Food Supply, Climate Change, Population: Stabilizing Tipping Points in Nature
We are in a race between tipping points in nature and our political systems. The risk is that the consequences of accumulating problems — population, poverty, climate — will overwhelm more and more governments, leading to widespread state failure and, eventually, the failure of civilization.
Aug. 14, 2009
By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute
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The United States increased the share of its grain harvest going to fuel ethanol — from 15 percent of the 2005 crop to more than 25 percent of the 2008 crop — in an effort to reduce its oil insecurity. However, this increase helped drive world grain prices to all-time highs by mid-2008, creating unprecedented world food insecurity.
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In recent years, there has been a growing concern over thresholds, or tipping points, in nature. For example, scientists worry about when the shrinking population of an endangered species will fall to the point from which it cannot recover. Marine biologists are concerned about the point at which overfishing will trigger the collapse of a fishery.
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We know there were social tipping points in earlier civilizations — points at which they were overwhelmed by the forces threatening them. For instance, at some point, the irrigation-related salt buildup in the Sumerian people’s soil overwhelmed their capacity to deal with it. With the Mayans, there came a time when the effects of cutting too many trees and the associated loss of topsoil were simply more than they could manage.
The social tipping points that lead to decline and collapse when societies are overwhelmed by a single threat or by simultaneous multiple threats are not always easily anticipated. As a general matter, more economically advanced countries can deal with new threats more effectively than developing countries can. For example, while governments of industrial countries have been able to hold HIV infection rates among adults to under 1 percent, many developing-country governments have failed to do so and are now struggling with much higher infection rates. This is most evident in some southern African countries, where up to 20 percent or more of adults are infected.
A similar situation exists with population growth. While populations in nearly all industrial countries except the United States have stopped growing, rapid growth continues in nearly all the countries of Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all of the 80 million people being added to the world population each year are born in the countries least able to support them — countries where natural support systems are already deteriorating in the face of excessive population pressure. In these countries, the risk of state failure is growing.
Some issues seem to exceed even the management skills of the more advanced countries, however. When countries first detected falling underground water tables, it was logical to expect that governments in affected countries would quickly raise water use efficiency and stabilize population in order to stabilize aquifers. Unfortunately, not one country — industrial or developing — has done so. Two failing states where overpumping water and security-threatening water shortages loom large are Pakistan and Yemen.
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