We’re Drowning In Our Own Trash

2008-07-11T19:05:37Z

Thomas Malthus has suddenly become popular again. While Americans are concerned about fuel prices, much of the rest of the world is concerned about food prices. In countries like Egypt and Bangladesh, and in regions of Africa, riots have erupted over a shortage of food. In other countries, like China and India, when rice is shipped, it’s shipped under the protection of armed guards.

Global production simply can’t keep up with global consumption. And so people are asking: Was Malthus right?

Malthus, an economist and demographer from the 19th century, is known for predicting that population growth moves more quickly than the expansion of food production. As he former moves geometrically, and the latter arithmetically, its inevitable that population overcomes production. As a result, Malthus predicted, people will starve.

Many experts now believe that the 19th century proved Malthus incorrect. The Green Revolution increased global food production, helping it keep pace with global population growth. It allowed us to keep consuming.

But with anything you produce, you also have waste. And, given the growing consumption, unless one is very careful about production technologies, you have waste on a massive scale. As photographs by Chris Jordan and our daily experience of taking out the trash and seeing litter everywhere can testify, our consumption of goods leads to an overwhelming volume of trash. So much so that the scale of the numbers can be difficult to comprehend. Consider some numbers Jordan uses:

Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the US every five minutes.
1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour.
426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day.
While 106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every thirty seconds.

And that’s just the waste we can see. Waste gases from power plants are filling the air that we breathe, leading to the early deaths of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands or millions around the world. Invisible carbon dioxide is turning the oceans so acidic that shell fish are having a harder time growing their shells while it changes our entire planet’s climate.

The point here is pretty clear. We’re drowning in a sea of our own waste.

This point changes the way we have to understand Malthus. For him, it was a two-way balance between consumption and production. Now, it’s a three-way balance between production, consumption, and waste.

And it’s no longer simply a question of whether we can have another Green Revolution to increase production, because even if we did that we would only increase our waste problem.

We have to begin addressing this question of waste. If we are to feed more people – and we will have to, given predictions of global population growths – than we should also free more people of the sea of garbage and poison and waste our production has created.

Part of this will be to examine of our own, personal consumption habits. Each of us should find ways to reduce our waste, whether it’s by bringing lunch to work, or by using cloth bags at the grocery store, or by driving smaller cars. Whatever it is that works for you, I’d urge you to try it.

Will that be enough? Certainly not. But it is a start. A start to be expanded on every day.

(Photo credit: Chris Jordan, www.chrisjordan.com)

The Heart of the World

2008-05-19T16:01:53Z

I recently had the pleasure to meet Los Mamos de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta at an environmental philanthropy forum in Miami sponsored by Poder, a Latin American business magazine.

The Mamos are known as the “Elder Brothers” of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Colombia – an area they call “the Heart of the World.” The health of their mountains, they believe, reflects the health of our planet. I agree.

The Sierra Nevada are the world’s tallest coastal mountain range. They rise from the temperate Caribbean coast into snow-capped mountains almost 20,000 feet high that feed 35 watersheds. These watersheds support the area’s 1.5 million residents, the nearby farming plains, and the region’s 50,000 indigenous people.

Once you get above around 10,000 feet, 100 percent of the reptiles and amphibians can be found nowhere else in the world but in the Sierra. The mountains boast well over 3,000 different species of plants, and play host to the migratory birds traveling between South America and the US and Canada. They are home to people speaking a language found nowhere else in the world.

But as the Mamos will tell you, the “Heart of the World” is changing. And rapidly.

Snowcaps are shrinking. Rivers and streams are drying up. Biodiversity is declining. The soil is eroding. And the birds are flying elsewhere. This is happening in the heart of the world and, I’m sad to say, spreading throughout the earth’s biosystems.

The story of the Mamos, and of global warming changing their way of life, is not the last chapter in an anthropology book, but the first chapter in the book of all of us. Climate change will get us all if we don’t act fast, and act strongly.

The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution. So for those of us in the U.S. and in big cities throughout Latin America, our job is to adopt the policies and practices that will solve the global climate crisis. Energy efficiency. Renewable energy. Market transformation. And to do all of this in a big way.

Some say wait. But as the Elder Brothers will tell you, the planet is not waiting.

Some say it’s too expensive. The truth is, it’s too expensive to keep wasting energy and using dirty energy.

The longer we wait, the dirtier the air and water, the more costly the switch to clean energy. The longer we wait, the more we’ll lose of human history. The more we’ll lose of our culture and the natural world around us. And, as the Elders will tell you, the more we’ll lose of our heart.

Peter Lehner's Blog: Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

We’re Drowning In Our Own Trash

The Heart of the World