Sustainability and the Prognosis for Humankind
I’d like you to ask yourself this quick question, and answer it as honestly as you can: Do you think we’ll still have a civilization here on Earth, in any meaningful sense of the world, in 100 years?
A “yes” answer could be based on 10,000 years of human history. We’ve been through some hard times: the Dark Ages, the Plague, the Third Reich. Yes, we have issues right now with environmental sustainability, the trend toward fascism, and the threat of nuclear war, but it’s quite possible that we’ll develop technology that outstrips the pressure we’re putting on the planet’s environment, and we’ll rise to the occasion and prevent the other catastrophes. We haven’t wiped ourselves out yet, and some would say that this alone is evidence that we never will.
If you think the answer is no, perhaps your reasoning lies the theories that economists of the 19th and 20th Century dubbed “The Tragedy of the Commons,” as described with great precision and childlike honesty below.
Human beings are complex creatures. In some instances, we’re wise and selfless, and we understand what is required to get along with one another and survive as a species. In other cases, we go the wrong way.
IMO, it’s largely a function of zeitgeist, i.e., the spirit of the times in which we live, and how these pressures affect our behavior. If that’s correct, it certainly doesn’t bode well at this particular moment, as the human race has never seen a time of such gratuitous cruelty and wanton disregard for the needs of others.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes and check out this video. Then, when you’re done, share it with someone who needs to understand this as well.
The level of uncertainty surrounding this question is mountainous. Thanks for posting the link to the vid.
That video is really fabulous, IMO. I had never seen such a clear explanation of the subject.
Craig,
Good grief, wasn’t nearly 100 years of bloody revolutionary wars and the pain of failed economic policies causing brutal stagnation, repression and genocide all in the name of socialism enough for you ?
Simplistic examples like the tragedy of the commons are neither realistic nor born out in real world experience.
The hatred by some ideologies against individualism remains one of the great anathema’s against human progress, prosperity and happiness.
Yearning for some long defunct, idealistic utopian society won’t make it happen ! The puerile philosophy of this video doesn’t result in Nirvana, just the brutality of North Korea or the shambles of Venezuela.
Are you related to Ayn Rand? She could have written this word for word. “Altruism is the new torture rack,” she wrote.
Craig,
Gosh, I wish I could write as well as Ayn Rand !
However, I’m not really a fan of her philosophy. A society that fully respects individual rights, need not also embrace more extreme types of laissez-faire capitalism.
I do share her suspicion of societies which try to enforce uniformity and adherence to one doctrine of social behavior including morality. I dislike social philosophies which don’t encourage or allow dissent, variety and tolerance.
Most of all, I guess I dislike hypocrisy.
(I am distantly related to William Wilberforce and the remarkable English philosopher John Stuart Mill ).
Craig,
The answer to the question is: of course.
We’ll have a civilization, and it will be more advanced than we are today. For the past ~700 years or so the accumulated knowledge of the human race has doubled every seven years. That hasn’t ceased to be true.
Within the next hundred years, the world will go through some terrible events: The mass migration of hundreds of millions of refugees, and all the war and suffering and death that entails; the ugly transition from petroleum, natural gas, and uranium, and all the wars and suffering that THAT entails; a transition away from fiat currency, the impact of rising seas and increased storms, etc…
But as some mighty countries fall others will rise, and they will have more knowledge and more technology… so the fallen nations won’t sink quite so deeply into chaos as they would have in the past, and the new powers will have greater power than the greatest in the world have today.
There will be a civilization. The world won’t completely die with Pax Americana.
The only real threat is the potential for a small scale nuclear event happening with North Korea, but that won’t destroy all of society… it will just cause a ~5-10 year global economic collapse. We’d still have society after that.
History notes for us that we’ve already come within a hair’s breadth of thermonuclear annihilation… not once, but twice – that we know of (and however many we don’t know of).
It’s interesting to recall that, in both cases, it was one lone Soviet military officer who refused launch orders and/or hard protocol, and saved the civilized world.
Glenn,
If you are correct then the world (or even the US and South Korea) should immediately act to disarm North Korea by force without delay.
Bit in reality, the dismantling of North Korea, and even if South Korea suffered substantial damage to Seoul would have very little economic negative impact and would be counter-balanced by the enormous economic opportunities created as South Korea absorbed and rebuilt the Northern provinces in it’s own image.
The rise of crypto-currencies is fascinating and like many others I have been an early speculator with substantial reward.
I say speculator rather than investor because I’m still undecided as to the true value of these currencies. We may be witnessing the birth of a new economic phenomenon, or hysteria on the scale of the Dutch tulip a bubble during the early 17th century.
I’m delighted to be in a position where my speculative returns have been sufficient to return my initial stake several times over, allowing me to continue speculating only accumulated profits.
The hugely entertaining and eccentrically brilliant John Mcaffe might be absolutely right…or all those Nobel Laureate economists and scientist so beloved by Craig, might be correct and the whole phenomenon will collapse.
What I do know, it’s going to be one helluva wild ride ! 🙂
” The mass migration of hundreds of millions of refugees, and all the war and suffering and death that entails, ugly transition from petroleum, natural gas, and uranium ” etc, etc,
I afraid that’s just another over-hyped reaction to the initial stage of a phenomenon which is already being contained and eliminated.
A combination of better border security, hardening resolve by potential host nations to reject and deport illegal migrants, reduced expectations and improved economic and political conditions in third world countries is already reducing the numbers of illegal migrants to a trickle.
In fact there’s never been a time when human society has been more productive or more peaceful.
Even in just my own life time, I can’t think of a period for greater optimism could be justified than right now.
Marcopolo,
You are just reiterating my own point regarding the Korean Peninsula: If that issue did quite literally blow up into a catastrophe, it still wouldn’t unbalance the world and “end society”.
As for your pollyanna syndrome regarding the evolving refugee issues over the next century.. Right now the world is looking at the effects of roughly 65 million refugees. That’s pretty horrible, but it pales in comparison with what is to come. We’re seeing in Libya what it looks like in states with weak governments and a bottleneck of the flow of refugees, and it’s a nightmare. We’re seeing in Syria what it looks like when a flood of refugees destabilizes a strong government, and it’s worse.
Within a century, the number of refugees will have increased to between 200 and 500 million. Many equatorial and tropical nations will be unable to support their population, and people within those nations will leave. Swarms of human-sized locusts numbering in the millions. It’s not a simple matter of “better border security”. It will be a problem. That, combined with worsening storms and rising seas, will absolutely make life more difficult for people in developed and developing countries alike. That will be even more the case as we experience peak oil, peak gas, and peak uranium; and we will experience all three within the next hundred years.
But there will be society. We won’t turn into Syria, and neither will Europe, China, Japan, Australia, Russia, Canada or several others. There will be order and leadership and strength, and society will hold as the world changes.
Glenn,
“Pollyanna” ? Really ? I guess if that means i don’t subscribe to any future that includes exciting Armageddons, or Doomsday fantasies, then I guess you’re right.
The world has never been more stable, or more capable of cohesive action to prevent catastrophes. Our main fear, “is a fear of fear itself”.
Australia cauterized attracting a flood of illegal migrants with resolute and determined action. It wasn’t easy, nor without a certain degree of disquiet, but the greater good prevailed.
The combination of better boarder security, improving conditions in third world nations, and the certainty of not be accepted, effectively lessens the motivations of illegal migrants.
Singapore is both an “equatorial and tropical” as well as a small Island state and get has no qualms about increasing its prosperous population enjoying a high standard of living.
It takes time for nations to learn. Unfortunately, like children, most nations must lean from painful experience. This process must be allowed to develop slowly and often painfully.
Experience has shown the lesson can’t be imposed by outsiders or provided as a sort of gift. All over the world we can see the problems created by, often well meaning, largely Western paternalism.
Coastlines have been continuously changing throughout history. The actual volume of the oceans also continuously changes but imperceptibly.
The is no accurate evidence (that bears scrutiny) of any increase in cataclysmic weather events despite all the sensational claims by alarmists.
” Record Sensational weather ” events are usually only records by infinitesimal margins and quite capable of other, more rational explanations.
Lastly, you must be one of the last believers in ” peak oil, peak gas, and peak uranium ” (there’s enough Thorium in Australia alone to power the world for at lest 500 years, the world oil reserves are at least 400 years).
I’m afraid Armageddon really has been indefinitely postponed !
In the worst case on current trends we could see in excess of 5 centigrade temperature rise. The end of Arctic summer ice, and rapidly accelerating melting of the ice caps,massive extinctions, huge and massively destructive wildfires, hurricanes with sustained winds >200 mph, increased volcanism and earthquakes as ice mass and water distribution changes, unsurvivable summer conditions in much of the tropics, unpredictable weather variations from one year to the next, huge famines, hundreds of millions of people moving in search of food, water, and cooler conditions, large areas of the oceans becoming anoxic wet deserts devoid of all but anaerobic organisms.
That’s the worse case in terms of climate change, but think of all the other forms of environmental degradation. Then add in nuclear way, world fascism, genocides, and all kinds of other stuff I’ve forgotten.
I think Glenn Doty’s comment is a bit dismissive of how hellish this can get.
Craig,
I didn’t think that I was being dismissive at all. I recognize that it is going to get very, VERY bad. But I don’t think that we’ll see anything that would be on the level of “ending society”.
American politics aside, the world population is just becoming too knowledgeable for that. We’ll see incredibly bad times ahead, but we’ll also see rapid technological advances to help counter those bad times… I do think there is a threat of an event involving a small-scale nuclear launch on the Korean peninsula. But if anything that would only serve to decrease the chances of a larger scale launch for the next several generations… it wouldn’t end society in the world, it would just make it suck a little more world-wide and very much more on the Korean peninsula itself.
I’m dismissive of any of the likely calamities ending human civilization. I’m not dismissive of the degree to which those calamities will cause suffering and chaos.
OK, thanks. Here’s another line of thinking for you: it’s Sam Harris on AI. https://youtu.be/8nt3edWLgIg
Indeed, we’re already well into massive losses of vertebrate populations. From 1970 to 2010, the global population of humans doubled, and the numbers of other vertebrates fell by half.
How many strings can we cut from a hammock before we fall on our asses? We’re about to find out.
I don’t think anyone can know for certain whether pockets of societal order resembling a just civilization will endure or not, but it quite appears assured that such order will shortly be severely tested.