THE RAPID GROWTH OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION—IN THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, the power of technology, and the size of the global economy—is colliding with approaching limits to the supply of key natural resources on which billions of lives depend, including topsoil and freshwater. It is also seriously damaging the integrity of crucial planetary ecological systems. Yet “growth,” in the peculiar and self-defeating way we define it, continues to be the principal and overriding objective of almost all national and global economic policies and the business plans of almost all corporations.
Our primary way of measuring economic growth—gross domestic product, or GDP—is based on absurd calculations that completely exclude any consideration of the distribution of income, the relentless depletion of essential resources, and the reckless spewing of prodigious quantities of harmful waste into the atmosphere, oceans, rivers, soil, and biosphere.
Growth of GDP used to be roughly correlated with an increase in the number of jobs and the size of average personal incomes. During the post–World War II years, when the American model of democratic capitalism was spreading, many experts believed that GDP was the simplest and most accurate measure of whether economic policy was moving in the right direction. Even then, however, the economist who had created it in 1937, Simon Kuznets, warned that it was a potentially dangerous oversimplification that could be misleading and subject to “illusion and resulting abuse” because it did not account for “the personal distribution of income” or “a variety of costs that must be recognized.”
In the twenty-first century, especially since the emergence of Earth Inc., policies aimed at maximizing GDP have been driving the world toward more concentrated wealth and power, more inequality of incomes, higher long-term unemployment, more public and private debt, more social and geopolitical instability, greater market volatility, more pollution, and what biologists refer to as the Sixth Great Extinction. Some of these negative consequences are actually counted as positive outcomes in the functionally insane definition of growth that we still use as our compass. The heading it gives us points straight off the edge of a cliff.
The world’s abject failure to acknowledge the danger to the future of civilization—and to change course—reflects the absence of coherent global leadership and the imbalance of power, as the insistent imperatives of Earth Inc. dominate decisions at the expense of participatory democracy. Even though growth of GDP no longer increases prosperity or the sense of well-being for the average person, it is still correlated with the incomes of elites.
The combination of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind now provides elites with an enhanced ability to manufacture consent for political decisions that serve their interests rather than the public interest—and provides corporations with an enhanced ability to manufacture wants in order to increase consumption of commodities and manufactured products. The result is rising levels of per capita consumption, with an impact that is magnified by the continuing increases in human population.
The global middle class will grow by an incredible three billion people in just the next seventeen years. And the globalization of culture on television and the Internet is linking their aspirations to living standards that no longer reflect those of their neighbors, but instead reflect standards that are more common in the wealthiest nations. That is one of the reasons why the growth in per capita consumption of food, water, meat, commodities, and manufactured goods is exceeding the rate of growth in the number of people in the world.
Earth Inc.—and its impact on ecological systems and the supply of key resources—is being driven by this combination of many more people and much larger per capita consumption rates. The advertiser-driven ideology that’s pervasive in the Global Mind equates more consumption with more happiness. It is a false promise, of course, just like the promise that GDP growth will bring more prosperity.
The tendency to confuse increased commercial consumption with increased happiness was the subject of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington in early 1784: “All the world is becoming commercial. Was it practicable to keep our new empire separated from them we might indulge ourselves in speculating whether commerce contributes to the happiness of mankind. But we cannot separate ourselves from them. Our citizens have had too full taste of the comforts furnished by the arts and manufactures to be debarred the use of them.”
Jefferson would not be surprised by the recent voluminous research into the causes of happiness, which shows that over the last half century the United States has tripled its economic output with absolutely no gain in the general public’s happiness or sense of well-being. Similar results have been found in other high-consumption countries. After basic needs are met, higher incomes produce gains in happiness only up to a point, beyond which further increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being.
The cumulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to twenty-two prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in Nature, that we may soon reach a dangerous “planetary scale ‘tipping point.’ ” According to one of the coauthors, James H. Brown, “We’ve created this enormous bubble of population and economy. If you try to get the good data and do the arithmetic, it’s just unsustainable. It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst.”
In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored. Past warnings that humanity was about to encounter harsh limits to its ability to grow much further were often perceived as false: from Thomas Malthus’s warnings about population growth at the end of the eighteenth century to The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by Donella Meadows, among others.
We resist the notion that there might be limits to the rate of growth we are used to—in part because new technologies have so frequently enabled us to become far more efficient in producing more with less and to substitute a new resource for one in short supply. Some of the resources we depend upon the most, including topsoil (and some key elements, like phosphorus for fertilizers), however, have no substitutes and are being depleted.
On every continent, the population and economy are placing new demands for more food, freshwater, energy, commodities of all kinds, and manufactured products. And worryingly, over the past ten years, multiple indicators have been showing that real physical limits are being reached.
World food prices spiked to all-time record high levels in 2008 and again in 2011. Both times, food riots and political upheavals struck several countries. Important groundwater aquifers are being depleted at unsustainable rates—especially in northern China, India, and the Western United States. Water tables are falling in countries where 50 percent of the world’s people live. The unsustainable erosion of topsoil and loss of soil fertility are depressing crop yields in several important food-growing regions.
The prices of almost all commodities in the world economy have surged simultaneously in the last eleven years. After declining steadily throughout the twentieth century by an average of 70 percent—with the expected ups and downs for the Great Depression and the post–World War I depression, the two world wars, and the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979, all of those price reductions were wiped out by price increases between 2002 and 2012—increases larger than those that accompanied either World War I or II.
Among the commodities with the fastest price increases are iron ore, copper, coal, corn, silver, sorghum, palladium, rubber, flaxseed, palm oil, soybeans, coconut oil, and nickel. An influential investor, Jeremy Grantham, warns that the growth in demand for commodities creates the danger that we may soon reach “peak everything.”
The cause of these continuing price hikes is a surge of demand that reflects population increases, and even more significantly, sharply rising per capita consumption levels. This has proven particularly true in China and other emerging economies whose growth rates (since the middle of the 1990s) have been at least three times faster than those in the industrial world. China, in particular, is now consuming more than half the world’s cement, nearly half of all the world’s iron ore, coal, pigs, steel, and lead—and roughly 40 percent of the aluminum and copper.
Almost one quarter of the new cars being produced each year are now made in China. The largest U.S. automobile manufacturer, General Motors, now sells more automobiles in China than in its home country. In the last forty years, the world’s population of cars and trucks quadrupled from 250 million to slightly over one billion in 2013. The number of cars and trucks in the world is projected to double again in the next thirty years—driving ever higher oil consumption. The production of automobiles in developing and emerging economies will overtake production in developed countries by 2015 and auto sales in the same countries will overtake those in developed economies by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has also found that “All of the net growth [in the IEA’s scenario, which assumes that new proposed policies to reduce emissions will be put into effect] comes from the transport sector in emerging economies.”
Within the last two years, there have been some indications that consumption levels in the United States—where they are still the highest in the world—and in other developed countries may be slowing, and in some cases may have peaked. Some optimists believe that as a result, concerns about continued high growth rates may be overblown. However, even if consumption by the one billion people in the developed countries declined, it is certainly nowhere close to doing so where the other six billion of us are concerned. If the rest of the world bought cars and trucks at the same per capita rate as in the United States, the world’s population of cars and trucks would be 5.5 billion. The production of global warming pollution and the consumption of oil would increase dramatically over and above today’s unsustainable levels. With the increasing population and rising living standards in developing countries, the pressure on resource constraints will continue, even as robosourcing and outsourcing reduce macroeconomic demand in developed countries.
Around the same time that The Limits to Growth was published, peak oil production was passed in the United States. Years earlier, a respected geologist named M. King Hubbert collected voluminous data on oil production in the United States and calculated that an immutable peak would be reached shortly after 1970. Although his predictions were widely dismissed, peak production did occur exactly when he predicted it would. Exploration, drilling, and recovery technologies have since advanced significantly and U.S. oil production may soon edge back slightly above the 1970 peak, but the new supplies are far more expensive.
The balance of geopolitical power shifted slightly after the 1970 milestone. Less than a year after peak oil production in the U.S., the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to flex its muscles, and two years later, in the fall of 1973, the Arab members of OPEC implemented the first oil embargo. Since those tumultuous years when peak oil was reached in the United States, energy consumption worldwide has doubled, and the growth rates in China and other emerging markets portend further significant increases.
Although the use of coal is declining in the U.S., and coal-fired generating plants are being phased out in many other developed countries as well, China’s coal imports have already increased 60-fold over the past decade—and will double again by 2015. The burning of coal in much of the rest of the developing world has also continued to increase significantly. According to the International Energy Agency, developing and emerging markets will account for all of the net global increase in both coal and oil consumption through the next two decades.
The prediction of global peak oil is fraught with controversy, largely because of uncertainty about the size of reserves yet to be discovered deep underneath the ocean floor in regions that have been difficult to access, and in unconventional sources such as the exceptionally dirty tar sands of Canada, the carbon-rich extra-heavy oil in Venezuela, and tight oil resources discovered in deep continental shale formations. Some experts are predicting that even larger new oil supplies in the U.S. will soon be produced with the same water-intensive hydraulic fracturing (commonly called fracking) techniques—combined with horizontal drilling—that have been used to exploit the newly discovered abundance of deep shale gas. Yet even if supplies are increased significantly, global demand is growing even faster—and in any case, no sane civilization would add so much additional CO2 to the already oversaturated global atmosphere.
At current levels of growth, the global economy is now projected to require a 23.5 percent increase in the consumption of oil in less than twenty-five years—even as the marginal cost of increased supplies reaches all-time record highs, and even as the political instability in the world’s largest oil-producing region threatens wars, revolutions, and the disruption of supply routes.
Global oil production from conventional wells on land actually seems to have peaked more than thirty years ago. The growth of oil production since 1982 has been of more expensive unconventional onshore sources, and particularly offshore, where production is increasingly in risky deepwater wells—like BP’s Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) well in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the same accident-prone deepwater drilling technology is being recklessly deployed in the unforgiving and environmentally fragile Arctic Ocean. And unfortunately, oil companies are also ratcheting up the political pressure to produce oil from exceptionally carbonintensive tar sands, which would make the problem of global warming that much worse.
The projected reserves in these dirty sources, as well as in the deep reserves underneath the ocean floor, yield much more expensive oil than the world has enjoyed in the past. Even if we do not reach global peak oil in the near future, the prices we pay for oil are likely to be permanently higher than those we became accustomed to during the century and a half over which we exploited the cheaper, more easily recoverable reserves.
These higher petroleum prices have already had a big impact on food prices because modern industrial agriculture consumes prodigious quantities of diesel fuel for locomotion, and poorly contained methane for 90 percent of their fertilizer costs. According to Berkeley professor and author Michael Pollan, “it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food.” No wonder the demand for both oil and food is continuing to skyrocket—particularly in fast growing emerging economies. The impact of higher food prices is significantly larger in developing countries, where low-income families frequently spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.
In spite of the impressive increases in food production in the last half century, and in spite of premature warnings in centuries past that humanity was reaching hard limits in its ability to provide more food for more people, many experts are nearly unanimous in pointing to multiple threats confronting the ability of the world to expand food supplies:
• Erosion of fertile topsoil at unsustainable rates; each inch of topsoil lost diminishes grain yields by 6 percent;
• Loss of soil fertility; each reduction of organic matter in soil by 50 percent reduces many crop yields by 25 percent;
• Increasing desertification of grasslands;
• Increasing competition for agricultural water from cities and industry, even though agriculture is projected to require 45 percent more water by 2030;
• A slowing rate of agricultural productivity gains since the Green Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century—from 3.5 percent annually three decades ago to a little over one percent now;
• Increasing resistance of pests, weeds, and plant diseases to pesticides, herbicides, and other agricultural chemicals;
• The loss of a significant amount of the world’s remaining plant genetic diversity; as much as three quarters of all plant genetic diversity may have already been lost;
• An increased risk of export bans by large producers facing their own domestic price hikes; according to the Council on Foreign Relations, data from the U.N.’s World Food Programme show that “over forty countries in 2008 imposed some form of export ban in an effort to increase domestic food security”;
• Erratic and less predictable precipitation patterns associated with global warming—which leads to less frequent but larger downpours, interrupting longer periods of deeper drought;
• The looming impact of catastrophic heat stress on important food crops that cannot survive the predicted global temperature increase of 6 degrees C (11 degrees F); each one degree C increase in temperature is expected by experts to produce a 10 percent decline in crop yields;
• Growing consumption of food, driven both by population growth, the growth in per capita consumption, and the increasing global preference for resource-intensive meat consumption;
• Diversion of more cropland from food crops to crops suitable for biofuel; and
We already know that extreme shortages of food, fertile land, and freshwater in countries with growing populations can lead to a complete breakdown of social order and a sharp increase in violence. Studies have shown conclusively that this deadly combination was a major contributing factor in the years leading up to the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which at the time had one of the five highest population growth rates in the world, with 67 percent of its people under the age of twenty-four.
Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, wrote, “modern Rwanda illustrates a case where Malthus’s worst-case scenario does seem to have been right.… Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don’t succeed in solving them by our own actions.”
Several experts now worry that there is a danger that several large food-growing countries—China and India among them—will run into a wall. Were that to occur, the resulting global food shortages and price hikes could be catastrophic. In Gujarat, India, the head of the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station, Tushaar Shah, said of the looming water crisis in his region, “when the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”
India would not be alone. For example, rapid population growth and gross overexploitation of soil, water, and other natural resources are contributing to the anarchy and increasing radicalism in Yemen. Tap water flows in the capital city of Sana’a only one day in four. Partly because of water shortages and soil erosion, the harvest of grain has declined more than 30 percent in the last four decades. Yemen is becoming, in the words of Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, “a hydrological basket case.”
The collective failure to clearly see the most likely future consequences of realities evolving along easily measurable trend lines also reflects a well-known human vulnerability when we try to think about the future. Neuroscientists and behavioral economists have established that we have a kind of brain glitch when it comes to making choices in the present that require an evaluation of the future. The geeky term for this glitch in our thinking is “social discounting”—which simply means that we are prone to dramatically overminimize the future effects of choices we make now.
This vulnerability is an even bigger problem for us when the particular changes we have to evaluate are part of a pattern of exponential change—the kind of change that is common in the age of Earth Inc. and the Global Mind—because we are more comfortable thinking about change as a slow, linear process. There is one exponential change in particular over the last several generations whose implications we have been slow to recognize: the change in global population.
DURING THE LAST century alone, we quadrupled the human population. By way of perspective, it took 200,000 years for our species to reach the one billion mark, yet we have added that many people in just the first thirteen years of this century. In the next thirteen years, we will add another billion, and yet another billion just fourteen years after that—for a total of nine billion souls by the middle of this century. In only thirty-seven years, our population will grow by a number equivalent to all the people in the world at the beginning of World War II. And more than 95 percent of the new additions will be in developing countries.
Moreover, 100 percent of this huge net increase in global population will take place in cities, with the largest increases in the largest cities. In all, there will be more city-dwellers in the world than the entire population of the world at the beginning of the 1990s. In fact, the population of megacities already has increased tenfold over the last forty years. In this period of hyper-urbanization, cities with less than one million people will see a reduction in their share of the world’s urban population. This is a new trend that has surprised population experts, who note that it is a reversal of past urbanization patterns.
This historic transformation of human civilization from a predominantly rural pattern to a predominantly urban pattern has significant implications for the organization of society and the economy. The trend is so powerful that even with the enormous increase in overall population now under way, rural populations have leveled off and are expected to decline significantly, starting in the next decade.
Again, some perspective: for almost all of the ten millennia since the first cities were built, no more than 10 to 12 percent of people ever lived in urban areas. In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution began to increase urban populations, but the percentage was still only 13 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1950, roughly a third of the world’s people lived in cities, and as of 2011, for the first time, more than half of us lived in cities. Already, more than 78 percent of people in developed countries live in cities, and by 2050 that number is projected to increase to 86 percent, with 64 percent of the population in less developed countries living in cities.
Forty years ago, only two cities in the world—New York and Tokyo—had populations of 10 million people; in 2013, twenty-three cities will have more than that number. And by 2025, thirty-seven such megacities will sprawl across the Earth. The sheer geographic size of cities and their rapid expansion into surrounding rural areas that used to be primarily agricultural land is also a challenge in many nations. The sprawl is increasing even more rapidly than the population—with a projected increase of 175 percent between 2000 and 2030.
The fastest growing of the new megacities is Lagos, Nigeria—which will grow from 11 million today to just under 19 million in 2025. All five of the fastest growing cities are in developing countries. The others, in addition to Lagos, are Dhaka, Bangladesh; Shenzhen, China; Karachi, Pakistan; and Delhi, India—which is projected to have a population of almost 33 million people by 2025. The largest megacity today, Tokyo, has more than 37 million people and is expected to grow to 38.7 million people by 2025. By 2050, almost 70 percent of the world’s population will be city dwellers.
One of the challenges posed by this hyper-urbanization is to the ability of municipal governments to provide adequate housing, freshwater, sanitation, and other essential needs. More than a billion people in the world live in slums today, roughly one out of every three inhabitants of cities. Without significant changes in policy and governance, the number of slum dwellers is projected to double to two billion people within the next seventeen years. The urban poor population—defined as those living on $1.25 a day or less—is growing at a rate even faster than the overall urban growth rate.
The majority of those moving to cities—especially in developing countries—do so to earn higher incomes. Even though income inequalities have been increasing within most countries, on a global basis, there has simultaneously been a historic movement of people out of poverty and into the middle class—particularly in Asia. And the vast majority of the growing global middle class will live in cities.
Already, more than 80 percent of global production takes place in cities. The per capita carbon emissions of people who live in cities are lower than that of people who live in suburbs, but in spite of the improved efficiency with which resources are used in cities, the overall per capita consumption rates in cities are significantly higher than in rural areas—primarily because incomes are higher.
In just the last thirty years, per capita consumption of meat in developing countries has doubled, while egg consumption has quintupled. The impact of skyrocketing meat consumption on topsoil, deforestation, and freshwater resources—and its production of global warming pollution and cardiovascular disease—is magnified by another factor as well: nine kilograms of plant protein are consumed in the production of one kilogram of meat protein.
The change in diets around the world is also creating a global obesity epidemic—and in its wake a global diabetes epidemic—even as more than 900 million people in the world still suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, where many global trends begin, the weight of the average American has increased by approximately twenty pounds in the last forty years. A recent study projects that half the adult population of the United States will be obese by 2030, with one quarter of them “severely obese.”
At a time when hunger and malnutrition are continuing at still grossly unacceptable levels in poor countries around the world (and in some pockets within developed countries), few have missed the irony that simultaneously obesity is at record levels in developed countries and growing in many developing countries.
How could this be? Well, first of all, it is encouraging to note that the world community has been slowly but steadily decreasing the number of people suffering from chronic hunger.
Secondly, on a global basis, obesity has more than doubled in the last thirty years. According to the World Health Organization, almost 1.5 billion adults above the age of twenty are overweight, and more than a third of them are classified as obese. Two thirds of the world’s population now live in countries where more people die from conditions related to being obese and overweight than from conditions related to being underweight.
Obesity represents a major risk factor for the world’s leading cause of death—cardiovascular diseases, principally heart disease and stroke—and is the major risk factor for diabetes, which has now become the first global pandemic involving a noncommunicable disease.* Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to suffer heart disease or a stroke, and approximately two thirds of those suffering from diabetes die from either stroke or heart disease.†
The tragic increase in obesity among children is particularly troubling; almost 17 percent of U.S. children are obese today, as are almost 7 percent of all children in the world. One respected study indicates that 77 percent of obese children will suffer from obesity as adults. If there is any good news in the latest statistics, it is that the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. appears to be reaching a plateau, though the increases in childhood obesity ensure that the epidemic will continue to grow in the future, both in the U.S. and globally.
The causes of this surge in obesity are both simple—in that people are eating too much and exercising too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.”
Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent. Relative price, limitation of access to healthy food, increased inactivity, and the cumulative effects of massive food advertising campaigns all contribute to the obesity epidemic.
Several studies indicate that low-income neighborhoods have less access to supermarkets with a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables and are more likely to have fast food chains and convenience stores selling Slim Jims and Big Gulps than middle- and higher-income neighborhoods. Relative income and the time and knowledge necessary for food preparation both also play a role. Once eating habits are established, they are harder to change. When the U.S. government introduced healthier foods into the school lunch program in 2012, students at many schools launched protests on social media and threw the healthier food away.
In many countries, there is an almost precise correlation between the introduction of American fast food outlets and climbing obesity rates. One of the factors that led to the surge in fast food, manufactured food, and increasing portion sizes was a historic change in U.S. agricultural policy in the 1970s, at exactly the time when obesity rates began their climb. Instead of compensating farmers to withdraw land from production, as had been the case since FDR’s New Deal, the government subsidized farmers to grow as much as they possibly could. This policy change coincided with new advances in agriculture technology, including better hybrid seeds coming out of the Green Revolution. Consequently, food prices went down significantly. Dr. Carson Chow, a mathematician working at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, constructed a detailed mathematical model that strongly suggests that the changes in U.S. agricultural policy correlate precisely with the large average weight gains and increased obesity.
The advertising industry has played a major role. One fast food hamburger chain, to pick only one example, famously used in its television advertisements a skimpily clad sex symbol washing a car in a suggestive manner. The advertising budget for manufactured food items and fast food chains is already two thirds that for automobiles. And again, these interrelated trends may have started in the U.S., but have now spread around the world. The impact of obesity on the world’s resources is the equivalent of adding an extra one billion people to the planet.
The rising rate of consumption in the world is a relatively new phenomenon, less than a century old, and is also a trend that started in the United States. Although mass advertising began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most historians date the true beginning of consumer culture to the 1920s, when the first mass electronic medium, radio, was introduced in the United States, along with the first national circulation magazines and the first silent films shown in theaters. Significantly, consumer credit also became more widely available during the Roaring Twenties to help buyers finance the purchase of relatively expensive new products like automobiles and radios.
Electricity, which was available in less than one percent of American households at the beginning of the twentieth century, rose to almost 70 percent of U.S. homes by the end of the 1920s. The technology of mass production with interchangeable parts and early forms of automation (all forerunners of today’s Earth Inc.) began to decouple productivity from increased employment and produced a cornucopia of consumer goods that stimulated a keen interest among manufacturers and merchants in the emerging science of mass marketing. The advertising industry entered a new and distinctly different role in the marketplace.
It was at precisely this moment in history that the ideas of Sigmund Freud became popular in the United States. Freud’s first trip to America was in 1909, to deliver a series of five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an audience that included William James (whose young protégé, Walter Lippmann, was greatly influenced by Freud) and many of the other most prominent intellectuals in America. Throughout the following decade, ideas popularized by Freud—like the role of the subconscious in understanding human motivation, psychological transference, and other insights from psychoanalysis—spread, particularly on the East Coast, where the advertising industry was and is located. The American Psychoanalytic Society was founded two years after Freud’s visit.
By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, these psychological concepts had been adapted into techniques of mass persuasion that were used during the war effort. Woodrow Wilson established a Committee on Public Information. Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, served on the committee, alongside Walter Lippmann, only two years his elder, whose influence on Bernays almost rivaled that of his uncle Sigmund. After the war, Bernays pronounced himself astonished at the effectiveness of mass propaganda and set out to introduce the techniques into mass marketing.
Known as the “father of public relations,” Bernays actually coined the phrase “public relations” in order to avoid using the word “propaganda,” which had acquired a negative connotation in the U.S. due to its frequent use by Germany to describe its mass communications strategy during the war. Bernays revolutionized the field of marketing research by discarding the then standard technique of asking consumers what they liked and disliked about various products. Instead, Bernays spent time with psychoanalysts and conducted deep interviews with people designed to uncover the associations they made in their subconscious minds that might be relevant to the marketing of products and brands. Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, said, “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.… People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”
As Bernays later wrote, in 1928,
the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
In one of his early successes, Bernays tackled a problem for his client, the American Tobacco Company: how could he break down the social taboo against women smoking cigarettes? He hired a group of women to dress as suffragettes and march in formation in a parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1929. When they reached the section of elevated seats reserved for the press, the faux suffragettes all pulled out cigarettes, lit them up, and proclaimed them to be “freedom torches.” Decades later, the iconic cigarette advertisement aimed at women—“You’ve come a long way baby”—was still using Bernays’s innovative but sinister association of smoking with women’s rights.
In 1927, a prominent American business advisor, Edward Cowdrick, wrote that stimulating consumption had become more important than production: “the worker has come to be more important as a consumer than he is as a producer … not to manufacture and mine and raise enough goods, but to find enough people who will buy them—this is the vital problem of business.” He described this fresh macroeconomic conventional wisdom as the “new economic gospel of consumption.”
His use of the word “gospel” was not as casual as it may sound today. The struggle between capitalism and communism had taken on a new significance in the wake of Lenin’s successful revolution in Russia ten years earlier and the establishment of the USSR. During the long struggle between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century, unlimited growth was the one assumption built into both ideologies that neither questioned.
In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge in a speech to advertisers ventured into the same sacred territory that Cowdrick had described as a new economic gospel: “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.”
Three years later, two months before the stock market crash of 1929, Coolidge’s successor as president, Herbert Hoover, issued the report of his Committee on Recent Economic Changes, which took note of the newly recognized power of psychology in mass marketing: “The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically, we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants that will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied … by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact finding, by a carefully predeveloped consumption a measurable pull on production has been created … it would seem that we can go on with increasing activity.”
In the 1930s, another Freudian psychoanalyst from Vienna, Ernest Dichter, immigrated to the U.S. and began working on mass marketing. Fully aware of the popularity of Freudian concepts in the advertising business, he told potential customers on Madison Avenue and Wall Street that he was not only a “psychologist from Vienna” but that he had lived on the very same street as Sigmund Freud. He promised them that he could help them “sell more and communicate better.” And, like President Coolidge, he saw the importance of stimulating more mass consumption as a means of strengthening America’s economy in the struggle to ensure the triumph of capitalism. “To some extent the needs and wants of people have to be continuously stirred up,” Dichter said.
Inevitably, the new power of psychology-based mass electronic marketing had an enormous impact on the democracy sphere as well as the market sphere. Bernays and Lippmann had both always predicted it would. But in the desperate and dangerous interwar period in Europe, these new powers were put in the service of totalitarianism. In 1922, Joseph Stalin became general secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR and Benito Mussolini became the fascist prime minister of a coalition government in Italy. Six months earlier, Adolf Hitler had become the chairman of the National Socialist Party in Germany.
Fifteen years later, after the Nuremburg Laws and the opening of the first concentration camps, Edward Bernays was dismayed by the eyewitness report of a recent visitor to Berlin who told him that Joseph Goebbels was making intensive use of Bernays’s book Propaganda in organizing Hitler’s genocide.
In the U.S., also in 1922, Bernays’s friend and former wartime propaganda colleague, Walter Lippmann, wrote:
The manufacture of consent … was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique. As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.… The knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise.… It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy.
As noted in the previous chapter, the combination of unlimited secret campaign contributions and extremely expensive but devastatingly effective psychology-based mass electronic marketing is indeed posing a deadly threat to the continued vibrancy and good health of participatory democracy. If the current assault on the integrity of democracy is allowed to continue, Lippmann’s dark prophecy may yet come to pass; if elites can use money, power, and mass persuasion to control the policies of the United States, the average person may eventually come to a point where it seems, in Lippmann’s words, “no longer reasonable” to believe that America is a democracy.
In the market sphere, the amount of money spent to “manufacture wants” and stimulate increased consumption has continued to rise year by year. The appeal of Freudian-based mass marketing began to wane later in the twentieth century, but more recently the invention of more sophisticated techniques such as brain scans has reinvigorated the use of subconscious analysis in the field of neuromarketing. Mass marketing to promote increased consumption is now so pervasive that we almost consider it to be a normal part of our environment. The average person living in a city used to see an average of 2,000 commercial messages per day thirty-five years ago. According to The New York Times, the average city dweller now sees 5,000 commercial messages per day.
Increased per capita consumption by a larger and larger global population is pressing against the limits of some resources. As both human population and the global economy grow in size, we are not only consuming more natural resources to make products, we are also producing larger and larger streams of waste. According to a recent report from the World Bank, the per capita production of garbage alone from urban residents in the world is now 2.6 pounds per person every day; and the total volume is projected to increase by 70 percent in a dozen years.
The cost of managing the garbage will almost double over the same period to $375 billion per year—with most of the increase in developing countries. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, each one percent increase in national income produces a .69 percent increase in municipal solid waste in developed countries.
And that’s just the garbage. When the waste associated with energy production, the making of chemicals, manufacturing, electronic goods, agricultural waste, and waste from the paper products industries are apportioned on a per capita basis among the seven billion people who consume the results of all these processes, the actual amount of waste produced each day is more than the body weight of all seven billion people.
There is a thriving black market in the illegal disposal of waste—particularly shipments from developed countries to poor countries. In the European Union, exports of plastic waste—almost 90 percent of it to China—increased by more than 250 percent in the last decade. The news media has focused on the enormous “garbage patch” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—made up mostly of plastic—but much larger volumes are on land in millions of waste dumps.
Although there have been some laudable efforts by many companies and cities to increase the recycling of waste, the total volumes are overwhelming the current capacity for responsible disposal practices. For example, organic waste can be used to produce valuable methane, but due to inertia and an absence of leadership, so much organic waste is simply dumped in unimproved landfills that it decomposes to produce 4 percent of all the global warming pollution each year.
The growing volumes of e-waste (waste associated with electronic products) have been the focus of increasing attention because of the presence of highly toxic materials in the waste stream. And once again, even though recycling efforts are under way, the problem is still growing faster than the solution.
Toxic chemical and biological waste poses a particular challenge. During the 1970s and 1980s, I chaired and participated in a large number of congressional hearings on the dangers of toxic chemical waste. The tough laws that were enacted in the wake of those and other hearings have since been severely weakened by chemical industry lobbying of the U.S. Congress and executive branch. A recent U.S. study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified traces of 212 chemical wastes in the average American, including pesticides, arsenic, cadmium, and flame retardants.
Flame retardants? Their presence in the tissues of Americans has an interesting backstory that provides another example of the imbalance of power in U.S. decision making and the dominance of corporate interests over the public interest. An exhaustive examination by the Chicago Tribune in 2012 demonstrated in detail how the cigarette industry corruptly influenced policymakers to legally compel the addition of toxic flame retardants to the foam inside most furniture in order to save lives that were being lost in thousands of fires started each year by smokers who fall asleep and drop their lit cigarettes on a couch or chair.
A far more logical and less dangerous solution—one that had been proposed since the early part of the twentieth century—would have been to require the cigarette manufacturers to remove the chemicals they routinely add to cigarettes to keep them burning even when they are not being puffed. But the tobacco industry did not want to be blamed for the fires, and they worried that any inconvenience for smokers might hurt sales. So they came up with a corrupt scheme to buy enough influence to require the addition of dangerous chemicals to most all furniture instead.
When the companies manufacturing the flame retardant chemicals began to understand how they benefited from this ruse, they joined in providing more money to support the tobacco companies’ scheme. The same lobbyist represented state fire officials and the chemical manufacturers—and remained secretly on the payroll of the tobacco industry. Meanwhile, children continue to breathe in the dust from the decaying flame retardants and scientists continue to link their exposure with evidence of cancer, reproductive disorders, and damage to fetuses. And, by the way, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently found that the flame retardants added to the foam in the furniture didn’t work to cut down on house fires.
A few particularly dangerous chemicals, such as Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates (which are chemically similar to flame retardants), have been singled out for special attention by health experts, but the law enacted in 1976 to deal with such chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act, has never been truly implemented. An estimated 83,000 chemicals are listed in the inventory of substances that should be tested, but the Environmental Protection Agency has required testing for only 200 of them, and has restricted usage of only 5. The chemical manufacturers are allowed to withhold most of the medically relevant information about these chemicals from regulators, by claiming they are trade secrets.
THE SURGE IN the development of agricultural and industrial chemicals following World War II was based in significant part on leftover stockpiles of unused nerve gas and munitions. (The inventor of poison gas in World War I was also the inventor of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.) These new kinds of chemical compounds introduced more toxic forms of water pollution than in the past. In prior periods, water pollution had been dominated by fecal contamination causing typhoid and cholera. Although the latter problems have been largely solved in developed countries, waterborne diseases are still among the leading causes of death in developing countries, especially in South Asia, Africa, and portions of the Middle East.
Indeed, pollution of rivers, streams, and groundwater aquifers is a serious problem contributing to water shortages in many areas of the world. The World Commission on Water for the Twenty-First Century, in which multiple United Nations agencies participate, reported in 1999 that “More than one-half of the world’s major rivers are being seriously depleted and polluted.” One of the reasons for this global tragedy is that neither depletion nor pollution is included in the world’s prevailing system for measuring national income and productivity—GDP. As economist Herman Daly points out, “We do not subtract the cost of pollution as a bad, yet we add the value of pollution cleanup as a good. This is asymmetric accounting.” As a result, decisions to clean up the environment are routinely—and inaccurately—described as hurtful to prosperity. For example, in Guangzhou, China, the vice director of the city’s planning agency felt forced to defend a decision to limit automobile traffic as a means of reducing dangerous levels of air pollution by saying, “Of course from the government’s point of view, we give up some growth, but to achieve better health for all citizens, it’s worth it.”
Recently, an investigation by The New York Times collected hundreds of thousands of state and federal records of water pollution under the Freedom of Information Act that showed that approximately one out of every ten Americans has been exposed to chemical waste or other health threats in their drinking water.
Since 1972, the United States has pioneered clean water protections and most of the developed world has followed suit. However, the progress in developing countries has fallen short of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (a blueprint for global development agreed to by all 193 member states of the United Nations and 23 international organizations). According to the World Health Organization, “over 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources (defined as ‘likely to provide safe water’) and 1.8 billion people gained access to improved sanitation facilities between 1990 and 2010…[however] over 780 million people are still without access to improved sources of drinking water and 2.5 billion lack improved sanitation.”
If current trends continue, these numbers will remain unacceptably high in 2015: according to the World Health Organization, “605 million people will be without an improved drinking water source and 2.4 billion people will lack access to improved sanitation facilities.” In China, where 90 percent of the shallow groundwater contains pollution, including chemical and industrial waste, 190 million Chinese become ill each year due to their drinking water, and tens of thousands die.
Supplies of freshwater are unevenly distributed, with more than half of the total located in only six countries. The declining availability and deteriorating quality of freshwater in numerous countries and regions stands alongside the loss of topsoil as one of the two most serious limitations constraining the expansion of food production. Overconsumption and profligate waste of freshwater—new competition for water from cities and the growing demands of Earth Inc.—are threatening to create food crises in multiple areas of the world.
Just as urban sprawl has had an impact on the supply of agricultural land, “energy sprawl” is also having a harsh impact on the availability of freshwater for food crops. The unwise decision to promote the rapid growth of first generation ethanol fuels and biodiesel from palm oil has reallocated both water and land resources from food crops. And the growing craze for deep shale gas, which requires five million gallons of water per well, has put severe strain on supplies in regions that were already experiencing shortages. Many cities and counties in Texas, for example, have now been forced to choose between allocating water to agriculture and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of gas and oil. On a global basis, the use of water for energy production is projected to grow twice as fast as energy demand.
The expansion of oil and gas fracking is adding to the injection of toxic liquid waste into areas deep underground that have been thought to be safe repositories—until recently. In the United States, an estimated 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid waste have been injected into more than 680,000 wells for underground storage over the past few decades, even as the practice of fracking changes the underground geology, opening new fissures and modifying underground flow patterns. Unfortunately, some of these deep repositories have leaked waste upward into regions containing drinking water aquifers.
Groundwater resources represent approximately 30 percent of all the freshwater resources in the world, compared to one percent represented by all of the surface freshwater. In the last half century, the rate of shrinkage in groundwater aquifers has doubled. The rate at which groundwater withdrawals have been increasing has accelerated steadily over the last half century to double the rate in 1960, but in the last fifteen years (since the growth rates of China and other emerging economies have accelerated), the increases have proceeded at a much faster pace.
The introduction of new water drilling and pumping technology has also been a significant factor. In India, for example, $12 billion has been invested in new wells and pumps; more than 21 million wells have been drilled by the 100 million Indian farmers. Partly as a result, the aquifers in many communities have been completely dried up and drinking water has to be trucked in—while farmers must rely on increasingly unpredictable rainfall.
Because of the growth in population and the increase in water consumption, the surface water from many of the world’s important rivers is now so overallocated that many of the rivers no longer reach the sea: the Colorado, the Indus, the Nile, the Rio Grande, the Murray-Darling in Australia, the Yangtze and Yellow rivers in China, and the Elbe in Germany.
Although population growth rates have slowed in most of the world over the past several decades, the overall size of the population is now so large that even a slower rate of growth will add billions more people before our numbers stabilize near the end of this century at a total that is now difficult to predict but is estimated at between 10 and 15 billion. (There is also a low projection of 6.1 billion people, and a runaway projection of 27 billion people—that would occur if there are no further decreases in fertility. But the vast majority of experts assume that the most likely range is slightly above 10 billion.)
In the next dozen years, India will surpass China for at least the balance of the century as the most populous nation on Earth. In the next two dozen years, Africa will have more people than either China or India and by the end of the century is projected to have more people than both combined. Half of the global growth in population over the next four decades is projected to take place in Africa, which is now on track to more than triple its present population, to an astonishing 3.6 billion, by the end of this century. Given the dangerously low levels of soil fertility in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, shortages of freshwater, poor governance in many countries, and the projected impact of global warming, the limits to growth in Africa are likely to be a central focus of the world’s attention in the balance of the twenty-first century.
The reason it is so difficult to predict peak global population, and the reason that the range of estimates varies by five billion people—as many as all the people in the world at the end of the 1980s!—is that it is inherently difficult to predict how many children the average woman will prefer to have during the next several decades. An increase in that key variable by even a half a child (demographers have long since become numb to the discomfiture of that expression) can mean the difference in several billion people in world population in the course of the next eighty-seven years. The multiple factors that have an impact on women’s preferences are, in turn, also difficult to project over such a long period of time.
These new higher projections for peak global population in the latter part of the twenty-first century reflect a slower than expected decline in the average fertility rate in scores of less developed countries—the majority of them in Africa. The biggest single reason for the increased population estimates for Africa and the world is the failure of the world community to make fertility management knowledge and technology available to women who wish to use it.
Population and development specialists have learned a great deal over the last few decades about the many factors that actually drive changes in the dynamics of population growth. Voluminous research has shown conclusively that four elements of the population puzzle all fit together and act in combination to shift the pattern of population growth in any country from one equilibrium—characterized by high death rates, high birth rates, and large families—to a second equilibrium—characterized by low death rates, low birth rates, and small families.
The good news is that the global effort to slow population growth is actually a success story, albeit one that is unfolding in slow motion. Even though very large increases in our absolute numbers will continue for many decades to come, almost every nation in the world has been moving from the high equilibrium state toward the low equilibrium state. Some have changed quickly but others are lagging behind. In the U.S., the rate of growth in population has slowed to the lowest level since the Great Depression.
For several decades in the twentieth century, the prevailing view was that increases in GDP—particularly those factors associated with industrial development—were the key to falling population growth rates. This was another early illustration of the seductive convenience and illusory simplicity of GDP as a proxy measurement of generalized progress and how it can capture the attention of policymakers, even when it is only loosely connected to the real goals they are trying to reach.
Although GDP is not one of the four factors, economic growth is loosely correlated in many countries with the creation of social conditions that can and do have an impact on population. And conversely, in most instances, extreme poverty is certainly correlated with higher population growth rates—especially in countries with failing institutions and shortages of clean water and topsoil. All fourteen nations with those three characteristics have extremely high population growth rates; thirteen of the fourteen are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The four relevant factors, all of which are necessary but none of which, by itself, is sufficient, are:
• First, the education of girls—the single most powerful factor. The education of boys is also important, but population statistics show clearly that the ability of girls to become literate and to obtain a good education is crucial.
• Second, the empowerment of women in society, to the point where their opinions are heard and respected, and they have the ability to participate in making decisions with their husbands or partners about family size and other issues important to their families.
• Third, the ubiquitous availability of fertility management knowledge and technology, so that women can effectively choose how many children they wish to have and the spacing of their children.
• Fourth, low infant mortality rates. As an African leader, Julius K. Nyerere, said midway through the twentieth century, “the most powerful contraceptive is the confidence by parents that their children will live.”
The struggle to provide access to contraception and the knowledge of how to manage fertility has not gone as well as social scientists and population experts had hoped. The commitments by wealthy countries to finance wider access in poor countries to fertility management have not been fully met. In some developed countries where democracy is being weakened, like the United States, attacks on programs beneficial to women have been more successful in recent years. Political opposition to contraception, for example, has surprisingly reemerged in the United States in the last two years, even though the overwhelming majority of American women (including 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women) support it and even though it seemed to be a question that had been settled in the 1960s.
The religion-based opposition to contraception by a tiny minority in the U.S. has also had a harsh impact on U.S. contributions to the global effort to make fertility management available in fast growing developing countries—in part because of the disingenuous conflation of contraception and abortion. Since foreign aid is always vulnerable to budget cuts in the United States, the amount of help actually provided has fallen far short of the amount pledged. And once again, the imbalance of power and political paralysis in the U.S. has deprived the world of desperately needed leadership, which, in turn, has seriously damaged the world’s ability to take action.
Partially as a result, anticipated declines in fertility rates have not been achieved—especially in Africa, where thirty-nine out of the fifty-five African countries have high levels of fertility. (There are nine high-fertility countries in Asia, six in Pacific Island nations, and four in the low-income countries of Latin America.) In thirty-four of the fifty-eight high-fertility countries in the world, population will triple in the balance of this century.
On a global basis, women now have an average of 2.5 children during their childbearing years. In Africa, however, the average is almost 4.5 children per woman. Moreover, in four African countries, the average woman is still expected to have more than six children, leading to disruptive and unsustainable population growth. Malawi, for example, which has 15 million people today, is projected to have a nearly tenfold increase in population by the end of the century to an estimated 129 million. The African nation with the largest population, Nigeria, is projected to increase from slightly more than 160 million people today to more than 730 million by 2100. That would put Nigeria’s population at the level of China in the mid-1960s.
Before the improved understanding of population dynamics, many people assumed that higher death rates reduce overall population. But the impact of high death rates on high birth rates gives the lie to this former belief. The Black Death of the fourteenth century did reduce population—indeed, that is believed to be the last time population has declined. But in today’s world, even the most feared diseases have not had an impact on population. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has had an impact on the overall numbers of people in a few African countries, but on a worldwide basis population grew by more in the first five months of 2011 than all of the deaths from HIV/AIDS since the disease first began rapidly spreading three decades ago.
In countries with high rates of infant mortality, the natural tendency of parents is to have more children in order to ensure that at least some of them will survive to take care of their parents in old age and to carry on the family name and tradition. In practice, when child death rates fall dramatically, birth rates generally decline a half generation later—provided the other three factors are also present. Following World War II, revolutionary advances in health care—higher levels of sanitation, better nutrition, antibiotics, vaccines, and other achievements of modern medicine—led to significant declines in child and infant mortality in many countries around the world. This same combination of improvements in health care and nutrition has doubled life expectancy in industrial countries from the beginning of the nineteenth century—from thirty-five to seventy-seven years.
The education of girls has become commonplace around the world, including in most countries that used to focus only on the education of boys. Although there is still opposition to the education of girls among groups such as Afghanistan’s Taliban, most nations have long since become aware of the competitive advantages, especially in the information age, of educating all their children. Saudi Arabia used to focus on boys alone in their school systems, but according to the most recent statistics available, almost 60 percent—compared to 8 percent in 1970—of college students in Saudi Arabia were women.
The comparable figure in Qatar is 64 percent, in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, 60 percent; the average in Arab states is now 48 percent; in Iran 51 percent. Indeed, more women than men received college degrees in 67 of the 120 nations for which statistics are available. The world average is 51 percent. In the United States, women now receive 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 51 percent of doctoral degrees.
The empowerment of women, on the other hand, remains a challenging goal in many traditionalist societies. None of those women college graduates in Saudi Arabia, for example, is allowed to drive a car—or vote—although their relatively progressive king has announced plans to allow women to vote beginning in 2015. Even though 93 percent of the gender gap in education of women has been closed on a global basis, less than 60 percent of the gap in economic participation and only 18 percent of the gap in political participation have been closed.
The Global Mind has accelerated demands for the empowerment of women throughout the world; women make up more than half of all social network users globally, and almost half of all Internet users. When they are exposed to the more favorable norms of gender equity in advanced countries, they naturally become impatient for change.
Women have been coming into the workplace in almost all countries in higher numbers than men, reflecting a historic change in global attitudes about women working outside the home. In fact, for the last forty years, two women have entered the workplace for every man. Women have made a particular difference in the competitiveness of rapidly growing East Asian nations, with 83 women in the workforce for every 100 men. They have had the biggest impact in several export-oriented businesses, including clothing and textiles—filling between 60 to 80 percent of the jobs.
The Economist has calculated that on a global basis, “the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.” In developed countries as a group, women are responsible for producing slightly less than 40 percent of GDP. However, another flaw in the way GDP is measured—one noted by Kuznets when he first introduced it in 1937—is that it does not assign any economic value to the work women (and some men) do in the home: raising children, cooking meals, keeping the household, and all the rest. If this housework in developed countries were valued at the amount that would be paid for nannies, cooks, and housekeepers, the total contribution of women to GDP would be well over 50 percent.
The movement of women into jobs outside the home has had startling social impacts. In the United States, during the three decades between the 1960s and 1990s, the percentage of married women with children younger than six years old who work outside the home skyrocketed from 12 percent to 55 percent. The percentage of all mothers with young children who chose to work outside the home rose during the same three decades from 20 to 60 percent.
These sociological changes are also among the many factors contributing to the obesity epidemic. Because many more mothers are now working outside the home, and a much higher percentage of children live in families where both parents work, more people eat fast food, other restaurant food, and manufactured meals and food products designed for minimal preparation, such as microwaving. Portion sizes have also increased along with the body mass index. It all adds up to what Kessler calls “conditioned hyper-eating.”
Studies also show that children in low-income neighborhoods are often permitted and even encouraged by their parents and caregivers to watch more television than average because of greater concerns about their safety playing outside in neighborhoods that, relatively speaking, are prone to more violence. This mirrors a global trend for people of all ages, who are spending more time on electronic screens connecting to the Global Mind and are, on average, more likely to work in jobs that do not require as much physical activity as in the past. The trend toward more driving and less walking is also a factor.
The increased participation of women in the workforce, the dramatic changes in the education of women, and changes in social values have also led to significant structural changes in the institution of the family. Divorces have increased dramatically in almost every part of the world, partly due to new legislation making them easier to obtain, and, according to experts, partly because of the increased participation of women in the workforce. Some experts also note the role of online relationships; according to several analyses, between 20 and 30 percent of all divorces in the U.S. now involve Facebook.
The age at which the average woman gets married has also increased significantly, and a larger percentage of men and women choose never to marry at all. Fifty years ago, two thirds of all Americans in their twenties were married. Now, only one quarter are. Many more couples are living together—and having children—without getting married. Forty-one percent of children in the U.S. are now born to unmarried women. Fifty years ago, only 5 percent of U.S. children were born to unmarried mothers. Today, the comparable figure among mothers under thirty is 50 percent. Among African American mothers of all ages, the percentage is now 73 percent.
In the overall rankings of countries on the basis of gender equity, the four highest are Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden; the lowest rank goes to Yemen. However, the political participation of women has lagged far behind most other indicators of gender equity. On a global basis, women make up less than 20 percent of elected parliaments, with the highest percentage (42 percent) in the Nordic countries and the lowest percentage (11.4 percent) in the Arab states. The United States is barely above the global average. Only two countries in the world have a female majority in their parliaments—one of the tiniest countries, Andorra, and one of the poorest, Rwanda, which in the wake of its 1994 tragedy enacted a constitutional requirement that a minimum of 30 percent of its parliament be women. The empowerment of women in corporate governance is lower still—with only 7 percent of corporate boards in the world made up of women.
All four of the factors that bring about a reduction in population growth rates are connected to the expansion of participatory democracy and the right of women to vote. In those countries where women vote in high percentages, there is understandably more support for programs that reduce child mortality, educate girls, further empower women, and ensure high levels of access to fertility management.
In most wealthy industrial countries, birth rates have fallen so swiftly that some now have declining populations. Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, and several other countries in Eastern and Southern Europe now have fertility rates well below the replacement rate. Japan, South Korea, China, and several countries in Southeast Asia have also fallen below the replacement rate. The U.S. birthrate fell to an all-time low in 2011.
In a few of these countries, the fertility rate has fallen so low that they are in danger of falling into what demographers call the fertility trap. That is, fewer women of childbearing age will themselves have fewer children, adding up to a sudden and sharp further decline in population. Japan’s population is projected to decline from 127 million today to 100 million by midcentury, and 64 million by 2100.
Sweden and France both adopted policies some years ago to increase fertility and avoid the fertility trap; both countries spend roughly 4 percent of their national income on programs that support families and make it easier for working parents to have children if they wish: generous maternity and paternity leave, free preschool, affordable high-quality child care, excellent child and maternal health care, protections for women returning to their career paths after having children, and other benefits. Both countries are now once again nearly at their replacement rate of fertility.
By contrast, Japan and Italy have failed to provide such services and have not yet been able to slow their fertility declines. As a result, they will soon face great difficulty in financing pensions because of a dramatic change in the ratio of their working-age population to their retired population. Social contracts that are based on financing mechanisms that tax work to pay for retirement are far more burdensome for working people when there are many fewer of working age compared to the number who are retired.
To a greater or lesser degree, this new demographic reality is a major cause of the budget crises in most developed countries in the world today. Similarly, since health care is used more intensively by older people, the same demographic changes have contributed to developed country budget crises for health care programs—most of all in the United States, because of the greater per capita expense of U.S. health care compared to any other nation.
The relative size of the retiree population is also increasing because of a significant increase in average lifespans almost everywhere. Incredibly, more than half of the babies born in developed countries after the year 2000 are projected to live past the age of 100. In the United States, more than half of the babies born in 2007 will live to be more than 104.
This revolution in human longevity is causing dramatic adjustments throughout the world. Although statistics are hard to come by, anthropologists believe that the average human lifespan for most of the last 200,000 years was probably less than thirty years; some believe much less. After the Agricultural Revolution and the building of cities, lifespans began climbing slowly upward, but not until the middle of the nineteenth century did the average lifespan reach forty. In the last 150 years, however, average lifespans worldwide have climbed to sixty-nine—and in most industrial countries are now in the high seventies.
Improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and health care—particularly the introduction of antibiotics, vaccines, and other modern medicines—have played the most important roles in increasing lifespans. But education levels, literacy, and the distribution of information about health care have also had major impacts. Access to information online about health and wellness has also begun to play an even more significant role. Globalization and urbanization have magnified these factors in some countries, leading to even more rapid increases in longevity. China is projected to double the percentage of its population represented by those aged sixty-five and older within the next quarter century.
The larger ratio of older people in some countries represents only one illustration of how changes in societies can be driven not only by the absolute size of populations but also by changes in the distribution in different age groups. When a baby boom generation comes into the workforce, societies with an ample number of jobs to be filled can experience enormous productivity gains. Yet years later, when that same generation ages, they are sometimes less able to adapt quickly to new technology and new demands for flexibility in the workforce, as in the age of Earth Inc. If a subsequent decline in fertility leads to smaller successive generations entering the workforce to replace them, the same cohort that clamored for revolutionary change in their youth start clamoring for bigger pension checks and better health care in their old age.
China enjoyed an economic boom for the last three decades, powered by a young workforce. Yet, within the next two years, China’s working age population will begin to decline, and by 2050 fully one third of Chinese will be sixty or older. Similarly, the percentage of the Indian population over sixty-five will double during the same thirty-seven years, though the percentage of the elderly will still be half that in China.
Japan had a remarkable economic boom when its workforce was predominantly young, but its slowdown over the last two decades has coincided with the aging of its population. In 2012, the Japanese bought more adult diapers than baby diapers. By midcentury its median age, the world’s oldest, in 2012, at forty-three, will be fifty-six. Globally, the median is projected to increase from twenty-eight today to forty by midcentury.
Whenever there is an unusually large generation of young people compared to the rest of a society, the so-called youth bulge can also contribute to disruptive and even revolutionary pressures if the society does not have an adequate number of job opportunities—particularly for males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Demographic historians believe that the relatively large proportion of young men in France more than 200 years ago contributed to the pressures that resulted in the French Revolution. The same was true during the seventeenth-century English Civil War and the majority of the revolutions in developing countries during the twentieth century. The cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s in the United States coincided with the young adulthood of the post–World War II baby boom.
In the 1990s, according to Population Action International, nations with more than 40 percent of its adults made up of those aged fifteen to twenty-nine experienced civil conflict at twice the rate of countries generally, and more than two thirds of civil conflicts since the 1970s have been in nations with youth bulges. Among the many factors causing the Arab Spring in 2011 was the disproportionate size of the young adult generation in most of the Arab countries. It is worth remembering, however, that it was a food vendor in Tunisia who set off the Arab Spring during a period of food price hikes around the world.
One of the largest youth bulges in the world today is in Iran, and although the street demonstrations and the Green Revolution have been suppressed brutally, the pressures for societal change appear to be still building. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, where dissent and demonstrations are also suppressed, faces similar demographic pressures for change, because the percentage of its population made up of young men age fifteen to twenty-nine is exceptionally high, and the number of jobs available to them is exceptionally low.
By most of these demographic measures, the United States has a more favorable outlook than many developed countries. Its median age is climbing, but will reach only 40 by midcentury. Its fertility rate is above the replacement rate, partly due to immigration and to the fertility of immigrant populations.
In 2010, the United Nations reported that the world’s migrant population had reached almost 214 million people, driving the percentage of migrants in the population of developed countries to 10 percent, an increase from 7.2 percent twenty years earlier. In the last year for which statistics are available (2009), 740 million internal migrants moved from one region to another inside countries. Cities are the primary destination for these migrants—both international migrants and those who migrate within their own countries from one region to another, almost always from rural areas to cities.
One new trend is that the number of international migrants moving from one developing country to another is now roughly equal to the number of migrants moving from a developing country to developed regions of the world. As the secretary-general of the United Nations put it, “In other words, those moving ‘South-to-South’ are about as numerous as those moving ‘South-to-North.’ ”
Although migration has, of course, many beneficial effects—not least among them the enrichment of the talent pool in countries and regions to which they relocate—the number of international migrants has also been driving some dangerous trends in many countries. Xenophobia, with its associated discrimination and violence against migrants—particularly those with ethnicities, nationalities, cultures, and religions markedly different from the majority in the country they move to—has been most pronounced in regions stressed by high unemployment among natives and in countries where the percentage of international migrants has become seen as a threat to the majority’s culture, traditions, and future prosperity.
In Athens, neo-Nazi vigilantes have been patrolling the streets and brutally attacking the growing number of Muslim migrants from several countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Algeria. In Moscow and some other Russian cities, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other right-wing extremist groups are also brutalizing migrants—many of them from areas like Chechnya in the trans-Caucasus region, where there are significant Muslim populations.
Migrants now make up 20 percent or more of the people in forty-one countries around the world; three quarters of them have less than one million people. There are now thirty-eight larger countries where cross-border migrants make up 10 percent of the population or more.
India will soon complete construction of a 2,100-mile-long, 2.5-meter-high iron fence on its border with Bangladesh. As the nation most affected by the early impacts of climate change, Bangladesh has experienced a surge of internal migration from low-lying coastal areas and offshore islands in the Bay of Bengal, where four million people currently live. The overall population of Bangladesh is expected to increase from 150 million today to 242 million over the next few decades.
Bangladesh has also been the destination for a large number of international migrants from Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion. The presence among these migrants of many jihadists and Taliban members has given rise to concerns by India about an upsurge in Islamic extremism on the Bangladesh side of the border. But the continuing economic stress in Bangladesh is the principal source of pressure for trans-border migration toward India and through India to other destinations.
Even in the United States, where immigration has been a historic success story, the surge of legal and undocumented migrants in the early part of the twenty-first century created social stress. Twenty percent of all international migrants now live in the United States even though it has only 5 percent of the world’s population. During the twelve-month period that ended in July 2011, the number of “non-white” babies born outnumbered Caucasian babies for the first time. The concern over illegal immigration from Mexico and other countries during the same period is cited by domestic terrorism experts as a major factor causing the surge of hate groups.
A RECENT STUDY by the Brookings Institution indicates that “minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010.” The number of white children in the U.S. declined by 4.3 million as the number of Hispanic and Asian children increased by 5.5 million. Already, more than half of U.S. cities are minority majority, with the two largest groups represented by Hispanics at 26 percent and African Americans at 22 percent. Hispanics now represent the largest minority group in the United States.
U.S. domestic terrorist groups actually peaked in the 1990s just prior to the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City. The number declined sharply for more than twelve years until the inauguration of Barack Obama, which appeared to trigger a renewed upsurge in 2009–12 to levels far higher than the previous peak. The Southern Poverty Law Center links the increase to the changes in America’s demographic makeup: “This very real and very significant change is represented in the person of Barack Obama. We’ve of course seen the most remarkable growth in the radical right since 2008, precisely coinciding with Obama’s first three years as president.”
Ironically, net immigration from Mexico fell to zero in 2012, though immigration from several other countries has continued. Flows of Asian immigrants to the U.S. overtook Hispanics in 2009. And according to the Brookings study, “Even if immigration stopped tomorrow, we will achieve a national minority majority child population by 2050 (by around 2023 if current immigration trends continue).”
The relatively higher birth rate in the Palestinian territories, compared to the Jewish birth rate in Israel, is causing changes in the political analyses by both Palestinians and Israelis of how to evaluate potential options for resolving, or at least managing, the tensions in the region. The same differential birth rate has led to a sevenfold increase in the Arab minority population inside Israel’s borders since the modern state was founded, leading to oft-expressed concerns by some Israelis that demographic trends could one day force a choice between the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and the democratic principle of majority rule.
There are also often negative consequences in countries where large numbers of migrants are leaving. Chief among them is the problem caused by a brain drain when highly trained professionals—such as doctors and nurses—leave their countries of origin, in part because their skills make it much easier for them to find lucrative employment and higher standards of living in developed countries. When middle-class families migrate, there is often diminished support in their countries of origin for continued investments in public goods like education and health care. At the same time, the increasing percentage of migrant and domestic minority populations in developed countries has sometimes appeared to weaken the social contract supporting the provision of public goods—particularly public education—when phenomena such as white flight to private schools results in less support for public school budgets.
Nevertheless, many destination countries have adopted policies designed to attract higher-skilled migrants. And the need for low-wage workers in many developed countries with smaller than optimal workforces has also led to a significant expansion of temporary worker programs—particularly in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Colleges and universities have also significantly increased their recruiting of migrant students from foreign countries.
Many of the nations and regions from which migrants originate also experience some positive benefits, particularly in the form of remittances, especially from migrants leaving lower-middle-income countries. The remittances sent by migrants back to their families totaled $351 billion in 2011 and are projected to reach $441 billion in 2014.
The amount of remittances sent back to their communities of origin by internal migrants is believed to be much larger. In China, internal migrants from rural areas send an average of $545 per year back home from the cities where they work. In Bangladesh, the Coalition for the Urban Poor calculates that migrants from rural areas to the capital city of Dhaka routinely send back home as much as 60 percent of their income. Indian migrants from the poor states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal routinely send money orders from Mumbai back to their home communities in amounts that make up the majority of money flowing into those three states.
Alongside the flows of international and internal migrants are growing numbers of refugees. According to the international treaty on refugees, the definition of a refugee is someone who, unlike a migrant, leaves his or her country of origin due to the fear of violence or persecution. Almost 44 million people around the world have been forced from their nations of origin by conflict or persecution—of which 15.4 million are classified as refugees—and another 27.5 million people have been displaced by violence and persecution to new communities within their own country.
The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, notes that 70 percent of current refugees have been in that status for more than five years, and as a result, “it’s becoming more and more difficult to find solutions for them.” Twelve million among them are stateless, meaning they have no place to go home to. In the last five years, for the first time, more refugees moved to cities than to refugee camps. While equal numbers of migrants traveled to developed and developing countries, 80 percent of refugees live in poor regions of the world.
All of the large source countries for refugees are mired in violent conflicts, including Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, and Sudan. The two largest source countries for refugees are Afghanistan and Iraq. The ill-fated decision by the United States in 2002 to invade Iraq—thus prolonging the conflict in Afghanistan as well, by prematurely removing troops that had encircled Osama bin Laden—has had a cascading impact on the entire region, flooding neighboring countries with refugees.
The three million Afghans displaced by the war in their home country have fled mostly to Pakistan (1.9 million) and Iran (one million). The 1.7 million refugees from Iraq have also gone mostly to neighboring countries. Indeed, according to the World Development Report, more than three quarters of refugees worldwide are hosted in nations neighboring their country of origin. The largest number are now living in Asia and the Pacific (2 million—most of them in South Asia), Sub-Saharan Africa (2.2 million—403,000 of them in one country, Kenya!), and the Middle East and North Africa (another 1.9 million).
However, more than 1.6 million refugees, the vast majority of them Muslim, have found their way to Europe, further exacerbating xenophobic tensions and increasing fears of radicalization of poorly assimilated young Muslim populations living in Europe; Muslims already make up 5 percent of Europe’s population. The surge of international migrants from North Africa and South Asia into Europe has also triggered a renewal of xenophobia, even in countries previously known for their commitment to tolerance. In several European countries, the combination of economic stress and the growing numbers of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, has disrupted the political balance as extreme right-wing and nativist groups exploit the public’s uneasiness.
THE FASTEST GROWING new category of refugees is climate refugees. Although they are not legally classified as refugees (because the definition in the Refugee Protocol requires that the source of their motivating fear be violence or persecution from other people), they are nevertheless routinely described as refugees because their migration is not voluntary. In the U.N.’s State of the World’s Refugees report from June 2012, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement, “conflict and human rights abuses,” are now “increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors,” many of them related “to the relentless advance of climate change.”
Israel announced a major national plan last May on climate change that included a recommendation to build “sea fences” near its maritime borders on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, linked with impassable barriers on its land borders, in order to protect against a predicted wave of climate refugees. “Climate change is already here and requires comprehensive preparations,” said Israeli environmental protection minister Gilad Erdan. “The lack of water, warming and sea level rise, even if it will occur on a different schedule, will bring migration movements from all impoverished regions to every place where it is possible to escape this,” the study noted.
One of the two leaders of the team authoring the report, Professor Arnon Soffer of the University of Haifa’s Geography Department, added, “The migration wave is not a problem for the future. It is today, it is going on now.… It will just increase from day to day.” Noting that European navies prevent most boats with migrants from reaching Europe, he said they are forced to go elsewhere, but “in India they shoot, in Nepal they shoot, in Japan they shoot.” The team noted that climate refugees are expected from Africa, where approximately 800 lakes have dried up completely in the last decade, including the former largest lake in Africa, Lake Chad, which mobilized many climate refugees eastward into the Darfur region.
Persistent droughts and desertification in Somalia have also contributed to the violent conflict there. Other climate refugees attempting to migrate to Israel are expected from Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. In addition, still more internal climate refugees are expected from the Negev, from which many Bedouins have already moved to cities in the center of Israel. Soffer added, “If we want to keep Israel a Jewish state, we will have to defend ourselves from what I call ‘climate refugees,’ exactly as Europe is doing now.”
U.S. assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell recently wrote that the impact of climate change on Africa and South Asia, including “the expected decline in food production and fresh drinking water, combined with the increased conflict sparked by resource scarcity,” is likely to produce “a surge in the number of Muslim immigrants to the European Union (EU),” doubling Europe’s Muslim population within the next twelve years, “and it will be much larger if, as we expect, the effects of climate change spur additional migration from Africa and South Asia.”
A few years ago, I visited the southernmost extremity of the European Union, Spain’s Canary Islands, just off the coast of West Africa. I found many conversations dominated by concerns of residents about the surge of refugees attempting to migrate by boat from Africa to their most convenient point of entry into the European Union. In some years, more than 20,000 Africans have attempted the dangerous journey across to the Canaries.
Over the next century, the global community can expect millions of climate refugees. Almost 150 million people now live in low-lying areas only one meter or less higher than the current sea level. For each additional meter of sea level rise, roughly 100 million more people will be forced to abandon the places they call home. And this number, of course, does not include refugees from desertifying dryland areas.
The dimensions of the climate crisis are described in Chapter 6, along with the difficult but cost-effective and necessary responses. What is clear now, however, is that even with global warming in its early stages, the growth of human civilization is already pressing hard against limitations that are complicating our ability to provide the essentials of life for billions of people.
For example, where topsoil and groundwater are concerned, there is a disconnect between the frenzied rate of exploitation of both these resources on the one hand, and the extremely slow rate with which either resource can be regenerated on the other. Renewable groundwater aquifers fill back up, on average, at the rate of less than one half of one percent per year. Similarly, topsoil regenerates naturally—but at the agonizingly slow rate of approximately 2.5 centimeters every 500 years.
In just the last forty years, the overexploitation of topsoil has led to the loss of a significant amount of productivity on almost one third of the arable land on Earth. Without urgent action, the majority of the Earth’s topsoil could be severely degraded or lost before the end of this century. In China, topsoil is being lost fifty-seven times faster than this natural replacement process; in Europe seventeen times faster. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it is being lost in the United States ten times faster than it can be replenished. Ethiopia is now losing almost two billion tons of topsoil every year to rain washing the erodible soils down the steep slopes of its terrain.
In the case of groundwater, the nearly total depletion of some important aquifers and the sharply dropping levels of others have now focused the attention of experts in many countries on the future of this resource. The doubling of the global withdrawal rate over the last half century—and the projection that withdrawals will continue to increase at an even faster pace—have many experts beginning to get very worried. In many areas, the withdrawals from aquifers now far exceed the rate of replenishment; many aquifers are now falling several meters per year.
IT IS AS if we are willfully blind to the basic underlying reality of our relationship to the Earth’s limited resources. But this seeming blindness is reinforced by the world’s principal method of accounting for natural resources, which treats their use as income rather than withdrawals from capital. This is, in the words of economist Herman Daly, “a colossal accounting error.… At least we should put the costs and the benefits in separate accounts for comparison.”
The basic distinction between operating income and withdrawals from capital is crucial, whether one is accounting for a company or a nation. In the words of a classic accounting text, if this distinction is misunderstood and improperly made, it leads to “practical confusion between income and capital.” Another seminal accounting text notes that “net income of an entity for any period is the maximum amount that can be distributed to its owners during the period and still allow the entity to have the same net worth at the end of the period as at the beginning.… In other words, capital must be maintained before an entity can earn income.” This same principle holds true for nations and for the world as a whole. In recognition of this principle, the U.N. Statistical Commission in 2012 adopted a “system of environmental-economic accounts” as a step toward integrating environmental externalities. In 2007, the European Union launched its “beyond GDP” initiative, and is due to release an assessment by all member states of their “natural capital” in 2014.
When Simon Kuznets warned in 1937 that misuse of GDP would make us vulnerable to such accounting errors and could lead to a form of willful blindness, he noted that conflicts over resources might well exacerbate the risk inherent in the admittedly flawed design of his elaborate accounting system:
The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion … especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent on oversimplification.
In an example of the precise problem Kuznets was anticipating, today—all around the world—calculations about the impact of groundwater withdrawals are often at “the center of conflict of opposing social groups.” Often, officials in regions where water supplies are shared with other regions or countries—and whose farms and businesses would be disrupted by any change in water allocations—have strong incentives to minimize the seriousness of the problem—putting off for the future a problem they would rather not deal with in the near term. It’s an all too familiar challenge for anyone who works on global warming.
In just one of many examples of this particular variety of denial, when an expert from the University of Oklahoma, Luo Yiqi, visited Inner Mongolia in northern China a few years ago to study desertification, he was astonished to see fields of rice (one of the most water-intensive crops) grown with water that authorities allowed to be pumped at grossly unsustainable rates from deep aquifers. “Apparently,” he noted dryly, “farmers did not get enough scientific guidance.”
The regrettable decision to ignore the depreciation of natural resources, while accounting precisely for the depreciation of capital goods, may have been subtly influenced by the state of the world when this formula was created in the 1930s. We were still in the last stages of the colonial era, when limitations on supplies of natural resources seemed irrelevant; industrialized countries could simply obtain more in their colonial possessions, where the supply seemed, for all intents and purposes, limitless. Global population has tripled since the national accounts were adopted, and the dangerous illusion that Kuznets warned about is now at the heart of the world’s failure to recognize the twin dangers of unsustainable depletion of both topsoil and groundwater.
Since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, these two strategic resources have both been essential for the production of food. The irrigation of crops emerged roughly 7,000 years ago and the Green Revolution of the twentieth century increased agriculture’s dependence on irrigation—particularly in China, where 80 percent of the harvest depends on irrigation, and India, where 60 percent depends on irrigation. (The U.S. depends far less on irrigation.)
Large dams for water storage gained popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are now 45,000 large dams in the world, including on all twenty-one of the world’s longest rivers. FDR’s economic stimulus program in the 1930s resulted in large-scale dam construction by the Tennessee Valley Authority in my home region, and the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest—and of course, the majestic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which was the tallest in the U.S. when it was built seventy years ago.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of urban populations, more than 90 percent of global freshwater was used for agriculture. In more recent decades, the competition for water between agriculture, manufacturing, and fast-growing thirsty cities has led to growing disputes over water allocation—disputes that agriculture often loses. Today, more than 70 percent of the world’s freshwater is used to grow food, even though 780 million people in the world still lack access to safe drinking water. As noted earlier, the world has made significant progress in reducing the number of people who lack access to improved water resources (though little progress has been made in preventing the contamination of freshwater sources—both surface and groundwater resources—from human and animal waste and other pollutants).
Some deep aquifers have long been sealed from surface water. A recently tapped aquifer in the Northeastern United States, Patapsco (under the state of Maryland) has water found to be one million years old. Similarly, the Nubian Aquifer (underneath the Sahara), the Great Artesian Basin (underneath northeastern Australia), and the Alberta Basin (underneath western Canada) all also have water more than one million years old. But although these “fossil” aquifers are nonreplenishable, most scientists believe they are limited in their supply of water; the vast majority of aquifers are replenished slowly as rainwater filters down to them.
Until recently, the amount of information about groundwater depletion rates was spotty at best, and according to one expert, the threat to the resource is a classic case of “out of sight, out of mind.” Indeed, so much water is now being withdrawn from underground aquifers that it is believed by experts to account for 20 percent of the sea level rise in recent decades (although scientists forecast that the accelerating ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica will dramatically increase sea level rise later in this century).
The highest rates of groundwater depletion are in northwest India and northeast Pakistan, the Central Valley of California, and northeastern China. One Chinese groundwater specialist found that an aquifer in northern China with water 30,000 years old was being used unsustainably to irrigate crops in dryland areas. China has embarked upon the largest water project in history—the South–North Water Transfer Project that has been under construction for decades, intended to remedy water shortages in northern China. Asia, which has 29 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, is now using more than 50 percent of the world’s water. According to the United Nations, “In 2000, about 57% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal, and 70% of its consumption, took place in Asia, where the world’s major irrigated lands are located.”
Africa has only 9 percent of the world’s freshwater, but is using 13 percent, and is expected by U.N. experts to have the most intensive increases in water withdrawal in the coming decades. Europe is consuming only a slightly larger percentage than its own supply. The Americas are fortunate in having more water than they use, but large regions—particularly Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.—are already experiencing severe shortages. In 2011, more than one million head of cattle were herded north from Texas to wetter, cooler pastures. Few expect them ever to return.
According to a study by the Scripps Institute, there is a “50-50 chance” that Lake Mead—the largest man-made lake in the western hemisphere, the one formed by Hoover Dam—will run completely dry before the end of this decade. In addition, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the water table beneath three of the largest grain-producing states—Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma—has dropped more than 100 feet, forcing many farmers to abandon irrigation. Reservoirs in the state of Georgia have also been running at dangerously low levels for several years.
Improving the efficiency of water use is a cost-effective option for ameliorating shortages in some areas. Many aging water distribution systems leak extraordinary amounts of water. In the U.S., for example, an important urban water line bursts every two minutes on average, twenty-four hours a day. Some portions of older urban water systems were built over 160 years ago, and since then, have been—like groundwater resources—“out of sight, out of mind.” Repairing municipal water pipes is expensive, but some cities are belatedly recognizing the necessity of undertaking this task.
According to ecologist Peter Gleick, we should view efficiency as a giant wellspring that could provide vast new quantities of needed freshwater. Unfortunately, this wellspring, like many of the aquifers now being recklessly depleted, also seems to be out of sight, out of mind. The majority of agricultural irrigation practices are still extremely wasteful. Switching to scientifically precise drip irrigation techniques is cost-effective in most agricultural operations, but many farmers have been slow to make the change. Another benefit of switching to more efficient and precise methods of irrigation is that wasteful and excessive irrigation of crops increases the salinity of soils—because the irrigation water usually contains small amounts of salt that build up with continued use.
The recycling of water is growing in popularity. Some communities already require the use of greywater—used water that is not suitable for drinking but is safe for watering plants. The more controversial recycling proposals take sewage water and remove all of the contaminants, purify it, and put it into drinking water systems. There is still a great deal of consumer resistance to these plans, but some communities have successfully implemented the approach.
In regions where rainfall is becoming more concentrated in large downpours—interrupted by longer periods of drought—many experts are calling for the increased use of cisterns to capture more of the rainfall and store it for drinking water. This once common practice fell out of favor with the extension of underground water lines from reservoirs. I remember the cisterns we used to have on our family farm when I was a boy. We stopped using them when we got “city water.”
THE STATE OF the world’s topsoil is threatened by the same willfully blind overexploitation that has caused shortages of freshwater. In the world’s prevailing system of accounting, neither water nor topsoil are assigned any value. Therefore, wasteful and destructive practices that diminish the supplies of both are invisible in the world’s economic calculations. Yet topsoil, along with water, is the basis for virtually all human life on Earth. More than 99.7 percent of food consumed by human beings comes from cropland, more specifically from the six to eight inches of topsoil that cover roughly 10 percent of the Earth’s surface.
On a global basis, we are effectively strip-mining this crucial resource in an unsustainable pattern, by recklessly plowing erodible soils, overgrazing grasslands, taking arable land for buildings and roads to accommodate urban and suburban sprawl, tolerating reckless deforestation, and failing to use proven land management techniques that replenish soil carbon and nitrogen.
At present, every kilogram of corn produced in the American Midwest results in the loss of more than a kilogram of topsoil. In some states, such as Iowa, the ratio is even higher: 1.5 kilograms of topsoil lost for each kilogram of grain. These rates of soil loss are not sustainable. They deplete soil carbon, thus damaging the productivity of the soil over time, and accelerate the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
We already know how to slow and reverse soil erosion, but global leadership would be required to mobilize the community of nations in the same way that FDR mobilized the United States in the 1930s. Organic agriculture with low-till and no-till practices can sharply reduce soil loss while simultaneously increasing the fertility of the topsoil. Crop rotation, a technique that used to be widespread before industrial agriculture took over, can replenish soil carbon and nitrogen.
Another once common technique that has since been abandoned in large areas of the world is the recycling of animal manure as fertilizer for crops. Factory farming—the clustering of thousands of head of livestock in crowded feedlots and feeding them corn—has turned this natural fertilizer into highly acidic toxic waste that is harmful to crops and thus becomes an expensive liability instead of a valued asset.
A major study in 2012 by leading researchers at the University of Minnesota, Iowa State University, and the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that the use of nontoxic manure as fertilizer and a three-year crop rotation designed to replenish soil fertility reduced the need for herbicides and nitrogen fertilizer by almost 90 percent, without reducing profits. One of the researchers, Professor Matt Liebman of Iowa State, said that one of the reasons farmers do not use the approach recommended in the study is that “there’s no cost assigned to environmental externalities.”
For the last century, modern agriculture has been based on heavy use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer—90 percent of the cost of which is from natural gas, from which virtually all of the nitrogen is derived. However, agricultural productivity growth has been slowing even as fertilizer use per acre has been increasing dramatically. Moreover, the heavy use of nitrogen in agriculture has caused significant water pollution problems around the world as it runs off farmland with the rain and feeds uncontrolled massive algae blooms in coastal regions of the ocean—and dead zones, areas devoid of life, which are growing in several ocean regions, including the part of the Gulf of Mexico into which the Mississippi River drains. In China the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has increased by 40 percent in the last two decades even though grain production has remained relatively stable; it is this nitrogen runoff that has produced the recent spectacular algae blooms in Chinese rivers, lakes, and coastal areas.
Additional nitrogen emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels in factories, on farms, and in cars and trucks have created significant air pollution problems, particularly in the U.S., China, Southeast Asia, and parts of Latin America. More efficient and targeted use of nitrogen fertilizers, and tighter restrictions on emissions from factories and vehicles, are needed to address the problem.
While nitrogen supplies are not limited, there is a potentially serious emerging limit to the supply of another crucial component of fertilizer—phosphorus, which is a relatively rare element on the Earth. Even as conventional sources of phosphorus are running out, modern agricultural techniques have tripled the depletion of phosphorus from cropland.
The first warning about a phosphorus shortage in a 1938 message to Congress, by President Roosevelt, led to a successful worldwide search for additional reserves—including the discovery of phosphates near Tampa, Florida, where 65 percent of U.S. production now takes place. But while the United States produces 40 percent of the world’s corn and soybeans, it produces only 19 percent of the world’s phosphorus, which, in the long run, is essential for agriculture to continue—and so now the search for new reserves is beginning again.
Forty percent of the world’s current supply of phosphates (the most common form in which phosphorus occurs) is in Morocco, which has been called the “Saudi Arabia of phosphorus.” The next largest reserves are found in China, which imposed a 135 percent tariff on exports during the 2008 food price crisis. Many experts fear that similar hoarding of phosphorus could occur if food prices continue to go up, although other experts are more sanguine about the possibility of finding new sources in unconventional locations, such as the ocean floor.
Phosphorus is essential to all life, including human life. It makes up the backbone of DNA, among other things, and fully one percent of the bodyweight of human beings is made up of phosphorus; in fact, the seven billion people on Earth discard large quantities in urine every day. Some countries are now actively exploring the recycling of urine in order to extend the supplies of phosphorus for fertilizers.
The addition of rhizobium bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi to soils as seeds are planted can improve crop yields and also speed the recovery of soil fertility and enhance the sequestration of soil carbon. The planting of leguminous trees every thirty feet or so as buffer strips and contour hedges can replenish nitrogen in the soil and further protect against erosion. Leaving the majority of crop residue—like corn stover—on the land during and after harvesting the crop can also restore the fertility of the soil while diminishing erosion. The use of biochar (from sustainable sources) in a carefully managed way can also improve yields and soil quality. The reduction of meat as a percentage of a healthy diet can relieve pressure on the Earth’s topsoil. And the expansion of small-scale organic gardens in countries with a surplus of arable land could potentially add significant volumes of fresh food to the world supply, as they did in Western countries when Victory Gardens were planted during World War II.
But perhaps the single most effective measure to protect topsoil would be to use carbon credits to provide an additional source of income for farmers who pay careful attention to safeguarding and improving the carbon content and fertility of their soils.
So long as the world ignores the value of topsoil in its constant calculations of growth and productivity, the demands placed on agriculture by the combination of growing population and growing per capita consumption of food will continue putting the future of topsoil at severe risk. At current consumption rates (which are still increasing), we need an additional 15 million hectares each year to keep up with the extra food production needed for the increasing population. Yet we are destroying and losing approximately 10 million hectares (approximately 25 million acres) every year. At present, much of the additional cropland being developed results in deforestation—often in forest areas that have very thin topsoils that are quickly depleted by wind and water after the trees are gone. In addition, the more forestland that is converted to farmland, the more biodiversity is lost.
In some respects, the global topsoil crisis is an echo of what happened in the United States in the first third of the twentieth century when the first mass market tractors—pulling the more efficient plows that had been invented three quarters of a century earlier—broke the sod of erodible grasslands in the Midwest for crops; over the next three decades the vulnerable topsoil was washed and blown away, creating the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Less well known in the U.S. is the even larger tragedy experienced in Central Asia during the 1950s when the USSR plowed an enormous area of grassland—mostly in Kazakhstan (1954)—and created their own Dust Bowl.
Another epic land-use catastrophe occurred in Central Asia in the 1960s, when the USSR embarked on a shortsighted plan to grow thirsty cotton crops in dryland areas of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. So much water was diverted from two rivers—the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya—that the world’s fourth largest inland sea, the Aral Sea, almost completely disappeared. I visited the Aral Sea two decades ago and saw firsthand the tragedy that resulted for the people who used to depend on it.
My father’s generation was motivated by the U.S. soil erosion crisis to adopt new land management techniques. One of the great accomplishments of FDR’s New Deal was the massive program to reconvert eroded land to grassland and a nationwide effort to fight soil erosion. I still remember my father teaching me when I was a young boy how to stop gullies before they began cutting deep into the soil, and how to recognize the richest soil—it’s black from all the organic carbon in the soil.
Modern-day dust storms are now once again increasing in size and frequency as drylands are being overgrazed and erodible soils are subjected to higher temperatures and stronger winds. “Drylands are on the front line of the climate change challenges for the world,” said Luc Gnacadja, who heads the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification. The U.N. Environment Programme reports that land degradation in drylands threatens the way of life for an estimated one billion people in 100 countries. Desertification is taking a toll on topsoil and destroying arable cropland—particularly in regions of Africa north and south of the Sahara, throughout the Middle East, in Central Asia, and in large areas of China, where overgrazing, poor cultivation techniques, and urban sprawl are contributing significantly to the phenomenon.
In the U.S., in July of 2011, Phoenix, Arizona, was covered with dust when, in the words of the National Weather Service, “A very large and historic dust storm moved through a large swatch of Arizona.” Although these Southwestern U.S. dust storms, often called haboobs, are not new, Phoenix has had an unusually large number of them in recent years—seven in 2011 alone.
The U.S. Geological Survey and UCLA conducted a study in 2011 that predicted “accelerated rates of dust emission from wind erosion” as a result of climate change in the Southwestern United States. Climate expert Joseph Romm has recommended use of the term “dust-bowlification” as a way of describing what is in store for many regions of desertifying drylands.
Lester Brown, long one of the world’s leading environmental experts, points out that the two most significant desertifying areas now generating dust storms are in north-central China and in the areas of Central Africa that lie on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. As Brown puts it, “Two huge dust bowls are forming, one across northwest China, western Mongolia, and central Asia; the other in central Africa.”
According to geographer Andrew Goudie at Oxford, dust storms from the Sahara have increased tenfold during the last fifty years. The chairman of the African Union, Jean Ping, says, “The phenomenon of desertification affects 43 percent of productive lands, or 70 percent of economic activity and 40 percent of the continent’s population.” In large areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, soil carbon content is now lower than it was in the United States’ Midwest just prior to the Dust Bowl.
In Nigeria, while human population increased fourfold over the last sixty years, the number of livestock exploded from six million to more than 100 million. Partly as a result, the northern region of Nigeria is being desertified—which is contributing to growing clashes between Muslims moving from the north into non-Muslim areas in southern Nigeria. Growth in the population of both humans and livestock is also driving competition for land in other drying areas of Africa and has led to deadly conflicts between herders and farmers (whose ethnicities and religions are also different), who have fought one another in Sudan, Mali, and elsewhere.
The same livestock population explosion is damaging the overgrazed grasslands surrounding China’s Gobi Desert, where the dust storms are also increasing dramatically. While the United States and China have roughly the same amount of grazing land and roughly the same number of cattle (80–100 million), China has 284 million sheep and goats compared to less than 10 million in the United States. According to the latest statistics available, China is now losing almost 1,400 square miles of arable land to deserts every year.
The U.S. embassy in China has used satellite photos to illustrate the “desert mergers and acquisitions” in north-central China where two deserts in Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province are merging and expanding. In Xinjiang Province in northwestern China, the same thing is happening, as the Taklamakan and Kumtag deserts are also merging and expanding. More than 24,000 villages and their surrounding cropland have had to be at least partially abandoned in these northern and western regions of China. Similar tragedies are unfolding in both Iran and Afghanistan, both of which have already abandoned many villages to the encroaching desert.
While the massive sandstorms in China and Africa are capturing attention today, Lester Brown warns, “A third massive cropland expansion is now taking place in the Brazilian Amazon Basin and in the cerrado, a savannah-like region bordering the basin on its south side.” These soils are highly erodible and the results are predictable: low yields, followed by soil erosion on a massive scale. The knock-on effects also include the further expansion of cattle ranching into the Amazon rainforest, adding even more risk to the integrity of that globally important ecosystem. The Amazon has already suffered from two “hundred-year droughts” in the last seven years. As the deforestation and the wildfires continue in the Amazon, many experts have expressed concern that the Amazon is in danger of being transformed over time from the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth into a massive dryland region.
With the rapidly increasing populations in Africa and the Middle East, and impending food shortages, it is remarkable that the world has paid so little attention to the desertification crisis. According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification’s Luc Gnacadja, the reason desertification has not become a higher priority is that 90 percent of the people affected live in developing countries. It is another example of the imbalance of power in the world—and the lack of leadership. Gnacadja added, “The top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.”
The loss of arable land is particularly acute in the most populated nation of North Africa. According to the United Nations, Egypt is now losing an incredible 3.5 acres per hour of its fertile agricultural land in the Nile Delta—mainly because of new construction and urban sprawl to accommodate additional shelter for Egypt’s fast growing population.
In addition, rising sea level in the Mediterranean is already pushing saltwater aquifers upward in areas near the coast, resulting in the loss of cropland to salinization. Salinization is also occurring in the rich Ganges Delta, the Mekong Delta, and in other so-called mega-deltas. A one-meter rise in sea level—less than that predicted during this century—would inundate a significant percentage of the most fertile soils in the Nile Delta—from whence 40 percent of Egypt’s food production comes.
The pressure created by the increased use of water-intensive agriculture, population growth, and economic expansion is increasing tensions over the allocation of river water in several regions of the world where the management of rivers and dams affects watersheds shared by multiple countries. The potential for conflict is building in the Nile River watershed, where the largest country dependent on the Nile, Egypt, now benefits from its allocation of the majority of the Nile’s water. But Ethiopia, where 85 percent of the Nile’s headwaters originate but where very little of that water is now consumed, will double its population in the next thirty-seven years—and Sudan, which also depends on the Nile, is expected to increase its population 85 percent during the same period.
To the east of Egypt, the decision by Turkey to take a larger portion of the headwaters from the Tigris and Euphrates has led to growing complaints by Iraq and Syria that they are being treated unjustly. Both Iraq and Syria have been overdepleting their underground aquifers as they seek a resolution of the issue. Similarly, China’s effort to take for itself a larger percentage of water from rivers that flow into Southeast Asia and India is raising tensions that will only get worse as populations in all the affected countries increase. In the United States, the growing conflicts over allocations of water in the West from the Colorado River system are being waged in court. But the underlying cause in all four of these giant watersheds is the same: there’s more demand for water and less supply.
Conflicts between nations over access to freshwater have historically produced very few wars, though conflicts within nations over water have frequently produced social tensions and occasional violent clashes. By contrast, conflicts over land have, of course, frequently caused wars in the past.
In our new globalized economy, some nations with growing populations and shrinking resources of topsoil and water for agriculture are embarking on large-scale projects to purchase vast tracts of arable land in other countries—particularly in Africa, where an estimated one third of the world’s uncultivated arable land is found. The degree of control that African governments—and the elites that run many of them—have over property rights is much greater in many parts of Africa where tribal property rights predating the colonial era are too easily ignored.
China, India, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, along with multinational corporations and even hedge funds investing money from U.S. universities, are buying up large amounts of land in Africa to produce wheat and other crops for their own consumption and for sale in global markets. “It’s a new colonialism, it’s like the scramble of Africa in [the] 19th century whereby our resources were exploited to develop the Western world,” said Makambo Lotorobo, an official with a Kenyan NGO, Friends of Lake Turkana.
“There is no doubt that this is not just about land, this is about water,” said Philip Woodhouse from the University of Manchester. Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with GRAIN, an NGO specializing in food and agriculture issues, added, “Rich countries are eyeing Africa not just for a healthy return on capital, but also as an insurance policy.”
This has led to an agricultural real estate boom in Africa. More than one third of Liberia’s land, for example, has been sold to private investors. According to an analysis by the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Washington-based international coalition of NGOs, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has signed deals with foreign owners for 48.8 percent of its agricultural land; Mozambique has signed deals with foreign growers for 21.1 percent of its land. Almost 10 percent of the land in South Sudan (according to Norwegian analysts)—and 25 percent of the best acreage around its capital—was sold to investors after the country won its independence in 2011. China reached an agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8 million hectares of land. There is disagreement among experts on how much of the land involved in these massive African purchases is being used for biofuels. The World Bank calculated that in 2009, 21 percent were for biofuels; the International Land Coalition calculated that 44 percent was dedicated to biofuels.
The South Korean multinational corporation Daewoo attempted to purchase almost half of the arable land in Madagascar, though public riots led to a cancellation of the contract (South Korean companies purchased 700,000 hectares in northern Sudan for wheat, according to a study by The Guardian, and the United Arab Emirates purchased slightly more—750,000 hectares).
In Ethiopia, where 8.2 percent of agricultural land has been signed over to foreigners, Nyikaw Ochalla, originally from the Gambella region and who is now living in the United Kingdom, told The Guardian, “The foreign companies are arriving in large numbers, depriving people of land they have used for centuries. There is no consultation with the indigenous population. The deals are done secretly. The only thing the local people see is people coming with lots of tractors to invade their lands. All the land round my family village of Illia has been taken over and is being cleared. People now have to work for an Indian company. Their land has been compulsorily taken and they have been given no compensation. People cannot believe what is happening. Thousands of people will be affected and people will go hungry.”
The World Bank analyzed reports of international agricultural property deals between 2008 and 2009 and concluded that during that two-year period, foreign nations and corporations purchased almost 80 million hectares of land—approximately the area of the nation of Pakistan—and that two thirds of the deals were in Africa. In addition to the sheer scale of the international land purchases and long-term leases in Africa, other concerns highlighted by African and international NGOs include problems with the use of water, soil management, and the impact on local farmers whose precolonial tenure rights are often unenforceable. In Uganda, where 14.6 percent of agricultural lands have been signed over to foreign growers, 20,000 people have claimed they were unjustly evicted from their own land; the case is pending in Ugandan courts.
After examining more than thirty studies of this issue, the International Institute for Environment and Development concluded that many of the large-scale foreign investments have already failed because of miscalculations concerning difficulties in financing the projects or unrealistic business plans. Part of the underlying problem is a gross imbalance in political power, with elites in nondemocratic governments dealing with multinational corporations and foreign countries to make short-term profits at the expense of the sustainability of their nations’ food production capability and often at the expense of poor farmers who are evicted from the land when ownership is transferred.
Several nations suffering from loss of topsoil, sharply declining crop yields, and shortages of freshwater have been forced to increase food imports. Saudi Arabia may have its last wheat harvest in 2013; it previously announced that it will rely entirely on wheat imports by 2016. In the 1970s, fearful that its central role in organizing the OPEC oil embargo might make it vulnerable to a counterembargo on the grain imports it relied upon heavily to feed its people, Saudi Arabia launched a crash program to subsidize (at almost $1,000 per ton) the growing of wheat irrigated with water from a deep nonrenewable aquifer underneath the Arabian Peninsula. However, years later, it belatedly realized that it was rapidly depleting the aquifer and announced cancellation of the program. “The decision to import is to preserve water,” said Saudi deputy minister of agriculture for research and development Abdullah al-Obaid. Agriculture absorbs 85 to 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s water, and 80 to 85 percent of that water comes from underground aquifers. (Elsewhere in the region, Israel banned the irrigation of wheat in 2000.)
The need to meet increasing demand for freshwater and food, especially protein, has led many to look to the oceans for relief. Saudi Arabia is among many nations that have long dreamed that a logical solution to our water problems will eventually involve desalination of seawater. After all, 97.5 percent of all of the water on Earth is saltwater, and most plans to deal with the current and projected shortages of freshwater involve the use and allocation of the other 2.5 percent of Earth’s water resources—70 percent of which is locked up in the ice and snow of Antarctica and Greenland.
Unfortunately, even with the best currently available technology, the amount of energy required to remove the salt and other minerals from seawater is so great that even energy-rich Saudi Arabia cannot afford it. It is more beneficial, in their view, to sell the oil they would otherwise have to burn in desalination plants and use the money to purchase the use of water-rich land in Africa. There are, of course, many desalination plants in the world—including in Saudi Arabia. However, the quantities produced are still relatively small and the expense makes wider use of desalination for the world’s growing water needs financially unsustainable.
Nevertheless, there are many scientists and engineers working to invent new, more cost-effective technologies for desalination. Some believe that this challenge is yet another reason why the world should embark on a massive, large-scale global effort to accelerate the cost reductions now under way in solar energy. I have seen many intriguing business plans aimed at solving this problem, but none that yet appears to be close to financial feasibility.
As a measure of the desperation that water shortages can cause, one Saudi prince, Mohammed al-Faisal, provided funding to a French engineer, Georges Mougin, to develop a business plan for lassoing icebergs in the North Atlantic and then towing them to areas experiencing severe droughts. According to their calculations, a 30-million-ton iceberg could supply 500,000 people with freshwater for a year.
The production of food crops, of course, normally requires both freshwater and topsoil. Some techno-optimists, though, have touted the possibility of growing crops without topsoil in hydroponic facilities where the plants are suspended from racks and supplied with ample amounts of water, nutrients, and sunlight. Unfortunately, hydroponics is the food equivalent of desalination: it is prohibitively expensive, largely because it too is so energy-intensive.
Yet there is one source of high-quality protein that does not require topsoil—seafood. Today, more than 4.3 billion people rely on fish for approximately 15 percent of their animal protein consumption. Unfortunately, however, the demand for fish is far outstripping the supply. Consumption of fish has increased significantly because of two familiar trends: growth in population and growth in per capita consumption. Over the last half century, the average person’s fish consumption globally increased from twenty-two pounds per person per year to almost thirty-eight pounds in 2012. As a result, the majority of the world’s ocean fisheries have been overexploited and almost one third of fish stocks in the oceans, according to the United Nations, are in danger. Stocks of large fish—tuna, swordfish, marlin, cod, halibut, and flounder, for example—have been reduced by 90 percent since the 1960s.
Although other factors play a role—including the destruction of coral reefs and changes in ocean temperature and acidity due to global warming pollution—the overexploitation of the ocean fisheries is the principal cause of the decline. The world reached “peak fish” twenty-five years ago. According to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, “About 80 percent of the world marine fish stocks for which assessment information is available are fully exploited or overexploited.… The average maximum size of fish caught declined by 22% since 1959 globally for all assessed communities. There is also an increasing trend of stock collapses over time, with 14% of assessed stocks collapsed in 2007.”
The good news is that ocean fisheries that are carefully managed can and do recover. The United States has led the way in such protections, and many of the U.S. fisheries are now improving in their health and abundance. President George W. Bush enacted an excellent system of protection for a large marine area in the Pacific Ocean northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. However, most fishing countries have not yet followed the example of the U.S. restrictions on overfishing, and global fish consumption is continuing to increase steadily.
Most of the continuing increase in fish consumption is now being supplied by farmed fish. However, there are growing concerns about the rapid expansion of aquaculture—61 percent of which will occur in China over the next seven years. Farmed fish do not have the same healthy qualities as wild fish, and often—particularly if they are imported from China or other jurisdictions that lack adequate environmental enforcement—can be tainted by pollution, antibiotics, and antifungals. In addition, most farmed fish are fed large amounts of smaller wild fish processed for formulated fishmeal. Salmon, for example, are fed at a ratio of five pounds of wild fish for each pound of farmed salmon produced. Consequently, the netting of enormous volumes of small fish in the oceans is now causing further disruption to the ocean food chain.
During an expedition to Antarctica in 2012, I talked with scientists who are deeply concerned about the overexploitation of the krill population in the Antarctic Ocean, largely for fishmeal and pet food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has noted that the overexploitation of so-called industrial species that are used for fishmeal instead of direct human consumption will begin to impose limits on the production of fishmeal and fish oil for aquaculture in 2013. Over half of the fish food in agriculture is now made from plant protein, and some operators are trying to increase that percentage, but it is still difficult to provide essential nutrients economically without fishmeal.
In addition, any major expansion of plant protein dedicated to aquaculture would represent yet another diversion of arable land from the production of food that can be directly consumed by people.
The overexploitation of the oceans, like the reckless depletion of the world’s resources of freshwater and topsoil, has increased the amount of attention being paid to the genetic engineering of plants and animals—to give them traits that will enable them to thrive in the new conditions we are creating in the world. Although more than 10 percent of all cropland is now planted with genetically engineered crops, the issues raised are complex, as we shall now see.
* At least, it’s noncommunicable by means of pathogens transferred from one person to another; research shows that it is communicable socially in families, communities, and nations in which the people one normally comes into contact with include many who are obese and overweight.
† Obesity is also a major risk factor for osteoarthritis and other musculoskeletal disorders, some cancers—particularly colon, breast, and endometrial—and kidney failure. Health experts estimate that the cost of treating these obesity-related diseases consumes roughly 10 to 20 percent of U.S. health care spending each year. Globally, approximately 6.4 percent of the world’s adult population now has diabetes, and according to the World Health Organization that number is expected to grow to 7.8 percent in the next seventeen years, to a total of 438 million—more than 70 percent of them in low- and middle-income countries.