The problems facing our planet reflect an adaptive strategy gone awry. Indeed, it’s clear that we no longer enjoy the harmonious relationship we once had with culture or with the planet. Instead, culture has become an unintentional transformer of the environment. All we need to do is examine the very air we breathe to realize that we have overstepped our limits (Fig. 17-9).
Can the problems we’ve created be solved? Perhaps, but any objective assessment of the future fails to provide much optimism. Climate change, air pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, and loss of biodiversity are catastrophic problems in a world of 7 billion people. How well do we cope now with feeding, housing, and educating these 7 billion? What quality of life do the majority of the world’s people enjoy right now? What kind of world have we wrought for the other organisms that share our planet, as many are steadily isolated within fragments of what were once large habitats? If these concerns aren’t overwhelming enough now, what kind of world will we see in the year 2050, when the human population could reach 10 billion? Among other consequences of this population growth, the world’s food production would need to double in order for everyone to have enough to eat. (Millions are underfed and undernourished now.) Because our window of opportunity shrinks every year, industrialized nations must immediately help developing countries to adopt fuel-efficient technologies that will allow them to raise their standard of living without increasing their output of greenhouse gases. Furthermore, family planning must be adopted to slow population growth. In most societies, however, behavioral change is very difficult, and sacrifice on the part of the developing world alone wouldn’t adequately stem the tide. It’s entirely too easy for someone from North America to ask that the people of Bangladesh control their rate of reproduction (it runs two to three times that of the United States). But consider this: The average American uses an estimated 400 times the resources consumed by a resident of Bangladesh. The United States alone produces 25 to 30 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions that end up in the earth’s atmosphere. In 2007, China caught up with the United States in this regard, but over 1.3 billion people live in China, compared with 300 million in the United States. In his book The Future of Life (2002), E. O. Wilson discussed the issue in terms of “ecological footprints,” or the average amount of land and sea required for each person to support his or her lifestyle. This includes all resources consumed for energy, housing, transportation, food, water, and waste disposal. In nonindustrialized nations, the ecological footprint per capita is about 2.5 acres, but in the United States it’s 24 acres! Wilson went on to point out that four additional planet earths would be needed for every person on the planet to reach the current levels of consumption in the United States. Clearly much of the responsibility for the world’s problems rests squarely on the shoulders of the industrialized West.