ESEP Book 1 : Goals and Conditions for a Sustainable World

In the bicentennial year of Malthus’ seminal paper, human society is still debating whether the evidence of biophysical limits on population growth (which applies to other species) also applies to Homo sapiens. In terms of evolutionary or geological time, 200 years is a trivial span to test such a hypothesis. Human ingenuity and technology appear to invalidate Malthus’ hypothesis, although the present living conditions of at least 2 billion people support Malthus’ idea. However, the emerging debate on sustainable development or sustainable use of the planet has again raised questions about whether infinite growth in any species can occur on a finite planet. No other habitable planets are known and, even if they are discovered, shipping 95 million people annually to another location might exhaust Earth’s resources more quickly than sustaining the population here. As many others have noted, human society is engaged in a global experiment with no “control” planet. Unlike changing from an airplane that may be in poor condition, humans do not have the option of catching another planet. This paper analyzes some of the issues raised by Malthus in a sustainability context. What Hasn’t Changed in the Last 200 Years? (1) Human society still views complex, interactive systems in terms of special interest components (i.e., those of obvious interest personally or to an applicable group). The failure in this view is not realizing that affecting the components affects the system, and the system affects the components and, ultimately, human society. (2) Human society looks for single connections rather than patterns. Those who look at patterns are disregarded because the short-term uncertainty is usually higher than for simple, even limited, multiple connections. (3) Human society rarely acknowledges the programmatic futility of single interest, lobby(i.e., money-) dominated politics. 64