The Stolen Future - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 77

This thought experiment suggests that our energy-dependent large
populations require so much energy we cannot supply them without a
huge imprint on the planet of some kind. We now borrow from the pre-
vious history of life by burning fossilized creatures—in the form of oil,
coal, or gas. We mine uranium, refine it, and use its radiative energy in
nuclear power stations, but that process leaves behind nuclear waste,
whose half-life is on the scale of thousands of years. It seems we must
either colonize the planet's past or its future. If we wish to avoid these
options, we could set up millions of energy farms on land and sea to
extract the energy of sun, wind, and wave, of grasslands and forests. But
doing so will inevitably intrude into all those ecosystems in ways we do
not yet fully understand. How much of the deserts of the Southwest do
we wish to cover in solar panels if we respect the ecosystems there? What
happens to the Earth's dynamic flows if we harvest a good share of the
movement of wind and tide for our benefit? In effect, we would end up
colonizing the Earth's present in a style that would be novel even for us.
One innovation might be an exception to this patern: we could try
to capture and store carbon dioxide underground. In that case, we would
appropriate relatively hidden and unused parts of the Earth, though we'd
have to make sure that the stored gas would not escape someday far into
the future and do its damage then. Outside this single instance, it seems
that our sheer numbers make it necessary to colonize the Earth, and time
itself, for our own benefit.
The simple fact is that if we look at the present situation from a non-
anthropocentric viewpoint, there are too many of us. If we wished to
avoid sucking up the resources of the planet on this scale, we would have
to reduce our population by a serious fraction—perhaps to preindustrial
levels. The single greatest legacy of the era of unlimited growth is very close
to home: it is us . No doubt the rate of population increase in industrial-
ized nations has greatly declined over the past few decades. But that fact
does not cancel out the reality that the process of modernization since
the mid-eighteenth century has made possible a staggering increase
in human lives. We have by now far surpassed what William R. Caton,
Jr., described several generations ago as the planet's “carrying capacity,”
the number of people that the Earth's ecosystems could credibly sup-
port. 96 The fact that modern agriculture can feed the billions only by