Humans don’t care about the planet and the future of their race. By John Gibbons Doomsday cults are as old as human civilisation. The Bible is a rich sourcebook for ‘End Times’ enthusiasts, who pore over Iron Age manuscripts purporting to pinpoint a particular day that heralds the Apocalypse. Another such date passed on May 21st last, with the ‘Rapture’ now rescheduled to October. But just because they’re crazy, doesn’t always guarantee they’re wrong. “An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium,” says celebrated naturalist Prof EO Wilson of Harvard. But, he adds, “it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity”. In the half a billion year history of complex life on Earth, five mega extinction events have been catalogued. The last one occurred around 65 million years ago, most likely triggered by rapid global cooling resulting from an asteroid strike. It brought the 160 million year reign of the dinosaurs to an abrupt end – along with around half of all other species. Their misfortune was to be our lucky break, as this calamity opened the evolutionary window for the rise of our ancestors, the early mammals. Today, what scientists have designated as the ‘Sixth Extinction’ is already in full swing, with an astonishing 50,000 species disappearing every year and the very face of the planet being re-shaped. For the first time in Earth history, the actions of a single species are threatening to overwhelm the entire biosphere. Homo sapiens is a young species, barely 200,000 years old. In the 10,000 years of human history for which some records exist, there has never been an age like the modern industrial era, and there has never been a century remotely like the amazing 20th century. My grandmother was born in 1901. Over the brief three-generation span from her life to mine, global population quadrupled, the world economy grew 14-fold, and industrial output shot up 40-fold. All this astonishing growth was fuelled by a 13-fold increase in energy usage, compared to the already industrialised 19th century. Along the way, we chopped down a quarter of the world’s forests, exterminating tens of thousands of species in a frenzied scramble to convert the natural word into saleable goods and lebensraum for people, our agriculture and our livestock. Two fifths of the world’s land surface has already been sequestered for the exclusive benefit of just one species. This human tsunami also unleashed a five-fold increase in air pollution, and a 17-fold increase in emissions of the critical trace ‘greenhouse’ gas, Carbon dioxide (CO2). This ongoing orgy of extraction, consumption and population growth was predicated on one key ingredient: cheap, plentiful energy. In the 20th century, humans employed more energy than in all the previous 1,900 centuries of recorded history combined. All these trends have accelerated through the tumultuous first decade of the 21st century, as China and India in particular have clambered enthusiastically aboard the ‘globalisation express’. The energy involved in reshaping the planet is almost unimaginable. Since 1970, the rate of energy building up within the biosphere is on a par with exploding 2.5 of the bombs that levelled Hiroshima every second, or 216,000 atomic bombs a day, every day, for the last four decades. Minus the radiation, of course. Another example that vividly illustrates the might and scale of human planetary reengineering is the Syncrude mine in Canada’s Athabasca tar sands. This one project involves displacing some 30 billion tonnes of earth – that’s twice the total tonnage of sediment carried down all the world’s rivers in a year. For better or for worse, man is now the dominant force of nature on this planet. As Brian Cowen reminded us, being in power should not be confused with being in control. “The human race, without intending anything of the sort, has undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment on the Earth”, is how environmental historian Prof John McNeill put it. The bubble of spectacular affluence and comfort enjoyed by many of us in the Western world has been sustained by spending down the Earth’s finite natural capital and exhausting its ability to absorb wastes at an ever-increasing rate. The WWF’s Living Planet Index (which measures trends in biological diversity) found that between 1970 and 2007, global biodiversity had declined by an astonishing 30 per cent. “This global trend suggests we are degrading natural ecosystems at a rate unprecedented in human history,” says the WWF. The UN Environment Programme concurs, adding: “The world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity comparable with the great mass extinction events that have previously occurred only five times in the Earth’s history”. The mass die-off of the Sixth Extinction that has already spelled the end for vast swathes of the natural world has not – yet – impacted directly on human numbers. But since we are perched precariously at the apex of a global food chain that itself is a subset of a biosphere in freefall, this is no longer a matter of if, but when, and just how severe it will be. Not everyone is alarmed. “I think human beings are a failed species – we’re on the way out,” is the blunt assessment of Prof Michael Boulter of London’s Natural History Museum. “Our lives are so artificial they can’t possibly be sustained within the limits of our planet”. Looking down the road, he adds: “The planet would of course be delighted for humans to become extinct, and the sooner it happens, the better”. The Professor’s prognosis may be accurate, but that hardly makes it any less unpalatable to us humans. The scientific warning bells have been tolling ever more urgently recently. In May 2011 an expert group that included 17 Nobel laureates issued the ‘Stockholm Memorandum’ urging emergency action to reduce human pressures on the global environment. The language is plain: “Science makes clear that we are transgressing planetary boundaries
