1. Global Population, Growth & Sustainable Development
William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC
UBC/SCARP
Achieving Sustainability: A decent life for all
VIU ElderCollege, Nanaimo (14 October 2017)

2. The Human Nature of “Reality”
Humans ‘socially construct’ what they take to be reality— i.e., we make it up as we go along!
Religious doctrines, tribal myths, academic paradigms, political ideologies and scientific theories are all social constructs.
Social constructs are powerful. People ‘act out’ of their constructed beliefs as if they were true (consider suicide bombers).
Not all social constructs are valid—some are ‘truer’ than others (consider climate science vs. climate change denial).
The scientific method is the only formal way of constructing reality that explicitly tests its beliefs and assumptions (hypotheses) against the real world.
Many belief- and faith-based social constructs are little more than potentially dangerous shared illusions.

3. Let’s start with a two-part increasingly global shared illusion
Economic: Technology and increased efficiency (‘factor productivity’) are enabling the human enterprise to ‘decouple’ from nature.
Political: There is no conflict between the growth of the human economy and protection of ‘the environment.
Major implication? Material economic growth can continue indefinitely.

4. Cast from this mold: The UN SDGs
On 19 July 2014, the UN’s Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals suggested 17 SDGs with 169 targets covering a broad range of issues (Adopted Sept 2015):
11: Sustainable Human Settlements
12: Responsible Production and Consumption
13: Urgent Climate Action
14: Use Marine Ecosystems Sustainably
15: Use Terrestrial Ecosystems Sustainably
16: Promote Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
17: Revitalize the Partnership for Sustainable Development
1: No Poverty
2: Zero Hunger
3: Good Health and Well-being
4: Quality Education
5: Gender Equality
6: Clean Water and Sanitation
7: Affordable and Clean Energy
8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
9: Resilient Industry, Infrastructure and Innovation
10: Reduce Inequality

5. Jeffrey Sachs in The Age of Sustainable Development (2015)
“The first major economic lesson of recent history is that the first pillar of sustainable development— prosperity achieved through economic growth—is achievable on a large scale, and is indeed being achieved across large parts of the planet” (pp ).
The big but:
“We must ensure that economic growth... does not undermine Earth’s life-support systems... Unless we combine economic growth with economic inclusion and environmental sustainability, the economic gains are likely to be short-lived as they will be followed by social instability and a rising frequency of environmental catastrophes” (p. 27).

6. The Fly in the Sustainable Development Ointment
The growth of the human enterprise has already undermined many of Earth’s life-support systems and this reality can only worsen for the foreseeable future: we expect two billion more people by 2050.
While progress is being made in alleviating extreme poverty, there are more impoverished people* on Earth today—about 3.5 billion—than the entire human population in 1967, just 50 years ago
Then there’s inequality—just the eight richest billionaires control the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity and the rich-poor income gap is widening.
* Poverty = living on less than $3.50/day

7. Unsustainability: Root cause #1 H
Unsustainability: Root cause #1 H. sapiens is potentially unsustainable by nature (genetic drivers)
Unless or until constrained by ‘negative feedback’, H. sapiens, like all other species, will:
expand to fill all accessible habitat
use all available resources (and in the case of humans “availability” is constantly being redefined by technology) (Rees 2006).

8. A Fisheries Example: Canada’s Shame (We watched it happening for several decades!)

9. We come by it honestly: “Tool-wielding monkeys push local shellfish to edge of extinction” New Scientist 19 Sept 2017

10. The increasingly global myth of progress and continuous growth:
Unsustainability: Root cause #2 H. sapiens is unsustainable by nurture (socially-constructed cultural drivers)
The increasingly global myth of progress and continuous growth:
“We have in our hands now… the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years…” (J. Simon 1995).
The emergence of a socially-constructed new ‘age of unreason’:
E.g., politics increasingly influenced by neoliberal ideology, religious fundamentalism, climate-change denial, anti-intellectualism and other forms of ‘magical thinking’ (think ‘Donald Trump’).

11. Aggregate result: The anomalous, unsustainable oil-based expansion of the human enterprise
Oct 2017 population:
~ 7.6 billion
A four-fold expansion (from 1.5 to 6.0 billion) in the 20th century alone.
The heavy use of fossil fuel beginning in the 19th Century and the expansion of markets allowed the explosive growth of the human enterprise.
Continuous growth—population and economic—is an anomaly. The growth spurt that recent generations take to be normal is the single most abnormal period of human history.

12. Our bloated and expanding ecological footprint
A population’s ‘ecological footprint’ is the area of land/water ecosystems required, on a continuous basis, to produce the resources the population consumes, and to assimilate its carbon wastes, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water may be located.
Everyone on Earth is competing with everyone else, and other species, for the world’s limited (and shrinking) bio-capacity!

13. Humanity is already in dangerous overshoot
ffads
65% OVERSHOOT!
Global biocapacity : billion hectares (1.7 ha/capita)
Human eco-footprint (2012):
20.1 billion hectares (2.8 ha/capita)
Economic growth is being ‘financed’, in part by the liquidation of nature and the impairment of global life support systems (e.g., climate). We are literally consuming and dissipating the ecosphere from within.

14. Driving Climate Change: A 44% increase in CO2 over pre-industrial levels
Pre-industrial level = 280 ppm

15. It gets worse when we add other GHGs

16. You don’t need to be a climate scientist to see a temp trend
September 2017 was the hottest September ever recorded in the four decades of satellite data analyzed  by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). “…of the 20 warmest monthly global average temperatures in the satellite record, only September 2017 was not during an El Niño,”

17. We have entered the Anthropocene, a world dominated by H. sapiens
From almost nothing a few millennia ago, humans and their domestic animals have grown to comprise almost 99% of the terrestrial mammalian biomass on Earth.
Contrary to conventional political wisdom, growth of the human enterprise necessarily diminishes nature. (After all, it’s a finite planet!! )
Wild nature, all wildlife combined, is now clinging to the margins of existence.
Forget T. rex. We humans are the most viciously voracious carnivore and herbivore ever to walk the earth!

20. The next phase—as the earth shrinks, the wealthy competitively displace the poor (Remember those eight billionaires?
Jeffrey Sachs principal conditions for sustainability have both been violated. Are we condemned to increasing rates of “social instability” and “environmental catastrophe”?

21. ‘Olduvai Theory’: The short life-expectancy of fossil-fueled industrial society
Source: Richard Duncan

22. This vision resembles the ‘plague’ cycle of any species introduced to a new, resource-rich habitat
Here we see the rise and fall of reindeer Populations on the Pribilof Islands.
In this case, the depleted ‘fuel’ was lichens.

23. The Really “Inconvenient Truth”?
On a finite planet, material economic growth inevitably undermines “Earth’s life-support systems” thereby violating Jeffrey Sach’s core ecological condition for sustainability. Contrary to convention:
“Industrialized world reductions in material consumption, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means.” (BCSD 1993; ‘Getting Eco-Efficient’)
For sustainability with equity North Americans should be taking steps to reduce our ecological footprints by about 75% to our equitable Earth-share (1.7 gha) (Rees 2006).
Contrast this with the SDG goals of sustained material economic growth and projections of at least an 80% increase in GWP/capita for by 9-10 billion people by 2050!

24. The Bad News The Good News
Yet we do not act. Privileged elites with the greatest stake in the status quo control the policy levers. Ordinary people hold to the expansionist or rapture myths, so society remains in eco-paralysis.
We have the technology today to enable a 75%- 80% reduction in energy and (some) material consumption while actually improving quality of life.
“The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible but the politically possible may be ecologically irrelevant.”

25. How to account for deep denial?
During individual development, sensory experiences and cultural norms (constructed ‘realities’) literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences.
Subsequently, individuals seek out compatible people and experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information” (Wexler, 2006).

26. It gets worse: The extreme right has socially engineered the citizenry to ignore biophysical reality

27. Pssst! Welcome to the 21st Century ‘Endarkenment’!
This is the ‘post-truth’ era: A new ‘age of unreason’, science denial and magical thinking
Pssst! Welcome to the 21st Century ‘Endarkenment’!

28. But business-as-usual puts us on course for collapse
Source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

29. It wouldn’t be the first time!
“...what is perhaps most intriguing in the evolution of human societies is the regularity with which the pattern of increasing complexity is interrupted by collapse…” (Joseph Tainter 1995).