Martin Henry

The world is dangerously new. But, as we hurry about our planet-destroying business, we seldom think deeply enough about how things have changed over the past half a century or so. The fastest, widest and biggest changes that humans have generated on Earth have taken place in the last century. And those changes, added up, now have the potential to destroy the planet.

I am indebted to Peter Montaque's two-part, 'The World is New' article appearing in Rachel's Democracy & Health News last November. For all of human history until now the configuration was a shortage of people and an abundance of nature. Institutions of society - governments, laws, judicial systems, education systems, businesses, media, and even religious institutions - were designed to encourage and accommodate population and economic growth.

But as university professors Herschel Elliott and Richard Lamm point out in their article, 'A Moral Code for a Finite World', "Few people seem to understand the nature of steady growth. Any rate of growth has a doubling time: the period of time it takes for a given quantity to double. It is a logical inevitability - not a matter subject to debate - that it takes only a relatively few doublings for even a small number to equal or exceed any finite quantity, even a large one."

Just as no trees grow to the sky, no growth rate is ultimately sustainable, they simply point out.

Exponential growth

"Because the natural resources available for human use are finite, exponential growth will use them up in a relatively small number of doublings. The only possible questions are those of timing: When will the resources be too depleted to support the population? When will human society, which is now built on perpetual growth, fail?"

The rapid growth of giant China, which we have felt here in our corner of the world, has brought home the lesson forcefully. Just this week the news was reporting that the Chinese one-child policy is under pressure from growing affluence, for as people get richer in the economic boom they can afford to pay the fine for having more than one child. China's expanding consumption of world resources is jacking up international commodity prices. But there just are not enough resources in a finite world for all countries ever to reach so-called First World living standards; or indeed to sustain those standards where they now exist.

With a shortage of nature and a super-abundance of people and capital hungry for yet more growth, our institutions, our language, and our mental tools have not changed to handle the challenges of the new world. A growth-driven course must inevitably wreck the future.

In just the last 50 years, the human population has doubled. The oceans, which were treated as limitless both for extracting resources and dumping wastes, are now under extreme stress. We can identify with the death of coral reefs and the severe contraction of fisheries.

Scarce commodity

Clean fresh water supplies are getting scarcer as human pollution activities multiply. Human waste disposal all but killed some of the biggest bodies of fresh water in the world, the North American Great Lakes, and numerous lesser ones. Because we are an island without shared borders it may be a little distant to grasp that growing water scarcity is already precipitating conflicts between and within countries. 'Water wars' will intensify.

Loss of forest, loss of species, the spread of genetically engineered organisms into the wild with unknown consequences are drasticall the living world. Worldwide, frog populations are being decimated, and in much of North America, male fish are being feminised from pharmaceutical hormone contamination of fresh water bodies flushed from toilets to sewage to water bodies. Frogs, and amphibians in general, are indicator species for the health of the environment. Human sperm count has also been falling in frightening fashion over just the last few decades.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries has indicated that of 24 ecosystems studied worldwide, 60 per cent were in substantial degradation from human action. "Human activity," the report concluded, "is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."