10-12-2004 - Human World

On October 12, 1999, the United Nations declared that six billion humans inhabit the Earth. It’s also estimated that one in five people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water. We spoke with famed Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich about water and the growing population.

ES: What exactly is the issue with water in this century?

Paul Ehrlich: The problem is that not only are we pumping out groundwater at unsustainable rates, we’re also polluting water. For example, when I first started to do field research in the Rocky Mountains, you could drink the water almost anywhere, fresh out of a stream. Now you’ll get giardia if you do that, because there are so many people and so many animals brought in by people, that diseases are spreading. One of the things that few people understand is that the epidemiological environment, that is, our susceptibility as a species to diseases, is running downhill very rapidly as our population gets larger. It’s in part because the more people we have, the more likely it is that new diseases will jump into our population from animal populations, particularly in Africa. And, it’s in part due to our rapid transport systems so that sick people can spread diseases rapidly around the world, as for example, SARS indicated.

ES: In your recent book One With Nineveh, you describe the whole of humanity as being on ‘a collision course with nature.’ Could you speak to that?

Paul Ehrlich: I think there is a consensus in the scientific community that the current course that humanity is on is unsustainable. That in fact we are now facing, for the first time in our history, the collapse, not of a local or regional civilization, but of a global civilization. And that’s not just our view – it’s the view of the entire scientific community. It’s been announced by the Academies of Science, it’s been included in the World Scientist Warning to Humanity, which was about a decade ago. We’re going the wrong way, and the issue is why and how do we change it. And, the reasons why are multiple. But the main ones are lack of decent information among the public and decision makers about how serious our problems are. That is, people look at the environment as just one more political problem like social security or drugs – we’ll find a solution to when we need to, rather than a question of the survival of our civilization.

And the second one, of course, is a maldistribution of power. That is, the people who are on the top like things much the way they are, do not see or care what happens to their children or grandchildren, and are able to keep the world from moving in the directions that the scientific community is recommending.

For example, there are extremely serious potential problems with climate change, due to the greenhouse gasses that we’re putting into the atmosphere. Every serious scientist and every competent economist knows that we should be running gasoline prices up to encourage a switch away from the use of petroleum and towards other energy sources. And yet, if you try to put even a couple of cents worth of additional costs in the form of taxes on gasoline in the United States, you’d be thrown out of political office, even though we should be putting 2-3 or 4 dollars more, per gallon on the cost of gasoline. So there’s a disconnect between what the scientific community knows is happening to our life-support systems, and what politicians, particularly the current administration, is willing to do about it.

ES: Scientists aren’t known for venturing much into the political arena. What role do you see for the modern scientist in society?

Paul Ehrlich: When one becomes a scientist, one does not give up one’s position as a citizen. And, in fact, scientists as a whole have become more and more upset about the disconnect between what science knows and what civilization is doing. And a very large number, of very distinguished scientists have been moving into the political sphere because they see that as the only way to save a decent world for our children and grandchildren. For example, the World Scientists Warning to Humanity was signed by over 1500 of the world’s leading scientists, including more than half of all the living Nobel laureates in science. The 58 academies of science got out a warning on population about a dozen years ago, again because they feel that the situation is so incredibly serious. Dozens of the worlds leading scientists complained about the Bush Administration’s deliberate distortion of what science says. Now, of course, what I’m saying there is essentially political, and the critical thing is that one has to differentiate between when one is giving the consensus of the scientific community on a problem, such as the odds are about 10% that global climate change will be so serious as to be catastrophic for civilization – that’s consensus science – and an opinion of what ought to be done about it. That is, most scientists have looked at it, and most economists have looked at it, think that we should be increasing the prices of the use of fossil fuels, not subsidizing them, and encouraging a shift towards safer technology. That’s not science. That’s basically policy. But again, that’s policy from people who are very knowledgeable about the science.

ES: What motivates you do something as daunting as addressing the world’s critical problems?

Paul Ehrlich: Well, I’ve been concerned about the world’s problems because I had, when I started my work in this area in 1965, I had daughter who was less than 10 years old. And I wanted to see her grow up into a decent world. And now I have grand children. So, I have plenty of motivation to try and stop civilization from destroying itself. Obviously, I’d like to live in it a bit longer as well. So, motivation is easy, and our group has specialized over the long term, at looking at the entire problem, that is, not just the pure science, but also looking at the policy implications, the social science in this. Because right now, there’s much more that could be done on the social science side, that is, trying to figure out why our institutions and policy makers are malfunctioning so badly, and trying to find solutions there. And I work extensively with social scientists. For example, at the moment I have an article in press in the utmost leading economics journal in the United States, the Journal of Economic perspectives. The lead author is Kenneth Arrow, who has a Nobel prize in economics. And there are four or five other economists and ecologists on it. And the title of the article is, “”Are We Consuming Too Much?”":http://siis.stanford.edu/publications/20397/ We’re looking at the issue of consumption, because the first area that I started looking at when I got into this business was population growth, which was being ignored as a major driver of environmental problems. It’s now well recognized to be a major driver of environmental problems. We understand a lot about it, and we’re doing something about population growth. Whereas few people recognize consumption in the rich countries as a major driver, and nothing is being done about that. If anything, we’re just encouraging more and more. As we switch, for example from just plain automobiles to SUVs in the United States, when we should be switching much more to mass transit, bicycles, and feet. So, this is a long-term issue with me. I’ve been heavily involved in it for more than 40 years with my colleagues – I have a lot of colleagues. We’ve been looking at all kinds of dimensions of it. My colleagues include not just ecologists and engineers and lawyers and political scientists and economists, but also anthropologists and psychologists. I’ve written books with psychologists, political scientists, and anthropologists on these issues. So that’s where my special interest comes from, and it’s an interest that, as I say, is increasingly shared by much of the scientific community. Certainly, by almost all ecologists.

ES: Could you talk a little bit about some of the key environmental issues – and about the ‘nature’ that you say we’re on a ‘collision course’ with?

Paul Ehrlich: I think the critical thing for people to understand is that our life-support systems supply us with what are called ecosystem services, without which our economy cannot persist and we cannot persist either. And the ecosystem services include such things as maintenance of the quality of the atmosphere and control of the weather, control of the hydrological cycle which brings fresh water to us and purifies it, the generation of soils that are absolutely essential to agriculture and to forestry, the control of pests of crops, natural control, without which we would have no food whatsoever to eat, pollination of our crops, control of floods, and on and on. And major, major working parts of those life-support systems are the biodiversity you hear so much about – the other organisms of the planet that are absolutely essential to our lives. Well, right now, we are doing what no reasonable human being would do in their own life. We’re like the profligate child that inherited a vast fortune from the planet in the form of natural capital, that is, particularly the biodiversity, and are now depleting it at a very high rate. Every year, the politicians brag about how much economic growth and so on they’ve had. And what they’re basically doing, is taking a big inheritance and getting rid of it as fast as possible. In other words, every year they’re able to write a bigger check on the account, but they never look to see what’s happening to the balance and the balance is dropping very rapidly. And the critical parts of that balance are not so much the fossil fuels, which we’re going to have to stop burning because of their effect on the atmosphere among other things. But the really critical parts are deep, rich agricultural soils, which are generated on a timescale of inches per millennium, and are in many places going away at a rate of inches per decade or more, fossil ground waters, that accumulated during the ice-ages and are now being pumped out over much of the world at rates often dozens of times higher than recharge rates. In fact we are destroying the aquifers in many places and paving over the recharge areas, so we’re losing our water. And, above all, the biodiversity, which was generated over many millions of years, and which we have now entrained one of the great extinctions of all time, and are going to get rid of much of the biodiversity in a century or so, when it took many millions of years to form. So again, we’re like the rich idiot child who gets the inheritance and just blows it. And, so that’s what deeply concerns the scientific community, particularly the loss of biodiversity. That’s why you hear so much about the loss of biodiversity, although often it’s not expressed very well in terms of its importance to humankind.

ES: I realize that your time with me is limited, so I’m hoping that we might be able to key on state of one of the ecosystem services you mentioned – water.

Paul Ehrlich: The one place where I go, where I’m always called too much of an optimist is when I talk to Earth scientists, to geologists. And they say, if you understood the water situation, you wouldn’t be so optimistic. The problem is that not only are we pumping out groundwater at unsustainable rates, we’re also polluting water with not just poisons of various kinds, but also with organisms of various kinds. For example, when I first started to do field research in the Rocky Mountains, you could drink the water almost anywhere, fresh out of a stream. Now you’ll get giardia if you do that, because there are so many people and so many animals brought in by people, that diseases are spreading. One of the things that few people understand is that the epidemiological environment, that is, our susceptibility as a species to diseases, is running downhill very rapidly as our population gets larger. This is in part because of the things we add to water, which are very dangerous to us. It’s in part because the more people we have, the more likely it is that new diseases will jump into our population from animal populations, particularly in Africa. And, it’s in part due too our rapid transport systems so that sick people can spread diseases rapidly around the world, as for example, SARS indicated. We predicted in the 1960s the AIDS epidemic, and it came along. And we’re going to have more just like it. Perhaps the single most dangerous thing in the current situation beyond the possibility of a world wide nuclear war, is the chance of very large-scale epidemics, perhaps of a novel disease or a novel flu, or a new kind of flu, against which we have essentially no defenses, and which we’re doing essentially nothing to protect ourselves from. Everything we’re doing in those areas is going in the wrong direction. But water is an essential issue because we are extremely dependent on it not just to drink – that’s just the biggest problem – but also for agriculture, to grow our food. The irrigated land is much more productive than non-irrigated land. As we change rainfall patterns, we’re going to further stress agriculture and make it more difficult to supply ourselves with food. In terms of drinking water, that’s 5-10% of our total use. In the United States, drinking water is about 5%, industrial water is about 10%, and all the rest is agriculture. So the place you’re going to see the biggest effects of the water shortages, in terms of serious effects, is going to be through agriculture. Because, we can all get by with less water in our houses if we conserve it.

ES: One of the key points you made in One With Nineveh is that world societies are becoming increasingly interconnected and fragile, what you call ‘tightly coupled.’

Paul Ehrlich: Well, it’s truly a global system. Scientists all over the world talk to each other and hold meetings about issues, like the ones we’ve talking about. But, you know, all you have to do to think about the interconnection of the world is to think about how so many of our problems are tied to what happens to the atmosphere, what happens to the mix of gasses, not just from the point of view of climate change, but for example, atmospheric circulation has now taken poisonous pesticides to both poles. You can find really dangerous chemicals originating in the rich countries, in Antarctica. And not only the climate, but also the air pollution in the Arctic comes very largely from Europe and North America, from the industrial areas of the world. So, the climate ties us together. You know the old saying is, “a cow farts in Bangladesh and your grandchildren died,” because the methane that’s produced changes the balance of chemicals in the atmosphere and changes the climate. So we’re all tied together by climate, we’re all tied together in a sense by the oceans, which has a very large element of, what happens to the climate has to do with the global circulation of the oceans. If we change the climate, it will tend to change that circulation, or vice-versa. What we do on land affects our fisheries. As you may know we have huge dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico because of our overuse of fertilizers in the Great Plains of the United States. Oceanic fisheries are also affected by our movements to the coast. Whenever we dredge or close down a coastal marsh to put in a subdivision, we’re getting rid of a fisheries nursery and hurting oceanic fisheries. So it’s all tied together in one big mess, and the basic problem is that there are many too many of us, on average, particularly in the rich countries. Each one is consuming too much, although there is about a billion or two billion that ought to be more that are so poor that they can hardly get along. And we’re using the wrong technologies. A Hummer is a beautiful example of an unpatriotic, stupid technology. When you see somebody driving a hummer with an American flag on it, and you realize that American kids are dying in Iraq right now, because of Iraq’s oil – and that’s the only reason we’re in Iraq, don’t believe any of that stuff about Weapons of Mass Destruction or Saddam Hussein – we’re there because America wants to control the second largest source of oil in the world. And, you know, the reason we want to control it is that we’re dependent on imports to continue our energy profligacy. And profligacy means driving trucks instead of cars, for starters.

ES: So where do we go from here – what are some key things we can do to start addressing things like dwindling resources?

Paul Ehrlich: The most important things, I think, are to hold politicians feet to the fire – get them to learn about the issues thoroughly and do something about it. And that’s easier said than done. We now have the worst administration in the history of the United States, which is not a great thing at this time of history, which is, for example, not being cooperative on the beginning international efforts to do something about climate change. So, politics is the first thing – getting involved in politics, voting, but also trying to figure out ways and encourage politicians to, for example, find ways to deal with long-term problems as well as short-term problems. To give you an example, the Congress now is much too democratic, in the sense that instead of Congress having been making decisions, which on the basis of their knowledge they think is the right thing to do – they’re all looking over their shoulders because they can now, with email, radio, and television, at what their constituents think. That wasn’t the idea of the original founding fathers of the United States. And one of the suggestions that we have in One With Nineveh is that Congress ought to look more often to delegating more of its authority to sort of insulate the decisions from the immediate needs of immediate constituents. For example, the Congress has done this in the past when it needed to close military bases. Congress loves to give out pork, but it hates to give out pain. And so, any district that was going to have a military base, that congressman was going to be forced to fight crazily for it, because of the local economy, even if the base was, from the point of view of the United States a total waste of money. So what they did was they put together a base closing commission, an independent commission, that in as much isolation as they could provide, evaluated what bases should be closed, and came up with a list of bases. And the congress limited itself to just voting up or down on that list – it couldn’t pick it apart and have individual congressman argue for changing their districts. That’s the sort of thing, for example, that we ought to have for judging national gasoline taxes, and so on. No congressman can vote directly for one, but a congressman could vote for the conclusions of a commission, and be somewhat insulated, politically, from the consequences. That’s not the only device, but that’s the sort of thing that we need to think about. In a sense, the Fed is insulated from immediate Congressional action, and that’s a good thing. Because you can’t be changing the interest rate day in and day out depending on what individual congressman think. So people could think a lot more about how to restructure our government so that long-term concerns came in rather than short-term concerns. Because the politicians are locked into the short term – they operate on 2-4-and 6-year cycles, and unfortunately the global problems operate on a much larger timescale.

One of the big problems is that environmental systems don’t necessarily just change slowly. For example, we know very well from the historic record that the climate will stay relatively stable for a long time. And then some force will start pushing on it, and it will change a little bit gradually, and then all of a sudden it will flip into a new mode. A classic example is the change of the oceanic circulation, which can produce sudden cooling in the Northern hemisphere, particularly around Europe, if it occurs. And it’s occurred in the past, in a matter of decades. And there are many features of many ecological systems that work that way. That is, things seem to be going great, and then all of a sudden something flips.

The dead zones are a good example. An awful lot of fertilizer went into the Gulf of Mexico, until all of a sudden, dead zones appeared.

We used a lot of pesticides until DDT was invented, and then, all of a sudden, a lot of birds began to disappear. So you cannot count on having a lot of time to deal with these issues if you don’t get a head start on them. Our population for a long time grew exponentially, and as somebody once said, a long history of exponential growth doesn’t tell you there is going to be a long future of exponential growth. You can have these discontinuities and sudden changes, and what scientists call non-linearalities, which for example could have the climate changing very rapidly in the near future to all of our great distress. So, a really important thing is that we have to have foresight, and we should supply ourselves with some insurance. We should not, for example, be running the current experiment of seeing how many people we can cram into the United States before the country dissolves. No one has ever presented, even a semi-sane reason for having more than 145 million Americans alive at the same time. And yet we have almost 300 million now and we’re growing rapidly. And if you want the maximum number of Americans to live over all time, it would be much better to have 145 million Americans live for the next 10 million years, that size population, than have 400 million Americans and have the country disappear in the next 10 years – or 20 – or 30.

I think that one thing that people have to recognize is that all these things are tied together. That we’re fighting a war in Iraq over oil, we have still a world that is balanced on the edge of nuclear war – few people realize it but the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of missiles targeted at each other. Russia is in such bad shape that it hasn’t got a decent command and control system, and it can’t keep its nuclear submarines at sea, so everything is essentially on a hair-trigger alert. That’s very dangerous. Just like our invasion of Iraq is very dangerous. Just like the things that we’re doing not to solve the problems of terrorism are very dangerous. We really have to reexamine all of our priorities, that’s one of the reasons why we wrote One With Nineveh, and we try and give an overview – not of answers, because we don’t have all the answers. Most people don’t even know what the questions are, and we badly need, as we recommended in the book, a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, in which the people of the world, basically get together and as they have in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, begin to discuss how we treat each other and our environment. Because, if we don’t come to conclusions on that and do something about it, I fear for what our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren are going to face.

ES: It’s interesting that one of the options for dealing with the world’s problems is to examine and assess our own behavior.

Paul Ehrlich: Well a large number of people have expressed to me that they like the idea of a Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior; the biggest problems are of course that you’re going to be talking a lot about values and ethics. We have a lot of differences among cultures and so on, all sorts of issues on values and ethics. But I think everyone wants to survive and have a livable world for everyone. So our great hope, and that of other people who have gotten behind the effort, are that the very existence of such a discussion would help solve some of our problems, and where we can’t solve them, at least agree on the general directions we ought to be moving in, and disagree on some of the details of what the best thing to do is. Anne and I see no choice but to give it some kind of a try. Because we don’t have a general discussion in our society of, again, the ethics in how we treat each other, and the ethics in how we treat our environment. And both of those, in our view, are absolutely essential to the survival of the kind of civilization that, I think, most people want to see.

ES: Do you think that there might be the possibility of a future technological fix to alleviate the wholesale suffering of much of humanity that you’ve talked about today, some magic crop or water engine?

Paul Ehrlich: I’ve got an advantage on you there, in that I’m older. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3 1/2 billion people in the world. And everybody said, ‘you’re worrying too much. We’ll have such wonderful technological fixes that we’ll be able to give even 5 billion people a wonderful live, education, good diets, same kind of life as the average American has. Don’t worry about it, technology will fix us.’ Well, here we are, 40 years later. We have 6.3 billion people, 3 billion of them are still living in misery, and another billion in a style that no American would want to live. There are only about 2 billion people that live anything like an American lifestyle. And we’re still not taking care of over 4 billion people the way we ought to. And there’s been no technological fix. So my answer there always is very simple. When we’re taking good care of the people we have, then I’ll listen to the crap about how many more we can support happily. But first let’s take care of the 6.3 billion before we talk about how easy it will be to handle another- they’re not talking about another 2 billion people. Well that’s the number that was on the entire planet when I was born.

Written by Jorge Salazar