Humans — How can their influence change? March 27, 2012

If humans are the cause of various environmental disasters that I am experiencing (and while humans may argue about some of them, there are many that are undeniably of human origin, take mountaintop removal for instance), then the obvious question is what can be done to change the impact of humans within the next 100 years (perhaps I should post separately about how I picked this number, or whether it’s even the right one. But let’s use it for now because it’s nice and even and within range of many of the large changes being projected). From my perspective, there are a few possibilities:

How many years left? Non-renewables: Taflin Laylin , also see a more detailed graphic from New Scientist via Cool Infographics

• Human population could be wiped out or reduced to the point where it no longer has the same level of impact. Some thoughts on how this might happen can be found in books like Apocolypse When (Willard Wells), an astounding mathematically based analysis of the likely lifespan of the human species; and Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond), a historical account of the fates of human societies that covers a huge range of time (starting in “pre-history”), cultures, and concepts and has a fascinating case study of Easter Island that has daunting implications for the future of human society. How could this happen? I could become inhospitable for all life, including humans, a real possibility according to the well-respected climatologist James Hanson in Storms of my Grandchildren. Alternately, if technology fails to adapt to the expected collapse of available non-renewable resources, human society could be forced back into ways of living that require a drop in population. Humans could accidentally destroy themselves (Apocolypse When goes into great detail on why this is likely to happen and how it might occur). Another alternative is that because random luck or indirect pressures caused by humans, some other species arises that can dominate humans to the point of reduced population or extinction.
• Humans could evolve into a less destructive species. For an imaginative exploration of how this might happen, Stephen Baxter’s Evolution is a great read. For a scientific take on the evolution currently occurring within the human genome, check out The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending. The answer, by the way is not (just) “natural selection.” As New Scientist pointed out in 2008, there are many misconceptions about evolution and how it works (it is much more complex than an everyday understanding of “natural selection” might suggest) or how long it might take (consider the changes that occurred in a lizard species left on an island for 40 years, more on speed of evolution). Thus, the question is  what might push changes in the right direction, what the right direction is, and how long it might take. Despite the speed at which evolution operates, it is perhaps overly optimistic to think this will be the solution.
• Humans could leave the planet. Innumerable science fiction stories explore the possibility that humans spread across the universe.  Perhaps this could happen and take some of the load off of me. However, as non-renewable resources dwindle, as environmental pollution, climate change, population growth, the need to find new sources of non-renewables and economic problems suck up more and more resources and attention, it seems increasingly less likely that humans will invest the time and money necessary to invent the technologies that will make this possible. Additionally, a sudden event or sudden series of events could shift this from possible to impossible very quickly (if, for example industrialized societies begin to collapse for some reason).
• Humans could change their own behavior (and that of the social agents they have created, such as corporations, and so on). This seems to be an area that a lot of people have studied, and data on what can change human behavior include:
  • Factors affecting individual behavior drawn from fields such as psychology and economics
  • Social forces (within families, across families, and so on), drawn from sociology, psychology, economics and more
  • The study of non-human agents (governments, corporations, culture, etc) drawn from organizational psychology, political science, anthropology and many others
  • Society level forces drawn from macro-economics, studies of socio-technical evolution

  The many levels at which change must be affected introduce a great deal of complexity into the process of creating change. Additionally, it is not clear that humans are willing to do things that will perturb the system very much precisely because of the perturbations created. Some my be positive, but others are likely to be negative — humans can’t replace fossil fuel production, for example, without affecting the bottom line of fossil fuel companies, their employees, and so on. As long as those negative consequences are unacceptable, the degree of positive change is going to be equally limited. For every action there must be a reaction … Only when negative consequences come from outside (such as natural disaster) is this problem avoided.

I may have missed something here, but I am failing to see another alternative when it comes to addressing the impact the humans are having on me. Either they go away, become less powerful (and less numerous), or change (intentionally or not). Now if only I knew how to make one of those things happen!

The impact of negative population growth February 27, 2012

Population Decline. Red is decline, pink is approaching. @Doseiai2, Wikipedia. CC (some rights reserved)

Let’s assume, just for a moment, that the human population on earth never stops growing. That must lead to disaster unless humans find a way to travel to new planets — certain of my resources are finite no matter how you look at them. So, being optimistic for a moment, let’s discard that potential future and consider instead a future in which population growth halts and even declines. What might that look like?

From a non-human perspective, the impact of the human population can be felt in terms of land and water use (to create food or harvest food), waste products, and the use of non-renewables to create everything from fertilize to the ubiquitous stuff that humans seem to love so much. Even with a stable population, some of these impact could still be quite severe. For example, pollutants that take a long time to be absorbed back into the natural order of things would continue to build up even with a decline in population. However, this scenario is certainly better than continued growth.

Another question that must be asked, of course, is how drastic the decline is, and what its impact is. For example, rapid die off on a large scale could result in positive things (such as an opportunity for flora and fauna to recover land) but also negative (imagine an abandoned nuclear power plant, war, or other possible consequences). Since this post is attempting an optimistic viewpoint, let us assume for the moment a not-too-rapid, controlled decline followed by a leveling out when the population reaches a level that can more easily be sustained by my currently groaning body.

What might that look like? According to the Global Footprint Network, the 2007 footprint of the human population was 1.5 earths [1]. This would mean that (assuming no technological advances), the human population needs to decline by 33% (approximately) from the 2007 levels (6.67 billion), or by 2.5 billion people from the current 7 billion person population.

Over what time period might this take place? If the world population declined by 250 million people per year for 10 years, or 25 million per year for 100 years, we might achieve that goal. This is a very large number (a the list of anthropogenic disasters on Wikipedia has WWII as the worst, with a death toll of between 40 and 70 million over 5 years, or between 2% and 3% of the world population at the time) [2].

Although it is hard to find many attempts to model the impacts of population decline on humans themselves, there are some research articles on the topic. In particular, one consequence of controlled population decline is an excess of elderly individuals. According to Bloom et al [3], the relationship between fertility decline (which leads to population decline when births per year are less than deaths per year, and also to an aging population) and the size of the workforce is positive in the short run (meaning an increased percentage of the population is of working age) but negative in the long run (as the number of elders rises). According to the authors, migration has a relatively small effect on this. The paper concludes that population decline “may reduce output per capita” after a certain point.

An apparently open question is how controlled but large population decline (or even controlled but small population decline) would impact economic growth. Factors worth considering include how it might push off the end date of certain finite resources, how it might effect “dematerialized” growth, what institutions might be affected by the decline period (for example, how would a declining population of young people affect educational institutions?), what policies would best support a population with a relatively small workforce (compared to the number of aging adults) and so on. Additionally, it would be worth considering how such a decline might affect key resources (for example would it imply food scarcity without a shift in where people live?). An optimistic model of population decline (meaning one that does not assume causal disasters) would ideally help to shed light on which forms of decline might be more likely to lead to conflict within and among nations (if any). In examining all of these variables, it would also be fruitful to explore at what rate decline is most manageable, and to test these assumptions against existing examples of populations that have experienced decline.

Other people’s posts about population decline: [Wikipedia][Regions of Canada][Japan][Projected changes in Europe and impact of immigration][Russia]

[1] http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/data_sources/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll