End Game: Tipping Point for Planet Earth?

It was just such an approach that turned what is now one of the most densely populated countries in the world away from the brink of disaster. The tiny island nation of Mauritius, located about two thousand kilometres off the eastern coast of Africa, packs in more than six hundred people per square kilometre, a density one-third higher than India and four times higher than China. At about the same time that China was recognising its population-growth problem and instituting its one-child policy, Mauritius was recognising that its ballooning population was straining resources too. The local elimination of malaria, higher living standards and improved health care had brought down death rates, while birth rates continued to increase at a fast pace. Both countries integrated access to contraceptives into their health-care systems, but Mauritius emphasised education instead of laws that limited family size, including making school free by 1976, which made it much easier for families to choose between sending their sons or daughters out to work or continuing their education. But already by that time, as Ramola Ramtohul wrote in an article entitled ‘Fractured Sisterhood: The Historical Evolution of the Women’s Movement in Mauritius’, ‘Mauritius had a generation of young women, especially among the upper classes, who had had access to quality education and thus had a different outlook on life’ (Afrika Zamani 18 & 19:71–101, 2010–2011).

The result: a more than 60 per cent decline in fertility rate over the years 1965 to 1980, and a 75 per cent decline by 2010. Along with this came increasing prosperity for the country’s people as a whole – from a low-income agricultural economy in 1968 to a diversified middle-income economy over the ensuing decades. In fact, for the past few years Mauritius has ranked first among Africa’s countries (and forty-fifth worldwide) in terms of economic competitiveness, a measure that includes such things as infrastructure, education, financial market development, technology and market size.

That recipe for success is translatable to other countries that today stand where Mauritius did half a century ago, but it requires one more essential ingredient: tolerance for diversity of cultural traditions, and openness to new ways of doing things. Mauritians had those things built in through their history, with a succession of Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonisers, who over the course of a few centuries melded with Africans (originally brought in as slaves), Indians (brought in as indentured servants when the slave trade was abolished) and Chinese settlers. Once colonial rule was removed, the resulting ‘rainbow nation’ included four ethnic and four major religious groups that had found ways to peacefully co-exist and work together to make things better. That kind of tolerance and cooperation will be absolutely essential if the Mauritius success story is to be replicated elsewhere; religious intolerance and ethnic rivalries end up being deal-breakers.

The drop in fertility rates in countries like China, Mauritius, India and others was unforeseen by Paul Ehrlich when he wrote The Population Bomb, and is one reason his prediction of widespread doom by the year 2000 did not come to pass. When he wrote the book, fertility rates in such countries were near six children per woman or higher; less than a decade later, the carrot or stick approach began lowering that precipitously, with the effect that by the year 2000, the average fertility rate in those countries had fallen to 2.5 or fewer children per woman. The lesson there is that it is very possible to bring population growth rates under control fast, especially when it is done with the carrots of education and economic betterment, in ways that make the majority of people happy and more productive.

The other very important thing that The Population Bomb underestimated was human innovation. The prediction of doom was strongly influenced by the food crisis that was looming in 1968 – people in poor countries had been dying of starvation on a massive scale over the previous few years. But with the recognition of world hunger as a problem, innovation and cross-nation cooperation kicked in, taking the form of the Green Revolution, which ramped up food production many times over in just two decades, and thereby staved off mass starvation for a billion or so people. Later, along came computers, the internet and mobile phone technology, which now make possible a global conversation about any world crisis, and harness what could be called a global brain – at last count more than six billion connected people – to formulate and implement feasible solutions. So we bought some time through the last bit of the twentieth century. What about now?

One more lesson comes out of the nearly four decades we’ve had since 1968 to observe how population growth and the human spirit actually work: despite the fact that things didn’t crash by the end of the twentieth century, we are not out of the woods by any means. We now know with reasonable certainty that in just the next half a lifetime, some ten billion people will be on the planet, seething masses overwhelming the capacities of poor countries and banging at the doors of rich ones. As a result, cities will at least double in size, the old will outnumber the young in many communities, and many more places will see their social, political and economic systems put in a pressure cooker. Mind you, this is the best-case scenario – where we rapidly bring fertility rates down to replacement rate in all the nations where that is currently not the case. Even this optimistic scenario means that population growth is about to tip humanity into a future that will be as different from the present as the India we experienced in 2007 was from our home in the United States back then. Whether that future ends up looking like Ehrlich’s Hell remains to be seen – it still could, if we make the wrong choices.

But one thing is for sure: sustaining at least the quality of life that the world provides to people today is not going to happen if we ignore how an extra three billion of us are going to impact the planet. It’s not just our numbers we have to worry about – it’s also what each of us needs and wants.

3

Stuff (#u8bd62c41-881f-50ed-b03a-a71d189d5ecf)

Tony, near midnight, southern Colorado, around 1960

My heart was pounding just about as loud as his fist on the door. Bam! Bam! Bam! ‘I want my money! I want my money!’ Bam! Bam! Bam!

I was a little kid, maybe eight years old, eyes shut tight, hunkered down in our tiny house, a well-worn clapboard whose once-white paint had seen better days and was peeling here and there. Inside was hideous grey wallpaper with big maroon flowers in the cramped living room, a linoleum-floored kitchen with a chrome-legged, red-topped Formica table, one institutional-green bedroom for my parents, and a dingy pink room where I slept. One of the windows in that room had a prime view of the dirt alley where ragweed liked to grow, and the other opened right onto the slab-concrete front porch, which sat there like a pitiful stage in full view of one of the town’s busiest streets. My bed was right next to the porch window, wide open that hot summer night, so the slamming door of a ratty pick-up truck less than twenty feet away had awoken me, followed by the angry stomping of feet up the two porch steps. At that point all that was standing between me and the drunk man pounding on our door was a flimsy curtain and a rusting screen. I fully expected his fist to come smashing through at any second. I lay there as still as I could, tried not to breathe too loud, and hoped for the best.

I had had a lot of practice in hoping for the best, because we were poor. I never got the full story on why that man was beating on our door in the middle of the night, but as near as I could work it out, he thought he was owed some money, and whether or not he was, we just didn’t have any to give him. That year was a particularly bad one, I think – probably the same year when there was a month or two when we had to choose between getting our electricity or our gas shut off because we couldn’t afford to pay for both, and when some meals came from hunting rabbits or doves on the outskirts of town.

The point being, I didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. But I certainly knew a lot of kids who did. And like anyone who is forced to do without, I came to equate having nice stuff with having a better life. For whatever reason, that seems to be human nature, which is in large part why, fast-forward nearly fifty years, our family is now like millions of other middle-class families in industrialised nations. We have a decent house, with climate control and a nice irrigated yard, a couple of cars, computers, mobile phones, and what sometimes seems like an uncountable number of gadgets, the purchase of which makes us feel good, at least for a while. And, like most parents, we’ve done our best to make sure our children have all those things that we thought would make us happy when we were little. In a word, we’ve attained what a billion or so people consider normal.

Normal for places like the United States, the European Union and a few other small pockets throughout the world, anyway. Most of the human race now exists on less than $10 a day, and about a billion scrape by on less than $2 per day. Poor as we were by American standards when I was growing up, I now know that even back when that guy was beating on our door, we were well off in comparison to most people in the world. And I’d wager that, just like me when I was young, the vast majority of those people are looking for that sense of accomplishment that comes from bettering their situation, and especially from working to make sure their kids have a better life. Happily, the opportunities for advancing the next generation are growing in many countries that harbour huge numbers of poor people, among them the most populous nations on Earth – places like India and China. Which means that, if human nature follows the same course in such places as it has in already-developed nations, in many, many more households over the next thirty years the presents will pile high as the old stuff is replaced with the newer models.

The emotional satisfaction that ever-growing pile will bring to billions is hard to deny, both in principle and in reality. Although material goods are certainly not the route to true happiness, in today’s world, like it or not, they do in large measure help define social status, self-worth, and are often the currency with which to outwardly express affection, even love – diamonds are forever, so they say. And some material things – like our electronic communications network, planes, cars and so on – are in fact necessary to maintain the global connections that society now so depends upon.

All of which leads to a major conundrum, because the material stuff we value so much does not appear out of thin air. Ultimately, each and every thing we manufacture ends up eating a little bit of Planet Earth, and the pie is going fast. The best estimates, from a group called the Global Footprint Network, indicate that presently we are using up the planet at a pace that would require one and a half Earths to sustain us over the long term. Assuming no changes in how we do business, and taking into account the growing numbers of people in the world and the entry of more and more of them into better economic situations, we will require the equivalent of two Earths to sustain us by the year 2030, and three Earths by 2050. Actually, if everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American – that is to say, the lifestyle we live, and that many of you reading this book live – we’d need five Earths to keep us going. The problem, of course, is that there is only one Earth.

None of us are actively trying to trash the planet. We are simply enjoying the stuff we have, and in some cases actually need, in today’s world. Mobile phones are a prime example. Most of the people in the world now carry around these electronic wonders, facilitating everything from the casual chat to getting water (as we mentioned in the first chapter), mobilising social movements in places like Thailand and the Middle East, and negotiating global crises. The fact that more than 6 billion mobile phone connections now link us is remarkable, in that it potentially connects most of the human race in a way that could be harnessed to solve global problems – a sort of global brain, if you will, where each phone is like a neuron that can transfer information from one part of society to the next.

But all those phones have to be produced out of raw materials, some of which you’ve probably never even heard of, but which are already in short supply. Take the ever-more ubiquitous smartphone as an example. Lots of people, us included, don’t leave home without one of them, and it’s not inaccurate to say there is a large sector of society that regard them as indispensable. No need to memorise, just Google it.

Just using one popular model as an example, as of March 2014, around half a billion had been produced and sold worldwide. Include all smartphones, and the number increases to more than 1.4 billion in use, a number that grew by 44 per cent in 2013, with many more poised to be manufactured over the coming years. Mind you, there were no smartphones before 2007, so we’re still in the early days. Even so, the world is starting to feel the impact, although all you feel immediately is a bit of pleasure as you heft that sleek new phone in your hand, and as you stroke from app to app on that wonderfully responsive touchscreen.

What you’re actually stroking is rare earths. Producing that touchscreen requires somebody, somewhere, digging in a mine to extract minerals that will ultimately yield elements like yttrium, lanthanum, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, cerium and neodymium. Rare-earth elements are not exactly rare, but are so named because there are few economically viable ore deposits that yield them, and they are found in only a few countries. For that reason, among others, world production of rare earths has shifted from country to country over the years, as one area gets mined out or as political and economic winds shift. India and Brazil used to be leading producers sixty years ago. Then the Mountain Pass mine in California took over as the top dog in the 1960s and 1980s. Today it’s mostly all about China, which produces over 90 per cent of the rare earths necessary for manufacturing not only mobile phones, but also critical components in the motors and batteries for electric and hybrid cars, windmill turbines, and a variety of other things that are becoming increasingly important to society.

Which brings us back to tipping points, in two guises. The most obvious one is that any time a single country holds a monopoly on a needed commodity, problems can arise. In 2011, China produced a whopping 97 per cent of the rare-earth elements needed by the world. That has fallen to about 80 per cent since then, as mines in other countries came on line, but much of the ore from those mines ends up passing through China for processing anyway. This single-country bottleneck means we only have to look a couple of years down the road to see trouble. In 2010, world demand for rare-earth elements was about 136,100 tons, but global production was only 133,600 tons (remember, almost all from China). The 2,500-ton shortfall was covered by stocks already on hand from previous mining. By 2015, global demand is estimated to reach between 160,000 and 210,000 tons per year. Over the same time, China estimated that its internal demand would require 130,000 tons per year, which led to it restricting its exports, beginning in 2010. That caused some upheaval – it drove up prices for rare earths, meaning that United States and European manufacturers were forced to pay three times as much as their Chinese competitors, causing a dispute that landed at the World Trade Organization.

The outcome of that dispute aside (China lost, but as of 2014 was appealing), one simple fact remains. Within just the next two years, without a major recycling campaign, a lot more mines are going to have to be opened up to cover the anticipated shortfall of at least thirty thousand tons. While most experts agree that the reserves in the ground will probably meet demand for the next decade or two – it’s uncertain after that – bringing a new mine on line and getting its products into the supply chain takes five to ten years, meaning that at least temporary shortfalls are already on the horizon. The political and economic ramifications include things like price spikes and trade wars. In the best case, you can think of such marked and political fluctuations as very rapid changes in global dynamics that are potentially reversible, much like the boiling-water-to-steam kind of tipping point described in Chapter 1. For instance, with rare earths, five to ten years down the road, prices and availability could stabilise for a while if more mines are able to be brought on line, but in the interim, a period of volatility could make for some rough going for society. In the worst case, control of a needed resource by a single country makes for a new world order – a tipping point that is essentially irreversible over human lifetimes.

Ramping up rare-earth production also brings us to a second kind of tipping point – adding all those new mines means that we inevitably destroy what was there beforehand, and often make the surrounding areas unfit places to live. One of the most infamous mines-gone-bad examples is China’s Ba0tou district in the Gobi Desert of Inner Mongolia. Satellite images of the area bring to mind gigantic blobs of decaying grey-brown intestines splayed around waterways, and populated areas and waterways that show up as blood-red spatters and rivulets. (These remarkable NASA Earth Observatory Images can be viewed at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=77723.) The intestine-blobs are open-pit mines, the largest of which are more than half a mile deep (a thousand metres) and cover more than eighteen square miles (forty-eight square kilometres). Some of the blood-red rivulets drain into and out of black-coloured ponds that hold the waste water and muck from the mines. The water isn’t actually black (or blood-red) – that’s just the satellite-image colour enhancement. The real water is in fact much more colourful – oranges, yellows, browns and greys – a Technicolor swirl that is typical of soups of toxic waste.

On the ground, the situation is every bit as bad as the satellite images suggest, according to reporters who have visited and interviewed residents. You can get an idea of the scale of the problem when you realise that processing one ton of rare earths yields about two thousand tons of toxic waste. As a result, in the Baotou area, newspaper accounts say that the well water, which people drank before they knew any better, ‘looked fine, but it smelled really bad’, as related by a local farmer, Wang Jianguo, in a Guardian news story by Jonathan Kaiman (‘Rare Earth Mining in China: The Bleak Social and Environmental Costs’, 20 March 2014). The reason for the bad smell was that the water was laced with carcinogens and other toxic substances. The article that reported Wang’s words went on to say: ‘In the 1990s, when China’s rare earths production kicked into full gear, [Wang’s] sheep died and his cabbage crops withered. Most of his neighbours have moved away. Seven have died of cancer. His teeth have grown yellow and crooked; they jut out at strange angles from blackened gums.’ Some local sheep (those that survive) grow ‘two rows of teeth, some so long that they couldn’t close their mouths’.

Those kinds of examples are not confined to China by any means, nor are they confined to rare-earth mines – in the United States, for instance, just head west on Interstate 90 from Butte, Montana, towards Anaconda. In Butte you’ll see the Berkeley Pit, the mile-long, half-mile-wide, third-of-a-mile-deep remnant of an open-pit copper mine. The Pit is now partially filled by a lake, which is actually a potent broth of arsenic, cadmium, zinc, copper and sulphuric acid. Keep driving west out of Butte and you’ll begin to see stunted trees, then none at all, the result of soil contamination from noxious fumes and dangerous particulates that used to belch out of the copper smelters at Anaconda. Copper has not been mined in Butte or smelted at Anaconda for decades, yet a huge landscape, and its ability to support people and animals, and grow plants, has been changed forever.

We’ll talk more about the tipping points triggered by environmental devastation in Chapter 7, but the key point here is simply this: keeping all those mobile phones rolling off the assembly lines, as we’ve done up to now, is taking an ever-growing toll on Planet Earth. The copper in your smartphone probably comes from Chile, the gold from Peru, the silver from Australia, and the platinum from South Africa. It could also have coltan from Africa. Each of those places, and many more, now has its own versions of Baotou or Butte, and the number of those tipped-to-devastation landscapes is growing by the day.

Mining the raw materials that go into the stuff we like is just the first part of the impact story. The next part is turning the raw materials into the final product and getting it to your doorstep. That takes, in a word, energy, in the form of electricity or heat to power various manufacturing processes, and petrol, diesel or jet fuel to transport components through all the places linked in a product’s supply chain: for instance, the supply chain for smartphones can include about seventeen countries. All that energy means that the material goods we’re so fond of contribute mightily to changing Earth’s climate.

We’ll say more about climate change and its part in the tipping-point recipe in Chapter 4. But for now, suffice to say that there is a tight bond between climate change and our current love affair with stuff, because every new item that is produced adds more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It’s those greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide but also nitrous oxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons – that are essentially giving Earth a fever, causing not only more killer heatwaves, but also more droughts, floods, ocean acidification and so on. Greenhouse gases come from burning the fossil fuels we use to manufacture and transport all our material goods, a mode of energy production that people have exploited since the Industrial Revolution began some three centuries ago. And what that means in terms of manufacturing and transporting goods is that each and every thing you buy is part of the climate-change problem, as well as part of the raw materials problem.