Limits To Growth?: Plan A vs. Plan B vs. Plan S - Carl Bajema (Grand Rapids)
Presented by Carl Bajema, PhD, Retired Professor of Biological Sciences, Grand Valley State University
About the Speaker
Recently retired from Grand Valley State University, Dr. Bajema taught evolutionary biology for more than 40 years. He has conducted scientific research involving the measurement of the direction and intensity of selection in human populations. Professor Bajema also has been very active as a science educator helping students, teachers and others gain a better scientific understanding of the natural processes involved in evolution.
About the Event
Summary with Commentary for the August 25, 2010 meeting of Center for Inquiry- Michigan.
This lecture presentation was given by long time member of CFI-MI and the Freethought Association before that, and retired Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Grand Valley State University, Dr. Carl Bajema. The title for his talk was Limits to Growth? Plan A versus Plan B, versus Plan S, versus Plan Z. The plans had to do with our various proposed courses of action toward creating a more long- term sustainable environment. Ironically, one of the plans is to do nothing and go with the status quo, business as usual approach, which brings to my mind that pithy line: When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Another course of action that was cited, regarding moving our economical model to one that promotes a more sustainable environmental future may well be too little too late. One of the referenced plans is essentially a survival of the fittest model, which would occur after population increases and energy needs and environmental destruction have reduced humanity to an everyone- for- himself mode of existence. Yet another strategy is to adopt the sustainable model after society has collapsed. It is a start- from- scratch approach, where rebuilding is finally done in a more sensible manner, after the harsh lessons had been learned the hard way.
From the 1800s to the 1900s, the world population has increased 4 times; the world economy has increased 13 times; individual output: 14 times; energy use, a staggering 40 times; air pollution: 7 times; carbon dioxide emissions: 17 times; water use: 9 times, etc. This is not an example of anything that can continue in the same fashion without spelling disaster.
Dr. Bajema spoke of the power of exponential growth, using the 29 day math problem example. I have seen this rendered, also, in a dramatic example of exponential growth when the question is posed: Would you do a summer job that paid you a penny for the first day but where your wage is increased exponentially each day? When you start to envision the next several days of doubling it appears to be abysmal. But carried on to the end of the month and you have a very handsome wage indeed. Extended over a three month period? You can hire Bill Gates to mow your lawn and Warren Buffett to pull your weeds.
I have also seen the power of exponential growth memorably introduced using a single grain of rice and a chessboard. In this scenario, there is a peasant who agrees to labor for the landowner for that single grain as his first day’s earnings but with one catch that he introduced to the proposal. The grains were to be added exponentially over as many days as there are squares in a chessboard.Once again, when the wealthy landowner looks at the start of this agreement, he is overcome with joy at all the essentially free labor he is getting. He sees the poor devil toiling away for the first 5 days, ending up with but 16 grains of rice! After two weeks of hard labor, the landowner still must parcel out only 512 grains of rice. What a bargain! What a sap this peasant is!! Even after three, 5- day weeks of labor, and having almost a quarter of the chessboard used up already, he is doling out only about 16,000 grains. It is getting to be a noticeable quantity but still adds up to very cheap labor, indeed. His dread only begins to emerge upon maybe the close of 4th week of labor when he will have to take up a good deal of his attention toward counting out the grain allotment; now at 262 thousand on the 19th day.
However, in a span of only two day after that, the landowner owes the peasant his first million grains and he has had to secure a team of assistants in accumulating the earnings. The peasant is owed his first (yes, only first!) billion grains of rice after only one month has elapsed since beginning his work and the chessboard is less than half-filled! It gets worse… much, much worse (or better, if you are rooting for the intrepid and sly peasant). In 41 days (or after that many chessboard squares have been used), he is owed one trillion grains of rice. At 51; still having 13 more days—or squares—to go, he is to receive one QUADRILLION grains! After 2 months labor and with squares still remaining on the board, our shrewd peasant is owed a QUNTILLION rice grains! This is well beyond the landowner’s capability for amassing, of course, and his misery is not over yet. He is at 9.2 quintillion grains when the chessboard is at last filled, 64 days later. The landowner has long since committed suicide.
This sort of thing fascinates me, so I went off on a tangent, but Dr. Bajema’s point (that I was amplifying with my examples as well) was concerning how the numbers, quantities, capacities, etc., appear to increase only nominally at first (when exponentially factored), giving one little sense of urgency for a given problem. But they become critical and unmanageable quite suddenly, because it is a doubling. Exponentially, it may take a while for a pond to become ½ filled with a given thing, but by the very NEXT day (or agreed upon unit of time factored exponentially in a given example), it is completely filled in. Our environmental problems are compounding and growing swiftly beyond our grasp to resolve.
We are over-utilizing our resources; over-grazing, over-fishing, over-extending ourselves in fossil fuel consumption and extraction, etc. Nature and life have a self-regulating mechanism for when systems get too far out of balance. Famine and disease are natural outcomes of going along as we are and warfare will break out when limited resources dwindle ever more to the desperation point. Together, these will sharply curtail our current dilemmas of overpopulation and over-use of resources… but at a terrible cost.
Getting us back to a sustainable model would involve nothing less Herculean than the following: Cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2020; stabilizing the planet’s population at 8 billion or lower; eradicating poverty and restoring the Earth’s natural ecosystems.
Food scarcity will become a growing problem when more land is ravaged by climatic factors stemming from our greenhouse gas emissions and our misuse of the land that is currently available. There is only so much of any given resource, so the issue becomes how one manages the use of those given resources: money, land, water, etc. Do we grow grains to feed ourselves or for fuel or for sustaining huge cattle populations that are to be transformed into burgers? How much water do we allocate for different interests of ours? What approach has the best long-term outcomes and which choices are taking us to the brink of disaster?
What other alternative means do we have available to reduce our dependence on oil and oil products? What resources do these alternatives consume? There is no free lunch, but some methods that are currently available come at a reduced societal and economic cost.
Our evolutionary biology professor discussed what is termed the Red Queen problem (often used when communicating evolutionary ideas), in which one runs faster and faster just to stay in the same place. He also talked of another example used in biology; the closely- related arms race scenario that drives co-evolution. The latter example may be explained by thinking of a given organism that survives by evolving an adaptation that allows it to evade predation better than others of its type. This allows it and those like it to survive and reproduce better, thus adding this genetic boon to the gene pool in greater quantities. Its chief predator will then evolve its own features in order to also survive and reproduce better by catching its once- elusive prey. Both sides keep ratcheting up in an arms race but only to stay at the same level of success, in general, as predators and prey. Both prey and predator push co-evolution. Invasive species throw this all out of whack, as the native organisms and ecosystems have not had a chance to evolve in tandem with the invader and they may be virtually wiped out as a result of being literally defenseless against them.
As we use more resources, we allow for more population growth, but at the cost of needing to plunder those resources at an ever-increasing rate—which just keeps the cycle going toward eventual oblivion. Curbing our growth; reallocation of the remaining resources; using alternative means of energy production and agricultural activity; and sharply reducing our pollution rates that have enormous environmental impacts… all have the potential to not only halt our mad plunge over the cliff, but to even reverse the cycle, which would potentially lead to a sustainable future. If our only braking mechanism is population growth to a point of starvation and misery, then that point is exactly what populations will expand to. This is inevitable UNLESS changes are introduced. Status quo will spell the end of our existence as we know it.
Technology is often bandied about as a panacea for all our ills and misguided policies. Technology may indeed buy us more time, Carl allowed, but that additional time will need to be used toward developing other practices. Also technology, no matter how grand, is worthless unless harnessed intelligently and with foresight. I think of Arthur C. Clark’s phrase about how any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic. Indeed, if a 21st Century person were cast back in time to our hunter-gatherer existence, all his knowledge of modern life and its possibilities would help him not at all, without a supporting foundation and infrastructure. He would actually be at a disadvantage in that time, since he never grew up having to survive in those conditions. If he were dropped into that time with all the full accoutrements of his time, this individual would be seen to possess powerful magic and be deemed, mostly likely, a god. But this would only do him well until the underlying systems, methodologies and know-how; materials and means of producing and maintaining those technologically advanced products ran out.
In some circles, Dr. Bajema is denigrated as a Bleeding Heart Liberal while in other circles, he is castigated as a hardcore Conservative. He is neither. He is a realist. Real life/real world solutions demand cold, hard choices and not everyone can be made happy. The responsibility and belt tightening that Conservatives are wont to tout is a very good approach; yet their tendency to status quo/stay the course ways counter this. Both ends of the political spectrum have their share of denial. Strong conservatives often do not accept the crises that are looming or already here or else believe that the same failed approaches will solve everything that they do actually accept as detrimental. Liberals will often fail to see the hard choices to be made and that some suffering is inevitable no matter what changes are made.
One side focuses too much on the competitive impulse and desire for maximizing acquisition and access to resources that is part of all nature, but to the exclusion of how our common will can work cooperatively for the benefit of all. The other side looks to cooperative measures, without a full measure of understanding of the competitive nature built into us. They may also want to effect change for change’s sake without weighing all the pros and cons and doing a sober cost/benefit analysis for different strategies.
As a biologist, Dr. Bajema knows that competition and the struggle for existence involves a built in impulse to out-do others. We cannot change this at the fundamental level, but we can change the rules of the game and therefore change the outcomes and payoff.
The ability to gather, store and retrieve information for significant use is really what separates us from the rest of the Kingdom Animalia. Everything can be distilled down to the essences of energy, matter and information. Information may be used to manipulate the other two components. We not only evolve physically, but we have ideas that are also subject to evolutionary principles: memes.
The environmental impact that we effect is in direct proportion to our lifestyle. This can be seen as one examines human societies all around the globe and in biology generally. Because of our ability to make use of accumulated information, we can transcend other creatures in the shaping of the environment. This can be positive or negative. No other life form can destroy or build to a degree even remotely like what we can accomplish. In a world without humankind, nature would recover, heal; regain its natural balances and leave no discernable trace that we ever were… in time. But it is up to the destroyer to rebuild if we are to continue to exist, since nature moves so much more slowly than our ideas and technology and capacities for destruction or creation.
Another distinction between humans and other animals is that we have foresight. We are not stuck in the moment. We can not only THINK about the future and regard consequences, and know of our own mortality, but we can PLAN in a way that adjusts future outcomes. This is our true transcendent quality, no matter what level of technology we possess or how advanced or primitive our society is.
This is what gives us hope to make wise choices and to not allow our rapacious survival- of- the- fittest natures to overwhelm us. We have it hardwired within us to overwhelm all other competitors and to exploit our environments to the utmost, for our own genetic fitness. Due to our amazing technology and extended phenotypes (our tools, machines, etc.), we can create ruin at a staggering pace. But we can also think of our children and their children (what benefits our genetic legacy is, as just mentioned, hard-wired into us!) and think beyond our selfish genes.
Summarized by Charles A. LaRue
