Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
States, whose fearsome military machine kept a lid on international conflict and whose universally
accepted currency helped maintain relative international economic stability (in ways that served
US interests, of course). Globally, deaths from war have declined, as has mortality linked to dire
poverty.
So far, so good (more or less).
Unfortunately, however, many key components of our successful collective efforts to beat the
Reaper are essentially unsustainable. We have reduced mortality not just with antibiotics (to which
microbes eventually develop immunity) but also with an economic strategy of drawing down re-
newable resources at rates exceeding those of natural replenishment, and of liquidating nonrenew-
able resources as quickly as possible. By borrowing simultaneously from the past (when fossil fuels
were formed) and the future (when our grandchildren will have to clean up our mess, pay our debt,
and do without the resources we squander), we are effectively engaging in population
overshoot
.
2
Every population ecologist knows that when a species temporarily overshoots its environment's
long-term carrying capacity, a die-off will follow.
And so, as the world economy stops growing and starts contracting in the coming years, the res-
ults will likely include a global increase in human mortality.
3
Resilience theorists would say we're entering the “release” phase of the adaptive cycle that char-
acterizes all systemic development, a phase they describe as “a rapid, chaotic period during which
capitals (natural, human, social, built, and financial) tend to be lost and novelty can succeed.”
4
This
is a notion to which we'll return repeatedly throughout this essay, and it's a useful way of concep-
tualizing an experience that, for those undergoing it, will probably feel a lot less like “release” and
more like “pure hell.” Among the possible outcomes: Government-funded safety nets become un-
affordable and are abandoned. Public infrastructure decays. Economic systems, transport systems,
political systems, health care systems, and food systems become inoperable to varying degrees and
in a variety of ways. Global military hegemony becomes more difficult to maintain for a range of
reasons (including political dysfunction and economic decline at the imperial core, scarcity of trans-
port fuel, and the proliferation of cheap but highly destabilizing new weapons) and international
conflict becomes more likely. Any of those outcomes increases our individual vulnerability. Every-
one on the raft is imperiled, especially those who are poor, old, sick, or disabled.
We could redesign our economic, political, transport, health care, and food systems to be less
brittle. But suggestions along those lines have been on the table for years and have been largely
rejected because they don't serve the interests of powerful groups that benefit from the status quo.
Meanwhile the American populace seems incapable of raising an alarm or responding to one, con-
sisting as it does of a large underclass that is overfed but undernourished, overentertained but mis-
informed, overindebted and underskilled; and a much smaller overclass that lives primarily by fin-
ancial predation and is happy to tune out any evidence of the dire impacts of its activities.
A thoroughly unsentimental reader of the portents might regard an increase in the human death
rate as an inevitable and potentially beneficial culling of the species. The unfit will be pruned away,
the fit will survive, and humanity will be the better for it. Eventually. In theory.
Or maybe the rich and ruthless will survive and everyone else will either perish or submit to
slavery.
The greatest danger is that, if social support systems utterly fail, “overshoot” could turn to “un-
dershoot”: that is, population levels could overcorrect to the point that there are fewer survivors
than there
could have been
if adaptation had been undertaken proactively—perhaps far fewer than
