The Extinction of Thoughtful People and Fearless Parrots

Around five percent of all the people who have ever lived are still alive. That's an astoundingly high proportion given that modern homo sapiens have been around for upwards of 150,000 years, and it speaks to just how steeply the world's population has increased within living memory.

This increase, along with the technological advances that made it possible, have fundamentally transformed our planet in a way that has obviously taken an enormous toll. We've cleared away habitats to make way for our agriculture, practically emptied the sea of fish, and begun to change our climate, but the pace of all this has been just slow enough for each new generation to grow up thinking it's always been this way, that our use of natural resources is normal so we can go on like this forever. But we clearly can't. The reality we are now living with, and have apparently been living with for the last century, is that the Earth is experiencing a mass extinction event on a scale not unlike the one that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last century, vertebrate species have been disappearing at a pace that is conservatively estimated to be 114 times the background rate.

More troubling than vertebrate extinctions is the decline in pollinating insects, especially bees, that our food supply depends on, a worsening problem worldwide. In the 1980s, farmers in China's Sichuan province were already hand-pollinating their fruit trees because there weren't enough bees. The decline has sharply accelerated since then and a large proportion of all wild bee species are now extinct. The loss of bees is often presented as mysterious in the popular media helped by the coinage of the nebulous term "colony collapse disorder", but many of the causes of the decline are well understood. It has been linked to pesticide use (particularly neonicotinoids), "parasites and pathogens that have been accidentally moved around the world by human action", and the destruction of bee habitats. The good news is that these factors are mostly within our control so we have the potential to halt this trend if we can summon the political will.

There are clearly identifiable things we can do to address the broader threats to our environment too. In the short term, we can disincentivize environmental damage by making it much more costly (through things like taxation, fines, and carbon trading) to those who are responsible for it (to the extent that this is predictable) instead of redistributing this burden onto everyone else. In the longer term, we also need to ensure that ordinary people are not placed in the sort of precarious economic position that forces them to choose between personal survival and caring for the environment.

Inevitably, we also need to move away from an economic system that relies on endless growth. We live, after all, on a finite planet with finite resources. The number of fish we catch for food is no longer limited by the number of fishermen or their ingenuity but by the number of fish left in our oceans. The same applies to other renewable resources like forests and the ground water reserves we use for irrigation, and of course, non-renewable resources. In industry after industry, we have passed the stage where growth can be achieved through greater extraction efforts because resources are being extracted faster than they can be recycled or replenished. Perpetual growth in a finite system is simply unsustainable. Despite the obviousness of this statement, there is a deeply ingrained view that growth is the ideal state for any healthy economy. Unfortunately, this view has been so central to economic policy in the developed world that a shift in this culture may take more time than we can really spare.

Not all of the changes we need to make to reduce our environmental impact are necessarily painful though. One path we could have been following all along would have been to allow newer and more efficient technologies to free up our time so that we could work less and spend more time with family and friends instead of continually filling this extra time with more work. But oddly enough, we have chosen to live according to an economic system that, from the point of view of workers, tends to undermine any gains in efficiency that new technology provides by devaluing the labor that it renders more efficient so that, to earn a living, we have to keep filling our time with more work. Unfortunately, increases in productivity inevitably translate into a greater burden on our environment.

To the extent that we grow wealthier as we advance through life, we could choose to work less, but many of us find ourselves choosing to have more play things over more play time. Our culture also places a very high value on hard work and we derive a strong sense of self-worth from it so there would need to be a cultural shift to make the prospect of part time work a respectable choice. The virtue of hard work cannot be easily reconciled with the virtue of sustainability, and the cultural shift required to do so may also take longer than we can afford, but I suspect that the way to do this would be to start speaking about the kind of work we do and how much we do of it as part of our ecological footprint just like any other lifestyle choice. If large numbers of people begin to steer themselves away from careers in industries that place a heavy burden on the environment, the cost of labor in those industries will increase making them less profitable to investors.

We also need a decisive end to the sort of burdensome consumption that is driven by insecurities about not being attractive enough, interesting enough, fashionable enough, modern enough, patriotic enough, a good enough parent, and so on. Marketing that feeds off these kinds of insecurities is poisonous, both environmentally and psychologically through cycles of consumption and permanent dissatisfaction. This will require yet another cultural shift, but a very liberating one.

Now imagine a mobile phone designed to last for a hundred years and a culture that valued the choice to buy one. From an environmental point of view, this would be vastly superior to everyone recycling their phones every few years after they break or go out of fashion and become a social liability, but what sort of company would intentionally cut off its future revenue stream by making a product that never needed to be updated or replaced? Probably none under current norms, but there are compelling reasons to suggest that such projects will take off in the future. I will save the details for another post because they will take us too far from the topic, but for now, we need to add this to our growing list of requirements for cultural and economic change.

It's important to understand that many of the problems we are dealing with now are side effects of solutions to earlier problems. The solutions mankind has found to the problems of disease and other causes of death for instance have created a problem of overpopulation. One solution that has in turn been suggested for tackling the population problem is to encourage people to have fewer children. Dave Gardner of Growthbusters takes this to be one of the central messages of his organization and is very vocal about the considerable burden that each new child that is born will place on the environment throughout its lifetime. On the face of it, this seems like the right approach, but we need to take care that this solution does not have painful side-effects of its own.

A clip from Growthbusters: Hooked on Growth (2011) by Dave Gardner

One serious problem with encouraging people to have fewer children as a way of protecting the environment is that environmentally conscious people are far more likely to follow this advice than people who take environmental issues less seriously. Fewer children born of environmentalists will mean fewer children growing up in families that discuss environmental issues where they can pick up their parents' attitudes and activism, so although this approach may produce a temporary dip in population statistics in the short term, it could have the perverse effect of breeding out thoughtful, environmentally conscious types until we're left with only the children of people who for whatever reason weren't particularly impressed by things like ecological footprints. With no one left to offer advice about small families and no one left who is interested in following it, subsequent generations will reproduce as indiscriminately as ever until resource limitations force a painfully abrupt end to population growth. In the long run, this self-induced sterilization program would likely destroy environmentalism as a movement and without even succeeding in its declared aim of curbing population growth. It only takes one subgroup within a population to be reproducing exponentially for the entire population to end up doing so in the long term.

It's bad enough that of the approximately 120 million sexual encounters that occur each day, the partners who have the forethought to use contraception are much more likely to be responsible, educated, future-oriented people. By virtue of the increased availability of effective methods of contraception over the last half a century, people with these qualities are reproducing at a reduced rate compared to those who lack these attributes. The long term implications for the evolutionary trajectory of our species are worrying.

Population growth is unquestionably an enormous threat to the survival of the planet, but the only incentives that actually stand a chance of stabilizing or reducing the population would be those that work on everybody more or less equally: financial incentives, for example, or in the worst case, an authoritarian form of population control. As well as tackling population, we need to reduce consumption and otherwise reduce the burden we place on the environment, but we need to be very careful about the solutions we implement. New ideas and inventions, when multiplied in their application over vast numbers of people, can have all sorts of unintended consequences.

If the threat to our environment were as tangible as an invading army, I have no doubt our governments would be throwing unlimited funds at it, and if tackling it provided opportunities to demonstrate heroism, I've no doubt young men would be lining up to put themselves in harm's way. If there were a single event like a meteor impact at a specific point in time, or if the issues fiercely divided public opinion, then I have no doubt the media too would be taking a greater interest in it. If you were an evil mastermind looking for the most effective way to destroy the planet, you wouldn't choose a method that inspires fierce resistance. You would choose one that encroaches slowly and disguises itself in bland attire and have us go out with a whimper while Hollywood is busy making disaster films about meteor impacts, intelligent robots turning on their creators, nuclear wars, pandemics, and so on.

The late Douglas Adams made an insightful observation about the lack of attention we pay to the environmental destruction of our planet. He compared it to the reaction of the kakapo when confronted by a predator. The kakapo is a flightless parrot from New Zealand, which until human settlers arrived in the country with their pets and pests, had been living in an environment that completely lacked predators. This has unfortunately left it without any fear of cats, people and so on, so that it's possible to just walk up to one of them and pick it up without it running away or showing any sign of distress. Whatever defensive instincts its distant ancestors possessed, the kakapo has lost because of a lack of any selective pressure keeping them in check, so when threats unexpectedly arrived on its shores, it was completely ill-equipped to deal with them. The result is that it's now on the verge of extinction being kept alive by careful conservation efforts. Unlike the kakapo, humans evolved in an environment which did have predators so we have a perfectly appropriate fear response for that, but a different sort of threat has arrived on our shores now, and we're just as unprepared for it as the kakapo was for the arrival of predators. The idea that we could run out of space and permanently exhaust our environment of resources is nothing we've ever had to worry about before so it's little wonder that we're mentally incapable of being aroused by this threat in a visceral way. Fortunately, we are at least able to grasp the problem on an intellectual level, but that will only be the case while there are still some thoughtful people left.