Chapter 3: The Roots of Unsustainability

In the first decade of the 21^st century, humanity is still dominated by the materialistic, energy- and resource-intensive, and narrowly self-concerned technological civilization born in the West and extended to all continents. A linear continuation of the trends and processes engendered by this civilization is not sustainable; it would provoke major crises and ultimately breakdown.

Before getting down to the question of how a better civilization could emerge, we should look at the roots of unsustainability in the presently dominant civilization – roots that reside in the condition of civil society, in the workings of the economic and the financial system, and in the state of the global ecology.

CIVIL SOCIETY

The lion’s share of current world population growth occurs in the developing countries. As a result – unless starvation and inhuman living conditions decimate those populations – the centers of poverty will expand dramatically. The population of the least developed countries will increase from 800 million today to 1.7 billion in 2050, with populations tripling in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, and Uganda. On the other hand, the population of the industrialized countries will either shrink or remain constant.

In the poor countries the exigencies of economic survival are destroying the traditional extended family. As women are obliged to leave the home in search of work, poverty breaks apart even the nuclear family. Women are extensively exploited, given menial jobs for low pay. Children fare even worse. According to he International Labour Organization, 50 million children worldwide (mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) are presently working. They are employed for a pittance in factories, in mines, and on the land, and many more are forced to venture into the hazards of life on the street as “self-employed vendors” – or plain beggars.

The unsustainability of conditions in civil society is not the consequence solely of economic gaps and imbalanced patterns of population growth; under growing stress, social structures are breaking down in rich countries as well. Increasingly, men and women find more satisfaction and companionship at work than at home. After children have “flown the nest,” it is becoming usual for couples to seek fulfillment with other partners rather than restructuring the family relationship in a childless home.

Child rearing is increasingly entrusted to kindergartens and company or community day-care centers.
Daily nourishment is shifting from the family kitchen to supermarkets, prepared-food industries, and fast-food chains, and leisure-time activities are strongly colored by the marketing and public relations campaigns of commercial enterprises.

THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Economic growth continues on the global level, but its benefits accrue to ever fewer people. Hundreds of millions live at a higher material standard of living, but thousands of millions live in shantytowns and urban ghettos. Without significant change, by the middle of this century some 90% of the world’s people will live in the poor countries, and the great majority of states themselves will be poor.

The unsustainability of the current distribution of wealth threatens the life and survival of the poor and poorest populations. The threat is not due to the finiteness of the planet’s physical and biological resources but to the imperfect functioning of the economic system that processes and distributes them. With better distribution of resources, the entire human population could enjoy a decent standard of living. For example, if food supplies were more equitably distributed, every person could receive about 100 calories more than the 1,800 to 3,000 calories required for health. But currently people in North America, Western Europe, and Japan use (and to a large extent waste) 140% of their daily caloric requirement, whereas populations in countries such as Madagascar, Guyana, and Laos obtain merely 70%.

Current trends in energy consumption are likewise unsustainable. The average amount of commercial electrical energy consumed by Africans is ½ a kilowatt-hour per person, the corresponding average for Asians and Latin Americans is 2 to 3 kWh, and for Americans, Europeans, Australians, and Japanese it is 8 kWh.

The average American places twice the environmental load on the planet as the average Swede, three times that of the Italian, 13 times the Brazilian, 35 times the Indian, and 280 times the Haitian.

THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

The world’s financial system is unsustainable as well. This unsustainability is structural and not immediately apparent; despite periodic crises, economic growth, measured in monetary terms, continues.

Yet the current patterns of economic growth unbalance the financial system. The U.S. has a growing trade deficit: the value of the goods it imports is far above the value of the goods it exports. The opposite is the case in China and other Asian economies: they have a growing trade surplus, as the value of their exports is consistently above the value of their imports. At present, the Asian economies are financing the U.S. overspending, but not voluntarily: central banks with large foreign exchange reserves, like China, Japan, and other Asian countries, are captives of America’s fiscal policy. This tend cannot unfold indefinitely: the financial imbalance is growing toward untenable dimensions.

If measures are unduly delayed, the adjustment could be “abrupt,” with hazardous consequences for global trade, economic development, and international security.
For the time being the adjustment is postponed, for it involves painful losses on the part of the reserve-currency economies and a major and likewise painful adjustment in U.S. economic and trade policies.

THE ECOLOGICAL SYSTEM

The way humanity exploits the environment is intrinsically unsustainable. The rising curve of demand is exceeding the descending curve of supply.
In the 6 decades since World War II, humanity has consumed more of the planet’s physical and biological resources than in all of history prior to that time.
Global consumption is nearing planetary limits.
The disproportion is shown by quantitative measures of human resource use, such as the “ecological footprint” (the measure of the area of land required to support a person or a population). The proportionate level of agricultural production – where production is sustainable – is a footprint of 4.2 acres per person. However, the global average is a footprint of 7 acres. The extremes range from 1.23 acres in Bangladesh to 25.5 acres in the United States and in the oil-rich Arab countries.
Each minute 52 acres of tropical forest are lost, 50 tons of fertile topsoil are blown off, and 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide are added to the atmosphere.
Each hour 1,693 acres of productive dry land become desert.
Each day 250,000 tons of sulphuric acid fall as acid rain in the Northern Hemisphere. An estimated 100,000 chemical compounds are injected into land, rivers, and seas, millions of tons of sludge and solid waste are dumped into the oceans, and billions of tons of CO2 are released into the air.
The situation as regards water is critical. In 1950 there was a potential reserve of nearly 17,000 m³ of fresh water for every person then living. By 1999 it had decreased to 7,300 m³.
If current trends were to continue, in the year 2025 there would be only 4,800 m³ of reserves per person.
Today about ⅓ of the population does not have access to sufficient supplies of safe water, and by 2025 ⅔ of the population will live under conditions of extreme water scarcity.
The worst hit countries will be in Africa, the Middle East, and south and central Asia. Here available supplies may drop to less than 1,700 m³ per person.

The trend concerning the availability of productive land is likewise critical. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that on the global level there are 7490 million acres of high quality cropland available, 71% of it in the developing world. This quantity is decreasing due to soil erosion, destructuring, compaction, impoverishment, excessive desiccation, accumulation of toxic salts, leaching of nutritious elements, and inorganic and organic pollution owing to urban and industrial wastes. In some parts of the world, this augurs major food shortages. China has a population that is 5 times that of the United States but has only one-tenth as much cultivated land; it is feeding 24% of the world’s population on 7% of the world’s agricultural land. This small percentage is further diminishing. Due to urban sprawl and the construction of roads and factories, 37 million acres of China’s cultivated land have already been converted to nonagricultural use. Of the remaining 247 million acres one-tenth is highly polluted, one-third is suffering from water loss and soil erosion, one fifteenth is salinized, and nearly 4% is in the process of turning into a desert.

Worldwide, 12 to 17 million acres of cropland are lost per year. If this process continues, some 741 million acres will be lost by mid-century, leaving 6.67 billion acres to support 8 to 9 billion people – no more than 0.74 acre per person, the area for subsistence-level food production.

The pollution of the atmosphere is another unsustainable trend.
Polluted air and air of inadequate oxygen content are of little use. Yet the oxygen content of the atmosphere is progressively being reduced, and its carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas content is being rapidly increased.
Oxygen has decreased mainly due to the burning of coal; it now dips to 19% of total volume over impacted areas and to 12% to 17% over major cities. At 6% to 7% of total volume, life can no longer be sustained.
Two hundred years of burning fossil fuels and cutting down large tracts of forest has increased the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content from about 280 parts per million to over 350 parts per million.
In Siberia, an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometers, the size of France and Germany combined, has started to melt for the first time since it was formed at the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago.
The west Siberian peat bog may hold as much as 70 billion tons of methane, a quarter of all of the methane stored in the ground around the world.
This would double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming. Climate change has already reached the danger point.

Temperatures in the western Arctic are at a 400-year high, and in September of 2005 satellite pictures testified that the extent of the Arctic ice cap is 20% below the long-term average for the month of September. If this trend continues the Arctic Ocean will be completely ice free before the end of the century and perhaps before. This is a realistic prospect, since the warming process feeds on itself: as ice disappears, the surface of the sea becomes darker, absorbing more heat. Less ice forms, which means that the sea becomes still darker, absorbing still more heat.

The progressive reduction of the Arctic ice cap is altering the world’s weather. It first of all threatens Europe, as the volume of fresh water streaming into the North Atlantic may ultimately deflect the Gulf Stream. That would flood Western Europe with frigid waters, creating winters of Siberian cold over England and much of the continent.

Climate change will play havoc with the yield of agricultural lands and thus threaten entire human populations.
The recognition that climate change-induced dangers are real and need to be combated is growing.
Although the U.S. continues to show reluctance to accept the economic costs and consequences of cutting emissions, no country in the world could contest any longer that ominous changes in the climate are actually taking place and that coping with them calls for urgent internationally orchestrated action.

Chapter 4: A Better Way to Grow

Quantum Shift in Global Brain Part 5