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We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large-brained,
long the master of fire,
tools and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge,
we empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from
our shared understanding of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines to
exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by
the generosity of humans like you.
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I'm Charles Kennel,
the Director Emeritus of
the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Today, I would like to share with you some thoughts
about the dynamics of the Anthropocene era.
The word, Anthropocene, conveys the global scale of
humanity's power over the natural systems
that determine the conditions for life on our planet.
The concept, Anthropocene, implies the existence of
an indirect but material causal relationship
connecting what global society
does to the resilience of
large-scale environmental and ecological systems.
Now, human communities have modified
their local environment since well
before the Agricultural Revolution,
but now the new scale of humanity's power could enable
this familiar form of agency
to be exercised on a global scale.
Should we learn in time how
that agency can be aggregated and exercised,
a long-feared tragedy
of the global commons could be averted.
Even the existence of that hope gives
Anthropocene thought and ethical dimension what
global society chooses to do alters
the planetary natural systems
that sustain later generations.
Now many experts agree that
our planetary life support system
is heading into crisis,
but they cannot agree on is which crisis,
or which should have priority.
Is our crisis social?
The nexus of population growth,
uneven economic development, social inequality.
Is our crisis ecological?
The unprecedented extinction rate and loss of
biodiversity and nature's services to society.
Is our crisis climatic?
Climate change, it's threats to
infrastructure, prosperity, social stability.
Finally, in today's world, especially today,
is our crisis world of public health? Disease,
it's threats to well-being, human survivability.
Now these social, ecological, climate,
and public health threats have three aspects in common.
Each is the consequence of collective human behavior.
Each achieved global scale
during the great acceleration in the growth
of world population and prosperity after World War II.
Each is documented by trends in data that
extrapolates separately to
its own potentially mortal crisis.
The experts might have a common ethical orientation,
but they have divided intellectual loyalties,
which will have even more serious consequences
downstream than it does now.
Were the drivers of social,
ecological, climatic, and health threats,
were they independent, working
separately as we do now to
counter them would be effective.
But all four are presenting
simultaneously and are beginning to interact.
The risks convergence implied by
this interaction would lead to a comprehensive crisis
should all threats interact so strongly that one crisis
cannot be solved without solving all.
A likely time for this crisis of the Anthropocene is that
the combination of the demographic transition
that we're currently in the midst of.
What the experts fear is
a concatenation of converging Malthusian apocalypses.
The primal fear,
first articulated by Thomas Malthus in 1798,
was that the planet's capacity to produce food will
inevitably be outstripped by population growth.
"The power of population,"
Malthus once said,
"is so superior to the power in
the earth to produce subsistence for man,
that premature death must in
some shape or other visit the human race."
Now, Agricultural science is so far
headed off the food security apocalypse,
but economists, demographers, naturalist,
ecologists, climate scientists,
and many others have articulated
sophisticated version of his apocalypse.
A few observers have asked
why they are presenting all at once,
and that's what I will discuss next.
One influential 1968 study of this convergence threat,
Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons,
blamed human psychology;
individuals rationally pursuing
their self-interest work against the common
good when they feel no restraint on
the exploitation of a public resource.
Thus, polluting rivers, oceans, the atmosphere,
cost the perpetrators virtually nothing
yet the exacts significant costs on the biosphere.
Another influential early report,
the Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972,
blamed headlong economic growth.
It's chair, Chairman Fiat,
Vice President Aurelio Peccei,
wrote by way of introduction.
"The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us,
we came up with the idea that pollution, global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.
The real enemy then is humanity itself."
Thus, the term anthro enters Anthropocene.
In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Center proposed
a planetary boundary framework for estimating how close
we are to the full-blown Anthropocene Convergence Crisis.
It identified nine boundaries where
complex eco-environmental systems cross thresholds,
tipping points, they call them,
where nonlinear functional irreversible changes
in biophysical systems are triggered.
Will Steffen and his group in 2015 estimated that four of
such nine planetary boundaries have already been
crossed at this moment.
In this sense then,
we're about halfway through to
the Anthropocene Convergence Crisis.
Thus, in the past two generations,
the principal international threat to
world civilization has morphed
from world military catastrophe
to world eco-environmental catastrophe.
Now international diplomacy's response to the notion that
global society is driving
the planet towards a Malthusian Apocalypse,
was generated by the World
Commission on Economic Development,
chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland,
the then president of Norway in 1987.
The idea was sustainability development.
The World Commission developed
such a definition that
nobody else has used a different one ever since,
even though it is almost a tautology.
Sustainable development is development
that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs.
Now the interesting thing is that the WCED's statement
defines implicitly the timescale
for meaningful global action.
Timescale that we can make
a change to be one human generation.
It takes a time for generations to
change in order to effect change.
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals of
2016 and
the earlier Millennium Development Goals of 2000,
articulated what sustainable behavior is,
but they leave achieving a sustainable global society,
actually walking the talk for another day.
The renewed SDGs,
Sustainable Development Goals, still do
not illuminate what institutions,
laws, policies, practices, technologies,
and resources are required to create and sustain
a socially just global society in a relationship
with its planetary environment that
is resilient to climate change.
In short, the Sustainable Development Goals
do not structure an action agenda.
The last report on
this line that I would like to cite was done by
the US National Academy of Sciences in
1999 and it was entitled, Our Common Journey.
As we have observed, Sustainable Development Goals say
little about where knowledge and innovation are needed.
In 1999, the Academy took up this issue, and
its study explicitly recognized in its opening remarks
that the world is in the midst
of a demographic transition.
This is what they said,
"We're in the midst of a transition to a world
in which human populations
are more crowded, more consuming,
more connected, and more
diverse than at any time in our history."
Here's the thing. "Current projections
envisage population,
leveling off at about 10-11 billion by 2100."
Now, the Academy then asked a question
never before put in this form.
"Can the transition to a stable human population
also be a transition to sustainability,
in which the people living on Earth
over the next half century meet
their needs while nurturing and
restoring the planet's life support system?"
They spent 200 more pages
articulating the proposition that how we
cope with the demographic transition we're in
sets new initial conditions for the long future.
Even a small 10 percent engineered reduction of
maximum global population would have
a disproportionate impact on sustainability,
since the greatest ecological environmental stresses
come when the population reaches maximum.
The eminent biologist,
E.O. Wilson, whom we just lost last year,
echoed that sentiment.
"Those species and ecosystems that survive
the coming ecological bottleneck set
new initial conditions for
the long future of the biosphere."
How are we doing?
One of my view,
I see a world that is
a mosaic of societies and transition.
The improvement in prosperity and social
well-being that drives demographic transitions,
which is a shift from a high birth rate,
low life expectancy to a low birth rate,
high life expectancy society,
that shift is about halfway complete.
With countries and communities in
different stages living side-by-side,
modern communications make it easy to see
economic inequality and cultural divide
between countries and within countries.
Moreover, depending on their focus,
experts can entertain different views
about the state of the planet and not be wrong.
Social scientists, exemplified by the French economist
Thomas Piketty and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker,
can document major increases in life expectancy,
world prosperity, and
societal well-being in the last two generations.
But during the same two generations,
natural scientists have documented evidence
that the planet is bearing more of the costs
of population growth and social advance
than its natural processes can sustain.
This unequal assignment of the costs of
the social events underlying the demographic transition
is leading to a multidimensional crisis and
argues that the grand rebalancing is an order.
I think our best hope is to
exercise our planetary agency.
Anthropocene thought has an intergenerational rhythm;
what each generation thinks sets
the next stage for what the next generation
does, and what that generation
does shapes the planet its children will live on.
In short, how we think as
a planet is what our children get as a planet.
I think our best,
perhaps the only choice, is to exercise the agency that
the advance of civilization and
technology has provided us.
What we did unthinkingly in
the past generation, we can now undo in the next two.
But first, we've got to decide what kind of society we
want to live in and what kind of
planet we want to live on.
All in all, we're proceeding towards
the Anthropocene crisis without the assurance that
our demographic transition can also be the transition to
the sustainability that was
hoped for in Our Common Journey.
Indeed, the geographer, Jared Diamond,
has recounted multiple sustainability failures
amongst small-scale historical societies.
Contemporary science is silent on whether
a collectively managed sustainability transition is
a natural step in
the evolution of intelligence-bearing planets,
for we know of no other such planet.
Thank you very much.
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