The Other Side of Progress: Macro Systemic Problems and the Longevity of Nice Things
August 1 was Earth Overshoot Day. Perhaps you already were aware of that and had your festivities for the occasion planned. I, however, have to say that the date snuck up on me. Candidly, I didn’t know about it at all until a few days beforehand when I read in The Guardian that Earth Overshoot Day is the date in a calendar year marking “the point at which consumption exceeds the capacity of nature to regenerate.” Earth Overshoot Day happens annually, but much like the onset of spring in a warming world, it keeps arriving a little bit earlier as each year passes. As economic techniques of extraction become more adept and intensive the global economy churns through the sustainability levels of natural systems be they forests, aquifers, fisheries, etc. August 1 is the earliest day ever recorded for this event. Yeah, us! This year humanity will consume resources at the rate of 1.7 Earths, according to the Global Footprint Network. Here’s a happy graph to illustrate the change over time since 1970.
A bad trend line could mean the same as saying that something is unsustainable. That is exactly the point of Earth Overshoot Day. It’s problematic to lump all people into a giant ‘us’ of humanity when many nation’s arrive at their own Earth Overshoot date much, much later than do the most intensive resource economies of countries like China and the United States. Global Footprint Network, the group behind this project, has a wonderful set of data infographics that illustrate how some countries have arrived at overshoot only recently while others have been there a long time, the early industrialized countries of Europe, case in point. Yet by 2018 almost every nation on Earth is running an annual ecological deficit, drawing down on the renewable resources of the future to drive their economies today. “Our current economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” says co-founder of Global Footprint Network’s Mathis Wackernagel. “We are borrowing the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present. Like any Ponzi scheme, this works for some time. But as nations, companies, or households dig themselves deeper and deeper into debt, they eventually fall apart.”
As a communications device Earth Overshoot Day seems to me to be effective. Discrete stories of environmental harm and resource depletion of fisheries, of forests measured in football fields per second, and the like have become so commonplace as to escape attention in the white noise of the daily news cycle. It’s not always easy to connect the troubling dots. Yet here is a master narrative in a single image. We can see the cumulative ecological deficit of our species laid out longitudinally on a global scale. The problem is focused. There’s the singular trend line and it isn’t at all good.
Get Jeffrey Crunk’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And yet, I cannot believe that anyone reading this thinks that this event will be any more than a blip in the current news cycle, dominated by other concerns ranging from the pop culture mundane to the geopolitically seismic. This particular kind of environmental message has been so ubiquitous since the beginning of the modern environmental movement that one knows its aesthetic without having to read the particulars past the headlines. It plays out like a well worn script — dramatic diagnosis of a problem, rousing calls to action, responses ranging from dismissive to fatalistic, calls by the advocates for re-tooling the message so as to get it right the next time. Movement builders experience burnout. The general public becomes inured. The actual, worrisome problems, such as environmental harm and unsustainable practices, worsen over time.Which raises the question, why is this so? If people have known for decades about the seriousness of resource exhaustion and damage to the biosphere, why is the problem continuing to get worse?
We of course get a sense of the answer when we examine a raft of other macro systemic problems facing humanity today which present the same story. Climate change threatens food security. Traditional weapons of mass destruction are spreading, and more terrifyingly, new and novel WMDs are being developed in genomics and industrial miniaturization. Drug resistant strains of familiar diseases threaten to turn the clock back to a pre-antibiotic era while new varieties of diseases emerge and spread because of a warming world. Multinational institutions intended to prevent or contain systemic threats, like infectious disease outbreaks or economic contagion, are suddenly fragile and failing due to fundamental changes in the arrangement of state power. The world is swimming in abundant, cheap energy that fuels progress, while simultaneously drowning nature in the externalized waste that energy abundance generates.
Collectively, these problems, which are emergent properties of social development, threaten to upend the very conditions of progress that generated them. It’s the Paradox of Development and it’s an age-old story. All of these problems have been trending in the wrong direction for some time causing a number of fairly savvy observers to suggest that Earth is increasingly looking like the fragile basket with all the eggs in it. Stephen Hawkings, citing climate change in particular, warned not long before his death this past year that humanity’s best bet for long-term survival is to find another planet to populate in less than a century.
Is Hawking right? Is it time for humanity to get out of Dodge? Or is this unwarranted pessimism, as many counter? Those kind of questions, it seems to me, are the most interesting questions and ones that I am most interested in today. To what extent are macro systemic problems pliable to human agency? Are the great challenges that face humanity more or less solvable, or are they more or less intractable? People, especially American people, believe almost as article of faith that they exercise enough agency so that hardly any problem is truly unsolvable. Is that in fact the case with the thorniest problems of our times? Considered eventually is one thing. What happens when the problems stack, intersect, and compound each other? And are we perhaps incorrectly assuming that there’s a get-out-of jail free card in the form of technological innovation, or economic growth, or a sudden blossoming of political will and corrective policies? That last question suggests we also consider that our own intrinsic human nature is itself a kind of structural liability because we’re disposed to a host of cognitive biases and social drives that many times hamper us in dealing with such challenges.
I think that anyone wanting to see humanity prosper in the future should mind the systemic problems that confront humanity today. Those are going to be the subjects I’ll be interested in thinking about more. I’ll be wanting to listen to optimistic takes on the present and on the future, and I’ll be minding my own maxim to never bet against the engineers who have a proven track record of solving problems that contemporaries say are without solutions. Having said that, when it comes to longevity all great civilizations have seen their time in the sun come to an end, sometimes lingering, but more typically, abrupt. Would we suppose that this global civilization is any different? Maybe, but if so why?
Macro systemic problems are the worst kind of problems. They are like the kinds of diseases in people that are slow acting and stealthy, consequently overlooked for the longest time because symptoms are mild, manageable, and many times deniable. Left untreated, when they do run their eventual course they suddenly present acute harm and causes cascading failures in the end. They are the proper subject of concern for humanity closing out the second decade of the twenty first century. They demand a cold eye. It may in fact be the most interesting time in history to be alive. It may also be the most consequential.
