The State of the Planet

Image by Robert Jones.

What is the state of our planet? We can look to a study conducted at McGill University which summarized our current situation as a so-called environmentalist's paradox. In short, over the last forty years, our standard of living has increased rapidly while the health of the planet has decreased rapidly - and the decline in the planet's health is leading to a decline in human health.

In the paper, the authors suggest the following:

• The way we measure human well-being is flawed; our standard of living is actually declining
• Being able to produce food, which we've enhanced through technology, outweighs the effects from declines in other ecosystem services
• Technology makes us less dependent on ecosystems
• There is a delay between ecosystem decline and a decline in our well-being - it will get worse

Let's look at four global trends as we keep these four points in mind:

1. Population Growth: Human population growth over the last two centuries has been staggering. The world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to about 7.8 billion today. We've grown by 2 billion over the last 25 years. Although the rate of growth is slowing, we should expect between 9 and 10 billion of us by 2050. Most of the increase will be in developing countries. All of these people will need energy, food, clothes, housing, and employment and/or income. In other words: everyone, now, and those who follow, will need resources from the earth to survive and will have an impact on the health of the planet - and thus will impact the health of themselves and other people. Our individual lifestyle choices and consumption patterns will matter.
2. Ecosystems: Ecosystems support our lives and economies. They provide us with a wide range of goods and services to do this. They provide us with food, water, materials for shelter, and energy. They also break down waste, regulate the climate, and manage pests. They are crucial, but we haven't fully appreciated their importance and have therefore not managed them as well as we could. We are depleting groundwater resources, ruining agricultural soils, overfishing the oceans, and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at alarming rates. Which leads me to the next concerning global trend...
3. Climate Change: Our global economy depends on fossil fuels. Without coal, oil, and gas, the world - and our lives - would be much different. Whenever we extract, refine, and/or use these fossil fuels, we release greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, etc.) and other harmful pollutants into the atmosphere. We release about 80 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per day. Carbon dioxide levels have increased from a pre-industrial level of between 180 ppm and 280 ppm to over 400 ppm today ("ppm" means parts per million). Carbon dioxide is a natural part of the atmosphere and is necessary for life. However too much of it is a bad thing. It produces a strong greenhouse effect which traps heat from the sun and warms the earth. Warming the earth too much is a bad thing. More on this topic in a separate post. In my opinion, the relatively stable climate pattern that began about 10,000 years ago is the main reason we have such a successful global civilization today. We don't want to destabilize it.
4. Biodiversity Loss: Biodiversity is the variability among terrestrial and aquatic living organisms. This includes variety within species (intraspecies), between species (interspecies), and within ecosystems. Our rapidly growing population and our increasing appetite for natural resources is proving detrimental to biodiversity as we degrade habitats, pollute, and kill species in search of food, water, energy, land, and other resources for our economies and lives. This isn't good because having a variety of plants and animals improves our ability to produce food and helps to stabilize natural systems that we rely on. The services these systems provide make life possible. See #2.