The future of life pdf free download

It suffers the same delusion as the one that destroyed the whaling industry. But the whale populations declined in equal measure until they were depleted. Whereupon most whaling was called to a halt. Extend that argument to falling ground water, drying rivers, and shrinking per-capita arable land, and you get the picture.

With only a small leveling adjustment of this income, the entire world population would be prosperous by current standards. Utopia at last, it would seem! It is the environment crumbling beneath us. In short, Earth has lost its ability to regenerate—unless global consumption is reduced, or global production is increased, or both.

All who care about both the economy and environment, and that includes the vast majority, are members of the same culture. Most economists today, and all but the most politically conservative of their public interpreters, recognize very well that the world has limits and the human population cannot afford to grow much larger.

They know that humanity is destroying biodiversity. The environmentalist view is fortunately spreading. In a realistically reported and managed economy, balanced accounting will be routine. The conventional gross national product GNP will be replaced by the more comprehensive genuine progress indicator GPI , which includes estimates of environmental costs of economic activity.

Already, a growing number of economists, scientists, political leaders, and others have endorsed precisely this change. What, then, are essential facts about population and environment?

From existing databases we can answer that question and visualize more clearly the bottleneck through which humanity and the rest of life are now passing. The rate, although beginning to slow, is still basically exponential: the more people, the faster the growth, thence still more people sooner and an even faster growth, and so on upward toward astronomical numbers unless the trend is reversed and growth rate is reduced to zero or less.

The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate. When Homo sapiens passed the six billion mark we had already exceeded by as much as a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.

We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that. By the end of the century some relief was in sight. In most parts of the world—North and South America, Europe, Australia, and most of Asia—people had begun gingerly to tap the brake pedal. They transmit to us always the same essential message, that to breed in excess is to overload the planet.

Thailand also passed the magic number, as well as the nonimmigrant population of the United States. When a country descends to its zero-population birthrates, or even well below, it does not cease absolute population growth immediately, because the positive growth experienced just before the breakpoint has generated a disproportionate number of young people with most of their fertile years and life ahead of them.

As this cohort ages, the proportion of child-bearing people diminishes, the age distribution stabilizes at the zero-population level, the slack is taken up, and population growth ceases. Similarly, when a country dips below the breakpoint, a lag period intervenes before the absolute growth rate goes negative and the population actually declines.

Italy and Germany, for example, have entered a period of such true, absolute negative population growth. The decline in global population growth is attributable to three interlocking social forces: the globalization of an economy driven by science and technology, the consequent implosion of rural populations into cities, and, as a result of globalization and urban implosion, the empowerment of women.

The freeing of women socially and economically results in fewer children. Reduced reproduction by female choice can be thought a fortunate, indeed almost miraculous, gift of human nature to future generations. It could have gone the other way: women, more prosperous and less shackled, could have chosen the satisfactions of a larger brood.

They did the opposite. They opted for a smaller number of quality children, who can be raised with better health and education, over a larger family. They simultaneously chose better, more secure lives for themselves. The tendency appears to be very widespread, if not universal. Its importance cannot be overstated.

Social commentators often remark that humanity is endangered by its own instincts, such as tribalism, aggression, and personal greed. The global trend toward smaller families, if it continues, will eventually halt population growth, and afterward reverse it. World population will peak and then start down. What will be the peak, and when will it occur? And how will the environment fare as humanity climbs to the peak?

This degree of descent has not happened of course and is unlikely to be attained for at least several more decades. Enough slack still exists in the system to justify guarded optimism. Women given a choice and affordable contraceptive methods generally practice birth control.

The percentage who do so still varies enormously among countries. The stated intention, or at least the acquiescence, of national governments favors a continued rise in the levels of birth control worldwide. The United States, where the idea is still virtually taboo, remained a stunning exception.

The encouragement of population control by developing countries comes not a moment too soon. The environmental fate of the world lies ultimately in their hands. They now account for virtually all global population growth, and their drive toward higher per-capita consumption will be relentless.

The consequences of their reproductive prowess are multiple and deep. The people of the developing countries are already far younger than those in the industrial countries and destined to become more so. The streets of Lagos, Manaus, Karachi, and other cities in the developing world are a sea of children. To an observer fresh from Europe or North America the crowds give the feel of a gigantic school just let out.

A country poor to start with and composed largely of young children and adolescents is strained to provide even minimal health services and education for its people. Its superabundance of cheap, unskilled labor can be turned to some economic advantage but unfortunately also provides cannon fodder for ethnic strife and war. Stretched to the limit of its capacity, how many people can the planet support?

A rough answer is possible, but it is a sliding one contingent on three conditions: how far into the future the planetary support is expected to last, how evenly the resources are to be distributed, and the quality of life most of humanity expects to achieve.

Consider food, which economists commonly use as a proxy of carrying capacity. The ability of India and other developing countries to climb the trophic chain is problematic. There are two ways to stop short of the wall. The bottleneck through which we are passing is real. But long before that ultimate limit was approached, the planet would surely have become a hellish place to exist.

There may, of course, be escape hatches. Petroleum reserves might be converted into food, until they are exhausted. Fusion energy could conceivably be used to create light, whose energy would power photosynthesis, ramp up plant growth beyond that dependent on solar energy, and hence create more food.

Humanity might even consider becoming someday what the astrobiologists call a type II civilization, and harness all the power of the sun to support human life on Earth and on colonies on and around the other solar planets.

No intelligent life forms in the Milky Way galaxy are likely at this level; otherwise they would probably have been already detected by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, programs.

Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to explore in order simply to continue our reproductive folly. The great bulk of this increase is crammed into the basins of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, covering an area about equal to that of the eastern United States. Americans, when they started from roughly the same point, found themselves geographically blessed. Hemmed in to the west by deserts and mountains, limited to the south by resistance from other civilizations, their agricultural populations simply grew denser on the land their ancestors had farmed for millennia.

China became in effect a great overcrowded island, a Jamaica or Haiti writ large. Highly intelligent and innovative, its people have made the most of it. Today China and the United States are the two leading grain producers of the world.

The two countries grow a disproportionate share of the food from which the world population derives most of its calories. The effort was successful but may be short-lived, a fact the government itself recognizes. Australia and Canada, largely dependent on dryland farming, are constrained by low rainfall.

Argentina has the potential to expand, but due to its small size the surplus it produces is unlikely to exceed ten million tons of grain production per year. China relies heavily on irrigation with water drawn from its aquifers and great rivers. Faced with chronic water shortages in the Yellow River Basin, the Chinese government has undertaken the building of the Xiaolangdi Dam, which will be exceeded in size only by the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River.

Plans are being laid in addition for the construction of canals to siphon water from the Yangtze, which never grows dry, to the Yellow River and Beijing respectively. But they are complicated by formidable side effects. China has maneuvered itself into a position that forces it continually to design and redesign its lowland territories as one gigantic hydraulic system. But this is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that China has too many people.

As a result their water requirements, already oppressively high, are rising steeply. The effects will be direct and powerful. As industrialization proceeds, per-capita income rises, and the populace consumes more food.

They also migrate up the energy pyramid to meat and dairy products. All the while the available water supply remains static or nearly so. In an open market, the agricultural use of water is outcompeted by industrial use. As China, already short on water and arable land, grows more prosperous through industrialization and trade, water becomes more expensive. The cost of agriculture rises correspondingly, and, unless the collection of water is subsidized, the price of food also rises.

This is in part the rationale for the great dams at Three Gorges and Xiaolangdi, built at enormous public expense. In theory, China can make up its grain shortage by purchasing from the Big Five grain-surplus nations. Unfortunately, its population is too large and the world surplus too restrictive for it to solve its problem without altering the world market.

All by itself, China seems destined to drive up the price of grain and make it harder for the poorer developing countries to meet their own needs. The problem, resource experts agree, cannot be solved entirely by hydrological engineering. It must include shifts from grain to fruit and vegetables, which are more labor-intensive, giving China a competitive edge. Among the most telling indicators is the pollution of water. Here is a measure worth pondering. Of these, according to the U.

Diseases from bacterial and toxic-waste pollution are epidemic. China can probably feed itself to at least mid-century, but its own data show that it will be skirting the edge of disaster even as it accelerates its life-saving shift to industrialization and megahydrological engineering. A war, internal political turmoil, extended droughts, or crop disease can kick the economy into a downspin.

Its enormous population makes rescue by other countries impracticable. China deserves close attention, not just as the unsteady giant whose missteps can rock the world, but also because it is so far advanced along the path to which the rest of humanity seems inexorably headed.

If China solves its problems, the lessons learned can be applied elsewhere. That includes the United States, whose citizens are working at a furious pace to overpopulate and exhaust their own land and water from sea to shining sea. Environmentalism is still widely viewed, especially in the United States, as a special-interest lobby.

Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important. Earth, unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by the activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles of energy and transformed organic matter.

The biosphere creates our special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction, we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology. When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.

Nor are we aliens who colonized Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle linked to others. The natural environment we treat with such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and only home.

That is the essence of environmentalism. It is the guiding principle of those devoted to the health of the planet. But it is not yet a general worldview, evidently not yet compelling enough to distract many people away from the primal diversions of sport, politics, religion, and private wealth. The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future.

We are innately inclined to ignore any distant possibility not yet requiring examination. It is, people say, just good common sense. Why do they think in this short-sighted way? The reason is simple: it is a hard-wired part of our Paleolithic heritage. For hundreds of millennia those who worked for short-term gain within a small circle of relatives and friends lived longer and left more offspring—even when their collective striving caused their chiefdoms and empires to crumble around them.

To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy—in theory at least.

But combine them we must, because a universal environmental ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our species has foolishly blundered. But if calculated from the condition of the biosphere, it is falling. No leveling trend is yet in sight.

Environmental indices are not popular topics at international economic conferences. By and large, religious leaders also lack a record in environmental stewardship of which they can be proud. Seen from a historical perspective, however, the hesitancy of the majority is understandable. The sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions contain few instructions about the rest of the living world. The Iron Age scribes who wrote them knew war. They knew love and compassion. They knew purity of spirit.

But they did not know ecology. A more realistic view of the human prospect is now in order. Overpopulation and environmentally ignorant development are everywhere shrinking natural habitats and biological diversity.

For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. Its lush forests and fertile valleys contained no mosquitoes, no ants, no stinging wasps, no venomous snakes or spiders, and few plants with thorns or poisons.

All these infelicities are abundant now, having been introduced by human commerce, both deliberately and accidentally. Prehuman Hawaii was biologically diverse and unique. Native eagles soared above thick forests that were home to strange long-legged owls and a glittering array of painted honeycreepers. Almost all of these endemic forms are now extinct. The majority, however, cling to life in densely forested upland valleys with high rainfall, as far removed from human presence on the islands as possible.

Like the tourists admiring them, they traveled to Hawaii by boat and aircraft from continents far away. The same species can be seen with monotonous frequency elsewhere in the warm temperate and tropical zones of the world.

Even the vegetation investing the most natural-appearing habitats of the coastal lowlands and lower mountain slopes is primarily introduced.

Once there were over ten thousand kinds of plants and animals native to Hawaii. Many ranked among the most distinctive and beautiful in the world. That number has now been drastically whittled down. The colonists erased other plant and animal species when they cleared forests and grasslands for agriculture. The biota of prehistoric Hawaii was relatively small and vulnerable.

The invasion of Hawaii can be viewed as an abnormal acceleration of the Darwinian process. Some of the voyagers traveled on air currents in the upper atmosphere. Standing on a leaf or twig, they spin out silk into a passing breeze, letting the threads grow longer and longer until, like swelling balloons, they tug strongly at the body of the spider. The spiders then let go and sail upward.

If they catch the right updraft and prevailing wind they can travel long distances before settling to the ground or—fatally—into the water. Some descend voluntarily by reeling in and eating the silk lines. Native spiders, it should come as no surprise, are abundant and diverse on Hawaii. The odds against each individual voyager settling prehuman Hawaii were astronomical. Even then the pioneers faced formidable obstacles. Species able to survive and breed were then candidates for evolutionary adaptation to the special conditions of the Hawaiian environment.

In time they became endemics, genetically distinct forms found nowhere else in the world. The Polynesian seafarers, arriving from the Society and Marquesas Islands, broke the crucible of evolution. The alien invasion then skyrocketed when American and other settlers imported legions of additional species not just from the neighboring archipelagoes but from all over the world.

As a result, a majority of resident land birds and nearly half of the plant species are now alien. Insects, spiders, mites, and other arthropods were unintended companions, arriving as stowaways in cargo and ballast. Moreover, the aliens dominate in numbers of individual organisms, especially in the disturbed environments. As a result, immigrants own the bulk of Hawaii. Most of the invaders are relatively innocuous: only a small fraction build populations large enough to become agricultural pests or harm the natural environment.

But the few that do break out are capable of enormous damage. In their native habitats on distant continents, they are almost always unobtrusive, hemmed in by predators and other enemies that coevolved with them since their evolutionary birth.

Now freed from these constraints in the long-sequestered and gentle environment of Hawaii and enjoying extraordinary reproductive success, they variously choke, consume, pauperize, and crowd out native species too weak to resist. The arch-destroyers of the Hawaiian biota among the nonhuman immigrants are the African big-headed ant Pheidole megacephala and feral strains of the common pig Sus scrofera.

The ant lives in borderless supercolonies of up to millions of workers and breeding queens. Spreading out as a living sheet from the point of entry, the supercolonies eat or drive out a large part of the other insects in their path.

The impact has rippled up the food chain. By reducing the food source of some of the smaller insect-eating native birds, it has likely contributed to their disappearance. In scattered localities not occupied by African big-headed ants, supercolonies of another alien species, the Argentine ant Linepithema humile , dominate the ground in a similar way, employing mass attacks and glandular poisons to overcome opponents.

The ants of Hawaii, like the humans of Hawaii, are aliens ruling over an impoverished dominion of fellow aliens. The vulnerability of the Hawaiian fauna to the invasive ants conforms to a familiar principle of evolution. Almost everywhere in the world, and for tens of millions of years, ants have been the leading predators of insects and other small animals. They are also among the preeminent scavengers of dead bodies, and as turners of the soil they equal or surpass the earthworms.

Prehuman Hawaii, because of its extreme isolation, never had them. They were unprepared for the shock of occupation by social predators of such high caliber. As a result, a large and still imprecisely measured part of the native Hawaiian species succumbed to their invading swarms. The Hawaiian environment was also evolutionarily unprepared for the coming of ground-dwelling mammals. Especially destructive has been the domestic pig, carried to the islands by the early Polynesians.

Today their feral descendants are more like the wild boars of Europe than the gentle domestic stocks from which they evolved. As they forage, the pigs sow the seeds of alien plants in their droppings, and the resulting growth crowds the native species.

The pigs also dig wallows that collect pools of water. And, as always, there is a trade-off to even that small advantage. The pools are also the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, which transmit avian malaria to the genetically unprotected native birds. People brought pigs to Hawaii deliberately, and only people can halt the destruction they cause. Teams of pig hunters, working with specially trained dogs, have cut the populations in nature reserves considerably but are nowhere near to eliminating them.

Other introduced mammals escalate the damage. Rats, mongooses, and feral house cats hunt the Hawaiian forest birds. The last individuals of some plant species survive only on inaccessible cliff faces, yet even there they are endangered by falling soil and rocks loosened by animals feeding along the cliff edges above. Among the lessons learned is that the decline of any particular species rarely has a single cause.

Typically, multiple forces entrained by human activity reinforce one another and either simultaneously or in sequence force the species down. Invasive species. Ants, pigs, and other aliens displace the native Hawaiian species. Fresh water, marine coastal water, and the soil of the islands are contaminated, weakening and erasing more species.

Some species, especially birds, were hunted to rarity and extinction during the early Polynesian occupation. The prime mover of the incursive forces around the world is the second P in HIPPO—too many people consuming too much of the land and sea space and the resources they contain. With the spread of Neolithic cultures and agriculture, the sequence reversed.

Each case is a result of the unique characteristics of the threatened species and the particular corner into which human activity has pushed it. Only by focused study are the researchers able to diagnose the cause of endangerment and devise the best means to nurse the species back to health.

No species better illustrates how peculiar, even bizarre, the causes of decline can be than the Vancouver Island marmot Marmota vancouverensis. This beautiful ground squirrel was never abundant. In the late twentieth century it began a dangerous decline. No obvious change could be found in the immediate environment that sets the species at risk.

Because of the remoteness of the habitat, humans rarely disturb the marmots. Nor do they hunt them. No disease appears to have recently swept the population, although it cannot be ruled out entirely as a contributing factor.

The problem, it turns out, is the clearcutting of forest to harvest timber below the subalpine habitat. With this change, an instinct that once kept the Vancouver Island marmot alive is now its undoing. Under natural conditions the small local populations composing the species frequently decline to extinction. But the empty habitats they leave behind are soon replenished, because young marmots in other populations instinctively emigrate from their homes upon reaching maturity.

They move down the mountains and travel through the conifer forests that clothe the lower elevations. As they proceed they zigzag up and down the wooded slopes until they encounter another subalpine meadow. There they halt and dig burrows. The rigidity of this instinct puts the young marmots at risk in disturbed environments. When they encounter the open spaces of clearcut conifer forests, they automatically accept them as natural meadows and settle down.

And there they perish, either from the more dangerous predators that prowl the lower slopes or, more slowly, from the failure of their hibernation cycle to adapt to the new temperature and snowfall regimes. Enough of the false meadows have been created by humans to bleed the more remote populations of the Vancouver Island marmot to near extinction.

The concentration of emigrants in the clearings is also likely to have unbalanced the population cycles of the source populations hard by. Discover how technological breakthroughs will change your world. Are you worried that AI will steal your job? Are you concerned about AI disrupting your life? Digital expert,. Download or read online Black Enterprise written by Anonim, published by Unknown which was released on Get Black Enterprise Books now!

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Reviewer: temporarybookborrower - favorite favorite favorite - October 6, Subject: no mention of pandemics etc tried to find same thing as previous reviewer - searched for "pandemie" and "crises economique" to find an alleged quote of Attali going around and I was not able to.

This was published in - apparently the infamous quote is in the version - I have yet to find that. Also checked book "Verbatim I " and could not find the alleged quote. Reviewer: Gordon K - - July 29, Subject: Looking for Jacques Attali's quote I read the Attali chapter to look for his quote on how an illness and poison vaccine would be used to depopulate, but there's no mention of it in this translation.

Perhaps I need to find the original French version.