marcia: ?The Earth Is Full?: Tom Friedman on ?The Great Disruption?

By Joe Romm on Jun 8, 2011 at 8:03 pm

Note:� At the end I post more of my exclusive interview with the author of The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding.

First, here?s the opening of Friedman?s op-ed, ?The Earth Is Full,? currently the most e-mailed piece on the NY Times website:

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we?ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century ? when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all ? and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we?d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

?The only answer can be denial,? argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called ?The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.? ?When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.?

Long-time readers remember Paul Gilding, former executive director of Greenpeace International, from Tom Friedman?s 2009 column on how the global economy is a Ponzi scheme.� I was quoted in that column, too, and as a result, I have gotten to know him.� I interviewed him earlier in the year and will post a couple of clips below.

The entire Friedman piece is worth reading, though. � Here?s more:

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many ?planet Earths? we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth?s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. ?Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,? says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

?If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,? writes Gilding. ?If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth?s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.?

It is also current affairs. ?In China?s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,? China?s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. ?The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation?s economic and social development.? What China?s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that ?the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.?

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don?t worry, we?re getting there.

On a visit from down-under, Gilding came by my house a while back for a chat.� I taped some ?Lip camera? video interviews of him about his new book.� As you can see from the sub-title, Gilding is an optimist, though a certain kind of optimist.

He doesn?t think averting catastrophic global warming will be easy, and he expects there to be many disasters along the way, but he believes we can ? and will ? avoid the complete collapse of civilization through a World-War-II-scale effort, since the alternative is almost beyond imagining and certainly beyond what people euphemistically call ?adaptation.?� He told me, ?You can?t just have an adaptation strategy. There?s no chance of that working.?

In this first video, he talks about the unbelievable drought and then equally unbelievable flooding that hit his home country of Australia, and why he remains optimistic in spite of that:

Failure to remake the economy is just not an option.� Fortunately, the solution, though not easy, is eminently doable, and that should be ?reassuring,? he says:

When I say reassuring, this is against the scale of the collapse of civilization.� Not reassuring as in ?all will be okay? but reassuring as in if we get this wrong, we are talking about global economic collapse and the potential for breakdown in a very serious way of civilization.� That?s what I think we can still prevent.

In Part 2 he� gives some of his personal background, explaining how his work with Greenpeace and corporations gave him confidence that the problem is solvable and affordable, and why it?s the end of shopping:

We know how to fix it. We know what technologies. They?re all available now. They?re all affordable.

Here?s how Friedman ends his piece:

Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, ?our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.?We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. ?How many people,? Gilding asks, ?lie on their death bed and say, ?I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,? and how many say, ?I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?? To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.?

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

?We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,? he says. ?We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we?re not stupid.?

Hmm.� The ecological jury is out on that last sentence.

Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, as I?ve said before (see ?Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme??).� Such are the privileges of being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves ?wise? twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet?s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the ?sapiens.? And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo ?sapiens? sapiens at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from ourselves.