Humans exist outside of the “confidence limits”
Humans?”>intriguing question - Is the human species sustainable?. According to a statistical device, known as “confidence limits”, that measures what the sustainable norm should be for species populations, humans are well outside the norm for sustainability. In fact, we are 1000 times numerous than what we should be.
“Our study found that when we compare ourselves to otherwise similar species, usually other mammals of our same body size, for example, we are abnormal and the situation is unsustainable,” said Charles Fowler, co-author of the paper and a lead researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Fowler likened the concept of normality to body temperature, where measurements can fall above or below the accepted average. A temperature of 105 degrees F, for example, is considered abnormal and unsustainable. In his paper, Fowler and colleague Larry Hobbs argue that the human population, now measured at approximately 6 billion, falls outside the range of sustainability, which puts us at risk.
For us to be in the acceptable norm our population should be around 6 million people. This number seems a bit small to me. I would admit that we are overpopulated, but 1000 times overpopulated, pleeaasseeee! But on the other hand, how many other land species have a total population of 6 million? How many species come close to numbers in population? If our number are that far out of whack, what would it take to correct this situation?
“It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here,” Fowler explained. “It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves.”William Rees, professor of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia, disagrees that humans are abnormal and said, “I would use the term ‘unusual’ instead.”
Rees explained that humanity has been inordinately successful. Unlike other species, humans can eat almost anything, adapt to any environment and develop technologies based on knowledge shared through written and spoken language.
Rees, however, said that we may be “fatally successful.” He agrees that industrial society as presently configured is unsustainable.
It is obvious that with our population and our ability to consume, something will give out at some point. Either we will run out of resources to fed everyone - not that everyone eats now - or we will run out of space for us to live. Don’t worry folks, I don’t foresee this happening in the next 100 years. Our lifetime, isn’t that all that really matters?
Rees believes unsustainability is, in part, driven by a natural predisposition to expand, in the same way that bacteria or any other species will multiply. He claims that it is an old problem, reflected in the collapses of numerous civilizations, such as the early human population at Easter Island.
Rees told Discovery News that there is a way out, but he wonders if we will take it.
Rees added, “It would be a tragic irony if, in the 21st century, this most technologically sophisticated of human societies finally succumbs to the unconscious urgings of fatally self-interested primitive tribalism.”