#anne ehrlich

[theecoreport]

A Rewilding Manifesto

A Rewilding Manifesto: Compassion, Biophilia, and Hope; Reconnecting With Other Animals And Nature

Originally Published on Psychology Today

“Nature is still our mother, but she’s grown older and less independent. We’ve grown more self-reliant, and as a result we’re beginning to redefine our relationship to her. We still need and cling to her …” – Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped By…

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[underpaidgenius]

The fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth, is obvious but too much neglected or denied. There are great social and psychological barriers in growthmanic cultures to even considering it. This is especially true because of the ‘endarkenment’—a rapidly growing movement towards religious orthodoxies that reject enlightenment values such as freedom of thought, democracy, separation of church and state, and basing beliefs and actions on empirical evidence. They are manifest in dangerous trends such as climate denial, failure to act on the loss of biodiversity and opposition to condoms (for AIDS control) as well as other forms of contraception. If ever there was a time for evidence-based (as opposed to faith-based) risk reduction strategies, it is now.

Paul Ehrlich and Anne Erlich, Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

'Growthmanic' culture and the 'Endarkenment'.

[underpaidgenius]

Today, for the first time, humanity's global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’, facing what the UK's Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources, including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas; and resource wars. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’, and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity. The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption. How far the human population size now is above the planet's long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis. It shows that to support today's population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization's life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses, in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. Of course, the claim is often made that humanity will expand Earth's carrying capacity dramatically with technological innovation, but it is widely recognized that technologies can both add and subtract from carrying capacity. The plough evidently first expanded it and now appears to be reducing it. Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use.

Paul Ehrlich and Anne Erlich, Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?

[nutopiancitizen]

Perpetual growth as imagined by some economists is biophysically impossible. Simple mathematics shows that a 'long' history of exponential growth (which is actually only about 250 years of industrialising societies) does not imply that a long future of such growth is possible. Many economic works today, for example, Spence seem to share the implicit belief that the physical economy can expand indefinitely. But, as distinguished economist Kenneth Boulding said in 1966, 'Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist'.

from Solving the Human Predicament by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich