Commentary By Ron Beasley�
As politicians world wide argue about the debt crisis few are willing to even look at the real problem that faces not just the United States but every human on the planet. Tom Whipple takes a look at the third human transition which unlike the first two will not result in a better life or an ever increasing population - just the opposite.
Man in his present form has been around for about 200,000 years. For the first 190,000 of those man was a hunter gather - what you ate today was what you killed or found today. That all changed about 10,000 years ago - the first transition.
The first great change the Neolithic Revolution happened circa 10,000 to 7,000 years ago when our remote ancestors discovered how to domesticate plants and animals. This was great for instead of chasing around in the woods all day trying to spear or find something to eat, a person could sit at home and produce all the food he needed not only for himself and his family, but several others as well. These others could then group themselves in villages, towns, or cities and start developing specialized skills - tailor, shoemaker, brain surgeon, stock broker. All these wonderful new skills could develop because a farmer could produce and transport enough stored energy in the form of grain, veggies, fruits and animals, to allow civilizations to form. These civilizations did all sorts of things; they educated a least some of their young, discovered writing, science, the arts, and made war on each other -- all because there was enough energy stored in harvested food, wood, and later metals so that not everybody needed to search for food all day.
The second transition occured about 200 years ago - we know it as the industrial revolution.
Although this revolution started with better iron-making and waterwheel-powered textile factories, it really took off with the exploitation of fossil fuels (coal) and the invention of the steam engine. Someday the historians might get around to renaming the epoch, "the fossil fuel revolution" for it was this new source of energy that allowed it to happen. After the steam engine allowed us to pump out coal mines, there was no holding mankind back -- trains, factories, steamships, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, and electronics were all developed in short order. Lost in all the excitement, however, was the simple fact that all these wonders and a whole new way of life for many was all wrought by massive amounts of very cheap energy that could be extracted from the ground in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas.
For many, thoughts of getting enough to eat faded into the mists as a farmer or two equipped with science, mechanization, transportation and fertilizer could feed hundreds of others, living thousands of miles away, at ridiculously low cost. From an historical perspective, however, the major result of the fossil fuel-powered industrial revolution was the astonishing growth of the world' s population - from circa 1 billion people in 1800 to seven billion this coming August. That this growth could occur can be attributed to the massive increase in food production and transportation that fossil fuels and derivative fertilizers allowed, and to the nearly universal dissemination of modern medicine that cut infant mortality and increased life spans.
So we have seven billion people on the planet most of whom are dependent on cheap fossil fuels for their existence. Fossil fuels are a finite source and we are already at the end of cheap fossil fuels. There is perhaps no where that the unsustainability of the fossil fuel revolution is more obvious than India:
While Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for feeding billions his methods came with a price and is not sustainable. His agricultural methods were dependent an fossil fuels to power tractors and make fertilizer and other chemicals. His greatest accomplishment was thought to be in India but as Grist reports that success story slowly soured.
In India, site of the Green Revolution�s greatest putative triumph, the legacy is even more mixed.
Today in India�s grain belt, less than 40 years after Borlaug�s Nobel triumph, the water table has been nearly completely tapped out by massive irrigation projects, farmers are in severe economic crisis, and cancer rates, seemingly related to agrichemical use, are tragically high.
In other words, to generate the massive yield gains that won Borlaug his Nobel, the nation sacrificed its most productive farmland and a generation of farmers.
And it's not just fossil fuels, it's also water, phosphorus and metals. The pie is going to get a smaller and the population will have to follow.
Taken together, the decline and eventual near cessation of fossil fuel production and that of many other minerals, disruption in global weather patterns, and the growing food and water scarcity will constitute the third great transition. Unlike the previous transitions in which life arguably got better for some, if not most, of the world's peoples, any upside to this transition seems to pale in the face of what is to come. Obviously the seven billion of us are going to have to shrink to some more sustainable number. Some demographers are already arguing that this might be under 1 billion. It would be nice if we could all do a China and limit each female to one child for a few generations, but this seems unlikely to happen soon. In reality, the transition to a sustainable world population is likely to be much less pleasant.
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