24th march 2011
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich are in the Department of Biology of Stanford University. They are co-authors of The Dominant Animal, and Paul's latest book, co-authored with psychologist Robert Ornstein, is Humanity on a Tightrope.
The current unrest in the Arab nations has called the world's attention to some of the political and economic consequences of the West's addiction to petroleum. But sadly it hasn't brought back into focus two more fundamental and interrelated problems. The first is the population explosion; the second is the expectation of perpetual growth in per capita consumption, not just for several billion poor people, but for the billion or so who are already rich.
In the next forty years the populations of already-water short Arab nations are going to increase dramatically, and at the same time their people will be aspiring to catch up with the living standards of today's developed countries. For example, Egypt, with 80 million people today, is projected to grow to some 138 million by 2050. Per capita income in Egypt is now about $5,500, compared with about $47,000 in the United States and $30,000 in the European Union.
In the next forty years the populations of already-water short Arab nations are going to increase dramatically, and at the same time their people will be aspiring to catch up with the living standards of today's developed countries. For example, Egypt, with 80 million people today, is projected to grow to some 138 million by 2050. Per capita income in Egypt is now about $5,500, compared with about $47,000 in the United States and $30,000 in the European Union.
The aspiration gap is even more stunning for sub-Saharan Africa, which is projected to explode from 870 million people to 1.8 billion in the next 40 years. Per capita income there is now $2,000, and less than a third of the population has access to a toilet. That gap will doubtless widen further as the poor suffer disproportionately from climate disruption, the spread of toxic chemicals, and an extinction episode unmatched in 65 million years, threatening the natural services upon which people are utterly dependent. Given the additional need to invest in completely re-engineering the planet's energy-mobilizing and water-handling infrastructure and rising pressure on resources, even maintaining today's standards of living in both rich and poor nations will be increasingly difficult.
The press is full of stories about problems caused at least in part by the conjoined but unmentionable twin elephants of population growth and overconsumption. But spiking food and energy prices, water shortages, increasingly severe weather, melting ice caps, dying coral reefs, intersex alligators, disappearing polar bears, collapsing infrastructures, terrorism, and novel epidemics are almost never connected to the elephants. While obviously there are limits to sustainable human numbers and to humanity's aggregate consumption, those limits are almost never discussed.
For full article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-and-anne-ehrlich/the-twin-elephants-in-the_b_840011.htmlThe press is full of stories about problems caused at least in part by the conjoined but unmentionable twin elephants of population growth and overconsumption. But spiking food and energy prices, water shortages, increasingly severe weather, melting ice caps, dying coral reefs, intersex alligators, disappearing polar bears, collapsing infrastructures, terrorism, and novel epidemics are almost never connected to the elephants. While obviously there are limits to sustainable human numbers and to humanity's aggregate consumption, those limits are almost never discussed.
For full article:
Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich are in the Department of Biology of Stanford University. They are co-authors of The Dominant Animal, and Paul's latest book, co-authored with psychologist Robert Ornstein, is Humanity on a Tightrope.
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