Sustainable Society Forum
A sustainable society is one whose population and rate of resource consumption equals or is
less than the rate at which the environment can easily replenish those resources
from generation to generation. A
truly sustainable society can endure indefinitely.
Every farmer understands the concept of the 'carrying capacity' of his land as it applies
to his grazing stock. He/she knows how many sheep or cattle they can run on their land without them stripping the earth bare and then dying of starvation.
Most farmers are excellent land managers and maintain the population of their grazing stock at a level that that their land can
sustain for a given period of time.
With changing seasons and changing climate the carrying capacity of their land changes. Over winter and spring and in good seasons, when their pasture is abundant and lush, they can allow the population of their grazing stock to build up to higher levels. Then is summer or drought they must sell off much of their stock so that the meagre
and stressed pastures are not stripped away. In the process they generally make a
profit each year.
In exactly the same way the Earth has an maximum carrying capacity for humans and our economies.
Now there is a whole hierarchy of ecological limits to human civilisation. Those
lower most in the hierarchy include crop yields and fresh water availability
and, to some extent, our technology has and will allow us to overcome such
limits. But there are fundamental limits, at the top of the hierarchy, that no
level of human technology can overcome.
Here is one such fundamental limit that few people would even give a moments thought to. Carbon is a component of all organic material and a major component of the bodies of all living things.
There is a finite amount of carbon on Earth and that finite amount is simply recycled through the global ecosystem by
photosynthesis and predation. The same goes for other elements that are
essential for life like
nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, potassium and magnesium etc.
Carbon moves from CO2 in the air, to the leaves and wood of
plants through photosynthesis, to the bodies of herbivores that eat the leaves, to the bodies of
carnivores who eat the flesh of herbivores, into the soil as organic matter from decaying
plant an animal tissue and then back into the air as CO2 again.
The first 92 elements of the periodic table, including carbon, occur naturally
throughout the universe and make up essentially everything in it. Synthesis of
these elements is known to occur via nuclear fusion, only in the cores of stars, like our own sun,
and in exploding super novae or dying stars. Fusion reactors have
so far eluded our technological capability and, even if we succeed in building
one, the best it could do is produce miniscule quantities of helium.
The elements that make up our Earth,
the tissues of all living things on earth, the air we breath and our entire solar
system, were synthesized in the cores of long gone stars billions of years
before we and our solar system were a 'twinkle in the eye' of the universe.
Back to the realm of our
Earth......the more humans there are the less carbon is available to form the tissues of the plants and animals we depend on for food.
Therefore there is a fundamental upper limit to how many humans can exist on our
Earth at any given time. And remember that all humans these days want the
trappings of western lifestyle with the large quantities of elements that they
continually consume.
This is the reason why biodiversity is being systematically annihilated just about every where you look on planet Earth. There are more and more humans containing more and more
carbon with more and more possessions that consume more and more resources and
occupying more and more of the available habitable land space.
Everyone knows that if you keep knocking bricks out of wall then sooner or later it will fall on you. Despite our technology
we are still completely dependant on the global ecosystem for our very existence. And, by annihilating biodiversity, we are knocking bricks out of this wall.
And what about our ever expanding
cities and suburbs? The
more arable land that they occupy the less that is available to produce our food.
We are allowing our population to expand at the same time that we are
allowing our capacity to produce staple food to diminish. How can anyone believe
that this is a long term benefit to our own nation and the world at large???? We simply cannot go on replacing
productive agricultural land and natural ecosystems with urban deserts of
concrete and asphalt.
With due humility we must accept that there is a limit to what human technology can
achieve, and that it will never match awe
inspiring creative force (call it 'god' or 'nature' or 'the universe' or what
ever you choose) that gave rise to the universe, galaxies, stars,
our own solar system, the Earth, to life on our tiny planet, to the global
ecosystem that sustains it, to a species that has the cognitive ability to probe
some that creative force's secrets (both here on Earth to the the very
edges of the known universe) and to ask the question "Why are we
here?"
So understanding such limitations of our finite Earth makes the perpetual economic growth ideology of most
politicians and business leaders seem extraordinarily naive and childish.
We are constantly bombard with glib mantras like
'sustainable growth', a favourite of the former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks.
But
'sustainable growth' is an absolute contradiction in terms. Net growth, at any
level, is not sustainable, and can never be sustainable in the long term. With
net growth, the population and its rate of resource consumption will, sooner or
later, exceed the carrying capacity of the environment. The only variant is
how long it will take to get there.
Politicians and the business community wont acknowledge
their relentless pursuit of 'growth' as major factor in or mounting environmental crises.
At same time the media, and
even conservation organisations, are to afraid to be seen publicly criticising
the 'growth' ideology, despite privately recognizing it as a major
contributor to environmental problems in many cases.
Growth is the root cause of all our environmental
problems and until we collectively acknowledge this our efforts to reduce or
reverse environmental degradation our civilisation is causing are futile. Once
population and economic growth is arrested then, and only then, is it worth while discussing
issues like electric cars and solar or geothermal electricity.
We have a clear choice. We can collectively stick
our heads in the sand and hand on, to our children and our ground children, an
even bigger mess than was handed on to us by our parents. Or we can collectively
'suck it up' and bare some pain and suffering and hand on to our children and
grand children a more hopeful state of affairs.
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