting the same need.” Optimists who make such claims ignore the unfore-
seen difficulties and long transition times regularly involved. For instance,
one area in which switching based on not-yet-perfected new technologies
has repeatedly been touted as promising to solve a major environmental
problem is automobiles. The current hope for breakthrough involves hy-
drogen cars and fuel cells, which are technologically in their infancy as ap-
plied to motor transport. Thus, there is not a track record justifying faith in
the hydrogen-car solution to our fossil fuel problem. However, we do have a
track record of a long series of other proposed new car technologies touted
as breakthroughs, such as rotary engines and (most recently) electric cars,
that aroused much discussion and even sales of production models, only to
decline or disappear because of unforeseen problems.

Equally instructive is the automobile industry’s recent development of
fuel-efficient hybrid gas/electric cars, which have been enjoying increasing
sales. However, it would be unfair for a believer in switching to mention hy-
brid cars without also mentioning the automobile industry’s simultaneous
development of SUVs, which have been outselling hybrids by a big margin
and more than offsetting their fuel savings. The net result of these two tech-
nological breakthroughs has been that the fuel consumption and exhaust
production of our national car fleet has been going up rather than down.

Nobody has figured out a method to ensure that technology will yield only
increasingly environment-friendly effects and products (e.g., hybrid cars),
without also yielding environment-unfriendly effects and products (e.g.,
SUVs).

Another example of faith in switching and substitution is the hope that
renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, may solve the en-
ergy crisis. These technologies do indeed exist; many Californians now use
solar energy to heat their swimming pools, and wind generators are already
supplying about one-sixth of Denmark’s energy needs. However, wind and
solar energy have limited applicability because they can be used only at lo-
cations with reliable winds or sunlight. In addition, the recent history of
technology shows that conversion times for adoption of major switches—
e.g., from candles to oil lamps to gas lamps to electric lights for lighting, or
from wood to coal to petroleum for energy—require several decades, be-
cause so many institutions and secondary technologies associated with the
former technology have to be changed. It is indeed likely that energy
sources other than fossil fuels will make increasing contributions to our
motor transport and energy generation, but this is a long-term prospect.
We’ll also need to solve our fuel and energy problems for the next several
decades, before new technologies become widespread. All too often, a focus
by politicians or industries on the promise of hydrogen cars and wind en-
ergy for the distant future distracts attention from all the obvious measures
needed right now to decrease driving and fuel consumption by existing
cars, and to decrease consumption by fossil fuel generating plants.

“There really isn’t a world food problem; there is already enough food; we
only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places
that need it.” (The same thing could be said for energy.) Or else: “The
world’s food problem is already being solved by the Green Revolution, with its
new high-yield varieties of rice and other crops, or else it will be solved by ge-
netically modified crops” This argument notes two things: that First World
citizens enjoy on the average greater per-capita food consumption than do
Third World citizens; and that some First World countries, such as the
United States, do or can produce more food than their citizens consume. If
food consumption could be equalized over the world, or if surplus First
World food could be exported to the Third World, might that alleviate
Third World starvation?

The obvious flaw in the first half of this argument is that First World
citizens show no interest in eating less, in order that Third World citizens
could eat more. The flaw in the second half of the argument is that, while

First World countries are willing occasionally to export food to mitigate
starvation occasioned by some crisis (such as a drought or war) in certain
Third World countries, First World citizens have shown no interest in pay-
ing on a regular basis (via their tax dollars that support foreign aid and sub-
sidies to farmers) to feed billions of Third World citizens on a chronic basis.
If that did happen but without effective overseas family planning programs,
which the U.S. government currently opposes on principle, the result would
just be Malthus’s dilemma, i.e., an increase in population proportional to an
increase in available food. Population increase and Malthus’s dilemma also
contribute to explaining why, after decades of hope and money invested in
the Green Revolution and high-yield varieties, starvation is still widespread
in the world. All of these considerations mean that genetically modified (GM)
food varieties by themselves are equally unlikely to solve the world’s food
problems (while world population supposedly remains stationary?). In ad-
dition, virtually all GM crop production at present is of just four crops (soy-
beans, corn, canola, and cotton) not eaten directly by humans but used for
animal fodder, oil, or clothing, and grown in six temperate-zone countries
or regions. Reasons are the strong consumer resistance to eating GM foods;
and the cruel fact that companies developing GM crops can make money by
selling their products to rich farmers in mostly affluent temperate-zone
countries, but not by selling to poor farmers in developing tropical coun-
tries. Hence the companies have no interest in investing heavily to develop
GM cassava, millet, or sorghum for Third World farmers.

“As measured by commonsense indicators such as human lifespan, health,
and wealth (in economists’ terms, per-capita gross national product or GNP),
conditions have actually been getting better for many decades.” Or: “Just look
around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets,
clean water still flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of immi-
nent collapse.” For affluent First World citizens, conditions have indeed been
getting better, and public health measures have on the average lengthened
lifespans in the Third World as well. But lifespan alone is not a sufficient in-
dicator: billions of Third World citizens, constituting about 80% of the
world’s population, still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level.
Even in the United States, an increasing fraction of the population is at the
poverty level and lacks affordable medical care, and all proposals to change
this situation (e.g., “Just provide everyone with health insurance paid by the
government”) have been politically unacceptable.

In addition, all of us know as individuals that we don’t measure our eco-
nomic well-being just by the present size of our bank accounts: we also look

at our direction of cash flow. When you look at your bank statement and
you see a positive $5,000 balance, you don’t smile if you then realize that
you have been experiencing a net cash drain of $200 per month for the last
several years, and at that rate you have just two years and one month left be-
fore you have to file for bankruptcy. The same principle holds for our
national economy, and for environmental and population trends. The pros-
perity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down
its environmental capital in the bank (its capital non-renewable energy
sources, fish stocks, topsoil, forests, etc.). Spending capital should not be
misrepresented as making money. It makes no sense to be content with our
present comfort when it is clear that we are currently on a non-sustainable
course.

In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the
Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as
from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society’s steep decline
may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers,
wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we
have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which
decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum popula-
tion, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum
environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips re-
sources. On reflection, it’s no surprise that declines of societies tend to fol-
low swiftly on their peaks.

“Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of
fearmongering environmentalists have proved wrong. Why should we believe
them this time?” Yes, some predictions by environmentalists have proved in-
correct, favorite examples of critics being a prediction made in 1980 by Paul
Ehrlich, John Harte, and John Holdren about rises in prices of five metals,
and predictions made in the Club of Rome forecast of 1972. But it is mis-
leading to look selectively for environmentalist predictions that proved
wrong, and not also to look for environmentalist predictions that proved
right, or anti-environmentalist predictions that proved wrong. There is an
abundance of errors of the latter sort: e.g., overly optimistic predictions that
the Green Revolution would already have solved the world’s hunger prob-
lems; the prediction of the economist Julian Simon that we could feed the
world’s population as it continues to grow for the next 7 billion years; and
Simon’s prediction “Copper can be made from other elements” and thus
there is no risk of a copper shortage. As regards the first of Simon’s two pre-
dictions, continuation of our current population growth rate would yield

10 people per square yard of land in 774 years, a mass of people equal to
the Earth’s mass in slightly under 2,000 years, and a mass of people equal
to the universe’s mass in 6,000 years, long before Simon’s forecast of 7 bil-
lion years without such problems. As regards his second prediction, we learn
in our first course of chemistry that copper is an element, which means that
by definition it cannot be made from other elements. My impression is that
pessimistic predictions that have proved incorrect, such as Ehrlich’s, Harte’s,
and Holdren’s about metal prices or the Club of Rome’s about future food
supplies, have on the average been much more realistic possibilities at the
time that they were made than were Simon’s two predictions.

Basically, the one-liner about some environmentalist predictions prov-
ing wrong boils down to a complaint about false alarms. In other spheres
of our lives, such as fires, we adopt a commonsense attitude towards false
alarms. Our local governments maintain expensive firefighting forces, even
though in some small towns they are rarely called on to put out fires. Of the
fire alarms phoned in to fire departments, many prove to be false alarms,
and many others involve small fires that the property owner himself then
succeeds in putting out before the fire engines arrive. We comfortably ac-
cept a certain frequency of such false alarms and extinguished fires, because
we understand that fire risks are uncertain and hard to judge when a fire has
just started, and that a fire that does rage out of control may exact high costs
in property and human lives. No sensible person would dream of abolishing
the town fire department, whether manned by full-time professionals or
volunteers, just because a few years went by without a big fire. Nor would
anyone blame a homeowner for calling the fire department on detecting a
small fire, only to succeed in quenching the fire before the fire truck’s ar-
rival. Only if false alarms become an inordinately high proportion of all fire
alarms do we feel that something is wrong. In effect, the proportion of false
alarms that we tolerate is based on subconsciously comparing the frequency
and destructive costs of big fires with the frequency and wasted-services
costs of false alarms. A very low frequency of false alarms proves that too
many homeowners are being too cautious, waiting too long to call the fire
department, and consequently losing their homes.

By the same reasoning, we must expect some environmentalist warnings
to turn out to be false alarms, otherwise we would know that our environ-
mental warning systems were much too conservative. The multibillion-
dollar costs of many environmental problems justify a moderate frequency
of false alarms. In addition, the reason that alarms proved false is often that
they convinced us to adopt successful countermeasures. For example, it’s

true that our air quality here in Los Angeles today is not as bad as some
gloom-and-doom predictions of 50 years ago. However, that’s entirely be-
cause Los Angeles and the state of California were thereby aroused to adopt
many countermeasures (such as vehicle emission standards, smog certifi-
cates, and lead-free gas), not because initial predictions of the problem were
exaggerated.

“The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase
of the world’s population is decreasing, such that world population will level off
at less than double its present level.” While the prediction that world popula-
tion will level off at less than double its present level may or may not prove
true, it is at present a realistic possibility. However, we can take no comfort
in this possibility, for two reasons: by many criteria, even the world’s present
population is living at a non-sustainable level; and, as explained earlier in
this chapter, the larger danger that we face is not just of a two-fold increase
in population, but of a much larger increase in human impact if the Third
World’s population succeeds in attaining a First World living standard. It is
surprising to hear some First World citizens nonchalantly mentioning the
world’s adding “only” 2V2 billion more people (the lowest estimate that any-
one would forecast) as if that were acceptable, when the world already holds
that many people who are malnourished and living on less than $3 per day.

“The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The
more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ulti-
mately more wealth.” Both of these ideas are associated especially with Julian
Simon but have been espoused by many others, especially by economists.
The statement about our ability to absorb current rates of population
growth indefinitely is not to be taken seriously, because we have already
seen that that would mean 10 people per square yard in the year 2779. Data
on national wealth demonstrate that the claim that more people mean more
wealth is the opposite of correct. The 10 countries with the most people
(over 100 million each) are, in descending order of population, China, In-
dia, the U.S., Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, Bangladesh, and
Nigeria. The 10 countries with the highest affluence (per-capita real GDP)
are, in descending order, Luxembourg, Norway, the U.S., Switzerland, Den-
mark, Iceland, Austria, Canada, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The only
country on both lists is the U.S.

Actually, the countries with large populations are disproportionately
poor: eight of the 10 have per-capita GDP under $8,000, and five of them
under $3,000. The affluent countries have disproportionately few people:
seven of the 10 have populations below 9,000,000, and two of them under

500,000. Instead, what does distinguish the two lists is population growth
rates: all 10 of the affluent countries have very low relative population
growth rates (1% per year or less), while eight of the 10 most populous
countries have higher relative population growth rates than any of the most
affluent countries, except for two large countries that achieved low popula-
tion growth in unpleasant ways: China, by government order and enforced
abortion, and Russia, whose population is actually decreasing because of
catastrophic health problems. Thus, as an empirical fact, more people and a
higher population growth rate mean more poverty, not more wealth.

“Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First
World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens
what they should be doing.” This view is one that I have heard mainly from
affluent First World yuppies lacking experience of the Third World. In all
my experience of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Africa, Peru, and
other Third World countries with growing environmental problems and
populations, I have been impressed that their people know very well how
they are being harmed by population growth, deforestation, overfishing,
and other problems. They know it because they immediately pay the
penalty, in forms such as loss of free timber for their houses, massive soil
erosion, and (the tragic complaint that I hear incessantly) their inability to
afford clothes, books, and school fees for their children. The reason why the
forest behind their village is nevertheless being logged is usually either that
a corrupt government has ordered it logged over their often-violent protest,
or else that they signed a logging lease with great reluctance because they
saw no other way to get the money needed next year for their children. My
best friends in the Third World, with families of 4 to 8 children, lament that
they have heard of the benign forms of contraception widespread in the
First World, and they want those measures desperately for themselves, but
they can’t afford or obtain them, due in part to the refusal of the U.S. gov-
ernment to fund family planning in its foreign aid programs.

Another view that is widespread among affluent First World people, but
which they will rarely express openly, is that they themselves are managing
just fine at carrying on with their lifestyles despite all those environmental
problems, which really don’t concern them because the problems fall
mainly on Third World people (though it is not politically correct to be so
blunt). Actually, the rich are not immune to environmental problems. CEOs
of big First World companies eat food, drink water, breathe air, and have (or
try to conceive) children, like the rest of us. While they can usually avoid
problems of water quality by drinking bottled water, they find it much more

difficult to avoid being exposed to the same problems of food and air
quality as the rest of us. Living disproportionately high on the food chain, at
levels at which toxic substances become concentrated, they are at more
rather than less risk of reproductive impairment due to ingestion of or ex-
posure to toxic materials, possibly contributing to their higher infertility
rates and the increasing frequency with which they require medical assis-
tance in conceiving. In addition, one of the conclusions that we saw emerg-
ing from our discussion of Maya kings, Greenland Norse chieftains, and
Easter Island chiefs is that, in the long run, rich people do not secure their
own interests and those of their children if they rule over a collapsing soci-
ety and merely buy themselves the privilege of being the last to starve or die.
As for First World society as a whole, its resource consumption accounts for
most of the world’s total consumption that has given rise to the impacts de-
scribed at the beginning of this chapter. Our totally unsustainable con-
sumption means that the First World could not continue for long on its
present course, even if the Third World didn’t exist and weren’t trying to
catch up to us.

“If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time
far off in the future, after I die, and I can’t take them seriously.” In fact, at cur-
rent rates most or all of the dozen major sets of environmental problems
discussed at the beginning of this chapter will become acute within the life-
time of young adults now alive. Most of us who have children consider the
securing of our children’s future as the highest priority to which to devote
our time and our money. We pay for their education and food and clothes,
make wills for them, and buy life insurance for them, all with the goal of
helping them to enjoy good lives 50 years from now. It makes no sense for
us to do these things for our individual children, while simultaneously do-
ing things undermining the world in which our children will be living 50
years from now.

This paradoxical behavior is one of which I personally was guilty, be-
cause I was born in the year 1937, hence before the birth of my children I
too could not take seriously any event (like global warming or the end of
the tropical rainforests) projected for the year 2037. I shall surely be dead
before that year, and even the date 2037 struck me as unreal. However, when
my twin sons were born in 1987, and when my wife and I then started going
through the usual parental obsessions about schools, life insurance, and
wills, I realized with a jolt: 2037 is the year in which my kids will be my own
age of 50 (then)! It’s not an imaginary year! What’s the point of willing our
property to our kids if the world will be in a mess then anyway?

Having lived for five years in Europe shortly after World War II, and
then having married into a Polish family with a Japanese branch, I saw at
first hand what can happen when parents take good care of their individual
children but not of their children’s future world. The parents of my Polish,
German, Japanese, Russian, British, and Yugoslav friends also bought life in-
surance, made wills, and obsessed about the schooling of their children, as
my wife and I have been doing more recently. Some of them were rich and
would have had valuable property to will to their children. But they did not
take good care of their children’s world, and they blundered into the disas-
ter of World War II. As a result, most of my European and Japanese friends
born in the same year as I had their lives blighted in various ways, such as
being orphaned, separated from one or both parents during their child-
hood, bombed out of their houses, deprived of schooling opportunities, de-
prived of their family estates, or raised by parents burdened with memories
of war and concentration camps. The worst-case scenarios that today’s chil-
dren face if we too blunder about their world are different, but equally
unpleasant.

This leaves us with two other common one-liners that we have not con-
sidered: “There are big differences between modern societies and those past so-
cieties of Easter Islanders, Maya, and Anasazi who collapsed, so that we can’t
straightforwardly apply lessons from the past.” And: “What can I, as an indi-
vidual, do, when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful jug-
gernauts of governments and big businesses?” In contrast to the previous one-
liners, which upon examination can be quickly dismissed, these two
concerns are valid and cannot be dismissed. I shall devote the remainder of
this chapter to the former question, and a section of the Further Readings
(pp. 555-59) to the latter question.

Are the parallels between the past and present sufficiently close that the col-
lapses of the Easter Islanders, Henderson Islanders, Anasazi, Maya, and
Greenland Norse could offer any lessons for the modern world? At first, a
critic, noting the obvious differences, might be tempted to object, “It’s
ridiculous to suppose that the collapses of all those ancient peoples could
have broad relevance today, especially to the modern U.S. Those ancients
didn’t enjoy the wonders of modern technology, which benefits us and
which lets us solve problems by inventing new environment-friendly tech-
nologies. Those ancients had the misfortune to suffer from effects of cli-
mate change. They behaved stupidly and ruined their own environment by

doing obviously dumb things, like cutting down their forests, overharvest-
ing wild animal sources of their protein, watching their topsoil erode away,
and building cities in dry areas likely to run short of water. They had foolish
leaders who didn’t have books and so couldn’t learn from history, and who
embroiled them in expensive and destabilizing wars, cared only about stay-
ing in power, and didn’t pay attention to problems at home. They got over-
whelmed by desperate starving immigrants, as one society after another
collapsed, sending floods of economic refugees to tax the resources of the
societies that weren’t collapsing. In all those respects, we moderns are fun-
damentally different from those primitive ancients, and there is nothing
that we could learn from them. Especially we in the U.S., the richest and
most powerful country in the world today, with the most productive envi-
ronment and wise leaders and strong loyal allies and only weak insignificant
enemies—none of those bad things could possibly apply to us.”

Yes, it’s true that there are big differences between the situations of those
past societies and our modern situation today. The most obvious difference
is that there are far more people alive today, packing far more potent tech-
nology that impacts the environment, than in the past. Today we have over
6 billion people equipped with heavy metal machinery such as bulldozers
and nuclear power, whereas the Easter Islanders had at most a few tens of
thousands of people with stone chisels and human muscle power. Yet the
Easter Islanders still managed to devastate their environment and bring
their society to the point of collapse. That difference greatly increases,
rather than decreases, the risks for us today.

A second big difference stems from globalization. Leaving out of this
discussion for the moment the question of environmental problems within
the First World itself, let’s just ask whether the lessons from past collapses
might apply anywhere in the Third World today. First ask some ivory-tower
academic ecologist, who knows a lot about the environment but never reads
a newspaper and has no interest in politics, to name the overseas countries
facing some of the worst problems of environmental stress, overpopulation,
or both. The ecologist would answer: “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvious. Your
list of environmentally stressed or overpopulated countries should surely
include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagas-
car, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Is-
lands, and Somalia, plus others” (map, p. 497).

Then go ask a First World politician, who knows nothing and cares less
about the environment and population problems, to name the world’s
worst trouble spots: countries where state government has already been

overwhelmed and has collapsed, or is now at risk of collapsing, or has been
wracked by recent civil wars; and countries that, as a result of those prob-
lems of their own, are also creating problems for us rich First World coun-
tries, which may end up having to provide foreign aid for them, or may face
illegal immigrants from them, or may decide to provide them with military
assistance to deal with rebellions and terrorists, or may even have to send in
our own troops. The politician would answer, “That’s a no-brainer, it’s obvi-
ous. Your list of political trouble spots should surely include Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Burundi, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Madagascar, Mongolia, Nepal,
Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia, plus
others.”

Surprise, surprise: the two lists are very similar. The connection between
the two lists is transparent: it’s the problems of the ancient Maya, Anasazi,
and Easter Islanders playing out in the modern world. Today, just as in the
past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both
become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments col-
lapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope,
they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable
to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each
other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that
they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tol-
erate terrorism.

The results of these transparent connections are genocides such as the
ones that already exploded in Bangladesh, Burundi, Indonesia, and
Rwanda; civil wars or revolutions, as in most of the countries on the lists;
calls for the dispatch of First World troops, as to Afghanistan, Haiti, Indone-
sia, Iraq, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, and Somalia; the
collapse of central government, as has already happened in Somalia and the
Solomon Islands; and overwhelming poverty, as in all of the countries on
these lists. Hence the best predictors of modern “state failures”—i.e., revo-
lutions, violent regime change, collapse of authority, and genocide—prove
to be measures of environmental and population pressure, such as high in-
fant mortality, rapid population growth, a high percentage of the popula-
tion in their late teens and 20s, and hordes of unemployed young men
without job prospects and ripe for recruitment into militias. Those pres-
sures create conflicts over shortages of land (as in Rwanda), water, forests,
fish, oil, and minerals. They create not only chronic internal conflict, but
also emigration of political and economic refugees, and wars between coun-

tries arising when authoritarian regimes attack neighboring nations in or-
der to divert popular attention from internal stresses.

In short, it is not a question open for debate whether the collapses of
past societies have modern parallels and offer any lessons to us. That ques-
tion is settled, because such collapses have actually been happening recently,
and others appear to be imminent. Instead, the real question is how many
more countries will undergo them.

As for terrorists, you might object that many of the political murderers,
suicide bombers, and 9/11 terrorists were educated and moneyed rather
than uneducated and desperate. That’s true, but they still depended on a
desperate society for support and toleration. Any society has its murderous
fanatics; the U.S. produced its own Timothy McVeigh and its Harvard-
educated Theodore Kaczinski. But well-nourished societies offering good
job prospects, like the U.S., Finland, and South Korea, don’t offer broad
support to their fanatics.

The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated,
distant countries become our own problems because of globalization. We
are accustomed to thinking of globalization in terms of us rich advanced
First Worlders sending our good things, such as the Internet and Coca-Cola,
to those poor backward Third Worlders. But globalization means nothing
more than improved worldwide communications, which can convey many
things in either direction; globalization is not restricted to good things car-
ried only from the First to the Third World.

Among bad things transported from the First World to developing
countries, we already mentioned the millions of tons of electronic garbage
intentionally transported each year from industrialized nations to China. To
grasp the worldwide scale of unintentional garbage transport, consider the
garbage collected on the beaches of tiny Oeno and Ducie Atolls in the
Southeast Pacific Ocean (see map on p. 122): uninhabited atolls, without
freshwater, rarely visited even by yachts, and among the world’s most re-
mote bits of land, each over a hundred miles even from remote uninhabited
Henderson Island. Surveys there detected, for each linear yard of beach, on
the average one piece of garbage, which must have drifted from ships or else
from Asian and American countries on the Pacific Rim thousands of miles
distant. The commonest items proved to be plastic bags, buoys, glass and
plastic bottles (especially Suntory whiskey bottles from Japan), rope, shoes,
and lightbulbs, along with oddities such as footballs, toy soldiers and air-
planes, bike pedals, and screwdrivers.

A more sinister example of bad things transported from the First World to
developing countries is that the highest blood levels of toxic industrial chemicals
and pesticides reported for any people in the world are for Eastern Greenland’s
and Siberia’s Inuit people (Eskimos), who are also among the most remote from
sites of chemical manufacture or heavy use. Their blood mercury levels are
nevertheless in the range associated with acute mercury poisoning, while the
levels of toxic PCBs (polychlorinated bi-phenyls) in Inuit mothers’ breast milk
fall in a range high enough to classify the milk as “hazardous waste.” Effects on
the women’s babies include hearing loss, altered brain development, and
suppressed immune function, hence high rates of ear and respiratory infections.

Why should levels of these poisonous chemicals from remote industrial
nations of the Americas and Europe be higher in the Inuit than even in urban
Americans and Europeans? It’s because staples of the Inuit diet are whales,
seals, and seabirds that eat fish, molluscs, and shrimp, and the chemicals become
concentrated at each step as they pass up this food chain. All of us in the First
World who occasionally consume seafood are also ingesting these chemicals,
but in smaller amounts. (However, that doesn’t mean that you will be safe if you
stop eating seafood, because you now can’t avoid ingesting such chemicals no
matter what you eat.)

Still other bad impacts of the First World on the Third World include
deforestation, Japan’s imports of wood products currently being a leading cause
of deforestation in the tropical Third World; and overfishing, due to fishing
fleets of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the heavily subsidized fleets of the European
Union scouring the world’s oceans. Conversely, people in the Third World can
now, intentionally or unintentionally, send us their own bad things: their
diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever, carried inadvertently
by passengers on transcontinental airplanes; unstoppable numbers of legal and
illegal immigrants arriving by boat, truck, train, plane, and on foot; terrorists;
and other consequences of their Third World problems. We in the U.S. are no
longer the isolated Fortress America to which some of us aspired in the 1930s;
instead, we are tightly and irreversibly connected to overseas countries. The U.S.
is the world’s leading importer nation: we import many necessities (especially oil
and some rare metals) and many consumer products (cars and consumer
electronics), as well as being the world’s leading importer of investment capital.
We are also the world’s leading exporter, particularly of food and of our own
manufactured products. Our own society opted long ago to become interlocked
with the rest of the world.

That’s why political instability anywhere in the world now affects us, our
trade routes, and our overseas markets and suppliers. We are so dependent
on the rest of the world that if, 30 years ago, you had asked a politician to
name the countries most geopolitically irrelevant to our interests because of
their being so remote, poor, and weak, the list would surely have begun with
Afghanistan and Somalia, yet they subsequently became recognized as im-
portant enough to warrant our dispatching U.S. troops. Today the world no
longer faces just the circumscribed risk of an Easter Island society or Maya
homeland collapsing in isolation, without affecting the rest of the world. In-
stead, societies today are so interconnected that the risk we face is of a
worldwide decline. That conclusion is familiar to any investor in stock mar-
kets: instability of the U.S. stock market, or the post-9/11 economic down-
turn in the U.S., affects overseas stock markets and economies as well, and
vice versa. We in the U.S. (or else just affluent people in the U.S.) can no
longer get away with advancing our own self-interests, at the expense of the
interests of others.

A good example of a society minimizing such clashes of interest is the
Netherlands, whose citizens have perhaps the world’s highest level of envi-
ronmental awareness and of membership in environmental organizations. I
never understood why, until on a recent trip to the Netherlands I posed the
question to three of my Dutch friends while driving through their country-
side (Plates 39,40). Their answer was one that I shall never forget:

“just look around you here. All of this farmland that you see lies below
sea level. One-fifth of the total area of the Netherlands is below sea level, as
much as 22 feet below, because it used to be shallow bays, and we reclaimed
it from the sea by surrounding the bays with dikes and then gradually
pumping out the water. We have a saying, ‘God created the Earth, but we
Dutch created the Netherlands.’ These reclaimed lands are called ‘polders.’
We began draining them nearly a thousand years ago. Today, we still have to
keep pumping out the water that gradually seeps in. That’s what our wind-
mills used to be for, to drive the pumps to pump out the polders. Now we
use steam, diesel, and electric pumps instead. In each polder there are lines
of pumps, starting with those farthest from the sea, pumping the water in
sequence until the last pump finally pumps it out into a river or the ocean.
In the Netherlands, we have another expression, ‘You have to be able to get
along with your enemy, because he may be the person operating the neigh-
boring pump in your polder.’ And we’re all down in the polders together. It’s
not the case that rich people live safely up on tops of the dikes while poor
people live down in the polder bottoms below sea level. If the dikes and

pumps fail, we’ll all drown together. When a big storm and high tides swept
inland over Zeeland Province on February 1,1953, nearly 2,000 Dutch peo-
ple, both rich and poor, drowned. We swore that we would never let that
happen again, and the whole country paid for an extremely expensive set of
tide barriers. If global warming causes polar ice melting and a world rise in
sea level, the consequences will be more severe for the Netherlands than for
any other country in the world, because so much of our land is already un-
der sea level. That’s why we Dutch are so aware of our environment. We’ve
learned through our history that we’re all living in the same polder, and that
our survival depends on each other’s survival.”

That acknowledged interdependence of all segments of Dutch society
contrasts with current trends in the United States, where wealthy people in-
creasingly seek to insulate themselves from the rest of society, aspire to cre-
ate their own separate virtual polders, use their own money to buy services
for themselves privately, and vote against taxes that would extend those
amenities as public services to everyone else. Those private amenities in-
clude living inside gated walled communities (Plate 36), relying on private
security guards rather than on the police, sending one’s children to well-
funded private schools with small classes rather than to the underfunded
crowded public schools, purchasing private health insurance or medical
care, drinking bottled water instead of municipal water, and (in Southern
California) paying to drive on toll roads competing with the jammed public
freeways. Underlying such privatization is a misguided belief that the elite
can remain unaffected by the problems of society around them: the attitude
of those Greenland Norse chiefs who found that they had merely bought
themselves the privilege of being the last to starve.

Throughout human history, most peoples have been connected to some
other peoples, living together in small virtual polders. The Easter Islanders
comprised a dozen clans, dividing their island polder into a dozen territo-
ries, and isolated from all other islands, but sharing among clans the Rano
Raraku statue quarry, the Puna Pau pukao quarry, and a few obsidian quar-
ries. As Easter Island society disintegrated, all the clans disintegrated to-
gether, but nobody else in the world knew about it, nor was anybody else
affected. Southeast Polynesia’s polder consisted of three interdependent is-
lands, such that the decline of Mangareva’s society was disastrous also for
the Pitcairn and Henderson Islanders but for no one else. To the ancient
Maya, their polder consisted at most of the Yucatan Peninsula and neigh-
boring areas. When the Classic Maya cities collapsed in the southern Yu-
catan, refugees may have reached the northern Yucatan, but certainly not

Florida. In contrast today our whole world has become one polder, such
that events anywhere affect Americans. When distant Somalia collapsed, in
went American troops; when the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union col-
lapsed, out went streams of refugees over all of Europe and the rest of the
world; and when changed conditions of society, settlement, and lifestyle
spread new diseases in Africa and Asia, those diseases moved over the globe.
The whole world today is a self-contained and isolated unit, as Tikopia Is-
land and Tokugawa Japan used to be. We need to realize, as did the Tikopi-
ans and Japanese, that there is no other island/other planet to which we can
turn for help, or to which we can export our problems. Instead, we need to
learn, as they did, to live within our means.

I introduced this section by acknowledging that there are important differ-
ences between the ancient world and the modern world. The differences
that I then went on to mention—today’s larger population and more potent
destructive technology, and today’s interconnectedness posing the risk of a
global rather than a local collapse—may seem to suggest a pessimistic out-
look. If the Easter Islanders couldn’t solve their milder local problems in the
past, how can the modern world hope to solve its big global problems?

People who get depressed at such thoughts often then ask me, “Jared, are
you optimistic or pessimistic about the world’s future?” I answer, “I’m a
cautious optimist.” By that, I mean that, on the one hand, I acknowledge the
seriousness of the problems facing us. If we don’t make a determined effort
to solve them, and if we don’t succeed at that effort, the world as a whole
within the next few decades will face a declining standard of living, or per-
haps something worse. That’s the reason why I decided to devote most of
my career efforts at this stage of my life to convincing people that our prob-
lems have to be taken seriously and won’t go away otherwise. On the other
hand, we shall be able to solve our problems—if we choose to do so. That’s
why my wife and I did decide to have children 17 years ago: because we did
see grounds for hope.

One basis for hope is that, realistically, we are not beset by insoluble
problems. While we do face big risks, the most serious ones are not ones be-
yond our control, like a possible collision with an asteroid of a size that hits
the Earth every hundred million years or so. Instead, they are ones that we
are generating ourselves. Because we are the cause of our environmental
problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not
choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for

grabs, lying in our own hands. We don’t need new technologies to solve our
problems; while new technologies can make some contribution, for the
most part we “just” need the political will to apply solutions already avail-
able. Of course, that’s a big “just.” But many societies did find the necessary
political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will
to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others.

Another basis for hope is the increasing diffusion of environmental
thinking among the public around the world. While such thinking has been
with us for a long time, its spread has accelerated, especially since the 1962
publication of Silent Spring. The environmental movement has been gain-
ing adherents at an increasing rate, and they act through a growing diversity
of increasingly effective organizations, not only in the United States and Eu-
rope but also in the Dominican Republic and other developing countries. At
the same time as the environmental movement is gaining strength at an in-
creasing rate, so too are the threats to our environment. That’s why I referred
earlier in this book to our situation as that of being in an exponentially ac-
celerating horse race of unknown outcome. It’s neither impossible, nor is it
assured, that our preferred horse will win the race.

What are the choices that we must make if we are now to succeed, and
not to fail? There are many specific choices, of which I discuss examples in
the Further Readings section, that any of us can make as individuals. For
our society as a whole, the past societies that we have examined in this book
suggest broader lessons. Two types of choices seem to me to have been cru-
cial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term plan-
ning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also
recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our
individual lives.

One of those choices has depended on the courage to practice long-term
thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time
when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis
proportions. This type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-
term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes our elected
politicians—the thinking that my politically well-connected friend decried
as “90-day thinking,” i.e., focusing only on issues likely to blow up in a crisis
within the next 90 days. Set against the many depressing bad examples of
such short-term decision-making are the encouraging examples of coura-
geous long-term thinking in the past, and in the contemporary world of
NGOs, business, and government. Among past societies faced with the
prospect of ruinous deforestation, Easter Island and Mangareva chiefs

succumbed to their immediate concerns, but Tokugawa shoguns, Inca em-
perors, New Guinea highlanders, and 16th-century German landowners
adopted a long view and reafforested. China’s leaders similarly promoted
reafforestation in recent decades and banned logging of native forests in
1998. Today, many NGOs exist specifically for the purpose of promoting
sane long-term environmental policies. In the business world the American
corporations that remain successful for long times (e.g., Procter and Gam-
ble) are ones that don’t wait for a crisis to force them to reexamine their
policies, but that instead look for problems on the horizon and act before
there is a crisis. I already mentioned Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company as hav-
ing an office devoted just to envisioning scenarios decades off in the future.

Courageous, successful, long-term planning also characterizes some
governments and some political leaders, some of the time. Over the last 30
years a sustained effort by the U.S. government has reduced levels of the six
major air pollutants nationally by 25%, even though our energy consump-
tion and population increased by 40% and our vehicle miles driven in-
creased by 150% during those same decades. The governments of Malaysia,
Singapore, Taiwan, and Mauritius all recognized that their long-term eco-
nomic well-being required big investments in public health to prevent
tropical diseases from sapping their economies; those investments proved to
be a key to those countries’ spectacular recent economic growth. Of the for-
mer two halves of the overpopulated nation of Pakistan, the eastern half
(independent since 1971 as Bangladesh) adopted effective family planning
measures to reduce its rate of population growth, while the western half
(still known as Pakistan) did not and is now the world’s sixth most popu-
lous country. Indonesia’s former environmental minister Emil Salim, and
the Dominican Republic’s former president Joaquin Balaguer, exemplify
government leaders whose concern about chronic environmental dangers
made a big impact on their countries. All of these examples of courageous
long-term thinking in both the public sector and the private sector con-
tribute to my hope.

The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to
make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly
served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed cir-
cumstances? Which of those treasured values must instead be jettisoned
and replaced with different approaches? The Greenland Norse refused to
jettison part of their identity as a European, Christian, pastoral society, and
they died as a result. In contrast, Tikopia Islanders did have the courage to
eliminate their ecologically destructive pigs, even though pigs are the sole

large domestic animal and a principal status symbol of Melanesian soci-
eties. Australia is now in the process of reappraising its identity as a British
agricultural society. The Icelanders and many traditional caste societies of
India in the past, and Montana ranchers dependent on irrigation in recent
times, did reach agreement to subordinate their individual rights to group
interests. They thereby succeeded in managing shared resources and avoid-
ing the tragedy of the commons that has befallen so many other groups.
The government of China restricted the traditional freedom of individual
reproductive choice, rather than let population problems spiral out of con-
trol. The people of Finland, faced with an ultimatum by their vastly more
powerful Russian neighbor in 1939, chose to value their freedom over their
lives, fought with a courage that astonished the world, and won their gam-
ble, even while losing the war. While I was living in Britain from 1958 to
1962, the British people were coming to terms with the outdatedness of
cherished long-held values based on Britain’s former role as the world’s
dominant political, economic, and naval power. The French, Germans, and
other European countries have advanced even further in subordinating to
the European Union their national sovereignties for which they used to
fight so dearly.

All of these past and recent reappraisals of values that I have just men-
tioned were achieved despite being agonizingly difficult. Hence they also
contribute to my hope. They may inspire modern First World citizens with
the courage to make the most fundamental reappraisal now facing us: how
much of our traditional consumer values and First World living standard
can we afford to retain? I already mentioned the seeming political impossi-
bility of inducing First World citizens to lower their impact on the world.
But the alternative, of continuing our current impact, is more impossible.
This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill’s response to criticisms of
democracy: “It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of govern-
ment except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our
future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.

Actually, while it won’t be easier to reduce our impact, it won’t be im-
possible either. Remember that impact is the product of two factors: popu-
lation, multiplied times impact per person. As for the first of those two
factors, population growth has recently declined drastically in all First
World countries, and in many Third World countries as well—including
China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, with the world’s largest, fourth largest,
and ninth largest populations respectively. Intrinsic population growth in

Japan and Italy is already below the replacement rate, such that their exist-
ing populations (i.e., not counting immigrants) will soon begin shrinking.
As for impact per person, the world would not even have to decrease its cur-
rent consumption rates of timber products or of seafood: those rates could
be sustained or even increased, if the world’s forests and fisheries were
properly managed.

My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized
modern world’s interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archaeologists and
television. While the Easter Islanders were busy deforesting the highlands of
their overpopulated island for agricultural plantations in the 1400s, they
had no way of knowing that, thousands of miles to the east and west at the
same time, Greenland Norse society and the Khmer Empire were simulta-
neously in terminal decline, while the Anasazi had collapsed a few centuries
earlier, Classic Maya society a few more centuries before that, and Myce-
nean Greece 2,000 years before that. Today, though, we turn on our tele-
vision sets or radios or pick up our newspapers, and we see, hear, or read
about what happened in Somalia or Afghanistan a few hours earlier. Our
television documentaries and books show us in graphic detail why the
Easter Islanders, Classic Maya, and other past societies collapsed. Thus, we
have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of distant peoples and past
peoples. That’s an opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a de-
gree. My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose
to profit from that opportunity to make a difference.

Climate Change
What every designer should know.

This is a short presentation covering climate change fundamentals for design students and professionals. Climate change is an important topic for designers to be aware of and responsive to, because designers help create the world we live in. The choices designers make, in what they make, how its made, what its made of, how its used, and what happens to it after it’s disposed of, can impact large numbers of people and the environment. This is what you need to know.
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Our planet’s climate is controlled by its atmosphere. You can see our atmosphere isn’t very big. It’s a thin protective coating stretched over the earth’s surface. But that thin protective coating is surprisingly important. Without it, our planet would have no life whatsoever. Its surface would be as barren and freezing as the moon you see in the background. A healthy atmosphere is a precondition of life.
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Our planet has had a relatively stable and predictable climate for much of the last 10,000 years. It is no accident that agriculture began within this time period, a period characterized by relative peace and stable civilizations.
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The climate has been so stable, we tend to completely ignore it and take it for granted, not even being aware how much we rely upon it. But we rely on a stable, predictable, and moderate climate for such basic and vital activities as growing food, placing and designing settlements, and many, many other things.
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Here’s the entire volume of the earth’s atmosphere in comparison to the volume of the earth itself: again, not very big. Because the earth’s atmosphere is not very big, it is sensitive to relatively small changes. The composition and relative amounts of chemicals inside that little ball play a big role in how the atmosphere functions.
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Here’s the composition and relative amounts of the chemicals inside that little ball. You can see carbon dioxide is a relatively miniscule part of the earth’s atmosphere. Yet the relative amount of this molecule and a few others has an outsized role in controlling our planet’s climate, because of how these molecules react to sunlight.
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A large portion of the sun’s radiation is absorbed at the surface of the Earth. This heat then re-radiates back into the atmosphere, and then back out into space. The atmosphere holds on to some of that heat for a time, before it leaks back out into space.
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Some atmospheric molecules hold onto this heat longer than others, which is why they are known as “greenhouse gases”. Like a greenhouse in the sun, atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide hold on to the heat re-radiating from the earth for a relatively long time. This is why the earth’s climate is sensitive to small changes in the relative amounts of these particular molecules. There are other greenhouse gases besides carbon dioxide, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. Some of these trap heat even more powerfully than carbon dioxide. These other GHGs are important. We are focusing on CO2 here, however, because of the greater relative quantity of CO2 being released into the atmosphere from human activities.
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Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are measured in parts per million, and you can see that CO2 concentrations have been rising steadily over the last several decades. (The line is squiggly by the way, because the concentration of CO2 varies during each year, dropping slightly when it’s summer in the northern hemisphere, when plants are growing and fixing carbon dioxide into their tissues.)
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Since carbon dioxide is good at holding on to heat, global average temperatures rise along with atmospheric CO2 concentrations. You can see that very tight coupling in this graph covering the last 400,000 years of the Earth’s history. Spend some time understanding this graph, because this is the real story. The blue line is CO2 levels over time, the red line is temperature. The red line closely shadows the blue line with a slight delay. In other words, when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere go up, global average temperatures soon follow. On the far right of the graph, you can see that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now way above historical highs. What do you think global average temperatures are going to do?
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We can see the first sign of this trend in recent temperature patterns. The top 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1998. Climate change is already happening. We have already destabilized the planet’s climate to an extent.
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The remaining uncertainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g., whether average global temperatures will increase by “just” 1.5 degrees Centigrade or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those numbers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global temperatures were “only” 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.
– Jared Diamond

Here’s how Jared Diamond, the author of this week’s reading, puts it: “The remaining uncertainties mainly concern the future expected magnitude of the effect: e.g., whether average global temperatures will increase by “just” 1.5 degrees Centigrade or by 5 degrees Centigrade over the next century. Those numbers may not sound like a big deal, until one reflects that average global temperatures were “only” 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.”
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Global warming is related to but different than climate change.
The Earth’s climate is complicated: not every place will consistently get warmer. Some places will get colder (wetter, drier, etc.).
An increase in average global temperature results in increased variability in climate and greater climate extremes (i.e., climate change).
Global warming vs. climate change

A few other important things to mention. First, global warming is related to but different than climate change. An increase in human-caused GHGs causes global warming (i.e., an increase in the average global temperature), but this does not mean every place on Earth is simply getting warmer. Because the Earth’s climate is complicated, an increase in average global temperature results in increased variability in climate and greater climate extremes (i.e., climate change). Some places get warmer, while some get colder, some drier, etc. Don’t let the phrase “global warming” confuse you. Climate changes means the climate is no longer relatively moderate and predictable.
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Weather is day-to-day change in the
atmosphere (e.g., precipitation, wind, etc.).
Climate is atmospheric conditions prevailing in
an area over a long period of time.
Climate change vs. weather

Also, don’t let daily weather confuse you. Weather is day-to-day changes in the atmosphere (e.g., precipitation, wind, etc.). Climate is atmospheric conditions prevailing in
an area over a long period of time. Don’t let the weather confuse you about broader trends happening to the climate.
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Sources and sinks

Other concepts that are helpful to know are sources and sinks. Atmospheric concentrations of GHGs are determined by the balance between sources and sinks. Sources are emissions of GHGs from human activities and natural systems. Sinks are the removal of GHGs from the atmosphere, either by conversion to a different chemical compound or long-term storage outside of the atmosphere. This is an illustration to help you visualize how this happens with carbon, known as the carbon cycle. Yellow numbers are natural fluxes in carbon, red numbers are human contributions, and all numbers are in gigatons (billions of tons of carbon). At the broadest level, you can see here our influence on the global carbon cycle. Humans are very active in doing two things relevant to the carbon cycle. First, through energy development, we are busy transforming that very large sink of fossil carbon in the lower left into an atmospheric source. Second, through agricultural and settlement practices, we are also busy transforming that plant and soil carbon sink in the upper left into an atmospheric source.
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Anthropogenic GHGs by human activity

It’s also good to be aware of which human activities result in GHGs, and their relative contribution to the total emission of GHGs by people. A top level view would look something like this. You can see that the electricity used in buildings causes about one-quarter of our GHG emissions, manufacturing a bit more. And land use change – through deforestation and agricultural practices – results in another one-quarter of our emissions.
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As designers, we design things, whether these are consumer products, experiences, the plans for buildings, or the design of entire cities. Each of these designs has an associated negative or positive impact on the human emission of GHGs, and these things can be measured. A product’s GHG “footprint” is a measure of a product’s contribution to global warming through the emission of greenhouse gases. It measures the emission of greenhouse gases from each phase of a product’s life-cycle – from the acquisition of raw materials, to manufacturing and processing, packaging, distribution, retailing, use and disposal.
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As designers, we can influence how what we make, and what we even choose to work on, impacts the global climate. But we can do this only if we appreciate our atmosphere and the implications of climate change, are aware of our potential impact, and become empowered by the range of choices we actually have.
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Credits
Earth’s atmosphere from space: NASA
Volume of Earth’s atmosphere: Adam Nieman
Solar energy balance: NASA
Greenhouse carton: UC Berkeley
Agriculture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Agriculture_(Primitive)_CNE-v1-p58-I
Top 10 warmest years: compiled from NOAA and NASA data
Anthropogenic GHG pie chart: http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/evolution.html
Snow: www.englishexercises.org
Rain: 72ppi.us
Black shoes: http://www.colourbox.com/image/black-leather-shoes-on-black-isolated-background-image-3109053
Video game still: www.theverge.com 
Blueprint: alexiasdesktop.com
Last image of Earth’s atmosphere: www.allsciencesites.com
© Sam Stier 2014

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