Apocalypse has been given a bad name. The Seventh Day Adventists are still around. The Nike sneaker cult failed to open Heaven's Gate. The new millennium brought us George W. Bush, not Jesus H. Christ. And everybody's terrified of "drinking the Kool-Aid."
But our species is living beyond its means. If we continue down this path, the planet, our food supplies, our climate, and life as we know it will collapse. If we bring population growth, consumption, and pollution under control, the damage already set in motion will play out for centuries, but complete catastrophe will likely be averted.
Meanwhile, we can barely get half of us in the United States to "believe" that global warming is happening. Of course, we step outside and there's a sauna, but that could just be "natural." So what if the ocean is a few inches higher? The people who've been predicting that for decades have been wrong until now, and now they're only a little right -- if you even believe them. The ocean looks about the same to me. And if they predict exponential acceleration of such changes, meaning that once the changes have become visible it won't be long before they're enormous, well that just proves one thing: they've drunk the Kool-Aid. They're pessimists.
In 1972 a group of scientists published a book called Limits to Growth. It passionately urged the changes needed before human growth and destruction exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. In 1992, the same authors published Beyond the Limits. There were by then, they found, too many humans doing too much damage. We were beyond sustainable limits and would need to change quickly. In 2004, they published an update, arguing that we were already 20 percent above global carrying capacity, and that we had "largely squandered the past 30 years." Their warnings grew sharper: "We do not have another 30 years to dither."
The updated book charts the course we've been on these past 30, now 40, years. Population has exploded in less industrialized countries. Many millions of poor people have been added to our species, while a shrinking percentage of the world's population has continued to hoard most of the wealth. The planet has become less equitable through the repeated act of giving birth. Then it has become less equitable still through economic growth that has been made to benefit most those least in need. Meanwhile, nations with high population growth have been least able to invest in infrastructure, being obliged to take care of their people's immediate needs. This has resulted in still greater poverty, triggering higher birth rates in families dependent on children to survive. These vicious cycles can be broken, and have been broken, but not by wishing or hoping. And time is running out.
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