Earth Day
Today I am advised through multiple emails and social media posts that it is Earth Day. I am somewhat surprised that Earth Day began in its current formal form in 1970, when I was sixteen years old. That means that Earth Day is fifty-one years old this year. For my entire adult life e have been focused on environmental issues. I also remember the summer of 1971 when I spent that summer before going off to college, in Cleveland, Ohio. The big news in Cleveland was whether the Cuyuhoga River would once again catch fire due to its high levels of pollution. Since then, most United States rivers have been vastly cleaned up and such unnatural disasters are far less an issue. Air pollution in the U.S. has also greatly improved over that time thanks mostly to a combination of industrial environmental regulation and specifically, emissions controls put on automobiles. As the earth has continued to warm due mostly to man-made pollution, its easy for us to forget that through long-term diligence and focus, we have been able to address some of the plagues of our day.
Back when I was getting out of college, if you had asked me what the big issues of the day were, my answer would have been, in this order, population and the ability to feed the growing ranks of the world, air and water pollution and the demon inflation that was undermining our economic well-being. This, of course, was all overshadowed by the Vietnam and Watergate, both of which were “resolved” during my time in college with a withdrawal and resignation. The most problematic issue for which there was only one humane solution was population growth and the growing global need for more birth control. In 1975, world population was approaching four billion. As mentioned, the big concern was food security and how to feed that many people. Being a student at Cornell University, perhaps the globally preeminent research university in the arena of agriculture and food science, there was great concern about how to vastly increase food production. At the time, my mother was a Director at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and as head of the Nutrition Division, so I had every imaginable perspective and insight on the topic and was still deeply concerned.
In the ensuing forty-five years the world has managed to very surprisingly address and “solve” that problem. The solution came in two ways. The research in non-lodging varieties of wheat and rice meant that more productive crops could be grown with underlying plants that could support the increasingly large production values. This came about through genetic improvement of the food-source plants themselves. The other improvement came through significantly increased production of ammonia and urea specifically destined for use in high-potency fertilizers that greatly increased the delivery of vital nitrogen and other elements consistent with higher productivity agriculture. While I’m sure some will advocate against the genetic variations used for productivity (GMO’s garnering plenty of attention in the organic community), the real concern should be placed on what increased fertilizer production has done to the environment. The way ammonia is produced involved a process called methane-steam reforming to generate the necessary hydrogen for the ammonia. This methane “cracking” releases twice as much CO2 into the atmosphere than the amount of hydrogen produced and thus contributes greatly and cumulatively to climate change concerns.
The message we should all take from this is that very often we solve one problem only to generate another. Think of pest control and DDT. Well, finding the means to increase food production has enabled the world population to double in the last forty-five years and it is now approaching eight billion, a level many scientists estimate is the maximum occupancy level for the planet. Naturally, those estimates are the product of science as we now know it and what we should all know by now is that man is pretty good about creating new science to break down such artificial barriers. But nonetheless, there must logically be a limit to what one earth can support and we are surely getting close to that limit. I should also mention that just having the ability to produce food (regardless of its methods and/or harmfulness) does not insure the ability to distribute that food to the people who need it. Economics create plenty of added barriers thanks to the fundamental and dispassionate concept of supply and demand. We still live in a world where rather than distribute food to people who cannot afford it, we are prone to thinking that destroying it to boost pricing might be perversely preferable. Luckily that happens less and less thanks to increased awareness and advocacy.
I have argued that economics and, indeed, governance, must change in a world with eight billion people. In the same way that the two social principles change when we move from one to two to three people networks (those should be easy enough for any of us to acknowledge and agree on), managing a world with eight billion souls is simply and vastly different than one with four billion. On the assumption of the continued focus on and importance of ongoing humanity, this logically means that collectivism needs to be refined and will need to prevail to keep the peace. Based on the world we are witnessing before us now, the priorities seem increasingly to require focus on health (both routine healthcare maintenance and pandemic infection control) and racial acceptance and equality. Those are both serious hot-button social issues that we seem to be struggling with as much or more so in the United States.
Collectivism is not an easy concept in our country. We are a country raised on fierce individualism and libertarianism is a very common current excuse for rejecting collectivism. But increasingly, a planet with eight billion souls will have a problem allowing libertarian thinking without the risk of lost humanity. But it is so much more than that. I contend that collectivism, the notion I would refer to most universally as “sharing the wealth”, may be the only way to allow the pie to continue to grow and everyone recognizes that a growing pie is critical for everyone’s prosperity. A default to a zero-sum game embodies a bad outcome for the species at some point and that point seems to be rapidly approaching. In the same way that the species requires collectivism, so does the planet. Our species may determine the outcome for all species in that we control the earth and therefore must be stewards of it. Thus, I contend that Earth Day is now, officially, the most important day of the year.