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By Root 2175 0

feed billions of Third World citizens on a chronic basis. If that did happen but without effective overseas family planning programs, which the U.S. government currently opposes on principle, the result would just be Malthus’s dilemma, i.e., an increase in population proportional to an increase in available food. Population increase and Malthus’s dilemma also contribute to explaining why, after decades of hope and money invested in the Green Revolution and high-yield varieties, starvation is still widespread in the world. All of these considerations mean that genetically modified (GM) food varieties by themselves are equally unlikely to solve the world’s food problems (while world population supposedly remains stationary?). In addition, virtually all GM crop production at present is of just four crops (soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton) not eaten directly by humans but used for animal fodder, oil, or clothing, and grown in six temperate-zone countries or regions. Reasons are the strong consumer resistance to eating GM foods; and the cruel fact that companies developing GM crops can make money by selling their products to rich farmers in mostly affluent temperate-zone countries, but not by selling to poor farmers in developing tropical countries. Hence the companies have no interest in investing heavily to develop GM cassava, millet, or sorghum for Third World farmers.

“As measured by commonsense indicators such as human lifespan, health, and wealth (in economists’ terms, per-capita gross national product or GNP), conditions have actually been getting better for many decades.” Or: “Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of food in the supermarkets, clean water still flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse.” For affluent First World citizens, conditions have indeed been getting better, and public health measures have on the average lengthened lifespans in the Third World as well. But lifespan alone is not a sufficient indicator: billions of Third World citizens, constituting about 80% of the world’s population, still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level. Even in the United States, an increasing fraction of the population is at the poverty level and lacks affordable medical care, and all proposals to change this situation (e.g., “Just provide everyone with health insurance paid by the government”) have been politically unacceptable.

In addition, all of us know as individuals that we don’t measure our economic well-being just by the present size of our bank accounts: we also look at our direction of cash flow. When you look at your bank statement and you see a positive $5,000 balance, you don’t smile if you then realize that you have been experiencing a net cash drain of $200 per month for the last several years, and at that rate you have just two years and one month left before you have to file for bankruptcy. The same principle holds for our national economy, and for environmental and population trends. The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital in the bank (its capital non-renewable energy sources, fish stocks, topsoil, forests, etc.). Spending capital should not be misrepresented as making money. It makes no sense to be content with our present comfort when it is clear that we are currently on a non-sustainable course.

In fact, one of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. In that respect, the trajectories of the societies that we have discussed are unlike the usual courses of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources.