The world provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed.
Mahatma Ghandi
To the rest of the Galaxy, if they are aware of us at all, Earth is but a pebble in the sky. To us it is home, and all the home we know.
From Pebble in the Sky, Isaac Asimov, 1950
Can humanity manage the planet – and itself – towards…transition to sustainability? I believe we can. Whether we will remains to be seen.
From The God Species, Mark Lynas, 2011
In the previous chapter we highlighted and discussed five main areas of environmental damage that give rise to ethical concern. We noted that humans have always left an ‘ecological footprint’ but that the footprint has increased both in depth and longevity as our technological expertise has grown and our population has increased. It is these latter two features that we now look at in greater detail.
The name of the geological epoch in which we are living is called the Holocene. The meaning of the word is ‘entirely new’ or ‘entirely recent’; thus the epoch started only about 12,000 years ago at the end of the last glaciation (ice age). It is an epoch that has seen the advent and development of agriculture, the development of human society, the growth of the human population (especially in more recent times) and the growth of cities (again especially in more recent times).1 It is these last two features, together with their inevitable effects on the natural world, that have led several authors to propose that a new epoch, the Anthropocene epoch, began in the 18th century and is now in full swing. The term implies human caused and new or recent. The idea behind the word is that humankind is having a significant and perhaps irreversible effect on the way that our planet works; the symptoms of this have been described and discussed in the previous chapter. In the words of Emilio Moran,2 ‘Our impact over the past 50 years has no analogue. We have no equivalent experience in our entire history or pre‐history as a species for what we are currently doing to the Earth’. Paul Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl3 put it even more starkly: ‘For millennia, humans have behaved as rebels against a superpower we call “Nature”. In the 20th century, however, new technologies, fossil fuels, and a fast‐growing population resulted in a great acceleration of our own powers. Albeit clumsily, we are taking control of Nature’s realm… We humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth… What we do now already affects the planet of the year 3000 or even 50,000. Changing the climate for millennia to come is just one aspect. By cutting down rainforests, moving mountains to access coal deposits and acidifying coral reefs, we fundamentally change the biology and the geology of the planet’.4 They go on to state that we have created our own ecosystems, including ‘mega‐regions’ containing 100 million or more inhabitants that are defined by heavy human use. These have become the major landscapes on many parts of the planet’s surface. Thus, ‘it is we who decide what nature is and what it will be’. So, the very nature of our planet is being altered by the activity of humankind, and there are a lot of us.
We wrote this in the spring of 2017. Behind this document, JB’s computer is running the 7billionactions website (www.7billionactions.org).5 An on‐screen clicker records the global population: it is increasing at a rate of about 145 per minute. According to this website, the seven billion mark was passed in the morning of 31 October 2011.6 The world population has increased more than threefold since the Second World War. Global population data give a clear picture of increasing birth rates up until the late 20th century, after which the rate has levelled of somewhat (although it is still very high: to go from six to seven billion took just under 12 years). Current estimates suggest that by 2050, the total population will be about 9.2 billion and that it will continue to increase from there, although possibly at a lower rate. So, can Earth sustain that many people?
Putting the rate of population increase into a more accessible form, if about 145 people are being added to the population each minute, that adds up to about 1.46 million each week, all of whom need food and shelter. To put this in perspective, the populations of Birmingham (United Kingdom), Philadelphia (United States) and Barcelona (Spain) are, respectively, about 1, 1.5 and 1.6 million. Thus, in the words of John Guillebaud, the rate of increase of our population ‘amounts to a huge new city each week, somewhere, which destroys wildlife habitats and augments world fossil fuel consumption. Every person born adds to greenhouse gas emissions, and yet escaping poverty is impossible without these emissions increasing’.7
It is undoubtedly true that the large number of people on the planet exacerbates all the problems that are caused by humankind. It is also true that in discussion of these problems, population has too often been overlooked or ignored. However, we ignore it at our peril. It is already difficult to feed the number of people we have on the planet. The United Nations (UN) estimates that about 795 million people are hungry, even though we can actually produce enough to feed the current human population of the planet. It is just that firstly, food supplies are not evenly distributed and secondly, very sadly, many of those who are hungry cannot afford enough food. Poverty is a major factor in hunger. Bringing people out of poverty therefore becomes a priority even though that will bring its own problems (see Chapter 14). In addition, as so strongly emphasised by John Guillebaud, there is an urgent need for increased education about and increased availability of contraception. There also needs to be more widespread empowerment of women, enabling them to make choices about family planning. It is thus rather unsettling (to put it mildly) that the largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, which has a very strong influence in, for example, South America, still prohibits contraception (see Chapters 2–4).
The importance of educating women has also been emphasised by Vivien Cumming8: For the foreseeable future, Earth is our only home and we must find a way to live on it sustainably. It seems clear that that requires scaling back our consumption, in particular a transition to low‐carbon lifestyles, and improving the status of women worldwide. Only when we have done these things will we really be able to estimate how many people our planet can sustainably hold, leading us on to think about ‘feeding the nine billion’.
Thinking first about feeding the increased population, which is expected to reach just over nine billion by 2050, we need to note that very significant increases in agricultural productivity have been achieved since the end of Second World War. This came about through intensive research in plant breeding and crop husbandry, including the ‘Green Revolution’ in the 1960s and 1970s.9 Wheat yields in developing countries, for example, increased threefold between 1950 and 1995. However, the rate of increase has declined to almost zero in the 21st century. Rather ironically however, the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration is pushing up cereal yields in several countries, provided that enough water can be supplied to the crop. However, the increased CO2 concentration does not automatically lead to higher yields because the positive effects on crop growth may be countered by other factors, some of which, such as rainfall patterns, are also part of climate change. Thus, although being wary of ascribing individual climatic events to the ongoing climate change trends, the long‐term and severe drought in California (2011–2016) has had and is still having marked effects on the growth and productivity of fruit, nuts, vegetables and cereals.
Returning to the global scene, it has been estimated that, based on 2010 figures, agricultural productivity must increase by about 1.75% per annum if we are to feed the world by 2050. The current average rate of increase in global crop production is actually 1.4%, even allowing for CO2‐induced increases in some countries. This means that in the next few years, population growth will outstrip agricultural productivity: it will not be possible, even in theory, to feed everyone.10 We need to note at this point that the required increase in productivity is actually greater than the growth in population because of a trend to increased meat consumption in countries that are becoming more developed, especially India and China. Thus feeding animals with plant protein results in a six‐ to sevenfold drop in the amount of protein available for human nutrition: 6–7 kg of plant protein fed to livestock results in the production of 1 kg of animal protein. The energy‐use ratios are even more disadvantageous. To produce 1 kilocalorie (kcal) for human nutrition requires livestock to be fed an average of 33 kcal.11 However, we also note that some livestock may be capable of exploiting more marginal land that is unsuitable for crop growth.
There is certainly scope for improvement and science has a role to play in this. For example, rice, the most important cereal crop in the world, is affected by rice blast disease; this kills enough rice to feed 60 million people. We have enough knowledge of both the pathogen and the host to be able to exert a good deal of control over the disease, thus adding significantly to total yields.12 We could make similar statements about other diseases and pests that affect important crops. However, application of the knowledge also depends on non‐scientific factors such as attitudes, culture and human behaviour (see Chapter 10).
Similar comments may be made about other approaches to improving crop yields. It has been suggested that the continent of Africa could become a net exporter of cereals, notwithstanding the fact that much of the continent is desert or prone to drought. African agricultural experts believe that yield increases of up to 30% could be achieved by improving agronomic techniques, despite loss of agricultural land to increasing population and to the effects of climate change.13
An aspect of crop improvement that has proved controversial, at least for some people, is genetic modification (GM), which we discussed in detail in Chapter 10. Indeed, GM‐based breeding has been in use with a limited range of crops since the mid‐1990s and has the potential for much wider use, both in terms of genetic traits and in terms of crop species. It is thus a set of techniques that form an extremely useful addition to the plant breeders’ ‘toolkit’. In our view, it is in this light that we need to regard GM although we understand that some of our readers may disagree. On its own, it is certainly not going to feed the world but it will contribute significantly to the effort. Thus, as we indicated in Chapter 10, uptake of GM crops into agriculture has been very rapid in some parts of the world where this potential is realised.
However, in Europe there has been strong and concerted (one might almost say orchestrated) opposition to GM crops as we discussed in detail in Chapter 10. The reasons for the opposition have been discussed in detail in that chapter and elsewhere14 but scientists are increasingly frustrated, believing that most of the negative views are non‐scientific and that governments should look at the science.15 Indeed, in the United Kingdom, there has been a recent online petition attracting the support of the plant science community, calling on the European Union (EU) and on the governments of individual European countries to ‘change GM legislation and adopt science‐based GM regulations’.
Be that as it may, the negative attitude in major European countries has rubbed off on some African governments so that they have become suspicious of crop strains that have been bred by GM techniques. This has had some tragic consequences. In 2002, seven countries in southern Africa suffered a severe famine. The president of Zambia rejected donations of maize (corn) from food aid programmes because the maize had been bred using GM techniques. His words ‘Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health’ show the depth to which negative views had penetrated. There has never been any suspicion that GM crops are dangerous for human health but the idea had been subtly (although not explicitly) planted by the opponents of the technology, as clearly described by the sociologist Barry Barnes.16 Reacting to the situation in Zambia, we wonder whether the campaigning organisations were proud of what they had achieved.
Eight years later, in 2010, Channel 4 TV developed the same theme in a programme entitled What the Green Movement Got Wrong; similar themes have been developed by Mark Lynas in his 2011 book The God Species and in a 2015 BBC TV documentary entitled GM Food – Cultivating Fear. Thus, there are indications of a shift of attitude, both in Europe and in a number of less developed countries, including some in Africa (see Chapter 10 for a much fuller discussion). For some, this is not before time. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics reported as long ago as 1998 that GM technology was entirely appropriate for use in Africa, while in 1999 Florence Wambugu, adviser to the UN and Director and the Chief Executive Officer of Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International, stated that Africa was desperate that the biotechnology revolution should not be rejected in Africa because of ‘unrealistic controversial arguments from the North, based on imagined risks’. In a similar vein, a leading Kenyan scientist, Dr Felix M’mboyi, said in 2011 that Europe’s opposition to GM crops is arrogant hypocrisy17: ‘The affluent west has the luxury of choice in the type of technology they use to grow food crops, yet their influence and sensitivities are denying many in the developing world access to such technologies which could lead to a more plentiful supply of food. This kind of hypocrisy and arrogance comes with the luxury of a full stomach.’ It is thus encouraging to see that several poorer countries in Africa and Asia are now developing their own GM‐bred crops (see Chapter 10).
Science is embedded in human society as a major activity, attracting, in developed countries, a significant proportion of GDP (see Chapter 2). However, as has been seen in the discussions on GM crops in Section 15.3.1 and in Chapter 10, acceptance and application of the findings of science may be affected by social attitudes. Further, there are other social aspects that also deserve our attention. The first is that although we can currently produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, about 795 million people were undernourished in 2015 (data from FAO18). This is a reduction compared with the figure for 2005 (962 million) and an even more dramatic reduction from the 1.1 billion recorded in 1992 but it is still a lot of people. And the reason is poverty – some people are just too poor to be able to buy enough food. This is emphasised when we consider the distribution of the 795 million. Most are in less developed countries, especially in Africa and South East Asia, but there are 15 million hungry people in the world’s industrialised nations. They are hungry because they cannot afford to eat. Some rely on food banks and similar organisations just to obtain the basics. However, there is some good news: as already noted, in many less developed countries, the number of undernourished people is actually falling. This is a result of working towards the UN’s Millennium goals, aiming to halve the number of chronically poor between 2000 and 2015, and although that assessment date is now passed, the initiatives continue. In this context, the FAO conclude: Economic growth is a key success factor for reducing undernourishment, but it has to be inclusive and provide opportunities for improving the livelihoods of the poor. Enhancing the productivity and incomes of smallholder family farmers is key to progress.
Another key social factor is lifestyle, especially in the developed, industrialised countries known as the ‘global north’ (but obviously including some Southern Hemisphere countries such as Australia). Many things have been said about the inequality in exploitation of the Earth’s resources between the developed and less developed countries. Here we concentrate on diet. Diets in poor countries are very rich in food derived from plants; diets in rich countries are high in food derived from animals. Indeed, in some parts of the global north, diets are so poor in plant material that people have to be reminded to consume their ‘five portions [of fresh fruit and vegetables] per day’. If this was a dietary fad, we might simply be concerned about the general health of the populations of industrialised countries. However, it is much more significant than that. Some of the land used to grow crops for animal feed is made available by destruction of wild habitats that may include important ecosystems such as rainforest (see previous chapter). Further, as discussed in relation to the ‘move to meat’ in countries that are becoming developed (see above), it takes much more in the way of land, resources and energy to provide a meat‐rich diet than a plant‐rich diet. In response there has been, among people concerned about these issues, a move to vegetarian and ‘low‐meat’ diets in some countries of the global north. However, those who have responded in this way form a very small minority, while on a larger scale, it is difficult to know what actions might be taken at, for example, a national level.
Another aspect of lifestyle is that consumers in the industrialised nations are in general faced with a range and abundance of foods that would not have been dreamed of a century ago. Further, it is often presented, especially in large supermarkets, in a way that subtly persuades the consumer to buy. Sadly and almost inevitably, this leads to food waste. Consumers buy too much and then throw the excess away. Added to this, supermarkets often jettison unsold fresh fruit and vegetables at the end of the working day rather than storing them in appropriate conditions to go on sale again the next day. The net result of these two aspects of modern life is that in the more developed, industrialised countries, about 30% of food is thrown away. In the face of this, some charities are organising collections of fresh food that supermarkets will otherwise discard and distributing it to those who, for whatever reason, cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. Further, in France, supermarkets are now legally required to donate to charities any fresh food that remains unsold at the end of the day. In the United Kingdom, the government’s waste advisory agency (WRAP) estimates that only 18% of the country’s estimated 270,000 tonnes per year of waste food is made available for distribution by charities such as food banks. This means that about 400 million meals’ worth of food is actually wasted in the United Kingdom each year, equivalent to about six meals for every man, woman and child. There is widespread concern about this but converting concern into action is not easy. Nevertheless, the EU is, in the spring of 2017, working on legislation to reduce food waste,19 while the FAO, in its Sustainable Development Goals, is aiming at a 50% reduction in food waste by 2030.20
It may seem strange to bring war into the picture at this point but there are good reasons. Although there are certainly specific bioethical issues associated with war, such as chemical and biological weapons, our inclusion of war in this chapter relates to its effects on human populations. Taking just one conflict as an example, the complicated war in Syria has been raging for over six years (as in Spring 2017). Formerly thriving cities such as Aleppo have largely been reduced to rubble. Once‐productive agricultural land lies abandoned and unproductive. The capacity of the land to produce food has been reduced to a small fraction of what it was because it is no longer farmed and, further, because there are very few people left to farm it. This war has forced 11 million people to flee their homes (in addition to the 13.5 million or so who remain ‘at home’, albeit that 6.3 million of these are displaced, and in dire need of humanitarian assistance); 4.8 million of the 11 million have also fled the country as refugees and have sought sanctuary in neighbouring countries and in the countries of the EU. At the time of writing, it is estimated that one and a half million Syrian refugees have reached Europe but there has also been considerable loss of life at sea during their journeys. The influx of refugees increases the demand on those countries not only in respect of infrastructure and services but also in respect of water supply and agriculture.21 Thus war is a major factor in determining our capacity to feed people.
By all current predictions, there will come a time that we simply cannot produce enough food for Earth’s human population, even if there are marked changes in diet in the global north (see Section 15.3.3). In a recent discussion, the Australian author Reg Morrison comments on this situation.22 Some readers will reject his strongly reductionist views (although others may agree with him), for example, that mysticism and spirituality are merely the products of genes and have been preserved by evolution because they are advantageous to human survival. Indeed, his arguments are very strongly biological in flavour, as seen in this quotation: ‘Any debate that touches upon human reproduction is invariably hi‐jacked by demographers, sociologists, politicians and media commentators – people who see it only in cultural terms. Here is an attempt to lever this crucial topic out of the mundane mire of “morality” and elevate it to its rightful place among the biological sciences.’ The rejection of both cultural and moral terms in dealing with population is, in our view, disturbing; this is after all a discussion about numbers of actual people. Nevertheless, the biological approach does come up with some interesting ideas. Particularly relevant is his analysis of what resources, especially but not exclusively energy and land (or, in his word, biocapacity), are needed to sustain an individual human. This leads him to conclude that planet Earth cannot support, at current average consumption rates, more than about four and a quarter billion people, a total that we exceeded over 30 years ago. Indeed, as we saw in the previous chapter, if the whole human population consumed resources, not at the global average rate but at the rate seen in developed countries, we would need several planets (based on the spring 2017 population of 7.5 billion). Morrison further argues that Homo sapiens has become a plague species, outgrowing and destroying its own habitat. He takes the deceleration in population increase of which there are some signs, as an indication of the decline of humanity.
Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess go much further than Morrison: ‘In deep ecology, we have the goal not only of stabilizing human population but also of reducing it to a sustainable minimum without revolution or dictatorship. I should think we must have no more than 100 million people if we are to have the variety of cultures we had one hundred years ago.’ Part of the reasoning of Naess and other members of the deep ecology movement is that we need to reverse the loss of wilderness so that human flourishing is set in the flourishing of the whole natural world. However, it is very difficult to see how such a dramatic reduction in human population could be achieved ‘without revolution or dictatorship’.
A world population of just 100 million people is clearly impossible to attain unless the majority of us are wiped out by some catastrophe. But what figure is a realistic target? All commentators suggest that we will inevitably reach somewhere between 9 and 12 million. Totals at the higher end of this are likely to be catastrophic in ways that we can only imagine. It is conventional wisdom to assume that as more and more countries become developed, their birth rates will decline and population will plateau and then eventually start to fall. There is extensive evidence to link the fall in birth rate with the degree of development, but this is also coupled with greater life expectancy. Thus, while the population may stabilise in a particular country, the age profile starts to shift towards the older end. Eventually we see the situation that is so apparent in some Western European countries. Birth rate has dropped below that needed for replacement and there is an increasing percentage of older people who (according to circumstances and prevalent social systems) may or nor be supported by the earnings and/or taxes of a smaller working population.
Falling birth rates may well result from increasing levels of development but that is not the only effect. Increasing levels of development means just what it says. It is associated with greater levels of industrialisation, larger proportions of the population living in cities and higher levels of technical and technological sophistication in every sphere of life. What this means is that there is a greater demand on Earth’s resources. The UN has calculated that by 2050, extraction of resources will triple if we go on as we are (even given some level of recycling). Further, as the reserves of metals decrease, so it will take increasing amounts of energy and water (and water will anyway become a scarce resource: next section) to extract them. Thus the Green Alliance suggests that we will reach a situation where extraction of one tonne of copper will generate an average of 300 tonnes of waste. Inevitably too, effects on climate will increase unless humankind has managed to come up with the technological and political means of curtailing CO2 emissions from use of fossil fuels.
We need to discuss water in more detail. It is absolutely vital for life, both for individual living organisms and to sustain human activity. Despite its apparent abundance, it is a limited resource. In July 2015, humankind’s total global use of fresh water per year was ca 4,500,000 billion (or 4.5 × 1015) litres of which 70% is used in agriculture, 20% is used in industry and 10% is taken up in domestic use. Of course, these overall figures hide a good deal of variation. In most industrialised nations, industrial use exceeds that in agriculture. Domestic consumption is also very variable. In the United States, the mean daily use per person is about 580 litres, in the United Kingdom, 150 litres, while in Uganda it is about 20 litres. This variation is further emphasised by the facts that at the time of writing, 10% of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water, while as many as one in three does not have access to adequate sanitation. These inadequacies in supply are linked with the 5000 children who die from diarrhoea every day (that works out at one every 17 seconds). So, even before we start to consider future prospects, there are problems with the current water supply situation that require attention.
The data on water use given in the preceding paragraph hide the dramatic effects that human activity has had and is having on the global water cycle. Mark Lynas23 has estimated that 60% of the world’s larger river systems are ‘fragmented by man‐made infrastructure’, including about 800,000 dams that hold back about 10,000 km3 of water. This has reduced slightly the rate of climate‐change‐induced rise in sea level and, according to some authorities, has also changed the distribution of mass on the planet so as to affect its axis and speed of rotation! Further, deforestation and irrigation continue to alter the distribution of atmospheric water vapour, leading to changes in rainfall patterns. In Pakistan, India and parts of Bangladesh, large amounts of groundwater are pumped for irrigation and the amount increased by 70% between 1990 and 2014. At the same time, changes in land use continue to lead to increased run‐off with concomitant effects, in periods of heavy rainfall, on flooding.
Turning now to consider the future, it has been estimated, based on the period 2000–2012, that water demand will increase by 55% between 2000 and 2050. This is partly driven by the increasing human population (see Section 15.4) and partly by increased levels of industrial development in the ‘emerging’ nations (e.g. Brazil, China, India) and in many less developed countries. Thus the biggest increases in demand will be seen in manufacturing industries, followed by generation of electricity and domestic use. The drive to greater crop productivity (Section 15.3.1) will lead to increased water usage, even if we manage to breed crops with better water‐use efficiency. However, compared with the major demands just mentioned, the increased demands for agriculture are likely to be relatively modest. One current estimates suggest that use of water in agriculture will increase by about 24% between 2000 and 2050, while others predict that changes in crop and animal husbandry, combined with use of newer strains, will lead to a steady state or even slight decline in agricultural water demand.
But increased demand is not the end of the problem. Already between 40 and 50% of the planet’s human population live in areas that are short of water and this is likely to get worse as global climate change takes effect. One oil‐rich nation in the Gulf region has stated that water is more important to it than oil. Climate change is already leading to changes in patterns of precipitation, causing increased likelihood of floods in some areas and increased likelihood of drought in others. Decreased precipitation in some mountainous regions is already leading to decreased meltwater in spring, which has an effect on the amount available, especially but not only, for agriculture. Further, increases in sea level may be enough to contaminate freshwater aquifers with salt, again decreasing available supplies. The very uneven distribution of adequate water supplies is already leading to tensions and, in some places, civil unrest, although some authorities have claimed that the likelihood of nations fighting over water is slim, at least in the decade to 2025. The Global Policy Forum states that As demand for water hits the limits of finite supply, potential conflicts are brewing between nations that share transboundary freshwater reserves. More than 50 countries on five continents might soon be caught up in water disputes unless they move quickly to establish agreements on how to share reservoirs, rivers, and underground water aquifers.24 Other commentators have suggested that distribution of water might be used as a weapon by terrorist groups.
With 71% of Earth’s surface being covered with seawater (totalling 97% of the planet’s total water content), it has been suggested that desalination would provide at least a partial solution to our water shortages. However, desalination is an energy‐demanding process, although newer technologies such as reverse osmosis are less so than distillation. Use of fossil fuels to run desalination plants leads to a very negative outcome in the ‘environmental equation’. However, if solar power can be used to drive the plants, the outcome is very much more favourable. Even so, the overall costs are high and at present, only wealthier countries can afford it. As a result, desalination contributes only about 1% of the world’s freshwater supplies. The most likely future for desalination is in wealthier countries that border the sea and in which water supplies are already scarce. Many commentators prefer to focus not on desalination but on about changing our habits in water use and on ways in which wastage of water can be prevented and in which domestic, industrial and agricultural activities can reduce the amount of water that they use. No one pretends that this is easy – it requires action at all levels from individual to international. For individuals this leads to a question.
It appears to be what some would call a ‘perfect storm’, caused by the convergence of several very serious problems. Climate change and population growth are perhaps the most serious with the former being made worse by the latter. But the knock‐on effects of both, including loss of land and changes in land use, add to the seriousness of the storm. What can be done? Throughout his book People and Nature,25 anthropologist Emilio Moran argues that change can be achieved by individuals consciously adopting a much more sustainable lifestyle. That message is especially strongly developed in Chapter 8, Quality of Life – When Less Is More. Thus he writes, To find balance on a very populated planet…will require re‐thinking what we value… To regain our balance as a species we need to re‐connect to our human evolution and to our place in nature – the value to the human species of trust, community, shared values and reciprocity. Referring back to our earlier chapters in this book, readers will recognise that this is a virtue ethics approach to the problem. The onus in Moran’s book is on the virtuous behaviour of individuals who, he says, have the power to change thinking at institutional and governmental levels. This leads to more questions.
From the point of view of people living in a wealthy industrialised country, the answer seems in general to be No to both questions. There is a strong tendency to hang on to and to protect what we have. Much of the tension within the EU about accommodating refugees from the war in Syria (see above) has been about protection of ‘our’ way of life, our incomes and so on. So, although significant numbers of people have been and are willing to alter their lifestyles, in respect of the majority in the industrialised countries of the world, reliance on individual virtue is not (yet) very effective.
So we return to the quotation from Mark Lynas’s book The God Species presented at the start of this chapter. It is a quotation underlain by optimism but his optimism comes from a different source than that of Moran. Thus he states, The transition of humanity towards a sustainable presence in the Earth system will constitute an epochal event, equivalent at least to the Industrial Revolution that so transformed our civilisation over the last two centuries. A major part of that ‘epochal event’ is reducing very significantly our dependence on fossil fuels by switching as far as is possible to renewable sources of energy. Further, there is evidence that this is now happening at an increasing pace, as we described in the previous chapter. This change does not rely just on lifestyle changes by individuals, although they are important, but also involves changes at institutional, governmental and intergovernmental levels.
Now it may well be that policy changes with respect to fossil fuels have been enacted just in time to prevent a temperature increase of more than 1.5°C (see previous chapter), thus removing or at least ameliorating one of the major factors of our ‘perfect storm’. However, that still leaves population growth. Lynas is aware of this and discusses it at some length in Chapter 11 of The God Species. He does not agree with those commentators who favour the use of pressure, whether simply moral or actually enforced (as in China’s former one‐child policy), to limit the number of children a woman should have. Rather, he is of the view that the rate of population growth will decrease as a result of more widespread economic development plus education and empowerment of women, a view shared by several population experts, as we discussed in Section 15.2. However, Lynas seems more optimistic than some of those experts in suggesting that a population maximum will be reached in the middle years of this century. We can say no more than time will tell.