Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?

William Rees
Parkland Institute Conference
Edmonton Alberta November 18, 2000

Humankind think of ourselves as somehow different and separate of the rest of nature. This shows up in most of our disciplines. Even in ecology, ecologists study non-human species. Ecologists in universities don't consider human beings as species of organism and so ecology has little to say about the problems confronting the planet because we speak of other species but we exclude humans from the mix. We do not look at ourselves as biological entities on the planet.

Economists do the opposite. They focus on humans exclusively but pay relatively little attention to the environment, and when they do, through environmental economics, it's merely an extension of the market dynamics: We've got to get the prices right. Put a price on nature, commodify and privatize it, and everything will be well.

The starting points of economic theory

The basic starting point for the analysis in most economics texts is that the economy is separate from the environment. And yes, we recognize there are linkages between the two-there is a flow of resources in this direction and a flow of wastes in that direction. But the fundamental image, the myth we have created, Christian philosophy solidified in the Enlightenment by the French philosopher Rene Descartes and, hence, we call this Cartesian dualism, is that humankind is somehow special and separate from the rest of nature. If you start from that perspective and then decide that these linkages aren't particularly important, we can arrive at a position where economic growth can continue indefinitely. And that is precisely what modern economics has done. Starting way back in the 1960s, we have these kinds of statements. Solow actually gave this talk in Toronto in 1973 but it was after ten years of developing the idea in economics that, if it is easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then the world can get along without nature. And the extinction of resources is merely an event, not a catastrophe.

Solow is relatively conservative about this, he has a big "If" up there. Solow, by the way, is also a Nobel laureate whose Nobel prize came from his work on the capacity of human ingenuity to substitute for natural resources and hence continually relieve us from any concern about the decline of nature. He's a relative moderate in this game. If we look at Richard Gordon, a very well known and prominent U.S. energy economist, the tendency to technological progress is the critical economic law. Let's get to the bottom line, human ingenuity has continually staved off any problem with resources, so the immediate need for avoiding depletion is nil. In other words, we have this entrenched view, it's called by the way the principle of near perfect substitution, that humanity ingenuity is capable of substituting for the products of nature. The most ebullient expression of this particular vision is driving our planet to a very large extent today.

Julian Simon died about a year or two after he made this statement. A professor at the School of Management at the University of Maryland, with Robert Solow, a member of the United States President's Council of Economic Advisors, here's how he sees the human prospect.

Technology exists now to produce in inexhaustible quantities of all the products made by nature. We can feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.

This is not a modest statement. The planet's been around for about 4 billion years, so to think that we can outdo nature and maintain the current rate of population and economic growth for 7 billion years is, I would submit, a fairly optimistic statement of the capacity of the human mind to proceed.

We're laughing at this, but these are the people who have created the intellectual platform for the current global hegemony of economism that is driving us away from passion and reason in the management of human affairs. He was challenged on this by a physics professor, a friend of mine from the University of Colorado, and he backed off. He said, well, this was a printing error, it should have said 7 million years. That's an enormous back track for an economist, let me tell you. Three orders of magnitude.

My physicist friend, Alfred Bartlett, who's also an expert on exponential growth, said let's take Simon at his word. Suppose the human population expands by only 1% for 7 million years. And he was able to show, you can't even do this on a calculator, you need a fairly sophisticated computer. After 7 million years of growth, with a starting base of 5.7 billion people, the numbers of human beings would be thirty-four thousand orders of magnitude, that's ten to the 34,000 larger than the number of atoms in known universe.

Would an intelligent species subscribe to the advice of an individual who believes this? Who gets this published in one of the right-wing journals that promotes the ideas that are driving the election in this country today? I want to keep raising this issue: Would an intelligent species continue to subscribe to this kind of analysis? The kindest thing we can say is that Julian Simon did not do the math.

Can we equate growth with human welfare?

Let's look to where it leads us. What are the assumptions that flow out of this? What we see is a platform that gives us unbridled optimism about growth prospects. It becomes very easy in that situation to define growth and the creation of wealth, at least material wealth, as the singular goal and objective of the human enterprise to the abandonment of virtually all else. Globalism today equates production and income growth with human welfare. The destruction of the welfare state, which is arguably the only sign of human intelligence that has arisen in this century, not the destruction but the welfare state is the obvious sign of human intelligence, is a backward step toward a uni-variate, unidimensional concept of what human beings are all about. We put economism and production and income growth as the singular variable, we nominate the marketplace as the wellspring and arbiter of all that matters in society, we rely on mechanistic assumptions of global economic efficiency and exploitation of national comparative advantage to maximize this output, notions of the public interest disappear. This country was built on a concept of the common good. That the word common interest, in which all of us had a stake, these things have now fallen off the table. In the current electorate you will hear no reference to any of those kinds of issues. Intangible values such as loyalty to person and place, community self-reliance, cultural mores are generally ignored, captured in Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase "There is no such thing as society." The environment in these circumstances is effectively priced at zero. Individuals and firms exercising preferences in the marketplace should determine the allocation, nothing said about the distribution, of the world's resources. That is the paradigm. These are the underlying principles driving the global development paradigm today. What we forget about all of this is that this is actually a perversion of good economics.

We're claiming this to be good economics, but economics recognizes that we should be maximizing welfare. But welfare comprises a great deal more than the propencity or capacity to consume. A healthy environment, natural beauty, stable communities, safe neighbourhood, economic security, social justice, a sense of belonging, and countless other life qualities contribute to welfare. To the extent that we tax ourselves to achieve any of those things, and to the extent that doing that reduces our capacity to consume at the margin, to the extent that we benefit from stressing these values than we do from groping for the next incrementive income, then we're better off as a society. If we value any of these public goods any more than people would value a bit more material consumption, foregoing additional production or income growth, is sound economics because welfare is increased.

We've reached the state today where we could make the case that but by prescribing to the list of values that I put up earlier, we're actually now destroying more value than we are creating through the wealth generating capacities of the economy. Let's push on that one a little bit.

Extreme market economics implicitly equates welfare with income growth. This model has nothing to do with moral or ethical considerations. Nothing to do with equity considerations. Nothing to do with gender considerations. It undermines intangible values such as loyalty to person and place, community, self-reliance and so on. As a result of all this, the model is even failing on its own terms. Economic growth is supposed to raise all hopes, relieve the poor of poverty, diminish the income gap between rich and poor; and yet after 40 years of trying this out, we've seen a steady increase in the income gap. In 1960 the richest 20% of humanity earned thirty times as much as the poorest 20% of humanity. After 40 years of continuous aggrandizement of this economism model we have seen the income gap increase to eighty to one. Today the richest 20% of humanity takes home eighty times the income of the poorest 20% of humanity. Not only has the income gap increased, but in the last few years, the absolutely poor are absolutely worse off than they were at the beginning of the implementation of globalism. The corporate model is failing on its own terms.

If we were to consider this to be a scientific experiment, scientists would reject the model and return to considerations of reality. In economism we have a kind of disciplinary distortion of the progress of humankind, we see the complete failure of the model. The solution is to try to get the world to conform to the model, not to try to change the model to conform to reality.

The vision of human ecology

Visioning is extremely important because we can shift the structure of our vision just a little bit and arrive at an entirely different description of how the system functions or ought to function. If we started out with an idea that economy and environment are separate issues, and we've seen where that has taken us to some detail, let's rethink this a little bit. Here's where I become an ecologist. The economy is really the physical manifestation of human ecology. It is how human beings are in the world in terms of getting and using resources and allocating and distributing them among competing interests within our society. If we study that process in any other species it's ecology. Ecologists look at how other organisms use the ecosystems of which they are a part and contribute structurally and functionally to the smooth functioning of those ecosystems. So economics is really human ecology. If we think in those terms, we have to recognize that the economy is not separate from the environment but is an integral component of the environment.

Let me illustrate this by asking a simple question. What do you suppose the most ecologically significant marine mammal is? I hear whales, seals, whatever. I don't mean to make fun, but we're still thinking in economistic terms because the ecologically most significant marine mammal is sitting in your seat. If you think of the energy and material flows through nature that occur in the ocean, human beings appropriate more of the products of the sea than all marine mammals that live in the sea put together. The human fishing fleet now takes between 25 and 35% of the total products of photosynthesis from that 10% of the ocean, which is truly biologically productive.

Now we talk about sea birds, we don't mean birds that live in the sea, we mean birds that feed at sea but nest on land. By that definition, we are marine mammals. We feed at sea, we nest on land. But we do not tend to think of ourselves in those terms, as biological entities. Now we could make the same argument for every ecosystem type on the planet. Human beings are clearly the dominant consumer organism on all the world's grasslands, either directly harvesting wheat, oats, barley, grain, rice for our own consumption or we feed it to other species, which we then consume.

We're clearly the dominant species in every forest ecosystem on the planet in terms of the appropriation of the products of nature through that forest ecosystem. How would an intelligent species, which by any reasonable definition of relationship has become the dominant consumer organism in all the ecosystems on the planet, how would such a species possibly conceive of itself as independent from and separate of nature? Is there intelligent life on Earth?

Let's pursue this a little bit. How come we've been so successful as species? Again, I want to keep emphasizing that like it or not, you are a bunch of animals. That's not all you are, but we have to acknowledge this side of our reality. But, we're different from other organisms in that we possess this capacity that I started to talk about of reason. We possess certain other qualities that make us unique in some degree. We have a uniquely broad and ever widening food niche. Do you realize that we eat more kinds of things than virtually any other advanced vertebrate organism? And if we can't eat it, we'll domesticate some other animal that will and we'll eat that animal. This gives us an incredible capacity to get into virtually any ecosystem and appropriate the products of nature for our own use.

We are uniquely adaptable. We don't really know, just like being in this room, whether it's July or November outside because we create a little subtropical cocoon in which we move about. And that capacity to alter our immediate environments enables us to exploit every ecosystem and environment on the planet, from the Antarctic to the tropical jungles. Most importantly, we have complex language, which enables us to pass knowledge on and to evolve technologically as well as socially in other ways. The human species, through its language and the cumulative wealth of knowledge, has enabled itself to be better and better at exploiting nature.

The myth we have created is one of independence of nature, because we see such incredible abundance around us, we assume detachment from nature, when in fact technology, far from separating the human enterprise from nature has merely increased the scope and capacity of our capacity to exploit nature.

This isn't divorced from Pat Armstrong's notion because human domination over nature has its parallel, in fact, some would say it's structurally almost organically related to male domination over females, the domination of the west over the east, domination of the north over the south, there is a whole complexity of dominance in this paradigm that emerges in these ways. Because of that, if we think of our dominance over nature, look at the facts of how the human organism has expanded. We expand by displacing other species from their ecological niches. That's just a fancy way of saying we take over their habitats and environments, and the energy and material flows for our own use.

The great plains of North America, this region, used to have somewhere between 20 and 60 million bison migrating regularly over the landscape. Where are they now? Again, they are sitting in your seats because we took over the energy flows through that grassland and we replaced it with grasses that we could eat, or we could feed to animals that we could eat.

The human enterprise expands by displacing other species. Then we eliminate the competition. On the west coast we shoot seals that might eat salmon. Those who own salmon farms have a licence to kill all the seals and sea lions they want that might damage their property. We poison our own food supplies in order to defeat insects that compete with us for our crops.

Language, myth and self-deception

The next way we expand is by depleting both self-producing and non-renewable assets. If you look at the list of ecological problems today-collapsing fisheries, degrading soils, falling water tables-all of these are evidence that the growth of the economy is dependent upon the depletion of other organisms. In fact, if we go back to this diagram, the first thing that we should have acknowledged is that the growth of this system is totally dependent on the availability of energy and material made in nature. The economic system is a consumptive process. Again, I want to illustrate this by showing how our language incorporates a particular myth that deceives us. It's a good place to ask this question. How many of you can name at least one oil producing company? Okay, almost everybody raises a hand-yes, sure, I can name an oil producing company. And, if I pressed you, would it be Shell or Petrocan or Husky or whatever. None of those are oil-producing companies. They are all mere oil extracting companies. But, because we have this self-aggrandizement, we think that the process is a productive process, it creates money wealth, but it does so by extracting energy and material that was originally produced in nature by photosynthesis. There is no process in the economy that does not have that quality of dependence of stuff first produced in nature. Moreover, 100% of the inputs to the economy from nature emerge at the other end as waste. And so we can list the other half of the environmental disasters-accumulating greenhouse gases, climate change, depletion of the ozone layer, the accumulation of toxic contaminants in the food supply-all resulting from the throughput of contaminants from this consumptive process that we have in our economy.

We can put this all together in what I simply call the competitive exclusion principle. This is a necessary consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Now I don't need to bother you with the details of this, but it is the one law that will never be repealed and to which there has never been an exception. Basically it says this: If there is a given amount of throughput, and we take half, then there is only half left for everybody else. If we take three-quarters, then there is only one quarter left for all the other species. This law says that the growth of the human enterprise necessarily means the diminishment of nature.

There is an absolute conflict between the material growth of the economy and the conservation of biodiversity. You will hear over and over again from the mainstream advocates of so-called sustainable development there is no fundamental conflict between economic growth and the environment. Absolute nonsense. There is a fundamental conflict between continued human population and material growth and the conservation of nature because the human process is one of converting nature into dimensions of the human enterprise.

Tony [Clarke] made a reference to the cancerous nature of the current model. Here's a statement from a U.S. medical anthropologist who in fact makes the same statement in rather more detail, that the sum of human activities over the past tens of thousands of years exhibits the four major characteristics of malignancy, naming uncontrolled growth, invasion and destruction of adjacent tissues (that we invade all ecosystems, as I've described), metastasis (the colonization and urbanization of the rest of the world), and dedifferentiation (the growth of this homogenous global culture and the complete destruction of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and so on, around the planet).

Given that that is our historic state, given that we are still growing in population terms of 1.4% per year, given that the expected rate of growth of the human economy is between 3 and 4% for the next half century, from just strictly an ecological point of view, this becomes a relevant question. Is there enough nature to produce all the resources we expect to be needed, to assimilate all the wastes that are going to be generated, while still maintaining the fundamental life support sytems of the planet? We've attempted in our group at UBC to answer that question through what I have called ecological footprint analysis. I can't get into the detail, but this is a technique by which we can estimate the total area of ecosystems, productive ecosystems, land and water ecosystems, required to produce the resources consumed by a defined population and to assimilate the wastes generated by that population.

So the ecological footprint is simply an area of land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources and to assimilate the wastes produced by any population wherever on the planet those resources or land base may be located.

This is fifty nations on the planet plotted in terms of their per capita ecological footprint. Given the current level of economic activity, in other words, the current level of consumption by the populations of these countries, how much of the Earth's surface is required to support each of those people? Here is Canada and the United States, Australia and New Zealand up here. Seven to ten, it's actually 12 hectares per capita right now. So, if you're a typical Canadian you need somewhere between 7 and 8 hectares of land on the planet to produce what you use to assimilate what you produce as waste. Here's most of the developed world. These are most of the countries of Europe and some in Asia. Here's the emerging economies of South America and East Asia. Here are the poorest of the poor--Bangladesh, India, Pakistan--down around a half to just one hectare per capita. That's all they need to produce everything that they consume and to assimilate the wastes that they produce. So there's almost a twenty-fold difference between the poorest and the richest in terms of their individual demands on the planet.

Why does this matter?

It matters because anybody can do these numbers. There are 9 billion hectares of ecologically productive forests, grasslands, croplands on the planet. There are 6 billion people. In an equitable world, each of us is entitled-and this is purely an anthropocentric position, never mind the other 30 million species-there's a hectare and one half of productive ecosystem on land for humans and about a half a hectare of oceans, because 90% of oceans are biological desert. There is 2 hectares per capita, if we then concede 12% to the rest of the species, we're down to about 1.7 hectares per person. But look what we need just to maintain us in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. The current global growth model assumes that we can bring not only all of these folks up to this level of consumption, but that we can add another 3 to 4 billion people to the human family over the next 40 years.

The official U.N. agenda, the World Bank agenda, the International Monetary Fund agenda is one which assumes at least an additional five, perhaps eight-fold expansion of the human economy in the next half century to bring about 8 to 9 billion people up to western European material standards. The question was "Is it possible to do that on this single planet?" and my answer is certainly not. Certainly not through growth with anything like the current technological base and any technologies that are likely to be available in those areas where much of this growth is anticipated to take place. Just to show you how starkly inequitable the current economic system has become in the last few years, I've plotted a selection of those countries in terms of the blue, which is their fair share of the world's ecological and economic output based on population. China is a very populous country, over a fifth of the world's population, they should be getting about 22% of the ecological and economic output. They are only taking about 13%.

The United States, by contrast, has less than 5% of the world's people, but consumes almost a quarter of all the resources on the planet-ecological resources and economic output. Before we knock the United States, in proportionate terms Canada and most of the other developed countries are precisely the same. In terms of our ecological footprint, there is a gross inequity in the distribution of the world's economic and ecological output.

In fact, when we add it all up, it's not difficult to show that at current levels of mean consumption, and you can already infer that from the distribution of footprints among nations, the area of productive ecosystem on Earth is represented by this bar, about 12 billion hectares, what we're using now is on the order of 16 billion hectares. How can we use more than there is? The answer is by drawing down the stocks. You can spend more money than your capital is earning in your bank account. You can do so by depleting the capital.

What does it mean when fish stocks are collapsing? What does it mean when soils are degrading? What does it mean when the forests are disappearing? What does it mean when the atmosphere is becoming contaminated? What does it mean when the Sun, which is the life producing force on the planet, becomes a hazard to health because of ozone depletion?

It means that we are exceeding the long-term carrying capacity of the planet right now, never mind what it will look like after a five-fold expansion of the economy over the next 40 or 50 years.

This is very crude, but I want to get the point across that for most of human history, consumption has increased without damaging the planet. We can live in harmony with this planet under a paradigm that combines passion, reason, and intelligence in a way that enables us to fit in and to sustain ourselves in material adequacy and equity without destroying the planet.

But if we insist on this mythic model that is driving the world today, we continue up this slope and so we're pleased to announce that Canada is growing at 5% per year, that's doubling in what-17 years, 15years? Not recognizing that we're at the point now where the basic carrying capacity, the resource base needed to sustain the existing population starts to go into decline. Ultimately we have to confront the possibility that there won't be sufficient there to maintain the gravy train, certainly not to extend it to the rest of the world's people.

What do we do then? This is where the real vision is required. Do we have the intelligence? I had to stop and think that through myself, and the answer bothered me. This curve, any biologist will tell you, is what happens when you throw a few bacteria in a culture and let them go, they explode, and then they collapse. The question is "Are we any different, really, from any other organisms?" Our claim to intelligence would suggest that we are able to see what's happening and take the kind of collective action needed to head off the crash. Can we at least organize ourselves socially to produce a soft landing?

That really is what this whole conference is about. Can we assert reason over the inevitable collapse that will come if we continue to follow a social myth, an economic myth, that isn't rooted anywhere in the reality that we are confronting? It's not there, certainly in environmental terms. More importantly, it's failing on its own terms to resolve the questions and problems it set out to resolve in the first instance.