Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Overextension: our American way of life is not sustainable
Chris Clugston, Culture Change
Culture Change Editor’s Note: Chris Clugston is the kind of independent researcher and commentator who has the corporate and academic background to put numbers together. Fortunately, it is for the big picture. Few environmentalists are willing to tackle overpopulation, but Clugston actually quantifies it. -JL
Through our relentless pursuit of the American Dream and our blind adherence to our American way of life, we have become overextended — we have exceeded America’s capacity to sustainably support our existing population at our current standard of living. That is, the natural resources and economic resources required to support our ever-increasing consumption levels by our ever-expanding population are simply not available; nor is the capacity of our habitat sufficient to assimilate the ever-increasing amounts of waste disgorged by our ever-expanding population.
To compound our predicament, we have become “irreversibly” overextended — we are past the point of “painless” return. We have so consistently and drastically overshot our sustainable consumption and population levels that returning to sustainable levels will necessarily involve significant lifestyle disruptions — living standard degradation, population level reduction, and the possible loss of sovereignty; there can be no “soft landing.”
Note: We are temporarily able to maintain prosperity and growth, despite our overextended condition, because the adverse effects associated with our continuously accumulating ecological and economic indiscretions — which enable our current prosperity and growth — have yet to be felt. We are essentially living on borrowed time.
Quantifying American Overextension
In order to fully appreciate the extent to which America is overextended and to understand why our American way of life is not sustainable, it is necessary to quantify American overextension; that is, to compute the difference between our current consumption and population levels, and the consumption and population levels at which America could subsist sustainably and self-sufficiently going forward into the future.
One method by which these metrics can be determined is through the use of “ecological footprint” data.
(27 September 2007)
Author Chris Clugston recently published Global peak energy in Energy Bulletin. -BA
UN: Thirty-five years to half-extinction
Michelle Michalos, The Ticker (Baruch College, NY)
At the United Nations’ climate change conference this month, experts painted a grim picture for the future of our planet. If humans don’t act within the next 5 to 10 years, they warned, not only will we cause the extinction of many of the world’s vital species, but in the end, we will be wiped off the earth ourselves.
“The entire web of life is on the verge of catastrophe,” said Dr. Stuart Pimm from the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “If things continue, in as little as 35 years half of all species of life will be extinct.” Perhaps the scariest aspect of this prediction is that nobody knows what the consequences will be. “Billions of people could die because of decreased biodiversity,” Pimm warned.
As much as humans may try to keep a distance from nature, our impact on the natural world can’t be denied. “The last mass extinction event was caused by an asteroid,” Pimm recalled. “Now it is being caused by homo sapiens.”
But while global warming is clearly a major factor in the extinction crisis – a temperature increase of just 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius would put 20-30 percent of plants and animals at risk of extinction – it’s not the biggest. Habitat destruction and pollution play large roles as well. Oddly enough, the species that live in the places least touched by humans are the ones who suffer the most. This includes species that occupy the Artic region and mountaintops – they have nowhere to escape – and lowland species, which have been isolated by the agricultural land.
There is no doubt that the impact of extinction is already being felt. According to Pimm and fellow speaker Chera Van Berg, two-thirds of the planet’s grazing land has already been overgrazed. Add forests that are shrinking at a rate of one and a half million square kilometers each decade – meaning that within a few decades we may completely destroy the world’s forests along with the diverse ecosystems that occupy them – and severely overharvested ocean fisheries, the tremendous scale of crisis is coming into focus.
(24 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
It seems we are loosing the ability to focus on critical issues as we slide deeper into global catastrophe. It seems we are trapped in a vicious feedback loop of dread and confusion that is generating a flight response — into the last bastion of emotional security, our collective fantasies. By the time enough pain reaches “The Deciders” and “wakes them up”… will it be too late to avoid our own extinction? Have we already failed the exam by tardy absence?
Mundane science fiction (what if there is no quick and easy escape route?)
Editors, Interzone Magazine
This will be the page for submitting stories to the future MundaneSF issue of Interzone Magazine. Closing date for submissions is likely to be 31 October 2007. …
Guidelines
Today there is no —
* Faster than light travel
* Psi power
* Nanobot technology
* Extraterrestrial life
* Computer consciousness
* Materially profitable space travel
* Human immortality
* Brain downloading
* Teleportation
* Time travel
— And maybe there never will be!
For one issue only, we are going to set aside all the noise and electric guitars and anything-goes-as-usual mentality associated with contemporary Science Fiction, and do it properly.
This is the challenge of the “what if not”. What if none of these familiar SF phenomena that allow us to imagine a quick and easy escape route ever gets invented? What if the known the laws of physics and biology as understood by the leading scientists of today turn out to be more or less correct? What if we’re still alone on this planet ten, a hundred, or a hundred thousand years from now, and…
The guest editors for this issue — Geoff Ryman, Trent Walters, and Julian Todd — understand that this is a very tough assignment. There is a huge void at the heart of the literature relating to a wide spectrum of probable futures so threatening that few people dare to think about it. …
For ideas that matter in the absence of spaceships, nanobots, brain downloads, etc, you might find it helpful to read material from sources that endeavour to speak of the future — a subject for discourse which has noticeably fallen from favour in recent decades. Some on-line examples, in no particular choice of merit: Collapse, Committee on Recently Extinct Organisms, Cryptome, Energy bulletin, Futures Studies, Futurismic blog, IMF World Economic Outlook, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Necessary Illusions, Realclimate, Scientific American, United Nations General Assembly, Wikipedia Random Article.
Make sure you have a story, and make it better than any of the sources you may have used for inspiration.
(27 September 2007)
Note the reference to Energy Bulletin.
Recommended by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling who admits to being a “closet sympathizer” with the Mundane science fiction movement.. Sterling is also the founder of the Viridian Green movement, which helped inspire worldchanging.com.
I’ve loved science fiction for decades, but I’m afraid that I now find most of it unbelievable. I think I agree with Geoff Ryman in his speech on Mundane science fiction: “Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!.
Staying home on the farm and raising kids seems to be just the activities most SF dreams of escaping.
…We felt as if SF had accumulated so many improbable ideas and relied on them so regularly, that it had disconnected from reality. The futures it was portraying were so unlikely as to be irrelevant, if not actually harmful.
…SF, especially mainstream commercial SF, copies the past onto the future, to make it comfortably entertaining. The future will be just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys. Perhaps that’s because so many people now fear the future, rather than welcome it as a wonderland of possibility.
…The drive to write and read big-market SF is not much different from the drive to write and read Peter Pan. You never grow up. You fly by magic away from home to Never-neverland. (Take the third star on the left.) It’s full of mermaids, pirates and native peoples, just like Star Trek.
…What, I want to ask, is so un-wonderful about Earth? What is so unexciting about our future here? Disaster, innovation, climate change and virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, biocomputers that evolve.
Will cramped, smelly spaceships full of people who have been trapped with each other for twenty years, with terrible food, no light, drugs and entertainment only so long the computers hold out, is that really the most exciting thing we can imagine?
-BA
