The Food Threat to Human Civilization

All of these steps require long-recommended changes in human behavior. Most people fail to recognize the growing urgency of adopting them because they do not understand the agricultural system and its complex, non-linear (disproportionate) connections to the mechanisms driving environmental deterioration. All inputs needed to feed each additional person will, on average, come from scarcer, poorer, and more distant sources, disproportionately more energy will be used, and disproportionately more greenhouse gases will be generated.

More than a millennium of changing temperature and precipitation patterns, all vital to crop production, has put the planet on a path toward increasingly severe storms, droughts, and floods. Thus, maintaining – let alone expanding – food production will be increasingly difficult.

A popular movement is needed to direct cultural awareness toward providing the foresight intelligence and the agricultural, environmental, and demographic planning that markets cannot supply. Only then could we begin to address seriously the population disaster – consider the nutritional/health benefits of humanely ending population growth well before we reach nine billion people and beginning a gradual decline thereafter.

The best way, in our view, to achieve such population shrinkage is to give full rights and opportunities to women, and to make modern contraception and back-up abortion accessible to all sexually active people. While the degree to which these steps would reduce total fertility rates is a matter of controversy, they would deliver significant social and economic benefits by making huge reservoirs of fresh brain power available to solve our problems, while saving hundreds of thousands of lives by reducing the number of unsafe abortions.

Can humanity avoid a starvation-driven collapse? Yes, we can – though we currently put the odds at just 10%. As dismal as that sounds, we believe that, for the benefit of future generations, it is worth struggling to make it 11%.

One of our most distinguished colleagues, biogeographer and energy expert James Brown of the University of New Mexico, disagrees. He puts the odds of sustaining human civilization at about 1%, but thinks that it’s worth trying to increase it to 1.1%.

Developing foresight intelligence and mobilizing civil society for sustainability are central goals of the (MAHB), based at Stanford University. Those who join the MAHB join the best of global civil society in the fight to avoid the end of civilization.

Paul R. Ehrlich is Professor of Population Studies, Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University. Anne H. Ehrlich is the associate director and policy coordinator of the Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.

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