The State of the World

29 Sept 2011

I’ve been trying to use Twitter as a less trivial way to communicate with large numbers of people who share my interests. I consulted the help menu and understand that to generate followers I have to be active. The messages I send out have to be noticed. The problem is I’m not willing to waste time pointing out the obvious, the vaguely amusing or the slightly surprising, and I’m too cynical to get involved in every-day political debate.

So, here is something important and controversial. PLEASE SHOW ME I’M WRONG!

I’ve become more and more convinced that our whole way of life is based on a myth; that concepts like “growth” and “progress” are built on sand. I’ve thought a lot about this in the last few years and I now believe that what is happening to our world is really quite simple. I’ve taken some of the basic principles of evolution (which seem to me to be only controversial if you are a creationist) and set them out as “rules”:

RULE 1

Go forth and multiply

This is how a living organism is defined – a structure that can reproduce itself

Evolution lays an iron rule on all of us living things:

“The whole purpose of your life is to pass on your genes. Success is measured by how many copies of your genes you can pass on.”

RULE 2

To multiply you need resources

 – food and a suitable breeding environment. We all need food; fish need water, birds somewhere to nest, humans need shelter, grass needs soil etc.

RULE 3

The food of one species is the offspring of another.

Every form of life is predated by another  - even top predators have diseases.

RULE 4

When breeding and predation are in balance population numbers remain stable

RULE 5

With a good breeding environment, few predators and plenty of food (abundant resources) any species is bound to increase its numbers.

It can’t avoid doing so. Every form of life is programmed to multiply in response to the resources available to them and to the pressure of predation.

RULE 6

It takes longer to breed than it does to eat

Breeding rate responds to the food supply, so at the end of the process there are more mouths than food to feed them. Some species – mice for example – can respond very quickly. If predation is removed and food is plentiful, numbers can double and double again in weeks, until within a very short time numbers reach plague proportions and use up all the food. Then the population crashes.

So what’s this got to do with humans?

We’ve got the better of most of the organisms that try to live off us – from sabre tooth tigers to smallpox. We have plenty of food and we have family planning. Whenever resources start drying up we find new ones, and we’ve been doing this for centuries.

My thesis is that the pattern is still there – we are clever enough to keep postponing the crash point but not clever enough to prevent it. What we have achieved with amazing ingenuity is to find more and more ways to cheat the process.  By exploiting coal and oil we’ve vastly extended the capacity of the planet to sustain human life and as a consequence human numbers have reached plague proportions.

It is this plague of humans which is threatening to destroy not just us but all life on earth.

The big question now is:

Can human ingenuity reverse the process before it’s too late?