What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #6

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down to ten percent of their previous population.

Down to ten percent? Maybe that's why

we're now eating tilapia instead of cod.

The cod is almost gone.

And with your tilapia may I suggest a

big tall glass of drinkable water?

When it comes to fresh water we probably

take about half of the available fresh water.

Part of the way we've fed the planet over

the last thirty years, as we've doubled

population, is to use a whole lot of water.

Our agriculture's now the leading

user of water in the world.

And in this nation as well.

Our watersheds in the United States have

been so highly developed that even small

changes in the amount of water that falls

are beginning to cause large implications

for society's availability of water.

Multiplying the impact of consumption

and habitat destruction is the fact that,

with fuels, with pesticides and

herbicides and industrial chemicals,

with noise and with electromagnetic waves

and with human activity and with

structures of control and domination,

Empire is literally and metaphorically

poisoning every square inch of the planet.

Yes, life will recover from

what we are doing to the planet.

But don't hold your breath.

It's going to take millions of years.

It's going to take an incredible

number of human generations.

Trillions of people will live in a

biologically impoverished world

if we don't stop our human impacts now.

I spoke with Daniel Quinn

about this mass extinction.

He gave me a metaphor

that has haunted me since.

We are like people who live in a

very tall building. . . brick building.

We live on the top floor.

And every day we go out, go down to the lower

floors and at random we knock bricks out, take

them upstairs to the top, and build higher.

Every day. Downstairs, 200 bricks.

Take them upstairs.

And the building is perfectly stable.

But it's not going to be stable forever.

Because we are attacking the

structural integrity of the building.

Two hundred species a day, day after

day after day, year after year. . .

And as our population increases

it's going to turn into 400 species

a day, a thousand species a day.

And there's going to come a day

when the system is going to collapse.

Two hundred species a day!?

This is calamitous.

We may already be well above 200 bricks

each day. And it looks to me like the

building is not far from collapse.

Everything in me wants to run out of the building

before it comes crashing down around my ears.

But where would I run?

Empire now covers the planet.

The building is everywhere.

And almost all of us are inside of it.

All of us.

All six and a half billion of us.

One of the hardest things to talk about

is the human population explosion.

The friends and neighbors I spoke with all

seemed to agree that the enormous

increase in human population would

soon have to be reckoned with.

We're approaching full tilt, I think,

in terms of what the planet can sustain.

Ane species that has outgrown its environment

is pressed for resources.

is it just all going to end,

and is that going to be the solution?

You know, are we gonna become extinct

like the dinosaurs?

Equilibrium will be re-achieved.

Unfortunately, nature is a harsh taskmaster.

Because we're so intelligent,

because we're such a different class of animal,

with such a big brain, we have the ability

to understand and foresee and prepare

and stuff for these things,

doesn't mean we will.

How will we face into the

issue of human population?

I went to speak with William Catton, a

professor of Sociology & Human Ecology

at Washington State University,

now retired, and author of an amazing

book on ecology and human

population called Overshoot.

According to Catton's assessment

of the carrying capacity of the planet.:

I think the way we're living now,

the world was overpopulated already

be the time of our civil war.

The population at the time of the US

Civil War was just over one billion.

So we've now overshot that number by

more than 5 billion. As Catton told me.:

It is possible to exceed carrying

capacity. But only temporarily.

if you exceed carrying capacity

you then damage the environment

upon which you're depending.

Looking closely, I've come to see that

population numbers for humans, in and of

themselves, are only part of the story.

As Catton points out, it's the damage

those numbers do that counts.

And that damage is intimately

connected to our way of life.

The Earth supports as great a collective

mass of ants as it does people.

It can do so because ants aren't

building 6000-square-foot homes,

driving two hours to their jobs,

buying plasma TV sets, and killing each

other with depleted uranium munitions.

We in the developed world have

32 times the footprint on the planet,

on resources... depletion...

32 times a person in india.

I think we all know that

though the figure is stunning.

And it ought to make us really think,

and start to talk with each other about this.

You talk about how many "energy

slaves", per capita, do we have?

In this country we've got something like 70 times

as many energy slaves per capita

as people in Bangladesh.

instead of thinking of Bangladesh

as the overpopulated country,

if you multiply each of us be seventy

- take that 290 million, or whatever number of

us there are now, multiple it be seventy - wow.

We are an overpopulated country.

In those terms, the US is a nation of

21 billion people. And my own three

children add 210 to that number.

To speak of population, then, as the root

cause of our problem makes little sense to me.

It conjures images of crowded third-world

cities and teeming masses of human flesh,

while the global impacts of rich first-world

lifestyles go unexamined.

Big feet. More and more feet. And more

and more feet getting bigger and bigger.

And if these feet just keep on walking, one of

these days they're gonna walk right into oblivion.

It cannot be sustained for much longer.

There are any number of catastrophic

forces that could lower our numbers,

as oil depletion, climate change and

environmental collapses play out.

One thing large populations are

especially prone to is disease.

Microbes are gonna have a lot more to do with it

than humans have to do with it in the end.

Nature - we're still governed by natural rules,

we like to think we're not, but we are -

when you put together the kind of biomass

that humans represent on this planet,

we're an asset to somebody. We're a resource.

But it may be possible to meet the

situation with consciousness and intention.

Once we get to the peak human

population, wherever that is -

I hope it is 8 1/2 billion rather than

12 billion but it's gonna be high -

whenever we get there, what -

do we have a vision of what we should do?

I mean, we got to the peak,

and there's trouble all around us!

What should we do?

Somehow we've got to devise a way

for obtaining a soft landing as we

reduce the population from six-plus

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