OUR HUMAN population is now pushing against the limits of Planet Earth, our home.  As citizens of Planet Earth, we must face up to some unpleasant realities.

National economies rest on concepts of growth. The human population, and Australia’s human population, continue to grow. Children born across much of the planet will expect to use more of the planet’s resources than their parents. For hundreds of years, scientists, philosophers and writers have drawn attention to the limited nature of the planet, and called for a new relationship with nature. However even today, when the planet’s limits are so painfully obvious, community leaders such as the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Pell, are calling for people in countries where population growth rates are slowing to “have more babies” (ABC TV Seven O’clock News, July 14, 2008).

The single most important issue the world faces today is the need to develop an ethic of planetary stewardship, underpinned by a reverence for the beauty and complexity of our “water planet” and its diversity of life forms. Without this ethic, the forces behind our industrial consumer societies are pushing global resource consumption to higher and higher levels, eroding the planet’s essential life support systems.

Outside nature and wilderness reserves (covering about 14% of the planet’s terrestrial areas) we have already modified and damaged almost all terrestrial and freshwater habitats. Only 40% of terrestrial ecoregions have 10% or more of their area within reserves (‘protected areas’). About half of the planet’s natural terrestrial ecosystems have been destroyed (with this percentage escalating) with most of the remainder significantly degraded. Over half of the world’s wetlands were destroyed in the twentieth century, mainly for agricultural and urban development, and the pace of destruction is accelerating in countries such as China and India. In heavily populated areas, the destruction of natural wetlands approaches 100%. About a quarter of the world’s bird species have already been driven to extinction, and habitat destruction over much of the third world (eg: Brazil) is accelerating.

We are killing the wild inhabitants of our planet, and destroying the places in which they live.

This is sometimes done deliberately, and sometimes unconsciously. Politicians and public servants have done a good job destroying the economy and the natural values of the Murray-Darling Basin, with farmers and wildlife paying the penalty. More than ten years after surface water use was “capped” in the Basin, total water allocations in the catchment still exceed (hugely exceed) the average natural flow in the river. We should not be surprised at the destruction we see, and as the Basin’s climate continues to dry, worse is to come.

The last twenty years have witnessed accelerating inroads into marine habitats, which are now broadly entering (or in) ecological collapse. Only 1.5% of the earth’s marine realm is designated as protected area, and only 0.18% is fully protected through no-take reserves. Over half of the world’s mangrove forests have been lost, and estuaries and coral reef ecosystems have been severely degraded around the planet - mainly by overfishing, pollution and the introduction of alien species. Climate change will accelerate this destruction. We have witnessed the dramatic decline of coastal fisheries over the last century, and this should not be unexpected. Even the ecosystems of the open ocean are now in deep trouble worldwide, largely due to overfishing with its attendant effects of habitat damage and bycatch.

Bottom trawling remains in widespread use, despite a realisation that the practice causes dramatic (and in some cases effectively irreversible) damage to benthic habitats. Bottom trawling has been likened to clear-felling a forest to catch a herd of deer.

Our biological world is already in crisis. Driven by an expanding human population, together with the resource demands of our industrial-consumer societies, the planet has already entered a period of environmental catastrophe. We need to realise that, with something as big as planet Earth, the signs of catastrophe do not ‘happen’ suddenly: there are no front-page headlines from the biodiversity crisis. Look to the world’s most vulnerable ecosystems if you want to see the signs: wetlands, coral ecosystems, estuaries, deserts, our rivers and lakes, rainforests, mountain environments, and even our open oceans and seamounts. They are being plundered and their ecosystems are dying. The time-scale of the collapse is often just outside the time-scale of a human life; we need to look backwards carefully. Without seeing the detail we will be unable to understand the signs and the processes of destruction.

The human population has over-shot the Earth’s carrying capacity. We are now eroding the planet’s fabric which sustains life on earth - consuming the capital on which the future of our children depends.

The human effects of environmental degradation are being felt most clearly today in ecologically fragile areas: sub-Saharan Africa, the steep erodible hillsides of Asia, and waterways and coasts over much of the third world. Sea level rise, and increasing storms will destroy human settlements in low-lying coastal areas, and entire nations, over the next century.

Each year, over 15 million children under the age of 5 die from “preventable” causes: around half from water-borne diseases and the effects of water pollution, and around half from diseases exacerbated by poor nutrition and outright starvation. The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to increase, in national and individual terms.

Our evolution from tribal hunter-gathers has provided us with a remarkable ability to respond to immediate challenges. We react well to short-term problems in our immediate vicinity.  As a species, however, we do not have strong abilities to construct effective social responses to long-term or global crises.  Our survival on this planet now depends on our ability to construct cultural and institutional mechanisms which will compensate for our inherited focus on short term immediate issues. This is the challenge we must face today

Humans are the most powerful predators on planet Earth, and our actions (as a species) are now well outside what appear to be the ecological survival limits of the environment we inhabit. We have moved from destroying individual plants and animals - as every predator does, to destroying whole ecosystems.

No population can continue to grow indefinitely in a finite environment. Unless we take action to limit and then reduce our population, famine and disease will become increasingly prominent within poorer nations and poorer peoples. Corn will be taken (and is already being taken) from the mouths of the poor to fuel the cars of the rich.

While the planet’s human population is expected to stabilise late this century at somewhere over 10 billion, many humans, as well as the planet’s ecosystems, are already paying the ultimate price for our erosion of the planet’s life support systems.

Our human population is already pushing against the limits of Planet Earth, our home. We need politicians, and other community leaders, clever enough, wise enough, and brave enough to start talking about a “sustainable retreat” rather than sustainable development. As citizens of Planet Earth, we need to retreat from continued global population growth, and continued growth in our use of the planet’s resources. If we are at all concerned about global equity or the biodiversity crisis, we need to retreat from the expectation of continued improvement in our material standard of living.

This huge problem highlights an immediate issue: the democratic governance model, used around the world, accentuates short term decision-making. Politicians wish to be re-elected every three or four years, and if one side adopts painful measures to protect the planet, the other side will appeal to the public’s short term and immediate concerns. This broad and pervasive problem is being played out today in Australia, with the Federal opposition calling for cuts to fuel excise charges to lower the cost of petrol – when cheaper fuel is the last thing the planet needs.

The future of the world, our future, depends upon politicians who are wise and courageous as well as clever, yet we have a political system which will suppress this wisdom where it exists. We must re-examine our democratic model, and do it urgently. The future of our planet depends on it.

For references and further reading, see www.onlyoneplanet.com.au.

Jon Nevill .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)      

Director, OnlyOnePlanet Consulting,
PO Box 106 Hampton 3188
Victoria, Australia

Jon Nevill

Our human population is already pushing against the limits of Planet Earth, our home. We need politicians, and other community leaders, clever enough, wise enough, and brave enough to start talking about a “sustainable retreat” rather than sustainable development. As citizens of Planet Earth, we need to retreat from continued global population growth, and continued growth in our use of the planet’s resources. If we are at all concerned about global equity or the biodiversity crisis, we need to retreat from the expectation of continued improvement in our material standard of living.

We must re-examine our democratic model, and do it urgently. The future of our planet depends on it.