A nice parable about modern society and two ways of understanding how to organize our world society and the practices we live with.
If you ask a fish if its in water, it'll say "what's water". Just as the fish floats in a sea of an existing matrix of conditions, so do we float in a matrix of existing thoughts and ways of being that we can call the prevailing consensus opinion.
Odometer moments are those times when we pass a number like 10,000, or any other number that ends with a few zero's. Remember the excitement when your "new" car reaches it's 10,000 mile mark? That's an odometer moment in action, and today we have an odometer moment in world population. It's estimated that today, Oct 31 2011, the human population of this planet has reached 7 billion people. In practical terms the difference between 6.999 billion and 7 billion is small, but these odometer moments offer an opportunity to reflect on where we're headed.
There's a basic fact here, the rate of population growth has sped up considerably since 1800 when world human population first surpassed 1 billion people.
The chart at the right shows population odometer moments since 1800. What's most important about that table is the period of years between each odometer moment. First, 127 years, then 33 years, then 14 years, then 13 years, then 12 years and again 12 years. That means for the last 30-40 years it's taking 12-3 years to add a billion people to the planets human population.
Here's another way to graph human population over time. Mathematically this is an exponential growth curve. Exponential curves are dangerous because they tend to explode.
This chart shows where population growth hotspots currently exist. The highest growth rates are colored in shades of green, and occur primarily in Africa, with other high population growth areas in Yemen, Oman, Iraq and Afghanistan.
India, one of the population powerhouses, is ominously growing at a fairly rapid rate whereas the other population powerhouse, China, is growing at a slower rate.
Fortunately the actual rate of population growth is slowing down. There have been years of efforts to slow down population growth because many recognize the problem which can occur from overpopulation.
Overpopulation is a condition where an organism's numbers exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat. Humanity has "agriculture" and "medical advances" to thank for the population growth. If we think over history it's clear human families can bear quite a few children, but that disease will kill most of them. Medical advances prevent childhood diseases from killing so many people and as a result our population is growing.
Modern agriculture has made tremendous strides in food production.
The recent rapid increase in human population over the past two centuries has raised concerns that humans are beginning to overpopulate the Earth, and that the planet may not be able to sustain present or larger numbers of inhabitants. However, the rate of population growth has been declining since the 1980s, and is expected to stabilize by around the middle of the 21st century. Unlike global warming, which has recently become considered nearly fact by the scientific community, many scientists do not believe that the world is overpopulated, and believe instead that waste and over-consumption, especially by wealthy nations, is the force putting strain on the environment.
The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.
The concern is that the human population is exceeding the carrying capacity of this planet. Not all population growth is the same. Paul Erlich developed the IPAT equation to summarize the effect of population based on technological capability:
where:
7 billion agrarians hunting and gathering have a smaller impact than 7 billion car owning humans following the American over-consumptive lifestyle.
America with 6% or so of world population consumes 25% or more of world resource production. Per-capita our impact on the planet's wellbeing is greater than the per-capita impact of a tribal farmer in remote Africa.
Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Sustained overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource.
This chart shows the effect of over-exploitation of cod fisheries in the North Atlantic. That fish used to be a primary source of food in America but by 1992 the Cod fishery totally collapsed. All along the coast from NY City up to Canada former fishing villages have run into serious economic trouble after the fishery collapsed.
This is presented as an example of effects of over-population and over-consumption. It shows a period of over-exploitation beginning in the early 1950's perhaps driven by the "Baby Boom" and improved fishery technology including the use of SONAR to track fish populations so the fishermen could do a better job of harvesting fish.
It's thought that by 2050 all large fish in the ocean will be extinct, due to over-fishing.
I want to end this by linking to Dr. Al Bartlett's seminal lecture, "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy." The argument is that if you look at the numbers, infinite growth is impossible and exponential growth patterns lead to crashes.
The ooooby (out of our own back yard) idea originated in New Zealand. I first heard of it via the In Transition 1.0 movie about the Transition Towns movement. This video shows a group implementing the idea in Ireland as a community supported agriculture system that's also a gardening training facility.
Part of this implementation is that backyard growers can sell their excess through the ooooby store.
ooooby Box Scheme from Tony Armstrong on Vimeo.
Arizona is a dry place, most of it's a desert. People have lived there for millennia and done so by understanding the environment and how to work with the environment. However westerners (us) in Arizona are flouting the natural ecosystem and it's most obvious in the water use patterns.
This is a good thing - for them to be studying water use on a 100 year time horizon.
Arizona's First Ever Statewide Study Projecting Water Use Praised by Conservation Group
Report Shows Need to Ensure Future Water Supplies, Protect Natural Resources
PHOENIX, Oct. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The first ever statewide report projecting Arizona's water supplies and demands over the next century is a key first step to "ensure that physical limits to water supplies don't limit Arizona's economic prosperity or the legacy of its natural resources," according to Environmental Defense Fund.
"This is the kind of forward-looking process that is needed for Arizona to ensure that it has secure water supplies for the future of its communities and natural resources, including its desert rivers and streams," said Jocelyn Gibbon, a Phoenix-based water law attorney for the Colorado River program at Environmental Defense Fund. "It also shows the need for a robust, well-funded Department of Water Resources to take a leadership role in developing creative solutions for the future. We need to ensure that physical limits to water supplies don't limit Arizona's economic prosperity or the legacy of natural resources that we leave to our kids."
The report, scheduled to be released today by the state's Water Resources Development Commission (WRDC) to the Arizona legislature, projects annual water use in the state could grow steadily from current levels of about 7.1 million acre-feet to between 9.9 to 10.6 million acre-feet per year in 2110, a jump of nearly 40 to 50 percent.
"Water is an essential element to Arizona's prosperity...It is clear that meeting the demand for additional water supplies in the 21st century requires inventive action to be taken and consideration of new ways to expand supplies," the report concludes. "Arizona must develop a broad portfolio of solutions to meet the myriad of challenges that are inherent in this diverse state. Finally, decisions must be made regarding what solutions will be most effective in discrete regions, how those solutions will be funded, and whether implementation of the solutions requires legislative changes."
Last year, the Arizona legislature passed House Bill 2661, which created the WRDC to assess the current and future water needs of Arizona.
The Commission's tasks include:
The final report released today includes data and reports from five committees, recommendations related to future studies and evaluations, and the suggestion that the Commission continue to meet.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) praised the Arizona Department of Water Resources and stakeholders for their efforts in developing the report information quickly and cooperatively under a tight deadline. EDF made particular mention of the work of the Environmental Working Group established by the Commission, which mapped and catalogued natural resources in Arizona that are dependent on water.
"The county-by-county inventory of natural resources dependent on water begins to illustrate how much the continued flow of water in rivers, streams, and other natural features means to the state," concluded Gibbon. "Arizona's incredibly rich and diverse ecosystems depend on reliable water supplies, as do communities across the state. We have a lot of work to do to prevent those supplies from being depleted."
The report identifies some next steps that could be taken towards planning for the state's water future, including evaluating the effectiveness of alternative water supply solutions for diverse areas of the state, and incorporating information about water for rivers and natural resources into future planning. The current report does not evaluate risks to these natural resources.
Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org), a leading national nonprofit organization, creates transformational solutions to the most serious environmental problems. EDF links science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships. Visit us on Twitter @EveryDayFactoid and facebook.com/EnvDefenseFund.
Contacts:Jennifer Witherspoon, (415) 293-6067, Crowley, (202) 550-6524-c, Gibbon, (602) 510-4619-c,
SOURCE Environmental Defense Fund
Environmental Defense Fund
Web Site: http://www.edf.org
