We live in extraordinary times! Never before has our planet been so profoundly transformed by a single species—seven billion of us, and counting. Not only have we commandeered more than half of the world's tropical and temperate land areas to feed ourselves and house our growing numbers, but we are disemboweling the Earth itself, building towers and chariots of steel, while feasting on the energy of fossil fuels. In the dead of night, our planet is bejeweled by electric lights from cities large and small. Our technologies are becoming ever-more sophisticated, accelerating communication, enhancing our health, and expanding knowledge of both the world and ourselves. Not unlike the long history of life, we are adding greater complexity to the planet that sustains us.

In fact, we may be witnessing the climax in our planet's long history of getting itself more richly diverse. Though more and more habitats are being converted to human uses, and species are being lost, a huge majority of the world's biological diversity is still with us. And while our own species may be losing some of its languages and smaller cultures, we are inventing ever-more elaborate technologies. Unlike automobiles of a few decades ago, those we purchase nowadays have an automatic transmission, fuel-injected engines, power-assisted steering, cruise control, air bags, and lots more. Thanks to little computers and global satellite positioning, the latest autos direct us to where we want to go. Digitized information, a world-wide Internet, and ever-more sophisticated technologies keep expanding our capabilities.

Surely our species itself is grandly expanding Earth's complexity. If the human mind is among the most complex devices in the natural world, then, logically, adding millions more humans to the planet every month adds to overall complexity, even as our gadget-happy culture produces further innovations every day. By continuously creating and discovering new knowledge, we are expanding the “information content” of our planet. Not unlike complexity, the concept of information is difficult to define. Requiring a sender, a receiver, and a shared code for communication, information has been expanding ever since the initiation of life. Even a simple bacterium requires information to absorb its food, control its metabolism, and—most amazing of all—prepare for division into two bacteriums! Likewise, human societies have grown by the creation and interchange of ever-more information. The product of evolutionary dynamics and ecological selection over billions of years, and by expanding our understanding of the world more recently, we have become the most consequential species in the history or life.

HUMAN HEGEMONY

We have conquered the biosphere and laid waste to it like no other species in the history of life. We are unique in what we have wrought.

—Edward O. Wilson1

Bipedalism freed our arms for many tasks, gesturing hands gave us speech, inter-tribal conflict inflated our brains, agriculture reduced the threat of starvation, and cultural innovations have done the rest. However, it wasn't just us. Historian Paul Conkin argues that our species’ ascendancy has benefited from five critical and serendipitous circumstances. First, he cites climate stability over the last ten thousand years. Though well documented in Greenland's ice and North Atlantic sediments, we have not witnessed sudden and dramatic climate shifts over the last ten millennia. Second, agriculture has benefited from rich soils that were formed over many millions of years. North America's fertile Midwestern Corn Belt is the product of fire-prone prairies having built deep soils over the last twenty million years. Third, our expanding industrial society has been powered largely by fossil energy sequestered within the Earth. Oil, coal, and gas are derived from biological remains accumulated and concentrated over more than 500 million years. Without this power base, we could not have become the force we are today. As a fourth condition, Conkin cites the enormous expansion of human knowledge over the last three hundred years, a phenomenon initiated by scientific methodology and advanced by the same fossil energy that propels the rest of our society. Finally, Professor Conkin sees the advance of public health and medical advances as the fifth driver of our growing numbers and our growing wealth.2 He might have also mentioned the world's extraordinary biodiversity, allowing us to survive in so many environments and feed ourselves in so many different ways.

HUMAN TECHNOLOGIES ACCELERATE

Eukaryotic cells followed upon two thousand million years of bacterial pioneering. Another thousand million years would pass before animals became larger and more active. Vertebrates ventured onto the land around 370 million years ago (mya), with mammal-like forms appearing around 220 mya. Primates probably arose 60 mya, with apes developing about 20 mya, and our own ancestors becoming upright 6 mya. Humans invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, learned to make steel 3,000 years ago, circumnavigated the globe 500 years ago, improved the steam engine 200 years ago, began flying airplanes 100 years ago, and walked on the Moon 45 years ago.

Not unlike the advance of natural complexity over geological time, human technologies have become ever-more elaborate over these last few thousand years. Today, following both a scientific and an industrial revolution, human technologies are expanding more and more rapidly. “More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” declares W. Brian Arthur.³ Very much like the natural world over its long history, human technology seems to be elaborating itself in ever shorter time frames.

Technological innovations provided platforms from which further advancement proceeded. Stone tools, woven fibers, and wooden spears may have been the first significant human artifacts. Language—a communication technology—and close social bonding accelerated our advance. Cooking enhanced our caloric intake. A transformational symbiosis, agriculture provided us with more food more reliably. Since then, and by using intelligent design within purposeful technological advance, humans have embarked on a trajectory unlike any that has come before. With paper, Islamic scholars gathered, translated, and elaborated knowledge. Later, and again with paper, Gutenberg's printing technology made knowledge more widely accessible. Finally, applying scientific analysis to technological challenges—and with fossil fuels to burn—we humans have become Earth's most successful species ever.

TRILLIONS OF TRANSISTORS

In 1965, Gordon E. Moore published a paper in which he predicted that the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit would approximately double every two years. Amazingly, his prediction held true over many years! Laser photolithography, using sharp ultraviolet light, helped propel this advance in computational power. Beginning with the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, and thanks to large numbers of tiny transistors, our ability to process information has escalated each and every year. Inevitably, physical and economic constraints halted Moore's Law around 2012. Not to worry: networked processing and many other strategies propel us forward. Today, digital integrated circuits can contain millions of logic gates and many microprocessors. Using an architecture similar to our own neural networks, a “brain chip” with over five billion transistors has recently been developed to analyze visual data. This chip can determine whether a dog, a pedestrian, a bicyclist, or an automobile is crossing an intersection. The digital-computing revolution has been an amazing advance, but there have been costs as well as benefits. Complex computational devices require diverse mineral resources to construct, especially “rare earth” elements. Our many technologies require massive amounts of energy to keep running. Worst of all, many of these advances reduce the need for human labor. Robots do not require vacations or pension plans and—if properly programmed—will never go on strike.

All told, and with the help of trillions of transistors, we have witnessed a major revolution in our ability to process, manipulate, communicate, and retrieve information. Today's desktop computers can do calculations that required a room full of computers in the 1950s. Medicine now has imaging capabilities that can see our insides without cutting us open. Genomic analyses are helping us understand our diseases and discovering thousands of bacterial lineages we never knew before. Elaborate computer models help predict the weather. Within seconds, search engines bring us the information we seek. Internet use rose from about 1 percent of the world's population in 1994 to over 35 percent in 2014. We've gone from 50 billion emails in all of 2006 to about 190 million emails sent and received each day in 2014. Societies are changing as technology becomes ever-more central to our lives. More importantly, nobody really planned this grand progression: it all just happened.

The ongoing dilemma of technology, then, will never leave us. It is an ever-elaborate tool that we wield and continually update to improve our world; and it is an ever-ripening super organism of which we are but a part, that is following a direction beyond our own making.

—Kevin Kelly4

In an insightful analysis, Kevin Kelly claims that technology has its own inner drive over which we have little control. Like a swift river, ever-expanding technologies carry our society forward into an uncertain future. Kelly believes this trajectory, though causing many problems along the way, will lift our species to new heights, perhaps even some kind of immortality. While his assessment of on-rushing advance is clear enough, I do not share his utopian vision. Kelly fails to mention that ever-accelerating technologies have an ever-greater appetite for energy. He does not discuss the enigma of greater industrial productivity resulting in fewer jobs. He fails to consider the greater susceptibility of more complex and interdependent technologies to sudden system-wide failures. (His notion that “our genes are evolving 100 times faster than in pre-agricultural time” is absurd.5 Actually, our brains seem to have been getting smaller since the expansion of agriculture.) Though Kelly discusses both the varied and unpredictable negative consequences of technological advance, he worries little about the biosphere that supports this onward rush. Kelly is an optimist, and I am not. I believe that our technologies and our numbers are eroding the world's biodiversity and that, by altering the biosphere itself, threaten our own long-term future. Nevertheless, Kelly's richly argued thesis is convincing: technology has its own unrelenting forward momentum.

AN EVER-INCREASING APPETITE FOR ENERGY

Expanding complexity, whether biological or technological, contradicts the second law of thermodynamics: sooner or later everything runs down. Capturing the energy of sunlight has allowed biology to ignore the second law and continue running uphill over a very long time. Dead, buried, and concentrated over millions of years, fossil fuels began the Industrial Revolution and continue to propel the progressive advancement of our many technologies.

We can no longer live without electric lights, refrigerators, or television. Today, satellites relay TV signals and personal messages all around the globe. Encyclopedias and scientific journals are available on the Internet with only a few key strokes. Looking for information? Google it! (One estimate has ten Google searches using the electricity equivalent to one sixty-watt bulb burning for twenty-eight minutes; it's work, not magic.) Meanwhile, more than four million people are flown around our planet each and every day. It takes around one hundred thousand pounds of fuel to propel a jet liner across the Atlantic, but who's concerned? Our dependence on technology has us burning around 86 million barrels of oil each and every day, and that figure is projected to increase each year by an additional million barrels per day. Worldwide consumption of coal doubled between 1980 and 2010. We burned around five billion tons of coal in 2015. These monstrous volumes of oil and coal, added to gas burning, wood burning, cement making, and our increasing numbers, suggest that our hopes for reducing carbon emissions are little more than science fiction.

Worldwide, both energy production and CO₂ emissions increased by about 10 percent between 2004 and 2008. Canada failed to achieve its Kyoto-agreed CO₂ emissions limit largely because of the extraction of oil from its tar sands. Thanks to increasing energy demand in China, and despite slight decreases in Europe and the United States, we humans are emitting about eleven billion tons of CO₂ a year. Of this, around half is absorbed by the oceans and biosphere, the rest is added to our atmosphere. If you think driving an electric car will reduce your carbon footprint, think again. Electric cars charged by older coal-fired generating plants result in about as much CO₂ emission as does a gasoline-fueled car. Meanwhile, fracking gives us previously inaccessible oil and gas and keeps the party going—at slightly higher costs.

Reasonable projections estimate that planet Earth may become home to nine billion of our kind by 2050.6 All the while, our appetite for more comfortable and exciting lives expands. The world's economy grew by as much in the last decade of the twentieth century as the world's entire economy in 1900! We may be driving two billion motorized vehicles in 2020. That's great news for personal freedom and commerce, but very bad news for our atmosphere. All this energy consumption has made our lives much more comfortable, a lot more entertaining, and our world ever more complex. Also, as Kevin Kelly argues, we cannot slow the pace of technological progress, or even determine its course. China and India are building many new coal-fired electric plants; their people want electric lights, TV, and refrigerators. Our quest for knowledge also demands more energy, as we attempt to cure our every ailment, design more versatile materials, and prepare to visit Mars.

Back here in the United States, we are using around 38,000,000 disposable plastic bottles each and every day, and billions of plastic bags as well. Near our Midwestern cities, richly productive agricultural lands have given way to an expanding suburbia of “McMansions.” These castle-like domiciles are adorned with a three-car garage on the outside and cathedral ceilings on the inside; their ample volume requires more energy to cool in summer and heat in winter. Entrepreneurs may soon be offering short space flights for the wealthy; the carbon footprint of this new diversion is never mentioned. In an authoritative review of our energy future, Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin writes, “the earth's capacity to render up unimaginably large amounts of oil, gas, and coal on demand is a fundamental premise of modern civilization.” He believes fossil fuels can power us for another two hundred years, yet ends his text on an optimistic note: “the transition away from fossil fuels is likely to be positive [but] the transition itself could be terrible.”7 Most people seem to agree: if technology created these problems, technology can solve them; everything will turn out just fine.

A VERY OPTIMISTIC SPECIES!

Optimism has been central to the process of human evolution. It permitted us to attack wild animals when we hunted and to have some confidence in seeds, soil, water and sun when we planted…anticipating optimistic outcomes is as much a part of human nature, of the human biology, as the shape of the body.

—Lionel Tiger⁸

The optimism bias stands guard. It is in charge of keeping our minds at ease and our bodies healthy.

—Tali Sharot⁹

Optimism is surely one of our species’ most distinctive characteristics, and clearly a consequence of natural selection. Put simply, optimists were more likely to cope and reproduce than pessimists! Whether as a community or as individuals, optimism has helped us rebound after every calamity, brush ourselves off, and continue on into an uncertain future. Religion—a vital part of every society—strengthens us in the face of adversity, commits us to close cooperation, and forms the foundation of our hope. We humans are genetically and culturally programed to be optimistic—and that's a problem.

Unfortunately, optimism comes with a close companion: denial! “Things really aren't that bad,” we tell ourselves. “Global warming is just another climate cycle that we can't do much about. Listen up; it will improve agricultural production in colder climates.” In their two fine books on technology, neither W. Brian Arthur nor Kevin Kelly mention the costs—in either energy consumption or environmental services—that continuing industrial expansion demands. These authors and just about everybody else believe that things are only going to get better.

We lurch forward, armed with the same optimism that has made us masters of the planet. Addicted to the comforts of our recent success, we are altering the atmosphere, depleting ocean fisheries, degrading soils, lowering water tables, and consuming ever more energy. Anyone concerned about our future is quickly labeled as having a “doomsday mentality.” Successful business people are especially disdainful of negative forecasts. Being successful in business means being bright, being dynamic, being optimistic, and having been lucky. Such leaders are insistent on rushing development ever onward.

We do have optimistic technological possibilities. If we could mimic photosynthesis and tear apart the water molecule cheaply, we might live in a hydrogen-powered economy—where the product of combustion is water! Greatly improved batteries might allow us to store electricity more easily—solving the problem of irregularity in wind and solar power. Hydrogen fusion is the process that keeps stars “burning” brightly. Unfortunately, containing the millions of degrees in which hydrogen atoms can fuse has resisted half a century of scientific effort; worse yet, such extreme temperatures may produce radioactive isotopes in the containment structure. In the 1960s, we were assured that hydrogen fusion was only thirty years away; today, hydrogen fusion is still “thirty years away.” Genetically modified crops should increase crop productivity, but only if soils are properly maintained. For optimists, there is no end to progressive possibilities.

To be sure, there are strong historical arguments for an optimistic future. Economist Julian Simon declared that everything was getting better and better. Using data beginning in the Middle Ages, Simon and his colleagues showed that health had improved, violence was reduced, ownership of homes and material goods had much expanded, and individual freedoms were now widespread. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution, market capitalism, and modern medicine have given people a far better life than in centuries long past.10 However, Simon and his associates had nothing to say about declining fish stocks, or the notion that industrial activity might change the weather. They viewed any attempt to restrain the capitalist juggernaut as a diminution of both our freedoms and our future. Julian Simon didn't live long enough to witness China's phenomenal growth or the dramatic changes in the Arctic's climate. From my reading, Simon was a champion of individual rights and economic freedoms; more fundamentally, he was an optimist.

We humans have had to be optimistic, whether dealing with the ordinary travails of life or an uncertain future. Preachers who remind us of misery and suffering offer hope at the end of every sermon. Politicians who warn of a difficult future are soon replaced by those who promise better times. In 2006, Thomas Friedman published a book subtitled A Brief History of the 21st Century. The first two hundred pages are a tour de force, making clear how information transfer and digitization has linked and “flattened” the world's economies. Unfortunately, the author all but ignored the natural world. It isn't until page 293 that we hear anything regarding the environment. A glorification of economic globalization, this tract omits many crucial aspects of our new century. Only near the end did the deliriously optimistic author finally write, “At worst we are going to set off a global struggle for natural resources and junk up, heat up, garbage up, smoke up and devour up our little planet faster than at any time in the history of the world.”11 I disagree: it is not “at worst,” it is right now!

Nowhere in Friedman's The World Is Flat do we read anything regarding our ongoing population explosion. I quote Friedman—one of our most highly regarded journalists—as an example of how totally blind contemporary journalism has been to the demographic disaster unfolding around us. To be fair, Friedman addressed many of these issues in his more recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, but this text focuses mostly on our energy needs and says little about our escalating numbers. My point is that journalists, economists, and many other “experts” are and have been blind to our planet's greatest dilemma.

THE HUMAN POPULATION EXPLOSION

Some scientists, amateur astronomers, and Hollywood filmmakers look fearfully to the skies for civilization-ending bolides. They should look inward. We are the meteor.

—Eric Roston¹²

In 1997, the New York Times Magazine published an article titled “The Population Explosion Is Over!” Data cited by the author were accurate—only he forgot to mention Africa, the Muslim world, most of Asia, and Latin America. Like Simon, and using very specific data sets, the author was arguing for unrestrained personal freedom and economic growth.¹³ Since then, and for most journalists, human population growth is yesterday's news—something we need no longer worry about. And why not? Rates of human population growth have declined around the world. True enough, but our numbers continue to expand! This may seem counterintuitive, but three important factors are growing our numbers. First, many more women are living today—with a lower birth rate but producing almost as many babies as did fewer women with a higher birth rate during the 1980s. The second factor is the huge number of young people in the pipeline! Young women who are now entering their reproductive years are the second factor propelling population growth forward, in what is called demographic momentum. This makes clear why China's population continued to increase for three decades after draconian population-control policies were introduced. The third factor is that the current rate of population growth is still far above replacement level. All three factors explain how our numbers grew from six billion to seven billion between 1999 and 2012.

Explosion is, in fact, the correct word for what's been happening over these last two hundred years. The Indian subcontinent probably numbered 125 million people in 1750; they reached 1,180 million in 2010. Mexico probably had around 13 million people in 1900, and has 112 million today. The population of the Middle East has almost tripled in the last thirty years. High growth rates continue in many poor countries. Recent estimates have the average woman bearing six children in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Niger. Even if two of these six children fail to reach adulthood, these populations will double their numbers in twenty-five years! Hunger and malnutrition already threaten these same regions. Sadly, many of the poorest countries of the world continue with high fertility rates.

What could be more wicked and heedless of human welfare than to bring more and more children into an overcrowded world, a world so impoverished by overexploitation that they hardly have a fair prospect of a satisfactory life?

—Alexander Skutch14

Here we are, the smartest species ever, racing down the very same path as lesser creatures and earlier societies. Yes, population growth is below replacement level in a few nations, but that's not the big picture. Despite a steady decrease in the rate of population growth, human numbers continue to expand. When I taught in Ethiopia in the early 1960s, that country's population was estimated to be around 22 million; today's estimate is 100 million. Recently, Peter Gill visited a Muslim family in western Ethiopia with fifteen children; such traditions are difficult to change.¹⁵

Our species’ overall annual growth rate peaked at 2.19 percent in 1963 and fell to 1.13 percent in 2015. Annual growth in numbers peaked around 1982 at 88 million additional people, and was well over 70 million in 2015. Despite these simple facts, the UN Millennium Development Goals, designed to decrease world poverty 50 percent by 2015, failed to include population growth. Similarly, two recent books regarding the economics of climate change had nothing to say about our increasing numbers.16 With ever more young women coming into their reproductive years, and despite decreasing rates of growth, current estimates have our numbers growing by more than 70 million each year for many years to come.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus proclaimed a fearful truth: “Population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical ratio. Subsistence only in an arithmetical ratio.” (Arithmetic is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; geometric is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16.) He warned of “the constant tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourishment prepared for it.” Accordingly, our planet's agricultural productivity cannot keep pace with human population growth, and famines must follow.¹⁷ Thanks to powerful agricultural machinery, plenty of fossil fuel, industrial fertilizers, and chemical biocides, Malthus’ dire prediction has been averted. The recent “Green Revolution” has been able to feed many more people, using better plant varieties, ample water, industrial fertilizers, and chemical biocides. Regions able to access these resources have benefited greatly; because of water limitations, Africa has not.

Contrary to Malthus, rather than wide-spread starvation, our increasing numbers suffer from something more insidious: growing unemployment! Pakistan's population grew by 50 percent in the last thirty years; large numbers of its young people cannot find employment.¹⁸ Economists claim that we need greater productivity to propel prosperity forward. But doesn't greater productivity result in fewer workers producing as many goods? Digital and robotic systems are reducing the need for human labor. Again, journalists ignore increasing human numbers, even as they report on social strife around the world.

The culture of journalism is basically a political culture that is not particularly hospitable—that is, in fact, institutionally arrogant—toward nonpolitical areas of coverage.

—Ross Gelbspan19

Even in a biological journal reviewing four books addressing the global environmental crisis, neither the reviewer nor the books’ authors seem concerned about our escalating numbers.²⁰ Serious famines have been averted, but there is something less draconian to worry about. A massive surge of young people are entering a world of only limited opportunity. Rising unemployment throughout the world portends social instability, ethnic conflict, and relentless emigration. In spite of falling birth rates, 2011 welcomed about 135 million babies into the world, even as 57 million of us departed—a net increase of 78 million.²¹ Thanks to 2011 alone, we have 78 million additional mouths to feed, schools to expand, and jobs to create in the coming decades!

And while the human population explosion is doing just fine, biodiversity is in decline. Two rhinoceros subspecies were declared extinct in 2011: one in West Africa, the other in Vietnam, very likely taken down by hunters. In contrast, the Yangtze River dolphin is the first large mammal species lost to environmental degradation. In 1980, Africa was estimated to have 76,000 lions; this estimate plummeted to 35,000 in 2014. Migratory birds have diminished in great numbers over the last five decades and are continuing to decline.

As a botanist photographing natural scenery around the Western Great Lakes for more than four decades, my observations over the last decade are worrisome. Small areas—less than an acre—within old forest preserves have been subject to severe damage; even as the trees around them are undamaged. Meteorologists call these “microbursts,” and they seem to be more common in what I like to call “Global Storming.” Dead ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) now litter our forests, felled by the emerald ash borer, a beetle recently arrived from China. More troubling is seeing fewer and fewer pollinators in our prairies. Even bright orange monarch butterflies are becoming less common. I suspect that agricultural biocides, however minimal their residues, are beginning to erode our fauna. Our biosphere is suffering from our success.²²

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES

After a long history of ever-increasing complexity, a single species has made itself the dominant life form on planet Earth. Progressive evolutionary trends, coupled with cultural advance, have finally created a “master generalist.” We are that species and our accomplishments are staggering. We have walked on the Moon and explored our solar family with interplanetary probes, making new discoveries millions of miles away. Astronomy has given us insights into the nature and history of the cosmos. Our understanding of our own planet and its life forms has become ever-more revelatory. We are beginning to comprehend the many biochemical networks supporting the living cell, and how interactive neural networks form our minds. Advancing in agriculture, technology, and science, our lives are getting better all the time.

Humans—most of us—have never had it so good. In technologically empowered societies, we are healthier and better fed; we have greater mobility and more ways of entertaining ourselves; we are living longer. Sanitation, cleaner water, better nutrition, vaccinations, antibiotics, and modern medical interventions have extended average life expectancy. Infant mortality is greatly reduced; starvation is countered with shipments of food from afar. Modern agriculture is fixing more nitrogen than is being fixed by all the rest of the biosphere, helping feed our growing numbers but changing nitrogen cycling globally. Each day, aircraft carry over four million passengers, and tons of time-sensitive cargo, even as satellites relay electromagnetic information around the globe. Today we find information, communications, and entertainment on the Internet, we watch TV for hours, and we fill huge stadia for sporting or musical events. By using about 30 percent of the planet's primary productivity, and burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuel, we have enriched our lives in ways unimaginable to earlier generations. Stated simply, we are the most successful species the world has ever seen. These are the “good times.”

The bad news is that many other species are in decline, and the biosphere itself is reeling. One might argue that our species has been increasing its fitness at the expense of most all the others. There are exceptions, of course: wheat, maize, rice, hogs, cattle, and our other favorites are doing well. Twenty billion chickens are helping feed over seven billion humans, even as wild birds decline. World biodiversity, which fostered our success, is being diminished by our success.

With human energy use significantly impacting our atmosphere, our refuse polluting both land and sea, and our numbers continuing to expand, a sixth great extinction in life's long history is underway. The last 500 million years have been witness to five “mass extinctions.” This sixth extinction cannot be blamed on suffocating volcanism nor an extra-terrestrial jolt. This time a single biological species is the cause of planet-wide decline. Challenging Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Peter Ward argues that the same selective forces that drive all species to exploit their environments must inevitably result in environmental degradation.23 We do not live in a world of happy cooperators, Ward argues; every species has its own selection-driven agenda. Technologically empowered Homo sapiens are the biggest thing to hit the planet since an asteroid put the dinosaurs out of business. Crocodiles made it through that last grand disaster; they are not likely to survive the ecological changes we have only just begun.

Human impact can be seen just about everywhere: thousands of square miles of maize, soybean, and wheat cultivation in North America's central plains, carefully sculpted terraces of rice in southeast Asia, pasturelands burning in dry-season Africa, and electrified communities glowing in the dark of night around the globe. In 2012, we harvested around 45 million metric tons of palm oil—on land that once supported lowland tropical evergreen forest. We are behaving like every other species on the planet: we are commandeering more resources to produce ever greater numbers of our own kind, even as we live more lavishly.

Whether red tides in the sea, hordes of migratory locusts, or an outbreak of microbial disease, the patterns are similar. When a species—any species—suddenly finds the resources to multiply, multiply it does. That's the uptick. The downtick comes as the growth spurt runs out of resources. Variously called boom-and-bust or overshoot-and-collapse, these patterns are familiar in the natural world: exponential population growth followed by resource exhaustion and a population crash. Such cycles often incur nasty environmental effects: poisoned waters in a red tide or devastated vegetation where locust swarms have fed. Human cultures have also expanded in good times or in supportive landscapes, but then, with prolonged drought or as soils become exhausted, food production faltered and societies collapsed. Such scenarios played themselves out in ancient Mesopotamia, in the Mayan lowlands, at Angkor in Cambodia, on Easter Island, and in many smaller communities.24

But here we are, the smartest species ever, racing down the very same path as lesser creatures and earlier societies. Yes, population growth is below replacement rate in a few nations, but that's not the big picture. Human numbers continue to expand, together with an insatiable appetite for more comfort and diversions!

DIMINISHING ECOSYSTEM CAPITAL

The species losses we are now experiencing may foretoken the loss of genera and functional groups, and beyond those, of self-sustaining networks and nutrient cycles. Ecosystems as we know them will be lost, and so too will be nature's services.

—Simon A. Levin²⁵

As has been the case with so many civilizations in the past, our society is fragile. Grain production appears to be reaching a plateau worldwide.²⁶ World soybean production amounted to 16 million metric tons in 1950, and reached 200 million tons in 2005. Many of these soybeans are making pigs fatter, and sausages-for-breakfast more affordable. Demands for meat-rich diets, electric lighting, and a refrigerator for every family will burn ever more fossil fuel. Over the past few decades, China has rescued more of its people from poverty and expanded its industrial prowess faster than ever before in human history. Powered by fossil fuel, China now leads the world in greenhouse gas emissions. Add these trends to claims by the desperately poor around the world, and we cannot help but continue to expand energy consumption. Also, because of greater interconnectedness, we are increasingly vulnerable to sudden failure; think of electric grids, linked economies, and ocean-traversing oil tankers. The financial meltdown of 2008 was such a collapse. (Deutsche Bank foreclosed on 1,000 homes in Cleveland.) Meanwhile, millions of refugees flee war zones, seek employment, and challenge the stability of more prosperous nations.

Capitalism is founded on an optimistic belief in progress; people who invest their capital will gain profits in a better future. Using the magic elixir of money, we can convert the value of food, real estate, labor, or machinery into savings, debt, or just about anything else. Unfortunately, today's globalized capitalism often displaces environmental costs to distant ecosystems.27 Few of us have witnessed tropical forests being felled to produce oil palms, bananas, plywood, or beef cattle. We are eager to purchase affordable products, and we don't worry about how they are obtained. Nor do we really know—or care to know—where all our garbage ends up. All the while, world fisheries decline, even as agricultural soils lose their fertility. (Rather like mining, farming extracts essential elements from local soils and sends produce to distant urban centers.) “We are devouring our very life-support systems, and finding excuses along the way not to care,” writes Jeffrey Sachs in a comprehensive analysis of our current predicament.²⁸ Despite so many negative trends, Sachs remains optimistic, arguing that we can develop sustainable solutions. Vaclav Smil, in a detailed analysis of current threats, is also quite hopeful.²⁹ Brahma Chellaney, on the other hand, claims that we are facing shortages in the single resource for which there is absolutely no substitute: clean fresh water. While the human population increased by a factor of 3.6 over the twentieth century, our demand for fresh water increased nine-fold. Advancing societies have an appetite for beef, but a pound of beef requires ten times the water that's needed for a pound of wheat.³⁰ Ocean waters can be made drinkable with desalinization plants, but that requires yet more energy consumption. Nevertheless, and insulated by our innate optimism, few people are fearful of a world of seriously limited resources or damaged ecosystems.31

In part, I agree. Yes, there's a major extinction event underway and environments are changing, but we humans will not be among the departed! Our amazingly versatile species survived all the recent glacial cycles, and we did that with only limited technology. Together with rats and roaches, humans will surely persist. Fears of human self-extinction by nuclear war were grossly exaggerated in my opinion; folks in the Southern Hemisphere would be little affected. Likewise, rebellious robots or nasty nano-beasties are science fiction: where might they acquire the energy for making trouble? Today's threat is much less dramatic and much more serious. Billions of people dependent on modern industrial societies are not a good formulation for long-term sustainability. I suspect that if our energy-devouring civilization falters, our species will muddle on—although with reduced numbers and much diminished lifestyles, to be sure. Humans have survived over thousands of generations in the rocky thorn bush of eastern Africa, hundreds of generations along the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and many generations in the back alleys of Calcutta; we are a tough crowd and are likely to be around for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, resource-dependent, energy-demanding societies—focused primarily on wealth acquisition—are unlikely to remain stable over the longer haul. Our unique industrial civilization, like so many that have come before, will probably end in disarray. But this is a very pessimistic view, rarely seen in print or voiced in conversation. Our brains have been programmed to imagine a better future; very few people dare to look forward realistically.

Optimistic experts, in contrast, believe that new technologies will solve the problems that modern lifestyles create. This is a quite reasonable assertion, considering the unimagined advances we have made over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, and whichever view you prefer, it does appear that our looming difficulties are the direct consequence of our own best intentions.

GOOD INTENTIONS: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

I start from the bedrock principle that we as a global society need more and more growth, because without growth there is no human development and those in poverty will never escape it.

—Thomas Friedman32

The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished, epic changes have begun…the transition from a system that demands growth to one that can live without it will be wrenching.

—Bill McKibben³³

Modern societies are inspired by economic systems that demand ceaseless growth: all dedicated to improving our lives.³⁴ Unfortunately, and as the old aphorism tells us, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Few people consider that our most cherished values may be undermining our future. Since earliest agricultural times, we have claimed the human right to cut the forest, clear the land, and harvest whatever resources we demanded. Modern medicine has multiplied our numbers, even as everyone seeks to share in the comforts of modern technology. Both by transforming natural ecosystems and burning fossil fuels we are altering the capacity of the biosphere to sustain us. “We are emptying our coal mines into the sky!” warned chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1900. Belching billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, our atmosphere is becoming not just warmer but a lot more volatile!

Global warming has many insidious consequences. High mountain glaciers are melting. Capturing fresh water as snow during the wet season, melting glaciers support irrigation systems for billions of people at lower elevations. Worst of all, global warming may produce greater storming in some areas and more severe drought in others. Recently, warmer waters in the northeast Pacific diverted the jet stream, bringing the “Siberian Express” southward into the central and eastern United States, making the winters of 2013–14 and 2014–2015 among the coldest on record. The winter of 2015–2016 is altogether different, thanks to a strong El Niño in the southern Pacific. All the while industry-funded “think tanks” question human-induced climate change with their own small army of subsidized experts. Journalists use this “expertise” to counter scientific consensus in a “fair and balanced” manner (cf. Fox News).

Ultimately, love and mercy may prove to be far more ruinous than atomic war or deadly plague. Love produces more babies; mercy nourishes them and helps them grow. Bringing forth children and raising them well are central to human survival and give our life its most rewarding purpose. Curbing our birthrate contradicts both religious teaching and biological imperative. For both the liberal and the conservative, birth control is an unacceptable constraint of a fundamental “human right.” Yes, most nations are experiencing reduced population growth, but our numbers are still expanding mightily. Sub-Saharan Africa, with many traditions fostering large families, is growing by about 80,000 people each and every day. Anyone who thinks we can reduce our carbon dioxide output or limit our use of non-renewable resources in a world of growing human numbers has lost touch with reality.

In an illuminating and level-headed review of our predicament, Laurence Smith focuses on the northernmost regions of our planet. Smith's book, The World in 2050, focuses on four major forces driving our future: (1) Demographic Growth, (2) Increasing Resource Demands, (3) Economic Globalization, and (4) Climate Change. He makes clear that the reduction of summer sea ice is the primary driver of rapid climate change around the Arctic Ocean. Ending his book, he asks: “What kind of world do we want?”35 Seems to me, the dynamics of his four forces will determine our future and not what we want! I agree with Elizabeth Kolbert, who concluded her book on climate change with the warning, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”³⁶

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

The primordial blessing “increase and multiply” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in the billions and massed together, marshalled, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything.

—Thomas Merton37

Finally, after more than three billion years, Mother Nature's tendency to get more complicated has fashioned a species able to expand its food and energy sources, defeat its pathogens, elaborate its technologies, and multiply its numbers, all without comprehending the long-term consequences. We differ little from other species, all striving to expand their numbers. Humans are operating much as did plagues of desert locusts in biblical times. Perhaps a master species is the inevitable culmination of nature's innate progressive tendencies. Propelled by the same subtle forces that have driven biological elaboration over these last three billion years, our species has grandly amplified that process with progressive technological advance. Traditional subsistence farming, supporting millions of families, is being deliberately replaced by large scale industrial agriculture, sending displaced farm families to ever-more congested cities. Both modern technologies and population expansion have made human labor “the world's most overabundant resource”!³⁸ Worldwide unemployment, propagated by both unimpeded free-market globalization and advancing technologies, has left many without the financial security to begin a family and look forward to a fulfilling life. In the face of such hopelessness, religious extremism offers both purpose and immortality, fueling terrorism around the globe. Meanwhile, our optimism insists that modern economies can become sustainable, while contradictory evidence is dismissed as “catastrophic thinking.”

In an earlier volume, I suggested that we humans might possess the only radio telescopes currently functioning in our corner of the Milky Way Galaxy. That's a stretch: there are billions of planets out there. However, a huge number of lucky breaks have provided us with a stable star, a supportive planet, nutritious food, big brains, and ever-advancing culture. Without a large stabilizing Moon, plate tectonic support for “floating” land masses, expansion of the flowering plants, extinction of the dinosaurs, and grasslands supporting tasty herbivores, we humans simply would not be here. My final argument for the lack of informative radio signals in our galactic neighborhood was that exploitive technological civilizations are unlikely to be sustainable, and they vanish quickly.39 One can imagine other civilizations having arisen, circling other stars. Perhaps they grew, prospered, invented radio communication, but then made a mess of their biosphere and crashed; surviving only as fragmented bands eking out a living on their plundered planet. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with radio telescopes (SETI) has detected not a single coherent signal on the interstellar airwaves in over forty years. Might our own radio telescopes shut down when ten billion humans clamor for their fundamental needs?

Our species is transforming our world, but are we capable of managing these changes? Sociologists Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe, using Aristotelian principles, examine Climate Change as Social Drama. They point out that “The problem is complex in its causality, widespread in its impacts, and not easily converted into compelling cultural forms that transmit danger and urgency to ordinary people.” They hope for a truly compelling social drama “that will change history for us.”⁴⁰ These authors have little to say about our innate optimism or tendency to deny negative human agency. Like so many other experts, they discuss the human population explosion not at all! The authors do recognize that climate change challenges deeply held notions of progress and human rights and is unique in demanding reductions in goods and services, all for the greater good of future generations. But how likely is that?

Unless we can ensure that the Economy is kept subservient to our Ecology we will self-destruct.

—Roger Short⁴¹

Traditional economics preaches perpetual growth, even though nothing, save God or the universe can possibly be perpetual—and there's some doubt about the universe.

—Alan Weisman42

The future of humankind is unknowable. We live in a complex universe where many things “can go wrong.” Nevertheless, and despite a lot of bad news, most folks have an optimistic vision for our future. Huge improvements in our lives and lifestyles over the last three centuries support such a worldview. In contrast, students of the environment are deeply fearful that our relentless demand for resources will lead to a severely diminished biosphere. Despite such differing viewpoints, I believe we can all agree that recent human achievements are the culminating epiphany in a long history that's been getting ever more complicated. We humans have become—quite literally—the pinnacle of organic evolution. Whether measured by our understanding of the cosmos, the luxury of our lifestyles, or our impact on the biosphere, humans are the most transformative species in the history of life! We have added significantly to the complexity of our planet.

With billions of beetles enlivening our terrestrial ecosystems, and trillions of transistors enabling our technologies, planet Earth supports more complexity than all the other members of our solar system combined. Lots of water, ample land surfaces, escalating biodiversity, and our own splendid ingenuity, have driven this scenario of ever-escalating complexity. Considering all the “lucky breaks” throughout the planet's history, how likely is it to find another heavenly body similarly adorned? I suspect that our galaxy has nothing to equal our globe's complexity within the nearest thousand light years. We are truly very special.

That said, human activities are threatening the very richness and stability of our biosphere. Regrettably, I am a pessimist who sees modern industrial society as unsustainable and “human nature” incapable of diminishing its biological and cultural appetites. Also, I'm worried that, since people cause trouble, more people will inevitably cause more trouble. Ever growing numbers make our future less likely to become better and better. Yes, the Industrial Revolution and its ongoing advancement have given us near-miraculous technologies. Our lives and our planet have been transformed! However, there is no guarantee that similarly inventive miracles will solve future challenges. Even if we could wring hydrogen from water cheaply or achieve the controlled fusion of hydrogen into helium, our resource devouring and ever-growing numbers are unlikely to be sustainable.

Today, a significant number of Christians believe that we are entering the end times of biblical prophecy—and that God's promises will be soon fulfilled. Many Muslims believe that increasing chaos will bring the Return of the Mahdi—and all will be well. Propelled by our innate optimism, most everybody anticipates a better future.

However, and regardless of how one views our future, I believe there is one further point on which hopeful optimists, religious believers, and fearful pessimists can all agree. Rephrasing the Ancient Chinese Curse:

We live in interesting times!