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Originally published June 23 2010

Humans vs. the environment - A thought experiment

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Protecting the environment isn't a "liberal" idea; it's everybody's business.
Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, the environment provides life support for us
all, and if we fail to recognize that, we are truly doomed as a civilization.

To help explain this, I've put together a simple thought experiment. It begins with three
undeniable truths about humans and the environment:

Truth #1 - The Earth's resources are limited.

This should be self-evidence, but some people still don't get it. The Earth's resources -- oil,
forests, water, energy, and so on -- are finite. They do not exist in infinite quantities. If they
did, they would obviously be larger than the Earth itself (and would, in fact, fill the universe).
But they don't fill the universe. They are contained within the boundaries of planet Earth, and
therefore they are limited.

Of course, many of Earth's resources can be either regenerated or recycled, but that only
happens over time -- usually a long time. In the case of oil, it's hundreds of thousands of
years. For fossil water it's much the same. The rate at which modern human civilization is
using up these resources is orders of magnitude faster than the rate at which they can be
naturally regenerated. This holds true for oil, water, topsoil, forests and more.

Truth #2 - Each person living in modern civilization consumes some amount of the
Earth's limited resources.

This should also be self-evident: People consume resources. When you drive your car, you're
obviously consuming limited natural resources. When you buy a car, you're consuming many
other natural resources (all the elements that went into making a car), too. This is true even
when you buy a solar panel.

Every time you turn on a light switch, or open a package of food, or swallow a piece of food,
you are consuming some amount of the Earth's limited resources.

The sum of your consumption is called your "ecological footprint," and your ecological
footprint is much larger than the immediate space you might call your home. The things you
consume in your home require the resources of a much larger area far outside your home.

A human child born in America today, for example, will consume 45,000 pounds of metal in
their lifetime (through the products they purchase). That's 45,000 pounds of metal that must
be mined, processed, transported and manufactured into consumable products, and metal
mining is a very dirty business, by the way, even if that metal goes into making clean energy
devices such as wind turbines.

Truth #3 - Humans are altering the environment

You can't argue with this (although some people ridiculously try). Human activity is altering
our environment in a huge way, from the massive deforestation of the planet to the release of
gases into the atmosphere. We've poisoned the rivers, destroyed natural habitat, polluted the
oceans (Gulf of Mexico, anyone?) and altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
These are undeniable scientific truths. No sane person can reasonably argue that human
beings have not radically altered the environment of our planet over the last 200 years.

If you visited North America 200 years ago, for example, you wouldn't even have recognized
it as the same continent dominated by human beings today. A few hundred years ago, North
America was teeming with life, with huge old-growth forests, pristine rivers and abundant
plains. Today it is relatively dead, having been over-developed, over-paved and over-
population to a point so extreme that our ancestors would largely consider it "dead".

Truth #4 - Humans really like to have babies

This is also self-evidence: People like to procreate. Every family, it seems, wants children,
and those children want their own children, too. In general, human beings want to
procreate without limitation. This, of course, leads to an explosion in population growth.
We've seen this explosion over the last two hundred years as the Earth's population has
grown from less than one billion people in 1800 to nearly seven billion today.

Human beings do not consider their impact on the global population when they procreate. The
decision to have children is made privately, selfishly, without regard to the impact on the
planet. One more child seems like no big deal from the point of view of a couple that wishes
for another son or daughter, but multiplied by billions, these decisions to procreate en masse
lead to overpopulation, which leads to over-consumption of the planet's limited resources.

The Easter Island effect

Now let's work our little thought experiment. Given the four simple truths described above, it
is only a matter of time before the continued procreation of human beings collides with the
reality of limited resources, causing a crisis of unsustainability.

At some point, in other words, the continued expansion of human beings will destroy so much
of the natural environment (and use so many natural resources) that there will not be enough
resources available to support the continuation of the existing population.

I call this the "Easter Island effect," in reference to the way in which the natives of Easter
Island chopped down all their trees to build ever-larger monuments to themselves, and in
doing so they destroyed their entire ecosystem and soon perished. The entire human
civilization is now pulling an Easter Island on a global scale.

Our two choices

Given that the unlimited expansion of the human population must inevitably use up key
resources required to sustain human life, it stands to reason that there are only two choices
for how we human beings can choose to deal with the situation:

Choice #1 - We can acknowledge the ecological impact of human beings on our planet and
make conscious choices to live within the bounds of sustainable balance with our planet (i.e.
keeping our population size relatively stable by limiting runaway population growth, reducing
our ecological footprint, respecting the natural environment that supports life on our planet,
etc.).
Choice #2 - We can continue our mindless population expansion and resource exploitation
while ignoring any long-term consequences. This is the definition of stupidity, and yet it is
precisely the path that modern human civilization is now choosing. It also seems to be the
chosen path of "anti-environmentalists" -- people who resist the idea that we need to protect
the environment at all.

Sadly, human civilization has decided to go with choice #2. I believe the future of modern
civilization is now set. Population expansion and resource depletion will soon collide with
the limitations of our planet and result in a cataclysmic collapse of our civilization. We human
beings are pulling off the Easter Island scenario, but with more than just trees: We're doing it
with oil, water, soil and habitat. We are destroying the only planet that can keep us alive, and
there now appears to be no stopping this self-destructive tendency of the human species.

I have personally seen no evidence that the current human species is capable of long-term,
sustainable balance with any ecosystem. It lacks the intelligent foresight necessary to
anticipate such outcomes and make adjustments well in advance of them coming true. Some
people among us even argue against environmental protection, not realizing they are
essentially arguing for their own self-destruction.

Other who are more thoughtful argue only against the fear of a world government enforcing
environmental regulations at the expense of losing personal freedoms. This is a legitimate
concern, and I happen to agree with these concerns. "Protecting the environment" can all too
easily become a slippery mantra for world domination over individual freedom. The best way
to avoid losing freedom while saving our environment is through education of the public that
urges people to make better decisions without turning them into criminals if they fail to make
those decisions.

Can humanity save itself?

Saving human civilization from its own ignorance is no easy task. It will require intelligent,
forward-thinking business leaders who see the long-term picture and who genuinely care
about the future. Yet sadly, there is no such thing. Business leaders are, by definition,
focused on the next fiscal quarter, not the next century. They will ALWAYS mortgage our
collective future to increase their immediate profits.

There is almost no such thing as a successful business person who is simultaneously an

effective steward of our planet's natural resources. The simple act of generating more
business -- in any business -- always results in more consumption because our entire
economic system is based on consumption. It's even true about internet businesses, by the
way. Every bit and byte you consume over the internet has an indirect environmental cost
due to the electricity consumption of the CPUs delivering that content to you as well as, more
importantly, the enormous cooling demand in data centers that spend fortunes just cooling all
the computers running there.

The fact that our economic activity is fundamentally based on consumption rather than
conservation demonstrates why humanity is doomed to destroy itself. After seeing the
failure of so many environmental summits, I'm convinced of it. I don't see any possible way
that human beings will suddenly gain the intelligence and foresight necessary to live in
balance with our natural world. Not without a crisis to teach everybody a few lessons,
anyway. But even the Gulf Coast disaster isn't fundamentally changing the way business
leaders think about consumption. They think it's just an "oil problem" not a global problem
with the business models that drive our world into a self-destructive cycle of mindless
consumption.

What may be coming in the next few years

When the population continues to expand and most of the world's resources are wiped out,
the human population will plunge into a time of great darkness. The loss of life will be
immense -- perhaps as much as a 90% reduction in the planetary population. Ecosystems will
fail, crops will fail and civilization itself will be brought to its knees. It won't take much to
crash the current global system. Once the power grid is down for as little as 5 days, there's
almost no bringing civilization back -- at least not modern civilization as we know it.

Once the population is drastically reduced, the natural environment will have a chance to
recover. Plants and animals will re-populate areas once lost to high-density human
populations. And once the abundance returns, humans will again have the abundance
necessary to re-populate, too. Hopefully future generations of human beings will learn from
our present mistakes and not pursue the same path we did -- the path of endless
consumption of the planet's resources to the point of destruction.

On a long time scale, you will likely see human population rising, then crashing, then rising
again from the ashes of a collapsed civilization. This is the ebb and flow of the future of life
on Earth. You might even call it a "natural" cycle of human population expansion, then
collapse, followed by expansion and yet more collapse. It's very similar to the way a virus
invades a human body and multiplies until it kills the very host that once gave it life. In terms
of big-picture behavior, humans are much like a virus on our planet.

This cycle of destruction and rebirth could be balanced out, though, by a sufficiently
intelligent species gifted with sufficient foresight to see what's coming and make early
adjustments to avoid the population collapse. Our current human species, sadly, is not
sufficiently intelligent to do so.

The corporate greed machine

I hadn't really accepted this outcome as reality until just recently. I've always maintained a
more optimistic attitude, thinking that we could find innovative ways to reverse climate
change, reduce consumption, educate people and invent new technologies to clean up the
planetary messes we've made. But I can now see that we're up against corporate monsters
that are relentlessly pushing for our collective destruction.

They're destroying our seeds and genes (for profit, no less), our soils, rivers, oceans and
lands. They're corrupting our minds with pro-business propaganda and our bodies with their
chemicals poisons. And they absolutely will not stop until every last exploitable resource on
the planet has been used up and sold to a consumer. When our world is dominated by
Monsanto, DuPont, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, weapons manufacturers, junk
food giants and chemical companies, there's not much hope for meaningful change that could
set humanity on a new course of conservation and protection of life.

Sadly, there is no stopping the great corporate greed machine. It will keep rolling forward,
aiming for more growth, more consumption and more exploitation until the very last drop of
oil is squeezed out of the tar sands and every last tree is slashed to make room for cattle
ranching.
A profit-based economic model cannot coexist with environmental protection
because the two concepts are opposites. Big Business depends on endless growth, expansion,
exploitation and consumption. But the environment can only be protected by consuming less.
And that's not even in the vocabulary of today's business executives. The idea of consuming
less is the antithesis of corporate profit and expansion.

Have you ever seen a Coca-Cola ad that urged you to "drink less Coke"?

That's why as long as corporations rule our world (and make no mistake, they already do),
there is no saving the environment. Ergo, there is no saving ourselves from a complete
civilization blowout that will eventually see the near-destruction of our natural world... with
the collapse of the human population to soon follow.

The thought experiment - SimEarth

Imagine you're playing a software game called SimEarth. (Such a game actually exists, I
believe, but I'm not referring to any real game. This is a fictional exercise.)

In this SimEarth game, you get 1 point for every year that one human being is alive on planet
Earth. The simulation runs for 1000 years and begins in the year we know as 1500 A.D.

In the game, just as in the real world, the survival of human beings depends on the people
having access to food, water, shelter, safety and other essentials. When the game begins,
you have a blank slate SimEarth planet with enormous untapped resources of fossil oil, fossil
water, old-growth forests, abundant ocean life and incredible biodiversity on land and sea.
The human population is relatively small, perhaps only a few million people.

As the game progresses and the years tick by, you start earning more and more points by
allowing the human population to multiply. At one point, you turn on the invention of the
combustion engine coupled with the discovery of oil, and then things really begin to
accelerate: Food production suddenly multiplies, making food resources incredibly cheap and
abundant, leading to a population explosion.

As the points keep racking up, you watch as your SimEarth world becomes increasingly taken
over by humans. The old growth forests are cut down and replaced with farm lands and cattle
ranches. The once-abundant populations of wild animals are replaced by concrete highways
and housing developments. Fossil water supplies drop sharply and oil drilling rigs pump out a
heavy portion of the planet's remaining oil resources.

Your points are really accelerating now as you watch the human population blow past four
billion people, then five, and then six. At that point, on-screen statistics begin to flash red,
warning you that world's oil, water, food, soil and ocean health are all reaching critical levels
of deficiency. Although you're earning big points from all the human activity, the
environmental cost of supporting all those people is now threatening the ecological stability of
the planetary ecosystem.

It is at this point you realize that, to beat the high score, you need to keep your human
population alive at some level for the next 500 years, and yet the planet's resources are
running out, reaching depletion in just 50 years or less. What should you do?

You decide to just watch and see what happens. With your eyes fixated on the screen, the
years tick past. Twenty-five years further into the simulation, the oil runs out, thrusting your
simulated societies into an energy crisis. Without cheap, plentiful oil, food production grinds
to a halt. Mass starvation takes hold in just one year, leading to disease and the unleashing
of a global pandemic. Over the next five years, the human population suffers a massive,
catastrophic die-off, plummeting to less than a billion people. Your once-awesome score now
looks pitiful: Human civilization crashed and you'll never win the simulation now. Game over.

This is the outcome facing modern human civilization... and it's no game. The possibility is
very real. Unless something drastic is done to find a balance between human consumption
(which is directly tied to population) and the natural environment that supports us all, our
population is going to crash, too. It is a simple matter of biology.

The population problem no one dares speak of

There's no way around this sobering thought: Population is the problem. There are too
many people consuming too much stuff. It cannot be sustained -- especially not at the very
high rates of consumption our western world has grown used to.

To solve this dilemma, you can either reduce the population over time (through one-child
policies, for example) or reduce consumption (through a variety of means), but you've got to
do something. In no way do I support the idea of a one-child policy, by the way. I don't
support government intervention in our private lives, and I don't support governments
mandating personal limits on our carbon consumption. But then again, if something radical
doesn't change, it's fairly obvious that the human population is simply going to keep
expanding until key resources are all dried up. And that, of course, will result in a devastating
crash of the human population.

So there you have it: The price for our expansionistic, high-consumption lifestyles
today is eventually going to be the blowout of human civilization in the future,
followed by a sharp population crash. The only thing that can really stop it is forced
government population control, a global pandemic, or some other widespread disaster that
kills off a huge percentage of the world population. None of these seem particularly desirable.

Or, perhaps, the world could be saved with a sudden burst of global education that teaches
people to think about the long-term consequences of their own actions, but I'm not betting on
that happening anytime soon. Even really smart people in first-world nations still burn up oil
and use up resources as if there were no consequences.

Education alone cannot save human civilization from destroying itself. Smart people are not
necessarily ecologically-aware people. In fact, you could argue that the most highly-educated
people on the planet are precisely those who are consuming the greatest natural resources.
(Poor, uneducated populations don't consume much for the simple reason that they cannot
afford to.)

There's no way around it: We are on a track headed straight for our own destruction. A
planet-wide collapse is coming sometime this century.

If you think I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from you. I hope I'm wrong, and I'm looking for a
reasoned argument that can offer a solution to our population problem -- preferably without
resorting to government-run population control initiatives or forced one-child policies.

Seriously: How can the human species now save itself from its own destruction? Even free
energy technologies aren't the answer, as they don't solve the problems of running out of
fossil water, topsoil, natural habitat or rare earth metals used in industrial processes. Free
energy will only cause the human population to explode even more rapidly, worsening the
current problem of over-population.

I challenge every person reading this to do the math. Run the numbers yourself. Look at the
limited resources on our planet and compare them with the per-capita consumption facts
associated with modern-day consumers. Then consider what happens when the population
keeps expanding... and add to that the desire for poorer nations to "achieve" the
consumption rates of first-world nations like the USA.

If you do the math, you'll quickly see it doesn't add up. The projects all come to a screeching
halt in the next hundred years (if not sooner). The population growth rates still under way
lead to a literal dead end, given current rates of consumption.

This may not be a popular topic to write about. Most people prefer to pretend this problem
doesn't exist (much like the U.S. national debt). But it is, in reality, the single largest problem
facing the future of human civilization: How do we find a way to live in balance with our
natural environment while sustaining a steady population... without turning our world into a
population control police state?

I personally cannot think of any acceptable solution to this problem that does not involve
some sort of massive population control measure... and that solution is, itself,
unthinkable.{SubscribeHealthRangerBlock}
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CAN HUMANITY HALT ITS OWN SELF DESTRUCTION?

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