Sustainability - Living sustainably means balancing our consumption, our technology choices, and our population numbers in order to live within our means, that is, within the limited resources of the planet. And yes, we can still enjoy chocolate! It means maintaining a stable and healthy environment for both humanity and biodiversity. A sustainable earth means that meeting the needs of society is balanced with maintaining the life support systems of the planet. Let's help keep a living earth enjoyable for all!
Population [S-1]
The size of the earth is fixed. It is not growing. Conversely, the population of humankind is growing rapidly, coupled with human desire for wealth. Voila! - we have the basis of economics - the study of human behaviour in the endeavour to fulfill needs and wants. Human exploitation of earth’s resources, coupled with an exponentially growing population, leads to scarcity. Scarcity, in economics, refers to the competition for limited and/or scarce resources provoked by our subjectively unlimited wants and needs. [S-2]
The daunting population scenario is simply that too many people are consuming too many resources with little regard to waste, pollution, ecological sustainability and potentially irreparable damage to the planet.
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Over-population + over-consumption = excess resource depletion + ecological trauma
Will we find enough suitably sustainable alternatives?
Most creatures on Earth do not change their living habits in any significant way from one generation to another. Humankind is the exception. Humans have an inventiveness that shines above all other creatures to create speech, civilization, rapid cultural change, and the imaginative use of resources and technologies. Although early humans appeared on Earth about 2 million years ago, human history is only about 0.0434% of Earth’s history and, only during the last 200 years of that have excessive human destructive impacts have been such that we must now consider living green, not just an option, but an urgent necessity. Ironically, it is human inventiveness and creativity that led to many technological and scientific advancements, such as in medicine, that enabled increases in human longevity and less destructive impacts of disease. Those traits, if well utilized, can bring us back to human life sustainability.
Excessive Wants -> Waste -> Wonky World
Significant population increase over that last 200 years along with our wastefulness of the Earth’s limited resources, primarily fossil fuel, are the key driving forces for living green. Interestingly, empirical evidence has shown that as a creature of nature, man tends to enjoy life more while spiritually attuned to nature and Earth’s resources – conserving rather than destroying. More affiliation with nature, hypothesized under what is called biophilia may be a strong impetus for conservation and help to lessen the negative impacts of over-population.
Prochlorococcus
On the one hand, we are concerned about the planetary harm due to over-population of humans on earth. On the other hand, we should really be aware of the population of one of the most prolific yet little known microorganisms which basically feeds life on earth. There are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, yet we didn't know they existed until 38 years ago.
We should appreciate that its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve. Thanks Prochlorococcus! That’s what these abundant microorganisms are named.
Before we get into the short timeline by which human population has gone from just a few millions to billions, let’s get some perspective and go way back some 4 billion years ago when there was no life on the planet, and there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Photosythesis changed that about two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. And they used the chemical energy produced to pull carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things from which life is made.
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Over time, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, until there was enough in the atmosphere, about 500 million years ago, that larger organisms could evolve. The number of life-forms mushroomed and, ultimately, with our sophisticated traits, we humans (homo sapiens) appeared on the scene, something over 300,000 years ago as . As some of those ancient photosynthesizers died, they were compressed, buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. Essentially, they are buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. [S-3]
Next: go to Earth's Population page on this site.
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Footnotes
[S-2]. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/586/markets/scarcity-in-economics/
[S-3]. Sallie W. (Penny) Chisholm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered Prochlorococus in 1986
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