Cultural habits – like people – go through stages when they face death. Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described this process as the “five stages of grief”: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance of reality. In human society, growth economics will eventually collapse in the face of ecological reality. We have witnessed decades of denial and anger about this end of growth, some remain stuck there, but society at large now appears to be entering the bargaining stage.

This bargaining appears in thousands of new corporate marketing strategies that promote “sustainability.” They’ve changed the ink in the printing presses, rolled out green and blue designs, replaced lightning bolts with fern leaves, and stamped images of the earth on plastic containers. We now have “sustainable detergent,” “sustainable events,” “sustainable development,” “sustainable profits,” “sustainable fashions,” and even “sustainable countertops” for the kitchen makeovers of discerning consumers.

The bargaining goes like this: If we call ourselves “green” and “sustainable” can we keep selling stuff? But like a drug addict, the patient has not yet changed the habit that is killing it. That habit is consumption growth. All these sustainable marketing campaigns are designed to sell more products to more people. Meanwhile, every day, we lose forests, exterminate species, erode soil, drain aquifers, and pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, we’ll notice that labeling things “sustainable” doesn’t make it so. That day may signal the “depression” stage.

The foolish king

The bargaining strategy we know as “sustainable growth” gained popularity with the 1987 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. The report recognized that human activity had caused serious ecological degradation, and they sought ways to reconcile economic growth, particularly for the poorer countries, with environmental health. The rich countries, meanwhile, sought ways to allow global corporations to continue plundering the earth for riches.

The Brundtland Report envisioned, “a new era of economic growth … that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.” This idea represents a noble vision that most people would support: a growing human economy that relieves poverty while sustaining the Earth’s resources. However, in nature, all physical growth eventually stops. There are no exceptions.

To understand why this is so, we must understand what real sustainability means in a biological habitat. For a species to maintain a pattern of energy and material exchange with its environment over a long period of time, it must achieve what biologists call homeostasis or dynamic equilibrium, whereby its consumption remains below the energy input into the system. 

We must also understand the nature of exponential growth. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” says physicist Dr. Albert Bartlett at the University of Colorado, “is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Since human population and consumption have been growing for thousands of years, we might assume that we can continue to grow for thousands more, but this is not how exponential growth works. This complex-sounding bit of arithmetic is actually quite simple.

Any material growth (a fixed or variable percent increase per year) eventually yields a huge number over time. You may have heard the story of the legendary king who agreed to pay a clever inventor with one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the next square, then four, eight, sixteen, and so forth. This is a story about exponential growth. All such growth has a doubling time, represented by the 64 squares of the chess board. However, by the time the foolish king reached square number 30, he needed a billion grains of rice. By square 40, a trillion grains, and the kingdom was bankrupt. This is the power of exponential growth.

In one of the more famous cases of delusion about endless growth, American business professor Julian Simon claimed in “The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving,” Cato Policy Report, 1995:

“We have in our hands now – actually in our libraries – the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7  billion years.”

Like so many modern business leaders, Simon does not appear to understand ecology or exponential growth. Our current human population, growing at just over 1% per year, will double every 60 years. (To find any doubling time, divide the growth rate into the number 70). These doublings are the “squares” of the chess board. At this rate of growth, the human population on earth would reach an impossible 7 trillion people in 600 years, a tiny fraction of Simon’s “7 billion years.”

Even if we assumed a slower population growth of only 0.1% per year, the population would reach over one trillion people in 5,000 years. A city such as Tokyo or New York would swell to over two billion people. It would not be possible to feed, house, or water, this population on Earth. The processing of waste and sewage would not be remotely achievable. The planet would be a cesspool of human waste. Simon was dead wrong by a factor of over a million.

Bargaining with nature

For the last two centuries, our consumption of critical resources – forests, energy, water, copper, phosphorus – has been growing over three times faster than population, at about 3.5 percent per year, meaning that humanity’s material consumption has been doubling every 20 years. We are now consuming about 8-thousand times as much as humans consumed in 1750. This is already more resources than the earth can supply. Humanity is in habitat overshoot, as evident by forest and soil loss, species extinction, and ocean and atmospheric pollution.

At this rate, in twenty more years, we’ll be consuming 16-thousand times the 1750 level, and by 2050, 32-thousand times. Earth cannot supply this material growth. Like the naïve king, we have bankrupted our kingdom, the Earth itself.

Some growth advocates claim we will save our growth economies with “efficiencies.” The history of human industrial development provides thousands of efficiency examples, which almost never result in less consumption of energy and materials. Rather, efficiency tends to make a resource cheaper, and therefore we consume more. This fact is well known in economics, called the “rebound” effect or “Jevons” effect, after William Jevons, who noticed that coal consumption increased as efficiencies increased.

Others bargain with natural law by claiming that we will “de-materialize growth” with new technologies. However, in every case in history, as economies grow, material and energy consumption grows. Marginal efficiency gains are swamped by population and consumption growth. Remember when people claimed that computers would save paper? It never happened. In 1950, before private computers, the human community used about 50 million tonnes of paper each year. Now, in the full-blown computer age, we use five times as much paper, 250 million tonnes per year.

“Sustainable growth,” Dr. Bartlett reminds us, “is an oxymoron.” In nature, no such thing exists. So growth economists and politicians attempt to haggle with nature, proposing policies that might take us “toward sustainability” to hedge the obvious contradiction. We hear about policies that might make us “more sustainable,” which means what? That we will last a little longer before we collapse?

Our bargaining with nature won’t work. Growth and sustainability are not compatible in the material world. If humanity wants sustainability, we must abandon the belief in endless economic growth. We don’t get to re-write the laws of nature for our own convenience.

Genuine Sustainability

When we get past our denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, when we finally accept the demands of ecology, what will real human sustainability look like?

First of all, when we talk about sustainable human civilization, we mean for thousands of years, not a few decades or until the next election. Sustainability in nature, dynamic equilibrium, allows diversity to increase and relationships to fluctuate, thus “dynamic,” but a species population and its consumption must cease growing, a state of balance we call homeostasis.

When humanity achieves real sustainability, it will no longer be necessary to bulldoze more forests, erode soils, drain aquifers, dam more rivers, deplete non-renewable resources, and fill the atmosphere, land, rivers, and oceans with our waste.

Genuine sustainability will value localized trade over globalization, not relying on fossil fuels – ancient sunlight – to ship food and materials around the world. Real sustainability will solve problems with the simplest, low-technology, whole-systems-based solutions available. Such a system will be aware of scale, and will not assume that “more” and “bigger” are in any way equated with better. We will learn to value a genuinely rich quality of life over mere quantity of stuff, to value a living watershed or mountain over corporate profit.

Real sustainability will include social justice, because our current state of injustice breeds conflict, violence, and additional destruction of nature. Most current economic growth benefits the already wealthy. Real sustainability will reduce total consumption, while closing the gap between rich and poor. We will discover a new definition of wealth: The health of our living world.

As ecologists, we have to help humanity navigate through these difficult stages of grief over the fact that our very economic system is simply unsustainable. According to Dr. Kübler-Ross’s observations, after we finish with our quibbling and bargaining, we may experience depression. We need to help our neighbours realize that accepting reality delivers us finally to the joyful stage of meaningful action.

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Most people I talk to support “sustainability” and “social justice” goals. Ecology teaches us that we need to frame these human aspirations in relation to the biological capacity of the earth: the energy, and resources that support our burgeoning populations and economies.

As human society sets out to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice on earth, we face two serious challenges: One, humanity already over-consumes the biological capacity of the planet; and secondly, humanity suffers from a vast gap between rich and poor.

Free-market fundamentalists claim we’ll close this gap, and restore the planet, by growing our economies, perhaps with “green” jobs, but this business-as-usual approach fails to account for ecological reality.

Do the Math

According to data compiled by the UN, the Global Footprint Network, and Dr. William Rees at the University of British Columbia, total human consumption already exceeds the earth’s capacity by 30 percent. This is known as biological “overshoot.” The UN estimates that most natural services to human societies – forests, fish, fresh water, and clean air – are now declining annually. As human population and consumption grow, our collective overshoot increases.

Meanwhile, the wealthy 15 percent use about 85 percent of the resources – the total energy and materials, the “stuff,” that Earth provides. The “wealthy” includes anyone who has a home, job, transport, access to education, hot showers, convenient fuel, and food every day: people in the so-called “developed” world. If you have those things, you live among the wealthy 15 percent, who use most of the world’s resources.

There is more to social change than the biophysical numbers, but any serious ecologist or justice advocate needs to know how resource overshoot limits our choices to achieve sustainability and social equality. Let’s do the math.

Nature’s rules

Start with these facts:

1. Total human consumption =

     130% of Earth’s capacity

2. The rich 15% use 85% of the stuff;

     while the poor 85% use 15% of the stuff

If we define the sustainable, equitable consumption per person as “1 unit” of stuff, the facts above mean that an average 100 people use 130 “units.” To be sustainable, the total consumption of 100 people needs to be 100 “units” of stuff. And to achieve social justice, each person would use 1 unit. But of course, that’s not how our world works.

Total human consumption of a 100 average people equals 130, not 100, and since the rich 15 use 85% of everything, they use 110 units (130 X 85%). The poor 85, meanwhile, use the other 20 units of stuff.

Therefore:

The average rich person uses:

    110/15   =    7.333  units of stuff

The average poor person uses:

     20/85    =    0.235  units of stuff

How are we doing? Not too well. The average person in the developed nations consume 30-times more than the average working poor, dispossessed, and starving multitudes. And meanwhile, we already use more energy and materials than Earth can annually supply.

So if we want a world of ecological sustainability and social justice, then we must face some difficult facts. To start with, humanity must consume less stuff.

We must reduce the total human consumption for 100 average people from 130 to 100, and then, we must share those 100 units of stuff that the earth can provide.

If we were able to achieve that, then everyone would simply use 1 “unit,” the ecologically sound, socially equitable amount of energy and materials. As we know, in our current situation, we consume more than the earth’s capacity and the rich take almost everything.

Another way to understand this is to imagine humanity as a family of seven people, that earns $100,000 per year but spends $130,000, and one member of the family alone spends $110,000. This family is going broke because one person, 15% of the family, is pigging out.

Dysfunctional? Yes.

Sustainable? No.

Reality bites

By these figures, we see that to achieve sustainability and social justice, the rich would have to consume about 1/7 of what they currently consume. If that happened, the world’s poor could increase their consumption by about 4-times.

That’s the straightforward, biological and physical reality we now face.

Under our current economic system, achieving sustainability and social justice might appear impossible. However, using less and sharing represent nothing more than common decency, the sort of behaviour we supposedly teach our children.

We hear from our alleged leaders, of course, that this is politically and logistically impractical. So, instead, we labour under the delusion that we’ll make the world “equitable” by growing all the economies until the poor, developing countries achieve greater wealth. We’ll make our economies “sustainable” by creating “green” products, hybrid cars, and renewable energy.

If the earth was an infinite storehouse and could provide infinite sinks for our garbage, that would be a reasonable plan. But the earth is not infinite. It remains unequivocally finite.

And Nature doesn’t really care about our social theories, economic presumptions, or our whining about wanting more. Humanity is now like a clever but obsessive adolescent, who must be warned: "Sorry, this will sound really annoying, but there are real limits to your freedom to consume."

Suppose we soften the blow for the rich world, the spoiled child of humanity. We could live within the earth’s capacity if the rich simply cut their consumption in half and the poor could then double their current consumption. Here is how that would work, by the numbers:

The average rich person would use 3.67 units of stuff, instead of 7.33. And then, the average poor person could use 0.53 units of stuff (slightly more than double), instead of 0.235. This equation alone would feed the 1-billion starving, and end world hunger.

Our equation for 100 average people would then look like this:

Rich consumption:  

    15   X   3.67   =   55 units of stuff

Poor consumption:  

    85   X   0.53  =   45 units of stuff  

Total  =  100 units of stuff for 100 average people.

In this scenario we would be sustainable and the world’s poor could grow their economies to the point of doubling their use of energy and resources.

If we achieved this simple change in human consumption patterns, we could exist within the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Is this difficult to imagine? Is it fair? The ratio between the average rich and poor would then be about 7-to-1, far more equitable than the current 30-to-1 ratio. To achieve this, the rich only have to give up half their consumption. That could be achieved primarily by eliminating wastefulness, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging, exotic holidays in jet airplanes, and the most wasteful of all human inventions: cars.

Growth fundamentalists will grumble at this because they imagine a world in which they can look forward to being richer, consuming more, not less. However, biophysical reality sets the limits. We do not get to rewrite the laws of biology and physics for our own convenience.

Two problems remain

Even if humanity could make this simple change – the rich cut consumption by half, the poor double their consumption, and we achieve sustainability – we still face two problems.

First of all, we currently add 75 million new people to the planet every year. What stuff are they going to use?

To live decent lives, these new humans would need the infrastructure services roughly equal to a nation such as France, Germany, or Egypt. And then again, every year.

Human population growth proves to be both an ecological and social justice issue. The planet is finite. I’m mystified that some people find this so difficult to accept. Since we have already reached biological overshoot, human population growth pushes us farther out over the cliff.

For example, we now face declining oil and fish yields, but few people realize that oil and fish yields per capita peaked in the 1970s, thirty years ago. Each day, as we add more people and degrade our ecosystem, the average human – regardless of stock market paper wealth – becomes biophysically poorer.

Like the over-spending family, having a new baby every year, and spending more, while degrading their assets, every year we have less to go around and more mouths to feed.

To achieve sustainability and social justice, we must stabilize human population. We are breaking the back of the natural world with our insistence on endless growth of both population and consumption.

Fortunately, we could stabilize human population with three simple and socially beneficial policies worldwide: Women’s rights, contraception, and education.

The second challenge we face is that we share this planet with millions of other species. These non-human earthlings possess a right to life and habitat as much as we do. Furthermore, humanity relies on the benefits of biological diversity and symbiosis within the ecosystem.

We cannot design human culture to devour every last niche of the planet, every river and forest, the last corner of the ocean and stretch of grassland. We need to preserve every acre of wilderness that still exists on the earth.

Living within Earth’s budget

Growth is not evil, it just isn’t permanent.

In nature, all growth stops. New organisms may replace the old, diversity can increase, but there exist no cases in nature of endless growth. As Dr. Albert Bartlett at the University of Colorado points out, “After maturity, continued growth is either obesity or cancer.” In a finite world, we cannot grow ourselves out of overshoot.

Years ago, Canadian master ecological logger, Merv Wilkinson, came to our small, island community in British Columbia to show us how he had managed to earn a living for over 50 years, selectively logging the forest he grew up in, and still retain a healthy forest with more standing timber than the day he started logging. As we walked through the woods, he explained the nuances of soils, natural seeding, tree growth rates, cutting rates, and selection criteria for harvest. Then, he stopped, thought for a moment, and said: “It’s simple really: Just cut below the annual growth rate.”

That is now the lesson for humanity on a global scale. We simply have to learn to live within the capacity of our single island in space, planet Earth. To achieve this, the wealthy must find peace with a lower-consumption lifestyle.

A reporter from Dubai phoned last week and asked, “Can Dubai become a sustainable city?” and specifically, “could the tourism industry be sustainable?” In age of global warming and declining fossil fuels, the entire airline industry is probably not sustainable. Dubai, of course, is not even remotely sustainable.

Dubai is a city built with oil cash, but the global economic recession brought construction schemes to a sudden halt. Many entrepreneurs fled the city, abandoning some 3,000 cars, found with keys in the ignition and maxed-out credit cards in the glove compartment

Between 2002-2008, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and partners invested $600 billion in Dubai, creating the world’s tallest building and largest shopping mall, man-made islands, and an indoor ski hill. Dubai has a beach “designed” by Versace, with chilled sand. Meanwhile, sections of the city have no sewage system, so sewage is collected by truck convoys and driven into the desert, where it seeps back through the sand and reappears on the Versace beaches.

On the artificial islands, $20 million villa properties sit empty, without power or sewer systems. Developers will eventually have to protect the faux-island real estate from the rising seas caused by global warming. So, no, Dubai is not sustainable, but neither is any other city.

The sustainable cities are small, modest, usually poor, semi-rural centres, closely linked to local food and energy sources. One of the most ecological western consumer cities is Lingköping, Sweden. In the 1980s, Lingköping’s seven political parties agreed to pursue a non-partisan “Environment Path.” They replaced oil and coal heat with electricity from municipal waste and reduced city CO2 emissions by 40 percent. The city offers free recycling, public transportation that runs on electricity and waste-biogas, bicycle paths, and reduced taxes due to income from the public waste-energy utility.

Even so, Dubai, Lingköping and all cities rely on goods, services, energy, and resources from around the world, delivered by fuel-guzzling transport. We hear a lot these days about “sustainable cities,” but let’s look at the reality.

Cities in history

Hunting and gathering is a sustainable lifestyle. We know this because all animals live this way, and humans lived this way for several million years. Early human fire-making hunters caused local extinctions and disturbed natural habitats, but the real problems with sustainability began with urban concentration.

Four thousand years ago, Sumerian cities on the Euphrates River plains required intensive agriculture and irrigation, causing erosion and salt accumulation. Sumerian texts describe barren soils and “earth turned white.” The communities migrated north along the river seeking new fertile soils, leaving abandoned cities to disappear under the sand.

By 500 B.C., deforestation and soil erosion had left most cities gasping for food and resources. In 460 BC, as the population of Athens swelled with war refugees, filth piled up, and a plague (probably typhus) killed over a third of the population. Cities everywhere began to experience similar plagues, and the human population growth rate began to decline for the first time in history.

Forty thousand years earlier, in Cro-Magnon communities, human population growth remained extremely slow, a few thousandths-of-one-percent each year. But this rate climbed steadily, and by 500 B.C., the growth rate reached 100-times higher, over a tenth of a percent, about 0.13%, per year. However, cities became population drains, and by about 200 A.D., the population rate had dropped below zero, and total human population decreased for the first time in history.

This growth rate did not recover to the 500 B.C. level, for two thousand years, until about 1750 A.D. During those two millennia, cities – centres of filth, disease, toxic smoke, and conflict – killed off more people than they produced. Lewis Mumford explains in The City in History that small, rural Medieval towns remained relatively clean and functional, but between 1200 and 1500 A.D., large cities became centres of death, and human population dropped incessantly. Meanwhile, burgeoning empires required ever more resources from distant lands.

The forests of Europe had been devastated by 1550, which provoked the use of coal fuel and an industrial boom in Europe. Burning coal increased urban air pollution, causing more death and disease. In 1661, John Evelyn described sections of London as “suburbs of Hell.”

Smoke inhalation, typhus and cholera killed urban citizens everywhere. In the twentieth century, with the additional toxic effect of leaded gasoline exhaust, thousands perished from “killer fog” in London, and U.S. cities, including Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. Four thousand died in London in December 1952 and hundreds died in Los Angeles in 1954. But modern industrial empires, like their ancient predecessors, still sought more resources from greater distances.

The biophysical city

Dr. William Rees at the University of British Columbia, who developed the “ecological footprint” analysis, points out that most cities require the environmental services from a land base 300 to 1000-times the city area. Rees points out that a city is a “biophysical entity” that includes the complex of land, water, atmosphere, resources, and waste sinks required to support the human population.

Rich consumer cities of Europe and North America require the most ecological space, but all modern cities carry an ecological debt to nature. I live in Vancouver, Canada, which prides itself as being a fairly “green” city with bike paths and urban gardens, but even so, Vancouver requires a global biophysical area about 390-times the city itself.

In the study, Ecosytem Appropriation by Cities," published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Carl Folke and colleagues estimate that the 29 largest Baltic cities – including Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki – appropriate for their resource consumption and waste an area of forest, agricultural, marine, and wetland ecosystems over 560-times the area of the cities themselves. New York requires a total eco-footprint almost 1000-times the city’s geographic area. Tokyo requires twice the entire domestic biocapacity of Japan.

The Folke study shows that the 744 largest cities worldwide require more CO2 sequestration than the entire world’s forests could provide. “If the goal,” write the authors, “is sustainable human settlements, the increasingly limited capacity of ecosystems to sustain urban areas has to be explicitly accounted for in city planning and development.”

Meanwhile, human activity continues to degrade the ecosystems that keep cities alive. Each year, we loose about 13 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of arable land, while adding some 75 million new humans – the combined populations of Mexico City, Mumbai, Seoul, and Sao Paulo.

“These data show that, in material terms, ‘sustainable city’ is an oxymoron,” says Rees. “Modern cities are entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it."

Reduce consumption

Dubai may be one of the more obvious examples of reckless urban consumption, but it is not alone. Most Modern cities remain vulnerable to distant food supplies, degraded cropland, declining fossil fuel resources, and climate change impact, including rising seas and human migrations.

“To act consistently with our best science may well require a planned economic contraction,” says Rees. He believes the wealthy nations “should plan to reduce their ecological footprints by almost 80 percent” to consume only an equitable share of global biocapacity.

Peter Victor, in the book Managing without Growth, believes this is possible, that human society can dump its untenable economic ideas about growing consumption. The only way out of our dilemma – ecosystem “overshoot” – is to consume less stuff. There is no magic technology that will allow us to continue consuming at current rates, much less a growing rates. But Victor, Rees, and others believe we can live higher quality lives with less consumption, particularly if we turn urban density into an advantage.

Here are some things we need to do to make cities less destructive and more sustainable. Many modest, small rural communities already do these things, which is why they are already more sustainable:

·        Reduce per capita demand for land and water resources (consume less stuff).

·        Reduce fossil energy consumption, and all energy consumption.

·        Preserve farmland and grow local food for local consumption.

·        Share: create co-housing, public transport, and food cooperatives.

·        Be satisfied with second hand clothes and furniture, and make simplicity, modesty, justice, and ecology your fashion statement.

·        Improve urban infrastructure, water, sewage systems, and recycling.

·        Gain efficiencies with neighbourhood scale technologies, such as heat pumps, electricity co-generation, district heating/cooling, using industrial waste heat systems.

·        Create low throughput and closed loop industries, in which waste energy is captured and waste materials become feedstocks for other uses.

·        Eliminate planned obsolescence in product design; build things that last.

We have to rethink cities as complete ecosystems that fully account for their consumption. “The aggregate effect,” says Rees, “would be global sustainability.”