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A friend was chatting with me about the topic of sustainability. She asked me whether scientists have come up with a number for a sustainable human population. I've looked into this before, and I've criticized the most mainstream calculations of the "carrying capacity" of the planet for being poorly constructed and much too generous.
I told her that this number depends on what "sustainable" standard of living you want that number of people to have, and for discussion purposes I threw out the number one billion humans, down from our current eight billion. But I think the problem is much worse than this initial answer suggests. I've never thought it all the way through before. My first approximation, which I called Green Communism earlier this year, assumed that a sustainable economy would be much like today's economy except without the use of fossil fuels.
Having sat with my first approximation for a few months now, I think this first approximation of mine was also much too generous. Even though my adoption of Green Communism 1.0 would require me to cut my own standard of living by about 90%, something I currently plan to accomplish over the next thirty years or so. A personal goal far more painful than that envisioned by the Green New Deal -- which magically assumes we can achieve a sustainable economy while simultaneously providing even more stuff to the median US family.
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A truly sustainable human population, in my new and more rigorous view, would engage in no resource extraction (i.e., mining, drilling, fracking), and no agriculture (i.e., farming, husbandry). This neo-gatherer society would comfortably sustain a global human population of about 4 million people distributed around the planet. That's a reduction of about 1,999/2,000 (99.95%) from today's 8 billion people.
The per-capita living standard of these 4 million people would nevertheless be only 1% of current US per-capita GDP.
So overall global GDP would fall by 39,999/40,000 (99.9975%) from today's $80 trillion.
This is the point at which the human population would return to a negligible number with negligible impact on the global environment.
-----
Getting from here to there ... practically impossible? How would I commit to getting there myself? Even if I gave myself a thirty-year head start?
How would I live on $500 per year? Not just an income of $500, but total consumption of $500 per year? Pretending it were as easy as a budgetary question, when the behavioral question presents the greatest difficulty --> living as a neo-gatherer without any agricultural or industrial output. Where would I live, that I could gather all of my food, clothing, and shelter from the wilderness, bringing nothing with me that originated from agricultural or industrial output?
I imagine converting myself into a viable neo-gatherer would cost me more than my remaining lifetime consumption as a neo-gatherer (i.e., $14,000). Wouldn't I need to purchase the necessary land and then pay annual taxes on it? I'd need 20 square miles (13,000 acres) of undeveloped land to fully support my foraging lifestyle without impacting my local environment. On average, this amount of undeveloped land would cost me $18 million in the US. On average, my annual property tax on this land would be $150,000.
This assumes I could actually learn how to live off these 20 square miles of land without the use of any agricultural or industrial products to keep me going. No pocket knife, Bug. No fleece blanket. It's a long way from my current "have lunch delivered by DoorDash while spending 14 hours/day on the Internet" lifestyle. Catching wild game, gathering edible plant matter, cooking it over firewood I've gathered myself. If I want to live with other humans, then we'd need even more undeveloped land. Let's say I brought a polyamorous triad with me into this imagined future -- we'd need 60 square miles (40,000 acres) to ourselves. At least we could take turns skinning the rabbits.
-----
A lot of our current focus on "sustainability" among environmentalists looks at replacing fossil fuels (and sometimes nuclear power) with renewable energy from wind, sun, and water.
This is fine, but it ignores other limits on sustainable consumption, such as the limits on how much other useful stuff we can pull from under the ground. We have a few centuries worth of metals left under the ground -- not an immediate crisis, but not an endless supply either.
And it ignores the effects of agriculture and animal husbandry on the environment -- enclosing land and devoting it to human consumption rather than sharing that land with all the other species and foraging to survive as they do.
If humanity were to abandon its destructive rapaciousness, and live as all other species do, then there wouldn't be many of us, and we wouldn't accomplish much other than making pottery by hand and painting cave walls. We'd go back to where we were around 10,000-5,000 B.C. That's when humans were ecologically sustainable. But as a species, we decided we were going to do more than that. We became a hyperinvasive species that acts like a cancer on Gaia, wiping out her other species and cracking her open like an egg so we can consume what's inside.
-----
Green Communism 1.0 was something I thought I could accomplish within my own lifetime. My first draft of Green Communism back in August 2020 was probably biased by my desire to have a goal I could actually accomplish within my own lifetime.
But now this Green Communism 2.0 is practically a Zero Population goal, a 99.95% smaller population of Neo-Gatherers living on the $500/year worth of stuff they can each forage from the surface of Gaia.
I cannot get there on my own during my lifetime. And we can't get there together, either. We'd have to voluntarily choose cultural suicide, or global genocide. We could do it nonviolently over the next century, by creating a birth lottery and only allowing 1/1,000 of women to bear exactly one child. Then after the rest of us die our natural deaths, the four million survivors of that next century could form small, widely spaced communities around the planet, limiting their own reproduction, living off the wild land.
But what's to keep their descendants from eventually rebuilding the unsustainable agriculture and industry of their ancestors?
How do we choose this path, and then make it stick? How do we bind our ancestors from doing what we currently do?
-----
There's such a wide gap between who we are now and what true sustainability requires, that I'm not sure how the concept of sustainability can inform our lives at present. The goals of the Paris Climate Accords, which are not enforceable, and which we aren't even trying to accomplish, are so far away from true sustainability ... do we simply give up? Consume all you want or all you can because it doesn't matter anyway?
Decades ago, a British politician referred to environmentalism as "green fascism". That phrase has stuck with me, because a truly Green approach does greatly restrict human freedoms. Especially the freedom to use any of the planet's resources as though they belong to us, regardless of our personal needs or anybody else's needs. We're way beyond considering needs in the industrialized countries. I don't mean that nobody is poor, nobody is homeless, nobody is starving, nobody is sick and can't get medical care. I mean our economy and politics have evolved way beyond meeting anybody's needs. When President Trump gave Apple (the most valuable corporation in the country) a $40 billion tax cut via his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ... when the CARES Act tossed trillions of dollars at US businesses and families to weather the COVID-19 shutdowns regardless of whether they needed it or not ...
We don't even focus on the needs of our fellow citizens in our nominal "democracy". I don't know how we'd focus on the needs of the entire planetary ecosystem, when that planetary ecosystem needs nearly all of us to disappear, and the survivors to give up nearly everything they have for the rest of our species' existence.
-----
It took me a while to work through all the implications of my Green Communism 1.0, back in the summer.
So, I'll need some time to work through the implications of Green Communism 2.0, AKA Zero Population. How do I live, how do I bear witness, for what do I advocate. For starters, humans cannot qualify as "intrinsically good". As in the computer RPG Tyranny, your only choice is which kind of evil path to follow.
I told her that this number depends on what "sustainable" standard of living you want that number of people to have, and for discussion purposes I threw out the number one billion humans, down from our current eight billion. But I think the problem is much worse than this initial answer suggests. I've never thought it all the way through before. My first approximation, which I called Green Communism earlier this year, assumed that a sustainable economy would be much like today's economy except without the use of fossil fuels.
Having sat with my first approximation for a few months now, I think this first approximation of mine was also much too generous. Even though my adoption of Green Communism 1.0 would require me to cut my own standard of living by about 90%, something I currently plan to accomplish over the next thirty years or so. A personal goal far more painful than that envisioned by the Green New Deal -- which magically assumes we can achieve a sustainable economy while simultaneously providing even more stuff to the median US family.
-----
A truly sustainable human population, in my new and more rigorous view, would engage in no resource extraction (i.e., mining, drilling, fracking), and no agriculture (i.e., farming, husbandry). This neo-gatherer society would comfortably sustain a global human population of about 4 million people distributed around the planet. That's a reduction of about 1,999/2,000 (99.95%) from today's 8 billion people.
The per-capita living standard of these 4 million people would nevertheless be only 1% of current US per-capita GDP.
So overall global GDP would fall by 39,999/40,000 (99.9975%) from today's $80 trillion.
This is the point at which the human population would return to a negligible number with negligible impact on the global environment.
-----
Getting from here to there ... practically impossible? How would I commit to getting there myself? Even if I gave myself a thirty-year head start?
How would I live on $500 per year? Not just an income of $500, but total consumption of $500 per year? Pretending it were as easy as a budgetary question, when the behavioral question presents the greatest difficulty --> living as a neo-gatherer without any agricultural or industrial output. Where would I live, that I could gather all of my food, clothing, and shelter from the wilderness, bringing nothing with me that originated from agricultural or industrial output?
I imagine converting myself into a viable neo-gatherer would cost me more than my remaining lifetime consumption as a neo-gatherer (i.e., $14,000). Wouldn't I need to purchase the necessary land and then pay annual taxes on it? I'd need 20 square miles (13,000 acres) of undeveloped land to fully support my foraging lifestyle without impacting my local environment. On average, this amount of undeveloped land would cost me $18 million in the US. On average, my annual property tax on this land would be $150,000.
This assumes I could actually learn how to live off these 20 square miles of land without the use of any agricultural or industrial products to keep me going. No pocket knife, Bug. No fleece blanket. It's a long way from my current "have lunch delivered by DoorDash while spending 14 hours/day on the Internet" lifestyle. Catching wild game, gathering edible plant matter, cooking it over firewood I've gathered myself. If I want to live with other humans, then we'd need even more undeveloped land. Let's say I brought a polyamorous triad with me into this imagined future -- we'd need 60 square miles (40,000 acres) to ourselves. At least we could take turns skinning the rabbits.
-----
A lot of our current focus on "sustainability" among environmentalists looks at replacing fossil fuels (and sometimes nuclear power) with renewable energy from wind, sun, and water.
This is fine, but it ignores other limits on sustainable consumption, such as the limits on how much other useful stuff we can pull from under the ground. We have a few centuries worth of metals left under the ground -- not an immediate crisis, but not an endless supply either.
And it ignores the effects of agriculture and animal husbandry on the environment -- enclosing land and devoting it to human consumption rather than sharing that land with all the other species and foraging to survive as they do.
If humanity were to abandon its destructive rapaciousness, and live as all other species do, then there wouldn't be many of us, and we wouldn't accomplish much other than making pottery by hand and painting cave walls. We'd go back to where we were around 10,000-5,000 B.C. That's when humans were ecologically sustainable. But as a species, we decided we were going to do more than that. We became a hyperinvasive species that acts like a cancer on Gaia, wiping out her other species and cracking her open like an egg so we can consume what's inside.
-----
Green Communism 1.0 was something I thought I could accomplish within my own lifetime. My first draft of Green Communism back in August 2020 was probably biased by my desire to have a goal I could actually accomplish within my own lifetime.
But now this Green Communism 2.0 is practically a Zero Population goal, a 99.95% smaller population of Neo-Gatherers living on the $500/year worth of stuff they can each forage from the surface of Gaia.
I cannot get there on my own during my lifetime. And we can't get there together, either. We'd have to voluntarily choose cultural suicide, or global genocide. We could do it nonviolently over the next century, by creating a birth lottery and only allowing 1/1,000 of women to bear exactly one child. Then after the rest of us die our natural deaths, the four million survivors of that next century could form small, widely spaced communities around the planet, limiting their own reproduction, living off the wild land.
But what's to keep their descendants from eventually rebuilding the unsustainable agriculture and industry of their ancestors?
How do we choose this path, and then make it stick? How do we bind our ancestors from doing what we currently do?
-----
There's such a wide gap between who we are now and what true sustainability requires, that I'm not sure how the concept of sustainability can inform our lives at present. The goals of the Paris Climate Accords, which are not enforceable, and which we aren't even trying to accomplish, are so far away from true sustainability ... do we simply give up? Consume all you want or all you can because it doesn't matter anyway?
Decades ago, a British politician referred to environmentalism as "green fascism". That phrase has stuck with me, because a truly Green approach does greatly restrict human freedoms. Especially the freedom to use any of the planet's resources as though they belong to us, regardless of our personal needs or anybody else's needs. We're way beyond considering needs in the industrialized countries. I don't mean that nobody is poor, nobody is homeless, nobody is starving, nobody is sick and can't get medical care. I mean our economy and politics have evolved way beyond meeting anybody's needs. When President Trump gave Apple (the most valuable corporation in the country) a $40 billion tax cut via his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ... when the CARES Act tossed trillions of dollars at US businesses and families to weather the COVID-19 shutdowns regardless of whether they needed it or not ...
We don't even focus on the needs of our fellow citizens in our nominal "democracy". I don't know how we'd focus on the needs of the entire planetary ecosystem, when that planetary ecosystem needs nearly all of us to disappear, and the survivors to give up nearly everything they have for the rest of our species' existence.
-----
It took me a while to work through all the implications of my Green Communism 1.0, back in the summer.
So, I'll need some time to work through the implications of Green Communism 2.0, AKA Zero Population. How do I live, how do I bear witness, for what do I advocate. For starters, humans cannot qualify as "intrinsically good". As in the computer RPG Tyranny, your only choice is which kind of evil path to follow.
