The Degrader (Homo eversor)

Humanity’s impact on the planet and its primary resources: water, soils, forests, deserts, oceans, minerals, energy. Our global footprint and its significance to our future. Causes of collapse of past civilizations. Avoiding scarcity and building a regene

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Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet —Bible, Psalms 8, verse 6.

The human story in the twenty-first century will be dominated by a titanic global struggle—economic, political, scientific and military—for resources. On this, to a significant degree, turns the fate of civilisation. In every prior age till now the bounty of the Earth was ample to sustain the ascent of human society. Scarcities, when they occurred, were local, regional or else the result of human interference or mismanagement. Now, with the advent of the postmodern era, a Rubicon has been crossed: the physical demands of seven to ten billion humans, each aspiring to a higher standard of living, are combining to exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity. Put simply, we are using more stuff than the planet can renewably provide. Human use of natural resources amounts to some 75 billion tonnes per year—or 10 tonnes per annum to support each one of us. That demand has grown tenfold in a century, from seven billion tonnes in 1900, and is due to reach 140 billion tonnes by 2050 (OECD 2015a). These resources fall into two main sorts—‘non-renewable’ resources like minerals, fossil energy, industrial and construction materials, and the so-called ‘renewables’ such as agriculture, forestry and fisheries—which are now proving not so renewable after all (Chap. 7). Then there are the key environmental resources of water, land, biodiversity and atmosphere.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J. Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2_3

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Surviving the 21st Century

To put this in a personal perspective, over his or her lifetime each citizen of Earth will (at our present rate of demand): • Use 99,720 tonnes of fresh water (Fischetti 2012), two thirds of it in the form of food • Cause the loss of 750 tonnes of topsoil (Wilkinson and McElroy 2006) • Consume 720 tonnes of metals, manufacturing and construction materials (World Resources Institute 2015) • Use 5.4 billion British thermal units (Btus) of (mainly fossil) energy (Energy Information Administration 2015a) • Cause the release of 288 tonnes of carbon dioxide (World Bank 2015a) • Cause the release of 320 kilos of industrial chemicals, many of them toxic (Cribb 2014) • Waste 13.4 tonnes of food (Gustavsson et al. 2011a). While the sheer size of your personal impact on the planet may come as a surprise, it is modest compared to what may occur as the human population expands to between 10 and 12 billion (Gerland et  al. 2014) and as, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the world economy grows “at an average rate of just over 3 % per annum from 2011 to 2050, doubling in size by 2032 and nearly doubling again by 2050” (PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2012). The OECD, for example, foresees world demand for metals alone expanding from 5.8 to 11.2 billion tonnes between 2002 and 2020 (OECD 2015b). Paradoxically, the efficiency with which the world uses its increasingly scarce resources is declining, not improving—due ch