Today’s reason we are an endangered species is: numbers.
Yeah, maths. The thing I sucked at as a kid, but have grown to like it as a common denominator for measuring human stupidity. Like, on a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to ignore me regurgitating numbers about the odds of your survival on a planet without necessary resources? I’d bet it’s closer to ten because it’s so far away, but guess what: at the current rate, we’d need 3 Earths to sustain the population by 2050. That’s 25 years from now, or the oldest girlfriend Leonardo di Caprio ever had and no, drifting away into the ocean and freezing to death won’t be an option, because, of global warming.
It took 200,000 years to reach the first billion in human population in the early 1800s. Then it took just 200 years to reach 8 billion. Half of all fossil energy and many other essential resources have been consumed in just the past 30-35 years. Energy is vital to grow other resources and the economy. While the population grew by a factor of 7, energy consumption grew by 25 and real GDP by 100%. People think this is normal, but it’s actually an anomaly if you look at the past 200,000 years of human history. And while we keep chasing growth, as if our livelihood depended on it, we are killing ourselves – literally. It’s a false assumption that our livelihood depends on growth. The measure of success is actually the opposite: it’s reducing the use of resources, because guess what: while the human population has surpassed 8 billion, Earth hasn’t grown. Not only are we using up the resources, we’re contracting its abundance – it’s a decrease in natural capital and over-filling natural waste sinks. We can’t maintain even the current population at the present material waste. As we near 10 billion, we’ll accelerate the depletion of essential resources. This is the boom-bust cycle of any species. If you introduce a species to a new habitat with no natural predators, the population will expand until it depletes natural resources, then we get to negative feedback: overcrowding, diseases, competition, and conflict, so the population crashes to a level at or below theoretical capacity, in other words: it goes locally extinct. European death rate is projected to climb 50% by the end of the century, but just like Pavlov’s dogs, we, humans can’t be trained to care about rewards if they aren’t imminent. So who cares if your grandchildren will suffocate, let’s drill baby, drill!
Now, I can’t put a price on my survival or yours, but I know the tech broligarchs who cheered on as Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord can. Their net worth topped one trillion dollars, so you and I can keep sucking on the paper straws – we are not the ones destroying the world en mass. And that, guys and dolls is today’s reason we are an endangered species.
