Human sustainability as seen by a by a fisheries scientist (xpost from E/E)
Dr. Charles Fowler is a recently retired American scientist who worked for NOAA at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. He has a strong interest in human sustainability, and has published a number of papers looking at the human presence on the planet from an ecological and biodiversity point of view.
In 2008 he wrote a paper entitled “Maximizing biodiversity, information and sustainability.” In it he looks for quantitative answers to the question “How much would human numbers and activity need to be reduced in order to maximize the biodiversity of the planetary system?” He did it by looking at 96 other mammalian species of similar body weights to humans, and analyzing their ranges of population, consumption, and CO2 emission levels. He then compared the numbers for humans to the statistical range of results in each category.
His numbers are truly shocking, even for a hardcore sustainability realist like me. According to Dr. Fowler’s calculations, in order to maximize the biodiversity of the planet we would need to reduce human population to about 1/700, overall energy use to 1/6000, CO2 emissions to about 1/8000, consumption of the planet’s primary production to 1/13,000, and our water consumption to 1/267,000.
To put it another way, a sustainable humanity that maximizes the biodiversity of the planet would consist of 10 million people, each of whom use 12% of today’s average energy, produce 8% of the CO2, use 5% of the planet’s productivity and consume just 0.3% of the fresh water.
Basically we’re looking at a sustainable planetary population of about 10 million, each with a standard of living of less than 10% what the “world average” person enjoys today.
Of course, the intention with this analysis was to maximize biodiversity. If we decided to take that goal off the table, we would be able to do a little better for ourselves.
This is about half the lower-bound number I arrived at in my recent article on Thermodynamic Footprints and Sustainability, of 20 million people all living a strict hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
I wonder where we will go from here, in terms of numbers and consumption rates. It’s an axiom of the natural world that unsustainable situations cannot be maintained. We will eventually, somehow revert back to a situation much closer to true sustainability. However, because the gap between where we are and where we need to be is so enormous, it’s essentially impossible for us to manage ourselves out of our predicament within the next century. That means an involuntary correction is inevitable, with all the hardship that implies.
How should we as individuals, communities, nations and a species prepare for it? Can we realistically prepare for a change this dramatic, even if it were to happen over a century?
