17 May 1999 Copyright, 1999, Max K. Goff, all rights reserved
These next few months will be quite intense from a travel perspective; more travel frequency than ever, it seems. I've been home just two days and tomorrow I leave again. I'll have another brief weekend at home, and the following week, a three week European sojourn. And the week after that, JavaOne, I think. It's getting be a little blurry eyed, I must say. I literally do wake up not knowing what city I'm in. The only constant is the box of messages a bring along with me. And I speak. Each place I go, I speak. That is a constant.
A few weeks ago I ordered several books from the World watch Institute. I'll add some of the titles to my reading list once I finish them, to be sure, provided I find something in a particular title of merit to share with others. The first of the books which I finished on this last trip, Beyond Malthus, discusses 19 dimensions of human population growth over the next 50 years and the impact that projected growth will have on limited global resources and services. And while it is not in my nature to become terribly vocal when it comes to dire predictions, I must say, many of the statistics cited by the authors left me thinking that things could get very bad. Very bad indeed.
I remember reading once several months ago that we had passed the point of sustainability on the Earth many years ago -- very likely before I was born. And if we were to have any hope of sustaining the current human population on the planet, we'd need two more Earths with equivalent resources. This sounds interesting, but seems to fly in the face of common sense. Why then, do we continue to live from day to day, year to year? Why do we still have air to breathe, food to eat, energy, clothing, commerce, etc.? Why does the Earth's human population continue to grow if we'd passed that point so long ago? I finally found the answer to those questions.
It's not simply a question of population. The other variable in the equation is consumption. According to the authors of Beyond Malthus, the Earth can sustain up to 10 billion human beings -- but at what level of consumption? If every citizen of the planet were to consume at the rate of the average American, no more than 2.2 billion people could live here without severe depletion of natural resources. That is what was meant by passing the point of sustainability so long ago. There were probably around 2.5 billion Earthlings when I was born, so indeed, we had passed that point back then. But if everyone on the planet were to consume at the rate of the average citizen of the nation of India, we could support as many as 10 billion. Americans, it seems, consume considerably more than their Indian counterparts. Over 4.5 times as much.
That's not to say that Americans on the average eat 4.5 times the calories as Indians. As a matter of fact, I'm quite sure that Americans do consume more calories each day, on the average, than do Indians. But certainly not 4.5 times more. Probably more like 25% more, or maybe even 50% more. But not 450% more. The calories we do consume, however, are much more expensive from the Earth's perspective. American calories are less ecologically efficient than are Indian calories.
If you consider that grain is the staple of the human population -- cooked grain, rice, bread -- and assign a value of 1 to grain, the amount of grain it takes to produce the same volume of say beef is about 9. Nine times the grain for every double cheeseburger. Chicken is a little less expensive than beef. Chicken McNuggets are maybe only 6 times the grain. But still, significantly more expensive from a consumption standpoint.
And it's not simply a matter of how much Americans eat versus the diet of the average Indian. Americans also burn a lot more fuel per person, use a lot more electricity per person, consume a lot more fresh water per person (via agriculture), and put a whole lot more carbon into the atmosphere per person than any other nation on the planet.
So it's not a question of population by itself, but rather population and level of consumption. And we Americans are quite adept when it comes to consumption.But wait. Didn't we win the Cold War? Didn't capitalism, as practiced by the U.S.A., win the day, the imagination of the rest of the world, the soul of human endeavor? Isn't the American economy the model for the rest of the planet? How can we champion an economic system that by definition cannot be attained by all other nations due to hard and real natural resource constraints? There is something wrong with this picture.
I'm not going to suggest that capitalism is wrong or even doomed. Quite the contrary. I do think that people act best when they act in their own self-interest. I believe in the invisible hand that governs markets (and other processes) and I strongly believe in freedom of thought and action. The notion of private property has always seemed a little odd to me, but I accept that as part of the equation as well. But I also believe that an economic system based on the assumption that there must be growth in consumption in order to be viable, an assumption which is fundamental to current capitalist models, is fundamentally broken when viewed from the perspective of limited natural resources and the unfettered growth of human populations. We simply cannot cookie cutter the U.S. economy around the world. It won't scale. Not based on current assumptions.
So what then? Are we doomed? Is that it? I may be naive, but I'm still optimistic when it comes to the future of humanity. If there is hope for humanity, it is in software. That is still the message I preach when I travel, and still the foundation of my own flavor of optimism. Information. The processing of information can give rise to optimal processes, efficient manufacturing, orderly and well planned resource utilization and more importantly, a mirror that can reflect for all to see the state of our planet and its people. Software can raise the bar of awareness globally and help us all to better see that our own personal self interest is only served when we consider the global impact of our very own behavior. Software. Crystallized thoughts. Our hopes, our logic, our need to connect, the best of our intentions and the economic manna that drives significant wealth without taxing the planet one bit. Software is the hope for a species on the precipice of ecological dismay.
I'll be traveling a lot these next few months. And that's the message I'll be delivering to audiences around the globe. If there is hope for humanity, it's in software. So let us therefore hope for a whole lot of humanity in the software we create.
