Earth 2100 Page #4

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Hundreds of thousands

of environmental refugees

fleeing drought and famine

are streaming toward Europe.

They will move across borders by

the droves, by the millions.

And that will be something

we've never seen before.

And that might be the thing that we would

find the most difficult to cope with.

From Laredo to Tijuana,

millions of Latin Americans

are massing along the US border.

You'll see intense pressure for people to

move and be on the move from the Caribbean,

from Latin America, from Mexico in

particular, into the United States.

And that'll put huge stress, I think,

on, on the systems in the United

States to try to cope with that.

I can't imagine the horrors that

will take place on the border

as millions of refugees try to

get into the United States.

I was working the midnight shift when

a call came from the border police.

"Be careful", Josh said.

"This doesn't sound good."

Thousands of refugees had been arriving at

the border desperate for water and food.

Someone had blown a hole through the wall,

and thousands of people were streaming through.

They had called in the border police.

I don't know how it started,

who fired first.

But suddenly, the police

were shooting into the crowd.

There were people falling,

panic everywhere.

Josh heard it on the news.

And how he found me in the midst

of all that chaos I'll never know.

In San Diego, Josh and Molly and I took

long walks on the beach to look for birds.

Over the years,

our favorites started to disappear.

The worst was the

end of the albatross.

These marvelous birds had finally been

done in by fishermen's long lines.

It was a bad omen for the rest of us.

Probably a third of all species will be

on an inexorable path to extinction by 2015.

They will include familiar species,

like lions and tigers and bears,

but there will also be

huge areas of the planet,

which presently are really lovely

and beautiful and diverse.

Those places will have

essentially disappeared.

In the history of the Earth,

there have been five mass extinctions,

In which at least half the

species on Earth disappeared.

They were caused by natural disasters,

massive volcanic eruptions,

rapid climate change,

meteors hitting the Earth.

Today, in the 21st century, we are

in the midst of what scientists

And for the first time, it is

being caused by a single species, us.

When one species proliferates

beyond any other, ultimately,

it sort of knocks out its own life

support systems and it collapses.

And in a way, that's what we're

doing at every level around the world.

Today in 2009,

the idea that we could do

so much damage to our natural environment

that it could cause our global

civilization to collapse,

may seem farfetched.

Think of all the signs of normalcy.

Water is still coming out

of the faucet in my kitchen.

The electricity still turns on.

I buy food at the supermarket.

It seems inconceivable that

our modern world could collapse.

Every society that collapsed

thought it couldn't happen to them.

The Roman Empire

thought it couldn't happen.

The Maya civilization

thought it couldn't happen.

The Byzantine Empire thought

it couldn't happen, but it did.

And it usually creeps

up on you unforeseen.

At its peak, the Maya

civilization numbered more than 10 million.

They had astronomy.

They had the only

writing in the new world.

They had great art.

They were the biggest game in town.

They are the equivalent of us

in their, in their era.

These city centers were

supporting 25,000 to 50,000 people.

So, they were very well adapted to their,

their surroundings they were able to grow.

But they grew too much

and exhausted their resources.

Growing population, meaning

growing the demands on the land,

deforestation and soil erosion,

which tied into warfare.

There was chronic warfare

among the Maya city states.

And then,

the climate suddenly changed.

There were these series

of extended droughts.

And those droughts just kept

hammering away and hammering away.

You lose your forest.

You lose your soil.

If you lose your soil,

you can't grow anything.

And if it stops raining,

then forget about it.

The endgame for the Maya

must have been horrible indeed.

It's highly likely there were

also periods of starvation.

It's a truly hideous

and ugly way to die.

The Roman Empire faced many of

the same problems that we face today.

It was kind of a precursor

of our globalized economy.

In just a few short centuries,

Rome built an empire

that stretched across three continents.

As it expanded, the requirements for simply

feeding its cities and feeding its army,

it became so large that the empire

couldn't generate enough food energy,

enough grain, to adequately

meet all its obligations.

So, there was a constant

fiscal crisis and financial crisis.

As resources ran out,

their empire collapsed.

The city of Rome itself went from a

million people down to perhaps 30,000,

and that was the largest city

in Western Europe at the time.

Civilizations in the past

have lost the fight.

I mean, they, they have collapsed as a

result of the inability to deal with

several different events going on at once.

And so, you know, I think the takeaway is

that, honestly, we're not that special.

Easter Island, one of the

most remote places in the world.

It's hard to imagine that a civilization

once thrived on such a barren Island,

but it didn't always look like this.

Easter Island used to be covered by

a forest of dozens of tree species,

including the biggest

palm tree in the world.

But as their population grew,

so too did their demand for wood.

As they gradually cut down more and more trees,

the trees didn't grow back rapidly enough to

replace the trees that were being cut down.

So, some time in the 1600s,

the last tree was cut down.

You saw all of the

classic signatures of collapse.

The population plummeted.

There was starvation.

And essentially,

they turned to cannibalism.

The question is, what was that

person on Easter Island thinking

when they chopped down the last tree?

The pattern is clear.

Civilizations that grow too

large and consume too much

damage their own life support systems.

As resources run out, they begin to fight

each other over what little is left.

Then, they either starve or leave.

But in our case, where can we go?

I think Easter Island is the perfect metaphor

because it's this small, fragile island

sitting within the Pacific Ocean,

it's very remote, and,

and it no longer was able to sustain

the population that lived there.

It's no different than Earth being

this small planet in a vast galaxy.

Think about that cartoon movie that

was made about the Beatles music,

'Yellow Submarine."

There was a creature in it.

"YELLOW SUBMARlNE"

Hey, look who's back.

Full speed ahead.

Its head is a funnel that

functions as a vacuum cleaner.

Suddenly, it's run out of things

to point at, there's nothing left.

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