The MAHB, the Culture Gap, and Some Really Inconvenient Truths

The human predicament—climate disruption, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, toxification of the planet, the potential impacts of nuclear war, and social and economic inequities that impede solutions to escalating environmental problems—has been amply described [1]. Although the steps needed to solve the predicament are clear, few have been taken—even as the situation steadily declines. The trend in greenhouse gas emissions has continued rapidly upward. The extermination of biodiversity and loss of natural services has proceeded unabated. The number of hungry people has hit an all-time high, which means that so has the number of immune-compromised individuals. That, combined with continued rapid population growth, increases the probabilities of vast epidemics [2]. In Asia, melting of the Himalayan water tower [3] and rising temperatures threaten the food supply of 1.6 billion people [4] whose countries are armed with nuclear weapons [5]. There also have been increasing signs of great toxic peril for humanity and its lifesupport systems, with a growing threat from the release of hormone-disrupting chemicals that could even be shifting the human sex ratio [6] and reducing sperm counts. Despite the clear warnings about the predicament almost two decades ago from the scientific community [7,8], precious little has been done. That’s why a group of social and natural scientists and scholars in the humanities is starting the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB, pronounced ‘‘mob’’). The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization. The urgent need for this call to action is clear when you consider that efforts to address even the most publicized of environmental problems—climate disruption—have fallen far short. Fifteen international conferences have effected no significant change in the accumulation of greenhouse gases and no enforceable agreement yet to reverse the trend. How much failure is enough? Even if nations were to fulfill their recent pledges, catastrophic climate change might well be inevitable [9]. The climate challenge will persist over centuries or even millennia [10] and will require an urgent revision of humanity’s energy mobilizing systems and of deforestation and other greenhouse gas (GHG)-releasing land uses. It will also necessitate a continual reworking of waterhandling infrastructure to adjust to changing precipitation patterns that are vital to agriculture, as well as massive adjustments of human settlements as sea levels rise, among many other adaptations. Whereas at least climate disruption is on the political agenda, most of the other issues are not, and public understanding of what drives environmental deterioration or, indeed, of natural phenomena in general is minimal. Few non-scientists are familiar with the basic idea that environmental damage is a product of population size, per capita consumption, and the sorts of technologies and social and economic systems that supply the consumption. A vast ‘‘culture gap’’ has developed over the past century or so between what our society knows and what each individual knows—a gap that has proven especially troubling when elected officials and other leaders have almost no knowledge of science [11]. That’s one reason why the devastating environmental consequences of an everexpanding human population have been largely ignored. Governments in many struggling poor countries fail to support family planning programs adequately, whereas those in the rich countries of Europe are irrationally encouraging higher fertility [12]. Few recognize that adding a billion people to the population in the future will cause more damage to humanity’s critical life-support systems than did the most recent increment of a billion, as ever more scarce and remote resources must be tapped to support the newcomers. Overconsumption by the rich is central to the deterioration of human life-support systems, but is ignored because most business economists, corporate executives, and politicians view it as an unalloyed good. To lead decent lives, at least two billion people are in dire need of more consumption, but extending American consumption patterns to even today’s 6.8 billion people is not only unsustainable but likely a biophysical impossibility. It would, sadly, take many decades for humane actions to produce significant changes in today’s population trajectory. Yet, we know that consumption patterns can change virtually overnight, as demonstrated by the mobilizations and demobilizations connected with World War II. Enormous changes in production and consumption occurred in the United States in 4–5 years, and, during those years, Americans accepted rationing of gasoline, sugar, and meat. Given appropriate incentives, economies can be transformed extremely rapidly. Undertaking a World War II–type mobilization, possibly lasting several times longer, to reduce GHG emissions fast and deal with the rest of the predicament would take vast political courage. The urgent need now is clearly not for more natural science (although in many areas it