Are People the Problem or the Solution?

The debate about humans and the self-destructive deterioration of the environment in which they inhabit is one that has continued since Thomas Malthus started worrying about it in the 18th century.  Malthus famously predicted that humans would quickly overwhelm the carrying capacity of the earth.  Then we had the Population Bomb in which Paul Ehrlich predicted, again, that population increases would soon lead to the end of humanity.  Of course the Green Revolution soon followed the population bomb and completely discredited it - not that it hurt Ehrlich's reputation at all, it seems one is always safe predicting the worst, because every one is happy and ready to forgive if it does not come to pass.

And then we had this ridiculous tautology: that humans themselves were more impactful on the environment than any one individual action.  (This is tautological because humans can be thought of as a collection of actions and thus the sum is greater than the parts).  This is a particularly pessimistic view of humans and the view that humans represent a problem and not a solution to me is dangerous. As birthrates and poverty are closely related, environmental scolds in rich countries are in danger of blaming the world's poor for the world's environmental problems.

Anyway this is all a long lead in to this interesting and (in my mind) quite correct essay on how to think about humans and their place on earth in The New York Times by Earl Ellis. Here is an excerpt:

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits. 

Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement. 

There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever. 

The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.

I think this is quite correct. And as I think about the impact of a new baby on the earth I prefer to think of the possibilities: to invent the next sustainable energy technology, to help solve world poverty, be a leader and lead people forward to a better future. I reject the pessimistic view of humans as only resource-suckers leading us to our doom. Our future is us and we need to figure out how harness the power of human potential rather than dismiss the world's poor as an overly reproductive cause of our problems rather than a symptom of a system that we have created.