Save the World to Save Ourselves

 by Brian T. Lynch

If you are over 50 years old, the population of the Earth has more than doubled since you were born. In the year 1800, before the industrial revolution took hold, there were one billion people on earth. There will soon be 8 billion. For perspective, there have been about 40,000 generations since the dawn of civilization. It has taken us just nine generations to go from one to eight billion inhabitants. Our primitive brain cannot grasp such a geometric explosion, but the numbers tell a story.

Our success as a species is on pace to be our downfall. Our exploitive and wasteful use of natural resources now has impacts on a planetary scale due to our population level. Our collective behaviors threaten the survival of our species and many other life forms on Earth. The destruction is well underway, and some irreparable harm to the biosphere is baked into the future.

There are nine scientifically identified boundaries within which life thrives on Earth. We have already breached six of them. One of these boundaries is the degree of biodiversity between and within living species. This is an essential buffer against naturally occurring environmental changes. It is estimated that the normal background rate of global extinctions, excluding mass extinction events, is between five and twenty species a year. Within the last two centuries, the current extinction rates have accelerated at least 100 times that rate, and we are solely responsible for this change.

Another broken boundary is the balance between the thermal energy we receive from the Sun vs. the amount the Earth loses in space. The ever-higher levels of carbon dioxide we release by burning fossil fuel is warming our oceans and atmosphere. The proliferation of phosphorus and nitrogen in our ecosystems from fertilizers and other sources is a boundary we have crossed. These chemicals are wreaking havoc on terrestrial aquatic and marine environments. The accumulation of hazardous man-made chemicals in the biosphere, such as PFAS and DDT, is another boundary breached. Land use and the loss of forest lands is another example of a broken barrier, and all these boundaries have been crossed because of the unprecedented scale of human population in the last 100 years.

The damage we have done to our sacred planet is great, but not as great as the damage we can yet prevent. We will save most living things and ourselves if we atone for our sins against nature, make righteous choices from here on out, and take timely actions. We have the power and the duty to save our world. What we don’t yet have is visionary leadership, a knowledgeable public, or the consensual urgency to act. The obstacles to global salvation are formidable. Our social, cultural, religious, and economic frameworks stand as bulwarks against the fundamental changes required. Our social institutions are homocentric and as self-serving as the public at large. This has to change. We must all become advocates for change.

Here is an article about the nine boundaries (but there may be a paywall):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-have-crossed-6-of-9-planetary-boundaries/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=week-in-science&utm_content=link&utm_term=2023-09-15_featured-this-week&fbclid=IwAR0W4PQzrP96bYHUqJZajz2Qd3Lr-Baxr6sYieyJbeeo9TyNHoGTrbTj6ho