The Chaos Point Part 4

THE CHAOS POINT

THE WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

ERVIN LASZLO

PIATKUS BOOKS               2006

PART IV

 

PART ONE: THE TIDES OF TRANSFORMATION

 

Chapter 3: The Drivers of Chaos (Cont.)

Social unsustainabilities

The fourth driver: The unsustainability of established social structures

• Stresses within human communities are nearing a critical point: Traditional social structures are breaking down. This is partially, but not entirely, the consequence of the explosive growth of population.
• World population in the year 1900 was about 1.5 billion people. In 2005, it was approximately 6.4 billion – more than a fourfold increase in just over 100 years.
• Population is still increasing at the rate of 90 million people annually. United Nations medium-range forecasts speak of 7.85 billion humans by 2025 and 9.1 billion by 2050.
• About 98% of world population growth is expected to occur in the developing countries. The population of the least-developed countries will increase from 800 million today to 1.7 billion in 2050, with population tripling in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, and Uganda.
• The population of the industrialized countries will either shrink or at the most remain constant. The median age will increase from 26 to 37 and the average life expectancy from 65 to 75 years. More people will be 60 or older than will be 15 or younger.
• In industrialized countries, to raise children in a nurturing environment is becoming more difficult; the rate for first marriages ending in divorce in the United States is 50%, and about 40% of children grow up in single-parent families for at least part of their childhood.
• In all parts of the world, families eat meals together less and less frequently, and when they do, the TV is likely to be the center of attention. Children’s media exposure to TV, video games and violent and sexually provocative themes is increasing.
• Child rearing is increasingly entrusted to kindergartens and company or community day-care centers. The provision of daily nourishment is shifting from the family kitchen to supermarket, prepared food industries, and fast-food chains.
• As women are obliged to leave home in search of work, poverty breaks apart even the nuclear family. 50 million children worldwide are employed for a pittance in factories, mines, and on the land, and many are forced to become “self-employed vendors” or beggars.
• In Asia alone, one million children work as juvenile prostitutes, exploited by the highly profitable pedophilia industry, serviced by international sex-tourism.

 

The ecological unsustainabilities

The fifth driver: the unsustainability of the human load on nature

• Unsustainable relations have evolved between human societies and nature as a consequence of two trends: the rapidly growing demand for the planet’s physical resources and biological wealth and; the accelerating depletion of the planet’s physical resources and biological wealth.
• Human kind has consumed more of the Earth’s resources in the 60 years since World War II than in all of history prior to that time. The production of oil, fish, lumber, and other major resources has already peaked.
• Today’s 6.4 billion humans are only 0.014% of the biomass on Earth, and 0.44% of the biomass of animals. Such a small fragment should not be a threat to the whole biosphere. Yet humanity is an acute threat; its impact is entirely out of proportion to its size.
• The ecological footprint is a measure of humanity’s impact on nature. If the footprint of a settlement is larger than the area of that settlement, the settlement is not independently sustainable.
• Cities are intrinsically unsustainable because few of the natural resources used by their inhabitants come from within their borders. Cities also depend on hinterlands for the disposal of wastes.
• A pathbreaking survey commissioned by the Earth Council of Costa Rica examined the ecological footprints of 52 countries; 42 of them had footprints that exceeded their territory.
• The optimum sustainable level of agricultural resource production – where the loss of topsoil is reduced and ultimately halted – is 1.7 hectares (4.2 acres). But the average per capita footprint of the countries examined came to 2.8 hectares (6.9 acres).
• Footprints of people in poor countries are far less than 1.7 hectares – half a hectare (little more than one acre) per person in Bangladesh, contrasting with 10.3 hectares (25 acres) in the United States.
• Each minute 21 hectares (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, mainly as 35,725 barrels of oil are burned as industrial and commercial fuel.
• Each hour 685 hectares (1,693 acres) of productive dryland become desert, and each day 250,000 tons of sulphuric acid fall as acid rain in the northern hemisphere.
• The wastes discarded into the environment do not vanish; they come back to plague those who produce them as well as other communities near and far. The CO2 released remains in the atmosphere, affecting the world’s weather. There has been a massive increase in allergies due to the toxic environment.

 

Landmarks in the degradation of nature

• Water, air, and soil are both overused and misused, and can no longer regenerate sufficiently to meet the demands of a growing population. Statistics from UNESCO, FAO, and other UN and world bodies show the details with striking clarity.

Water

• The renewable freshwater potentially available for human consumption – water in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs – is 0.007% of the water on the surface of the earth. This relatively thin trickle is essential: a person can survive for a month without food but no more than a week without water.
• In 1950 there was a potential world reserve of nearly 17,000 m³ of fresh water for every woman, man, and child. In 1999 this reserve decreased to 7,300 m³. In 2025 there will be only 4,800 m³ of water reserves per person, creating serious water shortages in many parts of the world.
• Today about one-third of the world’s population lives under nearly catastrophic conditions, and by 2025 two-thirds of the population will have to cope with such shortages.
• The worst-hit countries will be in Africa, the Middle East, and south and central Asia. Here the available supplies may drop to less than 1,700 m³ per person.

Soil

• Soil of a quality suitable for agriculture is relatively scarce. Pressures of human activity produce soil erosion, destructuring, compaction, impoverishment, excessive desiccation, accumulation of toxic salts, leaching of nutritious elements, and inorganic and organic pollution due to urban and industrial wastes.
• England’s Cranfield University discovered that soils in the UK are losing the carbon they contain at an accelerated rate. As temperatures rise, the decomposition of organic matter speeds up, and this causes more warming and hence more decomposition.
• Lands degraded to desert-like conditions reduce the world’s food and agricultural production for centuries; it takes 100 to 400 years to create 10 millimeters of productive top soil.
• There is a steady increase in the consumption of food and fiber produced by agriculture, while at the same time there is a steady decline in the quality and productivity of soil around the world. The two trends are on a collision course.
• China has a population that is five 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.
• China manages this feat by employing 40% of the world’s agricultural labor force and pumping vast quantities of chemical fertilizers and other chemicals into the soil, with serious consequences.
• Of China’s 100 million hectares of cultivated land, one-tenth are highly polluted, one-third are suffering from water loss and soil erosion, one fifteenth are salinized, and nearly 4% are in the process of turning into a desert.
• 15 million hectares of China’s cultivated land have been turned into non-agricultural use – roads and factories – an area equal to the agricultural lands of France and Italy combined.
• Worldwide, humanity is losing 5 to 7 million hectares of cropland per year. If this process continues, some 300 million hectares will be lost by mid-century, leaving 2.7 billion hectares to support over nine billion people.
• This would yield an average of 0.3 hectares (or 0.74 acres) per person, the subsistence level of food production for the entire human population.

Air

• It is a question of quality rather than quantity. Salty or polluted water is not much use when it comes to ensuring the survival of the human population, and polluted air of poor quality is also of little use.
• Oxygen in the air has decreased in recent times due to the burning of coal, which began in the middle of the 19^th century. The oxygen content of the atmosphere now dips to 19% over impacted areas and is down to 12 to 17% over major cities.
• This level is insufficient to keep body cells, organs, and the immune system functioning at full efficiency; cancers and other degenerative diseases are likely to develop.
• At oxygen levels of 6% or 7% of the volume of air, life can no longer be sustained.
• 200 years of burning fossil fuels and cutting down large tracts of forests have increased the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content from about 280ppm to more than 350ppm.
• In Siberia, an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres, the size of France and Germany combined, has started to melt for the first time since it formed at the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, releasing methane.
• The melting peat bog could release 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, about the same amount that is released annually from all of the world’s wetlands and agriculture. This would double atmospheric levels of the gas, leading to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming.

The climate

• Changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere trigger alterations in the climate. Climate change has already reached the danger point.
• A report published in 2005 by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the United Kingdom, the Center for American Progress in the United States, and the Australian Institute specified the point of no return: the chaos point beyond which global temperature change has massively disastrous consequences.
• This is a rise in the average global temperature two degrees Celsius above the average in the year 1750, producing widespread harvest failures, water shortages, increased spread of diseases, the rise of the sea level, and the die-out of major forests.
• In February of 2006, James Lovelock, the scientist who created the “Gaia hypothesis” claimed that for all intents and purposes, the point of no return has already been reached.
• It is a certainty that global temperatures have now risen 0.8 degrees Celsius, and the warming trend is accelerating.
• Temperatures in the Arctic are at a 400-year high. In September 2005, satellite pictures testified that the extent of the Arctic ice-cap was 20% below the long-term average for the month of September.
• The progressive reduction of the Arctic ice-cap alters the world’s weather. It threatens first of all Europe, as the volume of freshwater streaming into the North Atlantic would end by deflecting the Gulf Stream.
• That would flood Western Europe with frigid waters, creating winters of Siberian cold over England and much of the continent.
• While Europe is threatened with a colder climate, most of the planet is subjected to rising temperatures. Damage to the Amazon rainforest, already apparent, will become irreversible.
• There will be widespread destruction of coral reefs, the alpine flora of Europe and Australia will disappear, and there will be severe losses of China’s broad-leaved forests.
• The climate change triggered by higher temperatures will play havoc with the production of agricultural lands. Although in cold regions with short growing seasons it could increase yields, it will decrease harvests in tropical and subtropical areas where crops are already growing near the limit of their heat tolerance.
• These effects are not precisely foreseeable: Global warming is not a gradual and distributed process but a differential warming and cooling effect over different parts of the globe.
• But in their totality, these alterations in the climate threaten untold living species. They are also a threat to the food supply and, hence, to the very survival of human communities the world over.

 

Chapter 4: Parameters of a Positive Transformation