Your Kids Aren't Going To Make it! How We're Mortgaging The Future
Filed Under Inconvenient Truths, Survival
Well unless you’ve been living in a cave, or on Mars in recent times, you must have picked up on the debate about environmental damage, most likely climate change as one particular aspect of that, as mapped out in Al Gore’s movie "An Incovenient Truth".
So a while back I said to myself, here I am living a very comfortable lifestyle with my family in a leafy suburb of Sydney - what can I do to live more sustainably? What does green living mean in practice, how much does it cost to change lifestyle to do it?
So that’s how this blog started off life. and what I did next was to do lots of research about:
- electricity consumption,
- efficiency of different appliances
- alternative power sources,
- solar panels,
- solar water heating,
- carbon emissions,
- our environmental footprint
- etc, etc.
We started off by doing simple things like switching off lights all the time (and endlessly reminding the kids to do the same), putting on more clothes instead of the heating, turning off PCs, walking more, trading in the 2 large, fuel guzzling family cars for a small hatchback etc.
As I progressed through the research phase a painful reality began to emerge. The reality is that the consumption that goes along with the average western lifestyle is wholly unsustainable.
And it’s unsustainable right here, right now, not in some vague far off century, or maybe for our grandchildren.
It’s unsustainable in the sense that many resources will soon become scarce, especially oil and water, and the planet is going through changes that will probably mean the end of this particular phase of civilisation.
If that sounds over the top, it was primarily environmental destruction and resource shortages that ended almost every other human civilisation before ours. The difference this time is that it’s occurring on a global rather than a regional scale.
When Will This Happen?
Based on current progress, if you’re under 40 probably (I think almost certainly) within your lifetime. If you have young children like I do, it’s going to need, literally, a miracle for them to live their lives in a manner anything like we have.
Notice I use the word probably, because the reality is I really don’t know what the future will bring. I’m not claiming this is the "Truth". On the other hand, the mathematics and probabilities of what is likely to happen are clear. The numbers on consumption, population growth, resource depletion, environmental destruction all tell the same story when you examine them.
Simply put, 6.5 Billion people living the way we do are killing the planet. Specifically, we’re:
- reproducing too much
- consuming too much,
- destroying too much arable land with poor farming practices,
- losing too much topsoil,
- cutting down too many trees,
- using too much oil and othe rnon-renewable resources, (see peak oil)
- producing too much waste and pollution,
- taking too many fish and killing too many other species
- disrupting too many eco systems
- and so on
You see when you look under the surface of our technologically quite-advanced civilisation, it really has very simple foundations.
- We grow things and turn them into food.
- We dig up/mine other stuff and either use it for fuel or make useful things with it.
When you’re surfing the internet, or cruising around in your car courtesy of the satnav, answering emails on your mobile phone in the middle of nowhere, or watching a high definition movie on your home theater system it’s easy to lose sight of these basic underpinnings.
We’re biological beings and if enough stuff doesn’t grow we die.
Personally, I think there are 2 major issues looming:
- Constraints on oil availability due to peak oil (our economy and agriculture are dependent on oil as a raw material and for cheap, portable energy).
- Water scarcity combined with loss of topsoil and forest cover which will affect our ability to grow enough food to feed ourselves (and is I think more dangerous than climate change in the short term).
So why don’t "they" do something about it?
Because there are no easy answers and our political and societal systems are set up for one answer - growth and consumption. Nobody gets and stays elected for telling peope what they can’t have. The illusion of endless growth has to be maintained.
The unfortunate reality is that the environment’s ability to supply food and resources is finite - there is a limit to what it can provide and still survive longterm and all the signs are we’ve already gone past it’s limits of sustainability.
To use an analogy, the income (e.g. interest) on our capital (the world’s environmental capacity) is not enough to live on, so we’re eating into our capoital (eating up the environment) to keep us going. And when the capital is gone "it’s game over".
We’re eating up the envitronment just to feed, house and clothe the 6.5B people. Every year there’s less productive land, more topsoil has been lost, more species driven to extinction.
And despite the Kyoto Agreement, a growing awareness of the issues in the community, the efforts of government bodies and organisations like the UN, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and so on, consumption and the associated environmental damage is accelerating.
Most reasonable people now accept that human activity has had a negative impact on the planet’s environment. and climate (In reality you’d have to be blind not to notice it). The issue is most people don’t realise how far down the track to terminal, irreversible (for our civilisation) damage we probably are.
So the purpose of this site is to help you understand the situation with two objectives:
1. So you can make whatever difference you can in reducing your impact on the environment, both as an individual and as a member of a broader community.
2. Make your plans for how you are going to cope with the probable changes in living conditions in the years to come, especially learn how to grow your own food
Site Organisation and Layout:
After each topic there’s a set of suggested actions you can take or research.
Important Note:
This stuff is not in any way easy to deal with. After all, if you children you want them to have a good life too.
I think this type of material rarely appears in the mainstream press because there are no easy answers and our political and societal systems are set up for one answer - growth and consumption.
So it’s likely many governments and people won’t want to face up to reality until is it too late to put plans in place and it will then become a question of raw survival.
And so do civilisations rise and fall. . . .
Melodramatic? Maybe. A likely future? Probably.
