Overwhelming evidence has engendered a consensus among global scientists that the human population level and trend are unsustainable. Although we are part of nature, we may have some choice in the ongoing process of which our numbers are but one variable. Individual, social, and institutional factors are examined, and policy options are considered. Evidence is given debunking the claim that the rich attempt to coerce poor nations to reduce fertility. Carrying capacity and optimum population concepts are discussed, particularly as to equilibrium potential. Prospects for pro-active success are entertained.

INTRODUCTION

“A suitable total for the number of citizens cannot be fixed without
considering the land…” Plato, Laws, V

During the New Millennium, many unexpected events and conditions will undoubtedly surprise our progeny and us. Perhaps the decline of fossil energy sources will be rendered benign due to scientific discoveries. Perhaps “factor ten” improvements in technological efficiency will aid in the rehabilitation of the environment. Perhaps our species will self-select for survival tolerances in polluted or otherwise altered conditions. These possibilities are little more than speculations.

We can have a bit more confidence that our numbers will not continue the growth pattern of the last century, during which they quadrupled. This paper will briefly explore why it is that a consensus of the world’s experts believe the rate of growth will continue to slow, whether or not a reduction or crash is likely, and if it is plausible that stabilization might occur at some level other than extinction.

Some people claim that humans are somehow exempt from the sorts of systemic constraints, which limit the populations of other life forms. We indeed have managed to extend our range into vastly diverse habitats due to our adaptive fitness. Language, abstract thought, and reflective consciousness are traits, which aided this expansion. However, in a largely closed system, physical expansion cannot be infinite.

We will explore possible scenarios, which might lead to stabilization or equilibrium.

Projections vary somewhat, but the next half-century is conservatively expected to result in a 50% increase to approximately nine billion of us. We will explore the extent to which it is conceivable that human planning could affect the actual outcome.

The first section will provide brief evidence that overpopulation is a problem. The fascination with “virtual realities” and the myth of the “de-materialization” of economies are examples of impediments to the grasping of this issue. The vast majority of humans who are unwired know they cannot live on bits and bytes even if some of us believe otherwise; their needs include food, water, and energy.

The second section will outline some variables affecting human reproductive behavior as positive and negative feedback. These include our genetic make-up (hard wiring), environmental conditions, socio-economic values, institutional pressures, and what is called “free will”.

Next will be the question of what could constitute equilibrium. Carrying capacity connotes a maximum number of a species, which can endure in a habitat. Tolerances in a complex ecosystem are variable to inputs and internal changes, and are most sensitive when near maximum thresholds. Freedom has been described as the key human value, and it is reflected in maximal options for future decisions and actions. (Buchanan, 1997) Equilibrium seems inconsistent with carrying capacity, since the proximity of potential constraints would reduce future options and maximize the destabilizing risks of changing conditions. If attainable, equilibrium at some variable optimum level should maximize freedom and well-being, and minimize destabilizing occurrences.

Finally, I will venture into the realm of speculation to consider the prospects for success in the self-determination of equilibrium. Peace and the minimization of future suffering seem to be related to the ultimate outcome.

WHAT PROBLEM?

“Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a till greater increase in population.” (Peter Farb, 1978)

Albert Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of Physics at The University of Colorado, has demonstrated that with a 1% annual growth rate, human population would in 17,000 years equal all the atoms in the universe.(Bartlett, 1996) As a reference, the last ice age was about 17,000 years ago. We currently are growing at a rate around 50% faster than that. Bartlett was responding to the claim of the possibility of 1% annual growth of the human population for seven billion (then corrected to seven million!) years by Management professor Julian Simon. If space were the only requirement for a healthy, enduring habitat, the issue would be relatively easy to address. In short, sustainable (non-stop) growth of physical systems is an oxymoron.

Following are some opinions from diverse sources. In a letter to me dated October 3, 1996, U.S. Vice-President Al Gore stated: “I consider the dramatic growth in the world’s population to be the greatest challenge currently facing the environment…The effects of this rapid increase are felt around the globe. Starvation, deforestation, and lack of clean water are just some of the problems…”

Stuart L. Udall, former US Secretary of the Interior, wrote in a recent essay:

“…current consumption of the two cornerstone resources of modern life – water and oil – foreshadow shortages that will cripple the economies of many nations if present [population] trends continue.”(Udall, 2000)

There is a solid scientific consensus evidenced by a 1992 joint statement by The British Royal Society and the (US) National Academy of Sciences urging world leaders to address human overpopulation, as well as by the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” written in 1993 and signed by over 1600 senior scientists from 70 countries which includes the following:

“The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth’s limits.”

“Pressures resulting from unrestrained population growth put demands on the natural world that can overwhelm any efforts to achieve a sustainable future. If we are to halt the destruction of our environment, we must accept limits to that growth.”

“No more than …a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.”

” We must stabilize population.”

” We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.”

Many people besides world leaders and scientists understand the seriousness of our predicament. John H. Adams, Executive Director of The Natural Resources Defense Council, an organization not active in population affairs, began an essay entitled “What Matters Most” in The Amicus Journal:

“There is no single thing more significant for the future of the world than the fact of human population growth.”(Adams, 1997)

Author of Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond wrote in The Third Chimpanzee:

“A nuclear holocaust is certain to prove disastrous, but it isn’t happening now. An environmental holocaust is equally certain to prove disastrous, but it differs in that it is already well underway.”(Diamond, 1992)

Diamond may unfortunately underestimate the risk of a quick, violent demise.

The University of Toronto’s Peace and Conflict Studies Program has done extensive research on factors influencing violent conflict. One area of the program is the Project on Environment, Population, and Security. Scarcities, depletion, and degradation of resources such as potable water are part of the feedback loops of human activity-habitat systems which impact violent conflict.(Homer-Dixon, et al. 1993)

“Don’t worry, be happy” is sadly no longer applicable to our predicament. There are some, though, who dismiss these concerns as fiction. They point to past analyses (Ehrlich1968) which contained some incorrect judgments as to the timing of approaching limits. Evidence is strong, though, that the trends are proceeding as he envisioned if we believe the scientific consensus. The nay -sayers include those like the late Julian Simon and Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey who conveniently ignores issues like declining stocks of fish which are to be shared by a quarter of a million net additional people daily.(Bailey, 2000) The UN has been at the forefront in seeking solutions for overpopulation. The poorest nations are struggling to address the issue, but aid promised by wealthy nations has been slow in coming. India recently announced a national population policy and China is still struggling with the issue. Denial that overpopulation exists and is a serious problem led biologist Garrett Hardin to write a new book last year called The Ostrich Factor. Suffice it to say that I view the evidence as overwhelming.

FEEDBACK

“The more we examine the relationships between population, resources, and the environment the stronger the connections appear.” (Dr. Nafis Sadik in an address to The UN Conference on Environment and Development, Geneva, 991)

INDIVIDUAL/SOCIAL/ENVIRONMENTAL

The widely accepted theory called the demographic transition holds that upon reaching a secure and materially comfortable lifestyle, birthrates tend to decline. The case histories of North America and Western Europe are used as evidence for the theory’s validity. In some cases, correlations have occurred, and causal links may seem obvious. However, many physical and social scientists are more rigorous when seeking causal evidence. Virginia Abernethy a professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical School, argues convincingly that the perception of the commencement of better economic times (material well-being) leads to higher fertility rates. She gives several good examples:

“In times of privation in France, prior to the revolution, a sense of limits promoted reproductive caution, and small families were the norm…Prosperity induced high fertility rates in Ireland after the introduction of the potato, and in Turkey, when families received land.” (Abernethy, 1994)

Even when a “demographic transition” is claimed to have occurred, there could be several generations between supposed cause and effect, making the number of variables too numerous and complex to yield analytic certainty. Several generations of high fertility, like those in the US during the first half of the twentieth century, could result in a rapid population increase, after which a slowdown in births occurs. Abernethy claims that the rise of the US as an economic power, with concomitant optimism for well-being by it’s citizens, was key to the high birthrates. She sees uncertainty about real wages and job security, combined with the high costs of education and health care as factors in the slowdown in US fertility in the latter part of the century.

Humans do not easily embrace this sort of evidence, but we must continue to examine the possible causes of our actions if we are to pursue effective solutions. Many animals exhibit reduced fertility and/or lower survival rates of young offspring well in advance of serious food shortages. This is an adaptation for survival. Humans exhibit similar patterns when stressed by overcrowding and environmental scarcities. D.H. Stott discussed this at length, and I continue by quoting:

“…the predicted catastrophe of a world population increasing by geometrical progression to the point of starvation is unlikely to occur. It will be forestalled, if not by conscious human design, by physiological mechanisms, which have evolved to obviate such a calamity. This is not to minimize the fact that these mechanisms themselves are highly unpleasant. Nature prescribes happiness when it has survival value. To man nevertheless is given an answer. We need not wait for the physiological killers and maimers to come upon us…It should not, however, be beyond the capacity of man to develop cultural methods of regulating population-numbers which do not involve distress and unhappiness.” (Stott, 962)

Bill Rees, well known for developing the ecological footprint concept, noted ten years ago the relevance of work by Prigogine and Stengers, Crutchfield et al., and Palmer regarding thresholds of unpredictability. The systemic feedback that will affect human numbers with or without our intent may be unexpected in timing and intensity. Worth noting here is the principle of the weak link as expressed by Rees:

“It should be understood that while human society depends on many ecological resources and functions for survival, carrying capacity is ultimately determined by the single vital resource or function in least supply.” (Rees, 1990)

There are well-entrenched historically based values, which provide disincentives to reducing fertility. Only children were thought to be deprived by the lack of siblings. This “folk wisdom” is still widely believed despite the lack of conclusive supporting evidence. Large families are accepted by many societies as a joy or a blessing. When farm labor was important for economic viability, this might have reflected rational criteria. In modern industrialized nations, agriculture depends more on energy, chemicals, and technology than on farm hands, and a very small percentage of families is engaged in farming. In many countries the family farm has been subdivided among offspring for generations, resulting in small, unviable plots. Feedback of this nature can be mythical, but nonetheless is still effective.

In societies with high mortality rates for infants and youth, and lack of institutional old age security, poor families need to produce children as their only realistic means of attempting to secure their future. Here the biological constraint of the prospect of inadequate food is challenged by the human need for future security. This seems a most basic example of the human predicament, called by The Club of Rome, the “global problématique.”

POLICY OPTIONS

What types of actions might prove useful in a humane attempt to influence fertility? The acceptance that we have some sphere of free will seems necessary to continue this exploration; just how much is not easy to say.

“Sociobiology’s premise is that individuals of all species including humans are genetically predisposed to act in ways that maximize their ‘inclusive fitness’…Axiomatically, every living individual had ancestors that succeeded…so most of us carry genes impelling us…” (Abernethy, 1993)

It is not my intention to attempt to classify or divide human behavior into determined movements or free actions – or any percentage combination of the two. Tendencies or predispositions can be accepted as indicators of probabilities or expectations. We plan and make choices about our role in sexual reproduction to greater or lesser degrees. Ansley Cole has delineated three categories for successful intentional implementation of reduced fertility. First is the actualization and realization that both parties indeed have a choice in the matter. Second is that they perceive benefit(s) from the resulting smaller family. Third is the availability and knowledge of various means of implementing their choice.(Coale, 1989)

Dr. John R. Weeks is the Director of the International Population Center at San Diego State University. He develops Coale’s concepts into policies with direct and indirect impacts on reproductive behavior. From a systems perspective, these constitute feedback. Direct policies include full legal rights for women, payments for having fewer children, higher (rather than lower) taxes per child, legalization of contraceptive technologies, abortion and sterilization, and availability of family planning services in local outlets. Examples of indirect policies are improved secular education, increased economic opportunities for women, lower infant and child mortality rates, community birth quotas, and public campaigns promoting knowledge and use of birth control.(Weeks, 1990)

Further discussion of possible planned intervention will be undertaken in the final section of this paper: Prospects.

INSTITUTIONAL OBSTACLES

Government

Most governments, even when well-meaning, have discovered deficit financing and become addicted to revenue growth. The addition of interest results in larger total future payments than the amount of the original loan. This inevitably results in a race to keep up, as new borrowings are added on a regular basis. With the onset of declining fertility and demographically aging populations in many developed nations, immigration increases are sought to keep the economy growing and to expand payments into the pension system. There have been attempts in Germany and France, among others, to stimulate higher fertility by native born women. This may reflect fear of cultural dilution by societies, and is evidenced by recent political victories by advocates of restricted immigration. If there were a national wealth surplus rather than a debt, growth would not only be unnecessary, it might be undesirable. Old age security would be covered, and remaining wealth could be shared by fewer people.

Business

Globalization has been accompanied by the dominance of multi-national corporations. It is the mandate of corporations to deliver maximum profits to shareholders, and managers seek to maximize their own income and security by achieving that goal. It is not rational for corporations (or any business) to seek shrinking markets for goods or services. So the system has a built in growth imperative. At the same time, labor shortages would give bargaining power to workers, and would likely increase costs to business. For decades businesses have been relocating facilities to areas where labor is abundant and therefore cheaper. A lack of necessary skills may be a short term constraint, but a declining population is generally not appealing to businesses.

Now let’s have a look at how a Chinese expert perceives this. Zhang Zhirong is Deputy Director of China Population Welfare Foundation in Beijing. He wrote a report to the Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security from which I quote:

“China is caught in a vicious cycle of swelling population and diminishing resources…Economic growth is the goal of China’s industrial policy. However rapid population growth allays the economic growth that occurs.” (Zhirong, 1994)

It appears that it is possible for business leaders to catch on that there is a point of diminishing return to population linked economic growth. I expect this feedback to spread globally, like a viral meme, as systemic instability increases.

Religion

There are many religious (and ethnic) beliefs which can influence human reproductive behavior. Some examples include Muslim sects, Orthodox Jewish, and Catholic doctrine. The most extreme example that I’m aware of is the Morman belief that twelve offspring by a man places him closest to God. Groups at war have overtly used competitive breeding as an alternate method of conquest, and rape has been used as part of ethnic cleansing. Other than obscure suicide sects, I know of no religions, which advocate a reduction in the number of their adherents. Some might recognize that overpopulation is a problem. This could present a dilemma to them as they seek to spread their version of the truth and the good. The Dalai Lama gave a speech in New Zealand a few years ago where it was reported that he said the world’s population problem would benefit from more priests, nuns, gays, and lesbians. I interpret this as a touch of humor applied to a serious problem by a wise leader.

EQUILIBRIUM

“All optima must lie between the minimum viable population size, MVP, and the biophysical carrying capacity of the planet.” (Gretchen C. Daily, A. Ehrlich and P. Ehrlich)

The above range is wide enough to drive all the vehicles in the world through. How might we narrow it? The authors state in the same paper:

“…social preferences are critical because achieving any target size requires establishing social policies to influence fertility rates. Human population sizes have never, and will never, automatically equilibrate at some level. There is no feedback mechanism that will lead to perfectly maintained, identical crude birth and death rates.” (Daily, et al. 1994)

Although I agree with the need for planning, it seems like a conceptual error to place it somehow outside the feedback system. Again ignoring the free will issue, it is not reasonable in my opinion to somehow excise our planning from the ecosystem of which we are a part. Recall Stott’s point about natural governors of fertility. Our planning could be part of our adaptive fitness.

The paper goes on to state criteria for choosing optimum population size. First is a desired minimum quality of life balanced by the impacts to the ecosystem for sustaining it. Second is an acceptance that material wealth will always be unequally divided among humans, and the resulting need for a cushion (or excess) of continuously available per capita resources. They include a consideration of waste reprocessing without toxification of the system.

Next is the value of cultural diversity. They believe geographic dispersion requires a certain minimum amount of population. I think this is a prehistoric era consideration, and not meaningful now. Rather it seems that an excess of people combined with globalization, results in cultural extinctions. I find this categorically different than the prior criteria, believing that adaptation in evolution will result in ongoing cultural changes in any event.

A “critical mass” distributional criteria similarly perplexes me, although I understand the cultural value of urbanization. These two criteria seem more like value judgments based on the cultural biases of the authors, who live in the developed world.

Next is the need to protect biodiversity. Obviously each human displaces (or alters habitat potentially useful for) other life forms, with the partial exception of human parasites. Biodiversity, they explain, is anthropocentrically valuable as part of our habitat and is necessary for our health. It also provides aesthetic pleasure. They then add the ethical responsibility of humans to minimize species loss. Cultural bias seems involved in the latter two elements, but it is arguable that they reflect universal human values.

The authors then add the key value of human freedom that was mentioned in the introduction:

“In general, we would choose a population size that maximizes very broad environmental and social options for individuals.” (Daily, et al., 1994)

For a different perspective, let’s turn again to Zhang Zhirong on China’s population: “According to The China Academy of Sciences, and based on estimated land resources, the optimum population in China is 950 million now, and 1.16 billion by 2000.” (Zhirong, 1994). Zhirong then states that China’s carrying capacity, also based on “land resources” is no more than 1.6 billion. He believes that serious environmental and social problems exist and will worsen as China’s population first exceeds the optimum level, and then the carrying capacity level. Maybe China expected to add some land resources between 1994 and 2000. What other variables could cause it’s optimum population to go up by 7% in six years? No answer is given in the report.

Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel winner in Physics and Harvard professor, said in a presentation to colleagues: “Would a total world population of about one billion as existed two hundred years ago represent a reasonable compromise between quantity and quality of human life? The answer…clearly involves value judgments.” (Bloembergen, 1996)

J. Kenneth Smail, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has an argument for “…a sustainable optimum of approximately 2 billion by the beginning of the 23rd century.” He presents much evidence that mere stabilization during the 21st century will result in a “future demographic catastrophe.” (Smail, 1995)

I see no clear way, given the current cultural, economic, and geophysical variables of societies on earth, to expect a consensus for approximating an optimum human population. Stabilization, or equilibrium, if it is to be realized anytime soon, would seem to be based on fragmented actions, or unintentional outcomes. What is obvious from my investigations is that most concerned with the issue believe that the desired direction for human population is downward.

PROSPECTS

“Nobody knows if a steady state population could be reached by the year 2050. Perhaps a period of negative population growth could be envisioned…hopefully not be caused by …war, famine, and pestilence.” (Bloembergen)

We have discussed a variety of influences on human reproduction. Included were inherent predispositions and individual responses to environmental and social conditions. We also explored possible policy options, which many believe have the potential to influence our demographic future. Besides the institutional obstacles mentioned, there are some common misconceptions by many well-meaning people. I will mention only one, which, if sufficiently countered, might abet a more humane resolution.

The environment and social justice are issues, which have growing support among those able to think about more than their immediate material needs. Advocates seem certain that their own issue is the most important one, but many fail to question its sufficiency. A typical response to the introduction of the overpopulation factor is that the rich should reduce their consumption and waste production instead of chiding the poor people of the planet. This demonstrates a lack of knowledge that the poor have been clamoring for our aid in population matters, and that they have banded together to help themselves. Provision of such aid is not a substitute for encouraging conservation and cleaner economies at home. There is no either/or involved. Both are desirable.

In 1989, as verified by The UN Population Fund, the following countries signed a statement urging early stabilization of human population. Austria, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bhutan, Botswana, Cape Verde, China, Columbia, Cyprus, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Fiji, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Jordon, Kenya, Rep. of Korea, Liberia, Malta, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal, Nigeria, Panama, Philippines, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, Vanuatu, and Zimbabwe. Note the absence of most wealthy nations. It is ridiculous to claim that the rich are trying to coerce the poor nations to reduce population. In fact, they are not responding to the affirmed needs of the poor.

The following countries are part of either the South Commission or Partners in Population and Development: Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, China, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Ivory Ciast, Jamaica, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yugoslavia (former), and Western Samoa. The “Partners” share expertise with each other in reproductive health, appropriate technologies, and population policy. The Challenge to the South: Report of the South Commission, included this unequivocal statement:

” In the long run the problem of overpopulation of the countries of the South can be fully resolved only through their development. But action to contain the rise of population cannot be postponed.” (Nyerere, 1990)

Easier said than done. Nature will provide, as they say, but what percentages of any “cure” will be higher mortality versus lower fertility? What percentages of lower fertility could be due to wilful constraint versus physiological changes? We may have some choice in the answers to these questions, but acts of omission (purposeful inaction) decrease that possibility. Smail says he is “cautiously optimistic” that humans will take global action based on “an individual and collective concern for posterity.”

Bloembergen summarizes six measures proposed by Joel Cohen, which have been widely supported. “Educate and empower women; educate men; promote the distribution of contraceptives; save the children, improve the economics in developing countries; all of the above.” Abernethy strongly supports the empowerment and education of women. The economic element may need refinement to address the “opportunity model” (Abernethy and Smail) in which population expands in synch with perceived future well-being. This is the most difficult element of feedback to address in my opinion, since the poor naturally and expectedly strive for better material conditions. Perhaps sustainable development combined with other comprehensive measures is the right approach. Traditional development with minimal population policy action is a recipe for continued suffering by humans and the rest of the planet, only greater in scope and severity.

Udall’s essay calls for the establishment of “a direct-to-the-people non-profit organization financed by a consortium of billionaires.” It would be primarily locally staffed, and deliver women to women reproductive health services to the poorest nations of the world. The Ted Turner, Bill Gates, George Soros, Rockefeller, Packard, and many other foundations have recognized the importance of this issue. It may well be that those enmeshed in fierce economic competition are blinkered by their focus to succeed, while those who are very rich have the opportunity to step back and look farther into the future. A trillion dollars in assets passed to progeny can’t by itself guarantee them a peaceful planet, clean air and water, delicious healthy food, and the joys of a diverse natural environment.

A primary need is for human action to accelerate systemic feedback to augment womens’ empowerment, health, and education. The technical means already exist to control fertility. A second, and not previously mentioned challenge is the need for system science methodology to grow worldwide and to ultimately replace irrational, power based approaches to social organization. Overpopulation is but one of the global issues we must address; and the principle of the weak link applies to the whole system.

REFERENCES

Abernethy, Virginia D., 1993, Population Politics, The Choices That Shape Our Future, New York, Plenum

Abernethy, Virginia D., 1994, The Democratic Transition Revisited, Report of

The Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security

Adams, John H., 1997, What Matters Most, The Amicus Journal, 19(1)

Bailey, Ronald, 2000, Earth Day Then and Now, Reason, May 2000

Bartlett, Albert A., 1996, The Exponential Function, The Physics Teacher, 34

Bloembergen, Nicolaas, 1996, Focus, 7(1)

Buchanan, Bruce, 1997, Human Freedom and Cybernetic Principles, Proceedings of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome, Spring 1997

Coale, Ansley, 1989, The Demographic Transition, Proceedings of the International Population Conference, Liege, Vol 1

Daily, G., Ehrlich, A., and Ehrlich, P., 1994, Optimum Human Population Size, Population and Environment, 15(6)

Diamond, Jared, 1993, The Third Chimpanzee, Harperperennial Library

Ehrlich, Paul, 1976, The Population Bomb, Amereon Ltd.

Farb, Peter, 1978, Humankind, Houghton Mifflin Company

Homer-Dixon, T., Boutwell, J., and Rathjens, G. 1993, Environmental Change and Violent Conflict, Scientific American, 268(2)

Nyerere, Julius, 1990, The Challenge to the South, Oxford University Press

Rees, William E., 1990, Sustainable Development and the Biosphere, Teilhard Studies 23(Spring)

Smail, J.K., 1995, Confronting the 21st Century’s Hidden Crisis, NPG Forum, Aug.

Stott, D.H., 1962, Five Cultural and Natural Checks on Population Growth, Culture and the Evolution of Man, Oxford University Press

Udall, Stewart L., 2000, Population Control: A New Paradigm, The Seattle Times, February 11

Weeks, J.R., 1990, How to Influence Fertility: The Experience So Far, NPG Forum

Zhirong, Zhang, 1994, Identifying Population Security Links and Optimum Population Considerations, Report of the Third Conference of the International Consortium for the Study of Environmental Security

Steven B. Kurtz, a philosophy graduate of New York University, is a member of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome. He was an Assistant Director of Merrill Lynch International Bank during a twenty-five year career in financial derivatives. After nine years organic gardening in New Hampshire, he now does research and volunteer work in ecological economics and sustainable futures with several organizations.

Reposted from Countercurrents.

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”

The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren’t even trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth’s population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the United Nations.

And what about those billionaires and their billions? Can they stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world history will do it. Here’s why:

Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”

Other voices are darker, shrill: “We’re past the point of no return.” “It’s already too late.” “The end is near.” As with Rome’s collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it “WWIII: The Population Wars.” A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues” Population unrest would then create “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” And “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond’s 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the ‘demographic bulge’ with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people.” And if the “bulge” stops for any reason, game over. Economic “growth” ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond’s equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: “Official [U.N.] projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.” Still, that’s 23% more than today’s 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Population’s the new “third-rail” for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America’s population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: “There are ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population.” But he adds, they “consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it’s current impact.” And yet, that’s exactly what happens with “all third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards.”

Folks, we oversold the American dream. Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3 billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

“What really counts,” says Diamond, “is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.” First-world citizens “consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World.” So the race is on: “Low impact people are becoming high-impact people” aspiring “to first-world living standards.” The American dream is now the global dream.

Warning: The “Impact Multiplier” will drive the global “WWIII-Population Wars” equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond’s masterpiece, “Collapse,” the two key variables are what we call the “Over-Population Multiplier” and “Population Impact Multiplier.” Now let’s closely examine Diamond’s other 10 variables that are driving our “WWIII-Population Wars” equation:

3. Food

Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They “have collapsed or are in steep decline” forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The U.N. calls the global food crisis a “silent tsunami.” Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day.

In “The End of Plenty,” National Geographic warns that even a new “green revolution” of “synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds” may fail. Why? A joint World Bank/U.N. study “concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor.”

Meanwhile, a Time cover story warns that America’s “addiction to meat” has led to farming that’s “destructive of the soil, the environment and us.”

4. Water

Diamond warns: “Most of the world’s fresh water in rivers and lakes is already being used for irrigation, domestic and industrial water,” transportation, fisheries and recreation. Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: “Today over a million people lack access to reliable safe drinking water.” British International Development Minister recently warned that two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries by 2015.

Water will trade like oil futures as wars are fought over water and other basic essentials noted earlier in Fortune’s analysis of the Pentagon report predicting that warfare will define human life in this scenario of the near future.

5. Farmland

Crop soils are “being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation,” much higher in forests where the soil-erosion rate is “between 500 and 10,000 times” replacement rate. And this is increasing in today’s new age of the 100,000-acre megafires.

6. Forests

We are destroying natural habitats and rain forests at an accelerating rate. Half the world’s original forests have been converted to urban developments. A quarter of what remains will be converted in the next 50 years.

7. Toxic chemicals

Often our solutions create more problems than they solve. For example, industries “manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals” that break down slowly or not at all. Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.

8. Energy resources: oil, natural gas and coal

Pimco manages $747 billion: equity, bonds and commodity funds. Manager Bill Gross recently described a “significant break” in the world’s “growth pattern.” He’s betting we’re past the “peak oil” tipping point. Consumer shopping will continue declining as economies grow very slowly in the future and “corporate profits will be static.”

A recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal warns of the “7 Myths About Alternative Energy.” Are biofuels, solar and nuclear the “major ticket?” No, they’re not, never will be.

9. Solar energy

Sunlight is not unlimited. Diamond: We’re already using “half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity” and we will reach the max by mid-century. In “Plundering the Amazon,” Bloomberg Markets magazine warned that Alcoa, Cargill and other companies “have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world’s largest rain forest … robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming.”

Free market capitalism may be the enemy of survival.

10. Ozone layer

“Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere” where they can destroy the protective ozone or absorb and reduce solar energy.

11. Diversity

“A significant fraction of wild species, populations and genetic diversity has been lost, and at present rates, a large percent of the rest will disappear in half century.”

12. Alien species

Transferring species to lands where they’re not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects, “preying on, parasitizing, infecting or outcompeting” native animals and plants that lack evolutionary resistance.

In spite of the clear message in Diamond’s 12 time-bombs, he still says he’s a “cautious optimist.” What fuels his hope? Our leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”

Unfortunately, history tells us that cautious leaders are myopic, driven more by self-interest and nationalism than courage and long-term thinking. Eventually they’re caught off guard and their worlds collapse, fast. They only respond to crises.

And, yes, out of crisis may come opportunity. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman put it in his classic, “Capitalism and Freedom:” “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change” because in the aftermath of crisis “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Too many, however, delay and respond to crises with too little, too late.

Bottom line: The betting odds are 100% that global leaders will wait for a Pentagon-style “black swan” crisis before acting. Unfortunately, that delay positions the “WWIII: The Population Wars” dead ahead.

(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.

02 April, 2010
Candobetter.org

The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind:
1. The exponential function. Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can’t get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, your town can double in population in a mere generation at this deceptively incremental pace.

2. Efficiency paradoxes. People don’t understand that efficiencies, outside the context of a steady state economy, by making things cheaper only provoke more consumption and growth. (eg. Jevons Paradox, Khazoom-Brooks postulate).

3. Social justice doesn’t solve resource shortages . The integrity of the lifeboat is more important than how the passengers treat each other. Food can be shared equitably between passengers, but if there are too many passengers, the boat will sink. The law of gravity doesn’t care about social justice, human rights or human political arrangements. Moral laws, whether handed down by Stephen Lewis, Dr. William Rees or Moses, are trumped by bio-physical laws. Socialists, liberals, federal Greens, clergymen and humanitarians simply don’t get it. There ain’t enough to go around, however justly and efficiently things are managed or distributed. And economists of course, are equally delusional, if not mad for believing that with some technological ‘fix’ we can ‘grow’ the limits.

4. Limiting factors. The weakest link in the chain can bring a society to its knees. It can have everything in abundance, but a shortage in just one critical area can prove its undoing. This to me is the source of this current fashion of assigning “sustainability” to a series of sectors thought to enjoy some independence from others. It is this misconception which I find most pernicious.

Buzzwords

Like the word “green”, “sustainable” or “sustainability” has become the buzzword of the millennia. Corporations and governments of the left or right feel compelled to dress up the most ecologically invasive development proposal or economic activity with assurances that it is “sustainable”. Employed as an adjective it coats the unpalatable with the sweet syrup of delectability rendering the bitter pill of upheaval and damage neutral in flavour. Growth not couched in green psychobabble went down like Buckley’s Mixture, but “sustainable growth”, “sustainable tourism” and “sustainable agriculture” on the other hand tastes like sugary cough syrup. Such is the Newspeak of contemporary growthism, the vocabulary of deceit that promises a new kind of capitalism, capitalism in a green velvet glove, business as usual with apparent sensitivity to environmental concerns that will nevertheless satisfy the shareholders.

Trade-offs or the Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns

But even the compromise suggested by oxymoronic terminology does not apparently suffice to satisfy the corporate agenda. As can be witnessed in the tourist industry, economic considerations have achieved a delusional parity in a “holistic” paradigm that sees “environmental” sustainability balanced off against “economic” and “cultural” sustainability. In this three-legged stool model of viability, environmental issues must compete with other “sustainability” concerns on a level playing field with other equally valid objectives so as to achieve the optimal “trade-offs”. This misconception may be termed “The Fallacy of Equivalent Concerns”. It is the assumption that would, if applied to the human physiognomy, rate the heart as an organ of equal importance to every other organ of the body when in fact, as we know, a patient can survive with one lung, or one kidney , or a colonoscopy, or brain impairment, but when his heart stops all of these important but ancillary parts die with the patient. The economy is a subsidiary part of society. It is, as former World Bank economist Herman Daly described it, “a fully owned branch plant of the environment. “ We make our living in an economy, but we live in a biosphere.

Environmental externalisation doesn’t change Mother Nature’s rules

Case in point. Newfoundland politicians were warned that the cod fishery was not sustainable, but they replied that without the cod fishery, Newfoundland’s economy was not sustainable, so the fishermen of Newfoundland continued to fish. Nature replied that what the economy of Newfoundland required was irrelevant, and so refused to yield more cod. In any such contest, nature’s agenda prevails. Similarly politicians and developers want the city of Phoenix, already at 3 million people, to grow even further. Mother Nature’s City Council, however, has set limits to the volume of water available in aquifers. One day folks in Phoenix, together with 15 million other refugees in America’s south east, will discover that any economy without water is not sustainable. The needs and wants of an economy cannot trespass carrying capacity. Nature imposes boundaries. Without clean air, productive soils, replenished aquifers—without biodiversity services—any economy will collapse. And once the environment is trashed, try milking your “robust” economy for tax revenues to buy another one. Yet that is what corporate and government green wash implies. Former social democratic Premier of British Columbia, Mike Harcourt, crystallized this confusion with a classic line of obsolete reasoning, “To have a healthy environment we need a healthy economy.” He does not seem to understand that the environment was doing quite well before human activity arrived to “manage” it. His underlying assumption seems to be that the environment is an externality, a desirable luxury that we can only “afford” once we have achieved economic “prosperity”. This reasoning is equivalent to saying that yes, while it is desirable that I have a triple bypass operation, I must postpone the operation until I can afford it by continuing to work overtime at my strenuous job.

Environmental passengers

Imagine if the officers on board the sinking Titanic claimed that the cabins on the third deck were sustainable because each had a barrel of water, ten sacks of beans, a compost, renewable energy and a water-tight door. Trouble is, they would not be sustainable 5 miles underwater. Every cabin was rendered unsustainable when the Titanic itself was unsustainable after the collision. Similarly, the space shuttle Challenger could have been said to have a sustainable oxygen supply, a sustainable food supply, a sustainable waste disposal system, and a sustainable crew compartment. But one “O” ring was the limiting factor that made the Challenger unsustainable. All the other “sustainable” aspects on that space ship were rendered unsustainable by the explosion that blew the crew compartment away, eventually crashing it into the sea. Until it hit the water, apart from the loss of air pressure, the crew survived in a ‘sustainable’ compartment. Our economy and our culture are like that crew compartment. They are completely dependent on the health of the environment. Without the estimated $33 trillion in free biodiversity services, we’re toast. Trash the environment if you like but the so-called ‘prosperity’ you achieve won’t buy you a new one.

Misunderstanding the structure of the real world

We still believe that we can negotiate with nature on our own terms. We can pursue business-as-usual just by genuflecting to trendy green shibboleths. Government and corporate communiqués are now laced with green-growthist double-talk. Try this from a discussion paper from the Planning Department of a typical Canadian city. Note how it attempts to appease environmental concerns with trendyisms while remaining faithful to the political mandate to keep growing as usual: “Several growth allocation/land use scenarios will…be developed and tested for impacts on various sustainability criteria (financial, environmental, social and cultural).” In other words, there are several criteria for sustainability, and the environment is just one of them. So Mother Nature, stand back. Get to the back of the line and wait your turn until cultural and economic needs have been satisfied.

Hair splitting

Of course, what exactly constitutes “sustainability” is a matter of some debate among ecologists. As one wildlife biologist commented in response to this critique, “Because natural systems are always changing or ‘dynamic’ there seems to be some disturbing latitude in what we consider a sustained ecosystem. What degree of impairment can a system tolerate before it loses the very characteristics that ‘define’ it? The term ‘integrity’ often emerges in these discussions with predictable results. It is much easier to define what constitutes unsustainable or an irreversible change in the system. A boreal forest without fire disturbance is no longer “sustainable”? Or, can forestry be made to replace this disturbance? At what point do we no longer have a boreal forest? This does not at all detract from your argument that clearly shows that without a sustainable natural environment, all other constructs of “sustainability” are meaningless.” A dead planet indeed can achieve an equilibrium, but it cannot sustain life. And this may come as a shock to economists and nationalists alike, but human economic activity, culture, language and customs cannot exist without living human beings.

Sustainability doesn’t come in different brands

Even those organizations committed to imposing limits have succumbed to this flawed understanding. An emerging immigration reform organization declares, as one of its aims, “To promote the creation of a sustainable Canada through urgently needed reform of immigration policies that are in the national interest.” Well and good. But then one opinion has it that this proposal “has some merit because it implies sustainability across a number of areas—cultural and institutional as well as environmental.” But mass immigration is not, as Samuel Gompers characterized it, fundamentally a labour issue, nor is it a cultural one. It is not about how many people our economy requires or how many people our culture can assimilate but how many people our environment can sustain. Contemporary culture as we know it cannot survive an ecological meltdown. The nation itself would not endure. When the water you drink is polluted or inaccessible, when the farmland needed to provide food to Canadians after international trade collapses with stratospheric fuel costs, when our exhausted soils starved of fossil-fuel based fertilizers cannot yield crops, when our forests are mowed down and the air unfit to breath, the fact that a lot people in the neighbourhood are wearing strange clothing or speaking in foreign tongues will be of little importance. Cultural “sustainability” in this context will be a mirage. There is ultimately only one “sustainability”. The sustainability of the whole, not its constituent parts.

Tim Murray is an environmental writer and activist, and Vice President of Biodiversity First

14 December , 2009
Countercurrents.org

As my regular readers know, I’ve spent much of this year contemplating big themes, like the long-term picture for energy, energy and monetary policy, black swans and the human penchant for valuing the present more than the future, the problems of complex systems like the energy-food-water nexus, sustainability, and the relationship between climate change and peak oil.

As this year draws to a close and I review my work, the biggest question that emerges is about why it is so incredibly difficult to reach people on these subjects.

It’s more than the usual culprits. Yes, the corporate media and the ad-supported business model are problems — like when I was called a “peak freak” on television and given no opportunity to respond to my opponent’s disinformation.

Yes, the overweening influence of corporate lobbyists has effectively neutralized policy and confused the public debate on our most serious problems. Yes, the capitalistic system favors short-term concentrated profits over long-term public good. And yes, the simple human preference for happy talk over sad stories plays a role in our denial.

The real problem is much more pervasive. Those actors cannot explain more fundamental questions:

Why has our economic theory failed us?
Why is the reality of climate change so hard to accept?
Why does climate change dominate public dialogue while the more proximate threat of peak oil remains far off the radar?
Why do we have such resistance to change?
Why would anyone ever think Dubai World was a good idea?
Why is talking about population control — arguably the only real way out of our predicament — taboo?

For over 40 years, our public dialogue has gotten progressively dumber and more polarized. The one “town hall meeting” I attended on health care was a horrifying display of tribal theater, with both sides screaming at the other and drowning out the elected official. It did not even remotely resemble intelligent discussion of issues.

Our news media have substituted entertainment for information and sponsor-endorsed opinion for neutral reportage, while the literacy of the public and the capacity for critical thought have progressively declined. Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Chomsky, and a long line of others have decried it all along.

Yet it persists, and grows. Why?

Addicted to Fantasy

I discovered a partial answer to this question in the terrific new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by veteran journalist Chris Hedges. He argues that America has been slowly transformed into a nation entranced by Horatio Alger-wrapped fantasies of personal wealth, fame, and power. Our culture has been utterly subsumed by a fantasy world, he says, in which celebrity worship, dumbed-down “news,” and consumer messaging form an impenetrable veil of manipulated reality.

Hedges offers some compelling evidence: Nearly a third of the population is almost or fully illiterate. A third of high school graduates, and 42% of college graduates, never read another book for the rest of their lives. Eighty percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read one book in 2007. We did, however, watch 28 hours a week of television. Each.

Television, where we have hundreds of channels but nothing is on… nothing but unimaginative, formulaic entertainment packages for highly crafted messages designed to make you buy, buy, buy.

Jon Stewart offered a great example this week in his takedown of Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson — a high school class valedictorian, Stanford honors graduate, and former Miss America with classical violin chops — who pretended to resort to the dictionary to find out what the words “ignoramus,” “double-dip recession,” and “czar” meant.

Instead of discussing the content or import of the leaked “Climategate” emails, Carlson cited a poll asking if global warming research had been falsified… a poll which added up to 120%. Public opinion, however dumb, is now more important than facts.

I had to sort though dozens of articles and hours of radio and television that merely repeated the corruption allegations before discovering two decent articles (at New Scientist and Real Climate) that described what the “scandalous” e-mails said and what they meant.

What I found was… nothing interesting. Just scientists, doing their regular jobs of sorting through and correcting the errors in data.

But a few words, made in private conversation and taken out of context, is all Sen. James Inhofe and his tribe of right-wing activists needed to renew their assault on climate change legislation. His effort is no doubt enabled by the fact that only 11 of the 538 members of the Senate and House have backgrounds in science or engineering, and most are functionally illiterate about energy or climate science.

In fact, the deniers have no alternate scientific theory for global warming, nor do they care to formulate one. They only need to cast doubt on the existing research and claim that the scientific process has been corrupted.

The actual significance of the science, or lack thereof, in Climategate was quickly rendered irrelevant; that irrelevance was then seized and gloriously amplified in the media. The spectacle is more exciting than the dull facts about the science, so the media only care to perpetuate the spectacle. It’s entertainment, not news.

The “climate change is bunk” message was sent, but how many Americans who heard it then spent any effort trying to figure out what the e-mail leak actually meant, as I did? I’m guessing very few.

Perhaps a third of the public now believes that there is some sort of conspiracy to destroy the economy by taking action on climate change. The obvious lack of any conspirators is irrelevant. Merely saying there is a conspiracy is enough.

Global media king Rupert Murdoch pounded the final nail into the Fourth Estate’s coffin this week in a Wall Street Journal editorial where he argued passionately that media should only give consumers what they want. Government help, non-profit status, or any other mechanism that would support journalism without a profit motive is insidiously evil in his view. Yet he asserts that merely giving customers what they want — even if they only want illusions and circuses, and have no patience for thoughtful discussion of matters like policy or science — produces a free and informed citizenry.

This seems an utterly indefensible stance. The Fourth Estate is much wider, but also considerably shallower now than it was in 1888 when Oscar Wilde wrote: “The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.”

Our appetite for illusion has made us, as Aldous Huxley feared, a nation of passive, self-centered consumer idiots, endlessly distracted by trivia and irrelevance, embedded in a alternate reality matrix, saturated with information we don’t comprehend, easily confused, and easily led down paths we would never choose if we were informed and thinking clearly.

Peter Pan Meets Financial Truck Bomb

If you think I’m off on a tangential rant here, let me bring it home, for it has everything to do with our utter failure to respond in a meaningful way to our impending challenges, and with investing in general.

An outstanding and extremely important recent white paper by an oil and gas exploration consultant, “The Tragedy of 21 Darts,” confirmed the worst of what I have come to understand about the game of projecting oil and gas reserves. Reserve calculations are essentially mathematical simulations, which are regularly distorted and misrepresented by the companies that claim them. As a hedge fund manager and oil and gas producer friend of mine commented on the paper, “The oil and gas business is a bunch of holes in the ground with liars on top.”

To understand what you’re buying as an oil and gas investor, you’d have to spend many hours digging through technical papers full of unfamiliar jargon. You’d have to be able to read critically and understand probability distributions. I’ve done it, and it’s hard work. Harder than most people are willing to do.

The regulators and policymakers won’t read that paper, nor will most of the industry’s investors. As a result of this ignorance, the author warns, new SEC regulations will set off “a financial truck bomb that’s going to blow away ‘proved reserves’ as a meaningful metric of oil company assets” in January. The liars will get away with it… at least until the wells run dry.

This is why peddlers of absurd fantasies about the future of oil production, like Phil Flynn and Dan Yergin, are in the press and on the TV every day, while the people like me — patiently and diligently sorting through the facts and the fictions in search of reality — are continually marginalized.

This is why wingnuts like Sen. Inhofe get more airtime than those who could explain what the science on climate change really says.

This is why simple, rational solutions to our tangle of developing crises — like resource scarcity planning, or carbon taxes, or population control — are immediately disregarded as unworkable.

And it’s why we elect leaders who massage our egos and assure us that everything will be fine, when it clearly won’t.

If it doesn’t conform to our fantasies and the people don’t want it, then men like Murdoch will ensure we don’t get it. But they’ll happily sell us snake oil like space-based solar power for as long as we keep buying it.

We are not only lost in our illusions… we’re in love with them.

We desperately want to believe that there are no physical limits to our insatiable desires, even on a finite planet. We’d rather poke holes in the multiplying signs that humanity on Planet Earth is fundamentally in overshoot than face the hard work of figuring out how to adapt and survive.

We’re clinging to 17th Century remnants of the Age of Enlightenment, still trying to believe that humanity has a special elevated place above Nature when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it does not. Our models of the future, our economic theory, our educational regimen, our personal and cultural ambitions, our national identity, even our very conception of Man’s place in Creation have been rendered intellectually bankrupt. But we refuse to see it.

Our emotional progress is even worse. We’ve barely budged from total nihilism to tribalism… “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” and all that rot.

We can’t afford to go on this way because, as James Baldwin put it in the prologue to Hedges’ book: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”

It’s Up to You Now

In the absence of rational leadership, neutral journalism for the public good, or a free and informed citizenry, the task of meeting the challenges ahead falls to each of us, individually. There is no “them” who are going to sort all this out. There is only “us.”

We have to own the problems of energy, food, water, climate change, population, and investments that don’t go sour. They’re ours.

So will be the solutions. Fortunately, there is much we can do.

Concentrate on efficiency first: Insulate your house. Get a more efficient vehicle and more efficient appliances. When an opportunity like Cash for Clunkers/Caulkers comes around, jump on it. Try to limit your driving and use public transit. Move closer to work, or vice versa.

Then do something on the supply side: Add solar PV and solar hot water to your house. Tear up your lawn and plant a vegetable garden, even if it means paying a fine to your HOA.

Rebalance your investment portfolio with a view toward long-term sustainability. Limit your exposure to dollar-denominated assets and invest in hard assets. Do your own due diligence. Eliminate your debt as quickly as possible.

Instead of hoping that your fantasies of wealth will be restored when the economy recovers, think about how you can live within your means if it never does.

And finally, don’t wait for leadership in Washington. Be a leader, wherever you are. Work toward sustainable solutions, not at town hall meetings — but with your family, neighbors, friends, and local governments.

Until next time,

Chris

Republished from Countercurrents.

ATHENS, GA—Air quality in homes, offices, and other indoor spaces is becoming a major health concern, particularly in developed countries where people often spend more than 90% of their time indoors. Surprisingly, indoor air has been reported to be as much as 12 times more polluted than outdoor air in some areas. Indoor air pollutants emanate from paints, varnishes, adhesives, furnishings, clothing, solvents, building materials, and even tap water. A long list of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs [including benzene, xylene, hexane, heptane, octane, decane, trichloroethylene (TCE), and methylene chloride], have been shown to cause illnesses in people who are exposed to the compounds in indoor spaces. Acute illnesses like asthma and nausea and chronic diseases including cancer, neurologic, reproductive, developmental, and respiratory disorders are all linked to exposure to VOCs. Harmful indoor pollutants represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year, according to a 2002 World Health Organization report. 

Stanley J. Kays, Department of Horticulture, University of Georgia, was the lead researcher of a study published in HortScience that tested ornamental indoor plants for their ability to remove harmful VOCs from indoor air. According to Kays, some indoor plants have the ability to effectively remove harmful VOCs from the air, and not only have the ability to improve our physical health, but also have been shown to enhance our psychological health. Adding these plants to indoor spaces can reduce stress, increase task performance, and reduce symptoms of ill health. 

The ability of plants to remove VOCs is called “phytoremediation”. To better understand the phytoremediation capacity of ornamental plants, the research team tested 28 common indoor ornamentals for their ability to remove five volatile indoor pollutants. “The VOCs tested in this study can adversely affect indoor air quality and have a potential to seriously compromise the health of exposed individuals,” Kays explained. “Benzene and toluene are known to originate from petroleum-based indoor coatings, cleaning solutions, plastics, environmental tobacco smoke, and exterior exhaust fumes emanating into the building; octane from paint, adhesives, and building materials; TCE from tap water, cleaning agents, insecticides, and plastic products; and alpha-pinene from synthetic paints and odorants.” 

During the research study, plants were grown in a shade house for eight weeks followed be acclimatization for twelve weeks under indoor conditions before being placed in gas-tight glass jars. The plants were exposed to benzene, TCE, toluene, octane, and alpha-pinene, and air samples were analyzed. The plants were then classified as superior, intermediate, and poor, according to their ability to remove VOCs. 

Of the 28 species tested, Hemigraphis alternata (purple waffle plant), Hedera helix (English ivy), Hoya carnosa (variegated wax plant), and Asparagus densiflorus (Asparagus fern) had the highest removal rates for all of the VOCs introduced. Tradescantia pallida (Purple heart plant) was rated superior for its ability to remove four of the VOCs. 

The study concluded that simply introducing common ornamental plants into indoor spaces has the potential to significantly improve the quality of indoor air. In addition to the obvious health benefits for consumers, the increased use of indoor plants in both ”green” and traditional buildings could have a tremendous positive impact on the ornamental plant industry by increasing customer demand and sales. 

### 

The complete study and abstract are available on the ASHS HortScience electronic journal web site: http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/5/1377

Founded in 1903, the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) is the largest organization dedicated to advancing all facets of horticultural research, education, and application. More information at ashs.org

COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?

“In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

“In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

“The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation,” says Brown in Plan B 4.0.  But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

A World Bank study of India’s water balance notes that 15 percent of its grain harvest is produced by overpumping. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

“The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages,” says Brown. “It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.”

“Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven—a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.”

These trends include—in addition to falling water tables—eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

 With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Brown notes, “Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world’s second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia’s many rice-growing river deltas.”

“The world’s mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season.”

The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world’s leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers if we stay with business as usual poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. It then climbed to 915 million in 2008 and jumped to over 1 billion in 2009. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people, leaving millions of families trying to survive on one meal per day.

“We know from studying earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others,” says Brown, “that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilization as well.

“The world is entering a new food era, one marked by rising food prices, growing numbers of hungry people, and an emerging politics of food scarcity. As grain-exporting countries restrict or even ban exports to keep domestic food prices from spiraling out of control, importing countries are losing confidence in the market’s ability to supply their needs. In response, the more affluent ones such as Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea are leasing and buying large tracts of land in developing countries on which to grow food for themselves.”

Among the countries in which large tracts of land are being acquired are Ethiopia and Sudan, both already heavily dependent on World Food Programme lifelines to stave off famine. In effect, the competition for land and water, in the form of land acquisitions, has crossed national boundaries, opening a new chapter in the history of food security.

Our early twenty-first century civilization is showing signs of stress as individual countries compete not only for scarce food but also for the land and water to produce it. People expect their governments to provide food security. Indeed, the inability to do so is one of the hallmarks of a failing state. Each year the list of failing states grows longer, leaving us with a disturbing question: How many failing states before our global civilization begins to unravel?

“Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course—and do it before time runs out?” asks Brown. “Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.”

Plan B aims to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million. “In setting this goal,” says Brown, “my colleagues and I did not ask what would be politically popular but rather what would it take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia.”

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The energy efficiency revolution will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescents to compact fluorescent bulbs can reduce electricity use for lighting by 75 percent. But shifting from incandescents to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs) combined with light sensors can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent.

At least one of the new plug-in gas electric hybrids coming to market can get over 200 miles per gallon of gasoline. In the Plan B energy economy of 2020, most of the fleet will be plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars, and they will be running largely on wind-generated electricity for the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 per gallon.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago. Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived as China appears set to blow by the United States in new wind capacity added in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. A German firm calculates that solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. Algeria, which has already completed its first solar thermal plant, has signed an agreement to supply Germany with solar-generated electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.)

“The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself,” says Brown. “In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.”

The combination of efficiency advances, the wholesale shift to renewable energy, and expansion of the earth’s tree cover outlined in Plan B would allow the world to cut net global carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. In contrast to today’s global electricity sector, where coal supplies 40 percent of electricity, Plan B sees wind emerging as the centerpiece in the 2020 energy economy, supplying 40 percent of all electricity.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilize population by lowering birth rates before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising death rates?

“Yes,” affirms Brown. “But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

by carl zimmer

Human civilization has had a stable childhood. Over the past 10,000 years, as our ancestors invented agriculture and built cities, the Earth remained relatively stable. The average global temperature fluttered slightly, never lurching towards a greenhouse climate or chilling enough to enter a new Ice Age. The pH of the oceans remained steady, providing the right chemical conditions for coral reefs to grow and invertebrates to build shells. Those species, in turn, helped support a stable food web that provided plenty of fish for us humans to catch. The overall stability of the past 10,000 years may have played a big part in humanity’s explosion.

Now, ironically, civilization has become so powerful that it can reshape the planet itself. “We have become a force to contend with at the global level,” as Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, puts it. Humans have changed the chemistry of Earth’s oceans, lowering their pH and causing ocean acidification. We are shifting the composition of the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide higher than they’ve been in at least the past 800,000 years.

A number of scientists have warned in recent years that if we keep pushing the planet this way, we will cause sudden, irreversible damage to the systems that made human civilization possible in the first place. Typically, they’ve just focused on one of these tipping points at a time. But in today’s issue of the journal Nature, Rockstrom and 27 of his fellow environmental scientists argue that we have to conceive of many tipping points at once. They propose that humans must keep the planet in what they call a “safe operating space,” inside of which we can thrive. If we push past the boundaries of that space — by wiping out biodiversity, for example, or diverting too much of the world’s freshwater — we risk catastrophe.

Unfortunately, the authors of the Nature paper maintain, we’ve already started pushing out beyond these boundaries without knowing where they actually are. “We’re sitting on top of a mesa right now, and we’re driving around, but we don’t have our lights on and we don’t even have a map,” says Jonathan Foley, a co-author of the new study and the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “That’s a dangerous way to move around.”

In their new study, Foley and his colleagues put down stakes to mark where they believe seven of these boundaries lie. By their estimate, we have already pushed beyond three of these boundaries, and are moving quickly toward the other four. “We’re running out of time,” says Rockstrom.

The new paper has already drawn strong reactions from other scientists, some glowing, some harsh. “This kind of work is critically important,” says Christopher Field, the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. “Overall, this is an impressive attempt to define a safety zone.”

But other scientists wonder whether a planetary safety zone is a concept worth bothering with. “I don’t think this is in any way a useful way of thinking about things,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University.

Rockstrom and his colleagues developed the concept of planetary boundaries from earlier work on how natural systems change. Those  changes are sometimes gradual, but they can also come in jolts. A lake, for example, can absorb a fair amount of phosphorus from fertilizer runoff without any sign of change. “You add a little, not much happens,” says Shahid Naeem of Columbia University, who was not involved in the Nature paper. “Add a little more, not much happens. Add a little… then, all of sudden, you add a little more and — boom! — phytoplankton bloom, oxygen depletion, fish die-off, smelliness. Remove the little phosphorus that caused the tipping of the system, and it does not reverse. In fact, you have to go back to much cleaner water than you would have imagined.”

In recent years, some scientists have argued that the entire planet behaves in a similar way. Adding extra greenhouse gases can raise the planet’s temperature in a steady, proportional rate. But there may come a point when the climate will get pushed into a drastically new state. Some climate scientists have argued, for example, that global warming may trigger the runaway collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Even if we then immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases, the ice sheets would keep collapsing into the sea. And then we couldn’t do anything to reverse the change. “We don’t know how to refreeze the Greenland ice sheet,” says Rockstrom.

Rockstrom helped organize a workshop in Stockholm in April 2008 where environmental scientists talked about the other possible thresholds that might exist on a global scale. They concluded that there was good evidence for nine kinds of thresholds: climate change, ocean acidity, the ozone layer, freshwater use, the movement of nitrogen and phosphorus, the amount of land used for crops, aerosols (haze and other particles), biodiversity, and chemical pollution.

The scientists then reviewed each of those factors to mark boundaries that the world should not push beyond. “The idea is to say, ‘Let’s put up some guard rails,’” says Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont. “Maybe the guard rails are for a slope we could have taken and survived, but maybe not. We owe it to human civilization to be more careful.”

Ultimately, the scientists felt confident in estimating seven boundaries, three of which we have already pushed past. For one thing, they argue, we’ve already put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the Nature paper, has argued that to avoid catastrophic melting of ice sheets, we should keep carbon dioxide levels no higher than 350 parts per million. Before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration was at about 280 parts per million, but today we’re up to 387. In other words, we’ve moved out of the safe operating space — and into risky territory.

The scientists also argue that as we spread fertilizer on farmland and burn coal, we are pumping far too much nitrogen into the environment. Human activity releases 121 million tons of nitrogen, much of which ends up polluting rivers, lakes and oceans and potentially pushing their ecosystems into irreversible changes. At most, the scientists argue, less than 35 million tons of nitrogen would be a safe boundary.

The rate at which species are becoming extinct is also far beyond a safe boundary, according to the scientists. During most of the history of life, species have become extinct at a slow, fairly regular pace. And as old

species have become extinct, new ones have been evolving. There have been times when many species have become extinct at a much faster rate, and these pulses have sometimes ushered in a global collapse of ecosystems. The authors of the new Nature paper propose that to avoid collapse, the extinction rate cannot rise above 10 times the long-term background rate. Today, however, scientists estimate that the extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times higher.

In five other areas, the scientists found, we have not yet crossed the boundary into the danger zone. As we release carbon dioxide, for example, some of it goes into the oceans and makes it more acidic. In acidic seawater, coral reefs have a harder time building skeletons, because the minerals they produce for their skeletons quickly dissolve. Invertebrates have the same trouble making shells. According to recent surveys, the ocean is now acidifying 100 times faster than at any time during the past 20 million years. Yet the Nature co-authors estimate that we have not yet reached the point where acidity may cause ecological collapse. But we are close.

While the paper makes for a sobering read, its authors think we should also find some cause for optimism in it. Humanity nearly crossed another threshold by destroying the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons. But we recognized the crisis in time and banned chlorofluorocarbons, allowing the ozone layer to slowly recover. If we had waited much longer we might have been too late to do anything. “We were able to avoid a global disaster,” says Rockstrom. He hopes we can do the same again, and keep human civilization from falling off the environmental mesa.

“The authors make a strong case for their selection of key boundaries,” says the Carnegie Institution’s Christopher Field, “and the proposed locations for the boundaries are conceptually reasonable.” Field said he would not be surprised if other researchers argue for shifting the boundaries based on further research. “But most would agree with the general theme that we are pushing very hard on the Earth system, so hard that we should not be surprised if key parts begin to break.”

Other researchers agree with the basic concept of the new paper, but question whether we should be trying to pin down planetary boundaries. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, agrees that there probably is a dangerous threshold for climate change, but he thinks that 350 parts per million might be too strict a limit. And on a practical level, Mann points out that the policies being considered by the U.S. Congress probably won’t even be able to keep carbon dioxide levels down to 550 parts per million in 2100. “I sometimes worry that there is the danger that if we dramatically move the goalposts and argue that 350 ppm must be the stabilization target, policymakers will just throw their hands up in futility,” says Mann, or reach instead for a quick-fix geoengineering scheme, “which frankly terrifies me.”

But some critics question the basic concept itself. “The notion of a single boundary is just devoid of serious content,” says Stuart Pimm. “In what way is an extinction rate 10 times the background rate acceptable?”

One reason that the concept of planetary boundaries is so provocative is that it highlights how much scientists don’t yet understand about the thresholds built into our planet. “I think this is interesting and I’m glad the paper is coming out,” says Naeem, “but it could lead to the false sense that we understand the biosphere better than we do.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl Zimmer writes about science for The New York Times and a number of magazines. A 2007 winner of the National Academies of Science Communication Award, Zimmer is the author of six books, including Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about the high-tech search for a cleaner biofuel alternative and about using assisted migration to save species threatened by climate change.

Reposted from Environment 360.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ their entire lives – things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

The research also makes it clear that potential carbon impacts vary dramatically across countries. The average long-term carbon impact of a child born in the U.S. – along with all of its descendants – is more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. “Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources.”

In this debate, very little attention has been given to the overwhelming importance of reproductive choice, Murtaugh said. When an individual produces a child – and that child potentially produces more descendants in the future – the effect on the environment can be many times the impact produced by a person during their lifetime.

Under current conditions in the U.S., for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.

And even though some developing nations have much higher populations and rates of population growth than the U.S., their overall impact on the global equation is often reduced by shorter life spans and less consumption. The long-term impact of a child born to a family in China is less than one fifth the impact of a child born in the U.S., the study found.

As the developing world increases both its population and consumption levels, this may change.

“China and India right now are steadily increasing their carbon emissions and industrial development, and other developing nations may also continue to increase as they seek higher standards of living,” Murtaugh said.

The study examined several scenarios of changing emission rates, the most aggressive of which was an 85 percent reduction in global carbon emissions between now and 2100. But emissions in Africa, which includes 34 of the 50 least developed countries in the world, are already more than twice that level.

The researchers make it clear they are not advocating government controls or intervention on population issues, but say they simply want to make people aware of the environmental consequences of their reproductive choices.

“Many people are unaware of the power of exponential population growth,” Murtaugh said. “Future growth amplifies the consequences of people’s reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance.”

Murtaugh noted that their calculations are relevant to other environmental impacts besides carbon emissions – for example, the consumption of fresh water, which many feel is already in short supply.

Reprinted from Oregon State University

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.

Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis — a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and America’s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis.

Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control.

There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent.

While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases “food sovereignty” and “food security” on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little — a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue. When a nation loses the ability to substantially feed itself, it is not only at the mercy of global commodity markets but of other governments as well. At issue is not only the availability of food, which may be held hostage by a hostile state, but its safety: as recent scandals in China demonstrate, we have little control over the safety of imported foods. The deliberate contamination of our food presents another national-security threat. At his valedictory press conference in 2004, Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, offered a chilling warning, saying, “I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation. The American people are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its safety, its provenance and its healthfulness. There is a gathering sense among the public that the industrial-food system is broken. Markets for alternative kinds of food — organic, local, pasture-based, humane — are thriving as never before. All this suggests that a political constituency for change is building and not only on the left: lately, conservative voices have also been raised in support of reform.

Writing of the movement back to local food economies, traditional foods (and family meals) and more sustainable farming, The American Conservative magazine editorialized last summer that “this is a conservative cause if ever there was one.”

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply implicated in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves. To put the food system back on sunlight will require policies to change how things work at every link in the food chain: in the farm field, in the way food is processed and sold and even in the American kitchen and at the American dinner table. Yet the sun still shines down on our land every day, and photosynthesis can still work its wonders wherever it does. If any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.

How We Got Here

Before setting out an agenda for reforming the food system, it’s important to understand how that system came to be — and also to appreciate what, for all its many problems, it has accomplished. What our food system does well is precisely what it was designed to do, which is to produce cheap calories in great abundance. It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

Did you notice when you flew over Iowa during the campaign how the land was completely bare — black — from October to April? What you were seeing is the agricultural landscape created by cheap oil. In years past, except in the dead of winter, you would have seen in those fields a checkerboard of different greens: pastures and hayfields for animals, cover crops, perhaps a block of fruit trees. Before the application of oil and natural gas to agriculture, farmers relied on crop diversity (and photosynthesis) both to replenish their soil and to combat pests, as well as to feed themselves and their neighbors.

Cheap energy, however, enabled the creation of monocultures, and monocultures in turn vastly increased the productivity both of the American land and the American farmer; today the typical corn-belt farmer is single-handedly feeding 140 people.

This did not occur by happenstance. After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer – ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

In drafting these proposals, I’ve adhered to a few simple principles of what a 21st-century food system needs to do. First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals are admittedly ambitious, yet they will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind this One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

What happens in the field influences every other link of the food chain on up to our meals — if we grow monocultures of corn and soy, we will find the products of processed corn and soy on our plates. Fortunately for your initiative, the federal government has enormous leverage in determining exactly what happens on the 830 million acres of American crop and pasture land.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Your challenge is to take control of this vast federal machinery and use it to drive a transition to a new solar-food economy, starting on the farm. Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing “specialty crops” — farm- bill speak for fruits and vegetables.

(This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.)

Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops — including animals — a s possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale “alternative” farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant- scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can’t survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don’t survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason — save current policy and custom — that American farmers couldn’t grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest. (It should be noted that today’s sky-high grain prices are causing many Argentine farmers to abandon their rotation to grow grain and soybeans exclusively, an environmental disaster in the making.)

Federal policies could do much to encourage this sort of diversified sun farming. Begin with the subsidies: payment levels should reflect the number of different crops farmers grow or the number of days of the year their fields are green — that is, taking advantage of photosynthesis, whether to grow food, replenish the soil or control erosion. If Midwestern farmers simply planted a cover crop after the fall harvest, they would significantly reduce their need for fertilizer, while cutting down on soil erosion. Why don’t farmers do this routinely? Because in recent years fossil-fuel-based fertility has been so much cheaper and easier to use than sun-based fertility.

In addition to rewarding farmers for planting cover crops, we should make it easier for them to apply compost to their fields — a practice that improves not only the fertility of the soil but also its ability to hold water and therefore withstand drought. (There is mounting evidence that it also boosts the nutritional quality of the food grown in it.) The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions. A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America’s garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Right now, most of the conservation programs run by the U.S.D.A. are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in “conservation” or it is farmed intensively. This either-or approach reflects an outdated belief that modern farming and ranching are inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave land untouched. But we now know how to grow crops and graze animals in systems that will support biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration. The Conservation Stewardship Program, championed by Senator Tom Harkin and included in the 2008 Farm Bill, takes an important step toward rewarding these kinds of practices, but we need to move this approach from the periphery of our farm policy to the very center. Longer term, the government should back ambitious research now under way (at the Land Institute in Kansas and a handful of other places) to “perennialize” commodity agriculture: to breed varieties of wheat, rice and other staple grains that can be grown like prairie grasses — without having to till the soil every year. These perennial grains hold the promise of slashing the fossil fuel now needed to fertilize and till the soil, while protecting farmland from erosion and sequestering significant amounts of carbon.

But that is probably a 50-year project. For today’s agriculture to wean itself from fossil fuel and make optimal use of sunlight, crop plants and animals must once again be married on the farm — as in Wendell Berry’s elegant “solution.” Sunlight nourishes the grasses and grains, the plants nourish the animals, the animals then nourish the soil, which in turn nourishes the next season’s grasses and grains. Animals on pasture can also harvest their own feed and dispose of their own waste — all without our help or fossil fuel.

If this system is so sensible, you might ask, why did it succumb to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs? In fact there is nothing inherently efficient or economical about raising vast cities of animals in confinement. Three struts, each put into place by federal policy, support the modern CAFO, and the most important of these — the ability to buy grain for less than it costs to grow it — has just been kicked away. The second strut is F.D.A. approval for the routine use of antibiotics in feed, without which the animals in these places could not survive their crowded, filthy and miserable existence. And the third is that the government does not require CAFOs to treat their wastes as it would require human cities of comparable size to do. The F.D.A. should ban the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed on public-health grounds, now that we have evidence that the practice is leading to the evolution of drug- resistant bacterial diseases and to outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella poisoning. CAFOs should also be regulated like the factories they are, required to clean up their waste like any other industry or municipality.

It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will — as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.

It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you’re proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don’t know, because we haven’t tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food. The fact is, during the past century, our agricultural research has been directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuel. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex, sun-based agricultural systems wouldn’t produce comparable yields. Today’s organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, routinely achieve 80 to 100 percent of conventional yields in grain and, in drought years, frequently exceed conventional yields. (This is because organic soils better retain moisture.) Assuming no further improvement, could the world — with a population expected to peak at 10 billion — survive on these yields?

First, bear in mind that the average yield of world agriculture today is substantially lower than that of modern sustainable farming. According to a recent University of Michigan study, merely bringing international yields up to today’s organic levels could increase the world’s food supply by 50 percent.

The second point to bear in mind is that yield isn’t everything — and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food.

Much of what we’re growing today is not directly eaten as food but processed into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet- related chronic disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories that a food system produces improves health only up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important. We can expect that a food system that produces somewhat less food but of a higher quality will produce healthier populations.

The final point to consider is that 40 percent of the world’s grain output today is fed to animals; 11 percent of the world’s corn and soybean crop is fed to cars and trucks, in the form of biofuels. Provided the developed world can cut its consumption of grain-based animal protein and ethanol, there should be plenty of food for everyone — however we choose to grow it.

In fact, well-designed polyculture systems, incorporating not just grains but vegetables and animals, can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value. But this kind of farming is complicated and needs many more hands on the land to make it work.

Farming without fossil fuels — performing complex rotations of plants and animals and managing pests without petrochemicals — is labor intensive and takes more skill than merely “driving and spraying,” which is how corn-belt farmers describe what they do for a living.

To grow sufficient amounts of food using sunlight will require more people growing food — millions more. This suggests that sustainable agriculture will be easier to implement in the developing world, where large rural populations remain, than in the West, where they don’t. But what about here in America, where we have only about two million farmers left to feed a population of 300 million? And where farmland is being lost to development at the rate of 2,880 acres a day? Post- oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners.

The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land. The average American farmer today is 55 years old; we shouldn’t expect these farmers to embrace the sort of complex ecological approach to agriculture that is called for. Our focus should be on teaching ecological farming systems to students entering land-grant colleges today. For decades now, it has been federal policy to shrink the number of farmers in America by promoting capital-intensive monoculture and consolidation. As a society, we devalued farming as an occupation and encouraged the best students to leave the farm for “better” jobs in the city. We emptied America’s rural counties in order to supply workers to urban factories. To put it bluntly, we now need to reverse course. We need more highly skilled small farmers in more places all across America — not as a matter of nostalgia for the agrarian past but as a matter of national security. For nations that lose the ability to substantially feed themselves will find themselves as gravely compromised in their international dealings as nations that depend on foreign sources of oil presently do. But while there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food.

National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers. We simply will not be able to depend on distant sources of food, and therefore need to preserve every acre of good farmland within a day’s drive of our cities. In the same way that when we came to recognize the supreme ecological value of wetlands we erected high bars to their development, we need to recognize the value of farmland to our national security and require real-estate developers to do “food- system impact s tatements” before development begins. We should also create tax and zoning incentives for developers to incorporate farmland (as they now do “open space”) in their subdivision plans; all those subdivisions now ringing golf courses could someday have diversified farms at their center.

The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside.

And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

For your sun-food agenda to succeed, it will have to do a lot more than alter what happens on the farm. The government could help seed a thousand new polyculture farmers in every county in Iowa, but they would promptly fail if the grain elevator remained the only buyer in town and corn and beans were the only crops it would take. Resolarizing the food system means building the infrastructure for a regional food economy — one that can support diversified farming and, by shortening the food chain, reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet.

A decentralized food system offers a great many other benefits as well. Food eaten closer to where it is grown will be fresher and require less processing, making it more nutritious. Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience: regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks. When a single factory is grinding 20 million hamburger patties in a week or washing 25 million servings of salad, a single terrorist armed with a canister of toxins can, at a stroke, poison millions. Such a system is equally susceptible to accidental contamination: the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe.

The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.

Today in America there is soaring demand for local and regional food; farmers’ markets, of which the U.S.D.A. estimates there are now 4,700, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the food market. Community- supported agriculture is booming as well: there are now nearly 1,500 community- supported farms, to which consumers pay an annual fee in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the season. The local-food movement will continue to grow with no help from the government, especially as high fuel prices make distant and out-of- season food, as well as feedlot meat, more expensive. Yet there are several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:

Four-Season Farmers’ Markets.

Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets, on the model of Pike Place in Seattle or the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. To supply these markets, the U.S.D.A. should make grants to rebuild local distribution networks in order to minimize the amount of energy used to move produce within local food sheds.

Agricultural Enterprise Zones.

Today the revival of local food economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbors without making a huge investment in federally approved facilities. Food-safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.

This is not because local food won’t ever have food-safety problems – it will — only that its problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Local Meat-Inspection Corps.

Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the return of livestock to the land and the revival of local, grass- based meat production is the disappearance of regional slaughter facilities. The big meat processors have been buying up local abattoirs only to close them down as they consolidate, and the U.S.D.A. does little to support the ones that remain. From the department’s perspective, it is a better use of shrinking resources to dispatch its inspectors to a plant slaughtering 400 head an hour than to a regional abattoir slaughtering a dozen. The U.S.D.A. should establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve these processors. Expanding on its successful pilot program on Lopez Island in Puget Sound, the U.S.D.A. should also introduce a fleet of mobile abattoirs that would go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively. Nothing would do more to make regional, grass-fed meat fully competitive in the market with feedlot meat.

Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve.

In the same way the shift to alternative energy depends on keeping oil prices relatively stable, the sun-food agenda — as well as the food security of billions of people around the world — will benefit from government action to prevent huge swings in commodity prices. A strategic grain reserve, modeled on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, would help achieve this objective and at the same time provide some cushion for world food stocks, which today stand at perilously low levels. Governments should buy and store grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear, thereby moderating price swings in both directions and discouraging speculation.

Regionalize Federal Food Procurement.

In the same way that federal procurement is often used to advance important social goals (like promoting minority-owned businesses), we should require that some minimum percentage of government food purchases — whether for school- lunch programs, military bases or federal prisons — go to producers located within 100 miles of institutions buying the food. We should create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce. To channel even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local food would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Create a Federal Definition of “Food.”

It makes no sense for government food-assistance dollars, intended to improve the nutritional health of at-risk Americans, to support the consumption of products we know to be unhealthful. Yes, some people will object that for the government to specify what food stamps can and cannot buy smacks of paternalism. Yet we already prohibit the purchase of tobacco and alcohol with food stamps. So why not prohibit something like soda, which is arguably less nutritious than red wine? Because it is, nominally, a food, albeit a “junk food.” We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind. Defining what constitutes real food worthy of federal support will no doubt be controversial (you’ll recall President Reagan’s ketchup imbroglio), but defining food upward may be more politically palatable than defining it down, as Reagan sought to do.

One approach would be to rule that, in order to be regarded as a food by the government, an edible substance must contain a certain minimum ratio of micronutrients per calorie of energy. At a stroke, such a definition would improve the quality of school lunch and discourage sales of unhealthful products, since typically only “food” is exempt from local sales tax.

A few other ideas: Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at a farmers’ markets — all of which, by the way, need to be equipped with the Electronic Benefit Transfer card readers that supermarkets already have.

We should expand the WIC program that gives farmers’-market vouchers to low-income women with children; such programs help attract farmers’ markets to urban neighborhoods where access to fresh produce is often nonexistent. (We should also offer tax incentives to grocery chains willing to build supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods.) Federal food assistance for the elderly should build on a successful program pioneered by the state of Maine that buys low-income seniors a membership in a community-supported farm. All these initiatives have the virtue of advancing two objectives at once: supporting the health of at-risk Americans and the revival of local food economies.

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

In the end, shifting the American diet from a foundation of imported fossil fuel to local sunshine will require changes in our daily lives, which by now are deeply implicated in the economy and culture of fast, cheap and easy food.

Making available more healthful and more sustainable food does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. We need to use all the tools at our disposal — not just federal policy and public education but the president’s bully pulpit and the example of the first family’s own dinner table — to promote a new culture of food that can undergird your sun-food agenda.

Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in the schools. Nearly a half-century ago, President Kennedy announced a national initiative to improve the physical fitness of American children. He did it by elevating the importance of physical education, pressing states to make it a requirement in public schools. We need to bring the same commitment to “edible education” — in Alice Waters’s phrase — by making lunch, in all its dimensions, a mandatory part of the curriculum. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all primary-school students the basics of growing and cooking food and then enjoying it at shared meals.

To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. And we should immediately increase school-lunch spending per pupil by $1 a day — the minimum amount food- service experts believe it will take to underwrite a shift from fast food in the cafeteria to real food freshly prepared.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from public education about food. Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition.

Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public- health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial.

There are other kinds of information about food that the government can supply or demand. In general we should push for as much transparency in the food system as possible — the other sense in which “sunlight” should be the watchword of our agenda. The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.

Finally, there is the power of the example you set in the White House.

If what’s needed is a change of culture in America’s thinking about food, then how America’s first household organizes its eating will set the national tone, foc using the light of public attention on the issue and communicating a simple set of values that can guide Americans toward sun-based foods and away from eating oil.

The choice of White House chef is always closely watched, and you would be wise to appoint a figure who is identified with the food movement and committed to cooking simply from fresh local ingredients. Besides feeding you and your family exceptionally well, such a chef would demonstrate how it is possible even in Washington to eat locally for much of the year, and that good food needn’t be fussy or complicated but does depend on good farming. You should make a point of the fact that every night you’re in town, you join your family for dinner in the Executive Residence — at a table. (Surely you remember the Reagans’ TV trays.) And you should also let it be known that the White House observes one meatless day a week — a step that, if all Americans followed suit, would be the equivalent, in carbon saved, of taking 20 million midsize sedans off the road for a year. Let the White House chef post daily menus on the Web, listing the farmers who supplied the food, as well as recipes.

Since enhancing the prestige of farming as an occupation is critical to developing the sun-based regional agriculture we need, the White House should appoint, in addition to a White House chef, a White House farmer. This new post would be charged with implementing what could turn out to be your most symbolically resonant step in building a new American food culture.

And that is this: tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden.

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America.

The president should throw his support behind a new Victory Garden movement, this one seeking “victory” over three critical challenges we face today: high food prices, poor diets and a sedentary population. Eating from this, the shortest food chain of all, offers anyone with a patch of land a way to reduce their fossil-fuel consumption and help fight climate change. (We should offer grants to cities to build allotment gardens for people without access to land.)

Just as important, Victory Gardens offer a way to enlist Americans, in body as well as mind, in the work of feeding themselves and changing the food system — something more ennobling, surely, than merely asking them to shop a little differently.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

You’re probably thinking that growing and eating organic food in the White House carries a certain political risk. It is true you might want to plant iceberg lettuce rather than arugula, at least to start. (Or simply call arugula by its proper American name, as generations of Midwesterners have done: “rocket.”) But it should not be difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable- food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or- left issue: for every Whole Foods shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family of evangelicals intent on taking control of its family dinner and diet back from the fast-food industry — the culinary equivalent of home schooling. You should support hunting as a particularly sustainable way to eat meat — meat grown without any fossil fuels whatsoever.

There is also a strong libertarian component to the sun-food agenda, which seeks to free small producers from the burden of government regulation in order to stoke rural innovation. And what is a higher “family value,” after all, than making time to sit down every night to a shared meal?

Our agenda puts the interests of America’s farmers, families and communities ahead of the fast-food industry’s. For that industry and its apologists to imply that it is somehow more “populist” or egalitarian to hand our food dollars to Burger King or General Mills than to support a struggling local farmer is absurd. Yes, sun food costs more, but the reasons why it does only undercut the charge of elitism: cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and regulatory indulgence (both of which we will end), not to mention the exploitation of workers, animals and the environment on which its putative “economies” depend. Cheap food is food dishonestly priced — it is in fact unconscionably expensive.

Your sun-food agenda promises to win support across the aisle. It builds on America’s agrarian past, but turns it toward a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of American farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century’s most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve the health of the American people and to mitigate climate change. Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Reprinted from The New York Times.

New York Times Magazine (pg. 62), October 12, 2008

Robert Engelman, Worldwatch Vice President for Programs and author of the forthcoming book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, challenges assertions that world population is “expected” to be slightly higher than 9 billion people in 2050, up from today’s 6.7 billion. Demographers with the United Nations and other agencies produce a range of population projections, since there’s no certainty about future fertility rates or life expectancies. The projections, which range from less than 8 billion to nearly 11 billion people worldwide by mid-century, all assume continued declines in childbearing, which are not guaranteed to materialize.

“Sustaining further declines in childbearing and increases in life expectancy…will require continued efforts by governments to improve access to good health care, and both trends could be threatened by environmental or social deterioration in future decades,” Engelman writes. “The uncertain future of these factors makes population growth harder to predict than most people realize.”

While life expectancies have been rising and fertility rates have been falling worldwide over the past few decades, government spending on international family planning and related reproductive health services has stagnated in recent years, the new Update indicates. Current spending is well below what would be needed for global population to stabilize based on low birthrates.

“Governments will need to increase their spending significantly in these areas before fertility rates are likely to reach the low levels assumed in the most commonly cited population projections,” Engelman said. One result, he noted, is that half of all women from 15 to 49 in developing countries risk unintended pregnancy because they are sexually active but using contraception improperly or not at all.

In contrast to the global trend, fertility actually ticked upward in 2006 in the United States, which has by far the largest population (about 303 million) among industrial nations. The average number of children born per U.S. woman climbed to 2.1, its highest rate since 1971. Demographers are not sure why this increase has occurred but cite greater proportions of young people lacking easy and affordable access to sexuality education, contraception, and abortion services as likely reasons.

One positive indication for the future of population worldwide is a correlation between high female status and low fertility. Based on statistical work by the United Nations Population Division and the World Economic Forum, Worldwatch identified this correlation when comparing national fertility rates with scores on a global “gender-gap index” in 128 countries.

“Tackling the gender gap between men and women worldwide is critical for the well-being of half the world’s population,” Engelman said. “An added benefit is that when women have the same health status, rights, and opportunities as men, population growth is more likely to slow and eventually end. That is essential for both social and environmental sustainability.”

Reprinted from World Watch Institute.