Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [21]
While this steady increase in the productivity of land use in tandem with population seems to conflict with the environmental degradation classically ascribed to human use of land,18 the theoretical explanations for this are simple and robust. The low-density populations of early farmers tended to adopt long-fallow shifting cultivation systems (rotations of 20 years and longer), progressing through short-fallow shifting cultivation, annual cropping, multiple cropping, and the increasing use of irrigation and fertilizers as populations grew and land became scarce.19
Cultivation of agricultural land has resulted in all manner of environmental degradation at local scales. Although agricultural productivity inevitably declines after land is first cleared for agriculture and in agricultural systems without intensive management, there is little evidence of declining long-term productivity in agricultural lands that have been managed intensively for millennia.20 Indeed, the overwhelming trend is quite the opposite.21 Increasing demands upon the productivity of agricultural lands have resulted in an increasing demand for technological inputs (and labor, in the preindustrial era) in order to maintain and increase productivity, which continues to rise in most agricultural regions.
2.
The long trends toward both the intensification of agricultural cultivation and the engineering of ecosystems at increasing scope and scale have accelerated as more and more of the world transitions from rural and agricultural societies to urban and industrial ones. The exponential growth in population, resource use, technologies, and social systems over the past half-century marks the most rapid and powerful transformation of both Earth and human systems ever.22
In the past two centuries, fossil energy has mostly replaced biomass for fuel and substituted for most human and animal labor,23 revolutionizing the human capacity for ecosystem engineering, transport, and other activities. Large-scale industrial synthesis has introduced artificial compounds almost too numerous to count,24 including a wide variety used to control undesired species.25 Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have helped to both double the amount of biologically reactive nitrogen in the Earth system and have largely replaced the use of native soil fertility in sustaining human populations.26 Genetic engineering has accelerated gene transfer across species.27 The waste products of human systems are felt almost everywhere on land, water, and air, including emissions of carbon dioxide rapid enough to acidify the oceans and change the climate system at rates likely unprecedented in Earth’s history.28 Wild fish and forests have almost disappeared,29 receding into the depths of our ancestral memory.
At the same time, advances in hygiene and medicine have dramatically increased human health and life expectancy.30 Industrial human systems are far more connected globally and evolve more rapidly than prior social systems, accelerating the pace of social change and interaction, technological innovation, material exchange, as well as the entire tempo of human interactions with the Earth system.31 Over the last two centuries (and especially the past fifty years) most humans have enjoyed longer, healthier, and freer lives than we ever did during the Holocene.
There is no sign that these processes or their dynamics are slowing down in any way — an indication of their resilience in the face of change.32 As far as food and other basic resources are concerned, we remain far from any physically determined limits to the growth and sustenance of our populations.33 For better or for worse, humans appear fully capable of continuing to support a burgeoning population by engineering and transforming the planet.
3.
While human societies are likely to continue to thrive and expand, largely unconstrained by any hard biophysical boundaries to growth, this trend need