First, resources differ in their renewability. Like fossil fuels, minerals are inorganic (i.e., not biological and not renewable). That is, minerals don’t regenerate themselves or produce baby minerals; the amounts available to us now on Earth are, for practical purposes, all that we shall ever have. In contrast, forests and fisheries are renewable biological resources: fish and trees do produce baby fish and baby trees. Hence in theory and often in practice, they can be exploited sustainably, by harvesting them at a rate lower than the rate at which new fish and new trees are produced, so that the population of fish and trees remains steady or even increases. Fertile soil, although largely inorganic and only partly of biological origin, can also be considered a renewable resource because, while it can be eroded by human activities, it can also be regenerated by the action of earthworms and microorganisms. Fresh water is partly non-renewable (e.g., a drained aquifer), but partly renewable, because water evaporating from the ocean can end up as rain on land and generate new fresh water.
There is nothing that we can do to maintain the world’s reserves of non-renewable resources (minerals and fossil fuels) by our management practices. But management practices have big effects on reserves of renewable biological resources. As mentioned already in Chapter 8, a lot is known about how to manage forests and fisheries sustainably. Some of the world’s forests and fisheries, such as Germany’s forests and the Alaska wild salmon fishery, are already well managed. Unfortunately, most aren’t; they are being overharvested, with the result that their tree or fish stocks are shrinking or disappearing. Quick: when did you last eat Atlantic swordfish? Answer: not since many years ago, because it was overharvested and became commercially extinct. We also know how to manage topsoil, but sadly it too is often mismanaged and gets carried off into rivers and then into the ocean by erosion, or else its fertility and texture get degraded. In short, the world is currently mismanaging many or most of its renewable valuable biological resources.
Second, which natural resources could limit human societies? Answer: probably all of them, with the exception of atmospheric oxygen, which we show no signs of using up. Some minerals, especially iron and aluminum, are present in such huge amounts that they too seem unlikely to prove limiting—but I must temper this statement by acknowledging that the deposits that we have been exploiting have been the shallow, accessible, cheaply extractible ones. With time, we shall inevitably come to depend on deeper reserves that are more costly to extract, as is already the case for fossil fuels. Some other minerals important in industry are present in much smaller amounts, such that there are already fears of their reserves being limiting—for example, some so-called rare earths whose known reserves are concentrated in China. Perhaps you are inclined to view fresh water availability as unlimited, because there is so much salt water in the world’s oceans that we could make essentially infinite amounts of fresh water by desalinizing ocean water. But that requires energy, and we are already hard pressed for energy and suffering huge costs from its overuse, so in practice fresh water is indeed available only in limited quantities.
Our next consideration is the international dimensions of world resource problems. Some resources, such as forests, don’t move; each tree stays in the nation where it is now growing, so its management can in theory be dictated by that nation (although in practice there is an international dimension because other countries may buy or lease that resource). But international complications are unavoidable for resources lying in an international “commons,” and for mobile resources that move across national boundaries.
The open ocean is a “commons”: while ocean water within 200 miles of land is considered the territory of the nation to which that land belongs, ocean water beyond that 200-mile limit is owned by no one. (The name “commons” comes from a term applied to much pasture land in the Middle Ages: it was not owned by individuals but considered a “commons,” available for use by the public.) Nations have the legal basis to regulate fishing within their 200-mile limit, but any fishing boat of any country can fish anywhere in the open ocean. As a result, there is no legal mechanism for preventing overfishing of the open oceans, and many ocean fish stocks are declining. Three other potentially valuable resources also lie in a commons beyond national limits: minerals dissolved in the ocean, fresh water in the Antarctic ice cap, and minerals lying on the sea floor. There have already been some attempts to exploit all three: after World War One the German chemist Fritz Haber worked on a process to extract gold from ocean water; at least one attempt has been made to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to a water-poor Middle Eastern nation; and efforts are far advanced to mine some minerals from the ocean floor. But none of those three exploitations of the commons has proved practical yet; our current commons problem is “just” open-ocean fisheries.
The other resources likely to cause international complications are mobile ones that move from one nation to another. Many animals are migratory and move across national boundaries: the ones most important economically are many commercially valuable ocean fish, such as tuna, and also some river fish and migratory land mammals and birds (like river salmon, Arctic reindeer, and African savannah antelope). Hence when a fishing boat of one country harvests an ocean migratory fish stock, it thereby depletes fish that might otherwise be available to another country. Fresh water is also mobile: many rivers flow between two or more countries, and many lakes are bordered by two or more countries, hence one country can draw down or pollute fresh water that another country wants to use. Besides those mobile useful natural resources already present in water or air, there are mobile harmful things that human activities add to water or air, and that can be carried by water currents and winds from one country to another. For example, smoke from Indonesian forest fires already seriously damages the quality of air blown to adjacent Malaysia and Singapore; dust from China and Central Asia gets blown to Japan and even to North America; and rivers carry plastic to end up in even the most remote oceans and beaches.
Finally, let’s consider international competition for resources. That’s a big problem, because if it can’t be resolved amicably, countries may seek to resolve it by war. That has already happened in the case of international competition for oil, which was a major motive for Japan’s entry into World War Two, and in the case of Chile’s War of the Pacific (1879–1883) against Bolivia and Peru to control the rich copper and nitrate deposits of the Atacama Desert. Today, there is serious competition for fresh water in many parts of the world, such as for the water arising from melting of the Himalayan snow pack, which provides the water for the major rivers flowing through much of China, India, and all Southeast Asian countries. In the case of the Mekong and other rivers flowing through Southeast Asia, dams in upstream countries will block nutrient-rich sediments from reaching downstream countries. Competition for ocean fish off the coast of West Africa is occurring among fishing boats from the European Union, China, and West African nations. Other international “scrambles” over resources are underway for hardwoods of trees growing in tropical countries and coveted by temperate industrialized countries; for rare-earth elements used in industry; and for soil, such as China leasing agricultural land in Africa. In short, as world human population and consumption rise, we can expect many, many more conflicts caused by international competition for limiting resources.
Average per-capita consumption rates of resources like oil and metals, and average per-capita production rates of wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in the First World than in the developing world. For instance, each year the average American consumes about 32 times more gasoline, and produces 32 times more plastic waste and carbon dioxide, than does the average citizen of a poor country. That factor of 32 has big consequences for how people in the developing world behave, and it also has consequences for what lies ahead for all of us. That’s the last of the four sets of problems that I see as threatening civilization and our species.
To understand those consequences, let’s re
flect on our concern with world population. Today, the world has more than 7.5 billion people, and that may rise to around 9.5 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered population as the biggest issue facing humanity. But, since then, we have come to realize that population is just one of two factors whose product is what really matters. That product is total world consumption, which is the sum (over the world) of local consumptions, which are products of two terms: local population (number of people) times the local average consumption rate per person.
Population matters only insofar as people consume and produce. If most of the world’s 7.5 billion people were in a cold-storage locker and not metabolizing or consuming, they wouldn’t be creating a resource problem. The First World consists of about 1 billion people who live mostly in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and who have relative average per-capita consumption rates of 32. Most of the world’s other 6.5 billion people, constituting the developing world, have relative per-capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down towards 1. Those numbers mean that most resource consumption occurs in the First World.
Nevertheless, some people remain fixated on population alone. They note that countries like Kenya have population growth rates over 4% per year, and they say that that’s a big problem. It is indeed a problem, especially for Kenya’s 50 million people. But the much bigger problem for the world as a whole is we 330 million Americans, who outnumber Kenyans 6.6 to 1, and each of whom consumes as much as 32 Kenyans do. Multiply those two U.S.-to-Kenya ratios (6.6 to 1, and 32 to 1), and you’ll see that the U.S. consumes 210 times more resources than Kenya as a whole. To take another example, Italy’s population of 60 million consumes almost twice as much as do the 1 billion people who populate the whole continent of Africa.
Until recent times, the existence of all those poor people elsewhere didn’t constitute a threat to First World countries. “They” out there didn’t know much about our lifestyle, and if they did learn about it and got envious or angry, they couldn’t do much about it. Many decades ago, American diplomats used to play a game of debating which of the world’s countries were most irrelevant to U.S. national interests. Popular answers were “Afghanistan” and “Somalia”: those two countries were so poor, and so remote, that it seemed that they could never do anything to create problems for us. Ironically, those two countries then became perceived as such threats to us that we sent troops into both of them, and American troops are still in Afghanistan.
The reasons why poor remote countries can now create problems for rich countries can be summed up by the word “globalization”: the increased connections between all parts of the world. In particular, the increasing ease of communications and travel means that people in developing countries now know a lot about the big differences in consumption rates and living standards around the world, and that it’s now possible for many of them to travel to rich countries.
Among the ways in which globalization has made differences in living standards around the world untenable, three stand out. One is the spread of emerging diseases from poor remote countries to rich countries. In recent decades, feared fatal diseases have often been carried by travelers to rich countries from poor countries where those diseases are endemic and public health measures are weak—cholera, Ebola, flu, (notably) AIDS, and others. Those arrivals will increase.
The spread of emerging diseases is an unintentional consequence of globalization, but the second of the three spreads made possible by globalization involves human intent. Many people in poor countries get frustrated and angry when they become aware of the comfortable lifestyles available elsewhere in the world. Some of them become terrorists, and many others who aren’t terrorists themselves tolerate or support terrorists. Since the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that formerly protected the U.S. no longer protect us. We Americans now live under constant threat of terrorism. There will surely be more terrorist attacks against the U.S. and Europe, and probably against Japan and Australia as well, in the future—as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.
Naturally, global inequality by itself isn’t the direct cause of terrorist acts. Religious fundamentalism and individual psychopathology also play essential roles. Every country has its crazy angry individuals driven to kill other people; poor countries have no monopoly on them. The U.S. had its Timothy McVeigh who killed 168 people by a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, and its Theodore Kaczynski who mailed packages containing carefully designed bombs that killed three people and injured 23. Norway had its Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 people and injured 319, many of them children, with a bomb and a gun. But those three terrorists remained isolated crazy individuals and did not receive widespread support, because most Americans and Norwegians aren’t sufficiently desperate or angry. Only in poor countries, where much of the population does feel desperate and angry, is there toleration or support for terrorists.
The remaining consequence of that factor of 32, combined with globalization, is that people with low consumptions want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle themselves. They have two ways of achieving it. First, governments of developing countries consider an increase in living standards, including consumption rates, as a prime goal of national policy. Second, tens of millions of people in the developing world are unwilling to wait to see whether their government can deliver high living standards within their lifetime. Instead, they seek the First World lifestyle now, by emigrating to the First World, with or without permission: especially by emigrating to Western Europe and the U.S., and also to Australia; and especially from Africa and parts of Asia, and also from Central and South America. It’s proving impossible to keep out the immigrants. Each such transfer of a person from a low-consumption to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in increasing their consumption by the entire factor of 32.
Is everybody’s dream of achieving a First World lifestyle possible? Consider the numbers. Multiply current national numbers of people by national per-capita consumption rates (of oil, metals, water, etc.) for each country, and add up those products over the whole world. The resulting sum is the current world consumption rate of that resource. Now repeat that calculation, but with all developing countries achieving a First World consumption rate up to 32 times higher than their current ones, and no change in national populations or in anything else about the world. The result is that world consumption rates will increase by 11-fold. That’s equivalent to a world population of about 80 billion people with the present distribution of per-capita consumption rates.
There are some optimists who claim that we can support a world with 9.5 billion people. But I haven’t met any optimist mad enough to claim that we can support a world with the equivalent of 80 billion people. Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world’s 7.5 billion people enjoy it.
We Americans often refer to growing consumption in China and other developing countries as “a problem,” and we wish that the “problem” didn’t exist. Well, of course the so-called problem will continue: the Chinese and the people of other developing countries are just trying to enjoy the consumption rates that we already enjoy. They wouldn’t listen if we were so silly as to tell them not to try to do what we are already doing. The only sustainable outcome for our globalized world that China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, African countries, and other developing countries will accept is one in which consumption rates and living standards are more nearly equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to sustainably support the current First World, let alone the developing world, at current First World levels. Does that mean t
hat we are guaranteed to end up in disaster?
No: we could have a stable outcome in which the First World and other countries converged on consumption rates considerably below current First World rates. Most Americans would object: there is no way that we will sacrifice our living standards just for the benefit of those people out there in the rest of the world! As Dick Cheney said, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” But the cruel realities of world resource levels guarantee that the American way of life will change; those realities of world resources cannot be negotiated out of existence. We Americans certainly will sacrifice our consumption rates, whether we decide to do so or not, because the world can’t sustain our current rates.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a real sacrifice, because consumption rates and human well-being, while they are related, are not tightly coupled. Much American consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to high quality of life. For example, per-capita oil consumption rates in Western Europe are about half those in the U.S., but the well-being of the average Western European is higher than that of the average American by any meaningful criterion, such as life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools, and support for the arts. When you finish reading this page of my book, just go out into a street in the U.S., look at the cars driving by, estimate their gas mileages, and ask yourself whether that wasteful American gas consumption contributes positively to any of those measures of quality of life. There are other areas besides oil in which consumption rates in the U.S. and in other First World countries are wasteful, such as the wasteful and destructive exploitation of most of the world’s fisheries and forests already discussed.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 40