Rethinking Lifestyle

I’m a child of the 40s; a baby boomer. So pretty massive changes have occurred during my lifetime. Today I want to look at just two of them, and think, together with you about whether they have been for the good or not for the good. I am still healthy, nevertheless my age is advancing, and because of that I wonder whether those of my generation are leaving the earth a better place or a poorer place than the earth we inherited. David Dawson said in this column last week “humans are said to be the most intelligent animals on the planet.” Have we exhibited that intelligence?

Consider population: in 1950 the world population was at 2.5 billion; today it’s at 7.5 billion. That’s a three fold increase. My father, over a 65 year period, experienced at 2.5 fold increase; my grandfather a 1.7 increase, my great grandfather, 1.3. This is significant achievement! But let’s remind ourselves of something we all know: this population growth has not occurred because we became better at pro-creating; it occurred because we became better at managing health. Not only that. As more people stayed alive because of better health management, we also became better at growing food, so these people did not die from famine. And we have limited our wars. We kill each other less. We have brought war, famine and pestilence, the great population limiters of the past under control. Wow. This is indeed consistent with being “the most intelligent animals on the planet.”

But because of our intelligence [compared to other animals] we also know that perpetual growth is impossible. We know [and other animals don’t] that at some point the planet will be full of people. We know this. We will disagree as to when the planet will be full, but we know it will fill up. What do we do in light of that? Basically we have two options. One is to do what other, less intelligent animals do: we could go on procreating as we feel like, on the implicit assumption that nature will look after things – it always has! Right, it has – through war, famine and pestilence. We point to lower birth rates with higher education or with higher income, evidence that nature is looking after things. But that attitude is not exhibiting intelligence. It exhibits optimism. Intelligence, on the other hand, acknowledges that as we bring the traditional population limiters under control, we will need to find some other way of managing our population. If we don’t, nature’s limiters will again do their job.

What about GDP; the measure of the size of our economy. Since 1950 the world GDP has increased ten fold! That is quite an accomplishment, On the whole we are living better, and to a large extent we can attribute that to capitalism. But we need to remember that economic activity, although it is an indicator of our welfare, it is not a measure of our welfare. Similarly economic activity, although it is not a measure of our exploitation of the planet’s resources, it is an indicator of that. Hunters and gatherers basically leave the planet the way they found it. We don’t. We are extracting huge amounts of oil, iron, aluminum, carbon, etc. from the earth. Our planet has less resources as a result of our having been here. One would think that intelligent animals would find a way of distinguishing between life giving economic activity and life destroying economic activity, but so far it seems we have not.

So are we leaving the earth a better place than the earth we inherited? Depends how you look at it. But given our intelligence, I’m convinced we could do much better.