The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [26]
Since the Industrial Revolution oil, coal, natural gas, and metals have improved nearly every aspect of human life. Before then, a meager existence was the norm no matter what country one lived in. It is naïve to romanticize the eighteenth century as simpler, happier times—the lives of those farmers and townspeople were a constant struggle. Without fossil fuels and metals our lives would be very different. Indeed, today’s urbanization megatrend and gigantic cities would not even exist.
The modern city survives upon constant resupply from the outer natural world, from faraway fields, forests, mines, streams, and wells. We scour the planet for hydrocarbons and deliver them to power plants to zap electricity over miles of metal wire. We take water from flowing rivers with distant headwaters of snow and ice. Plants and animals are grown someplace else, killed, and delivered for us to eat. Wind, rivers, and tides flush out our filth. Without this constant flow of nature pouring into our cities, we would all have to disperse, or die.
This reliance of cities upon the outside natural world is a profound relationship to which their occupants give little if any thought. Unlike a hardscrabble Uzbek farmer, modern urbanites worry little about securing water and food, and instead focus on securing jobs and wealth. But a lack of awareness doesn’t make this dependency any less profound. Swedish cities, for example, import at least twenty-two tons of fossil fuel, water, and minerals per person annually.91 In a single year Portugal’s growing city of Lisbon gobbles some 11,200,000 tons of material (things like food, gas, and cement) but excretes just 2,297,000 million tons (things like sewage, air pollution, and trash).92 That’s twenty tons coming in and only four going out for every one of Lisbon’s 560,000 residents. The difference—nearly nine million tons—stays in Lisbon, mostly in the form of added buildings and landfills. So not only do cities feed on their outside natural resource base, they retain and grow from it.93
Clearly then, our global rush to urbanize does not mean giving the natural world a break. As we saw in the previous chapter, when people move to modern cities, consumption goes up, not down. And cities import all sorts of materials besides food, water, and consumer goods. Roads, buildings, and power plants require serious tonnage of steel, chemicals, wood, water, and hydrocarbons. Even in rural areas, the departing farmers are being replaced by tractors and petrochemicals.94
As described in the last two chapters, the developing world will experience extraordinary urban and economic growth over the next forty years. What does this portend for our third global force, demand for natural resources? Do we face oil wars and crazy steel prices? Stump forests and dried-up water wells? Are we about to run out of the raw materials our cities and mechanized farmlands so desperately need?
Are We Running Out of Resources?
The debate over natural resources, and whether we are running out of them, is a contentious and surprisingly ancient debate. Even Aristotle wrote about it. In 1798 Thomas Malthus’ first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that the exponential growth of human population, set against the arithmetic growth in the area of arable land, must ultimately lead us to outstrip our food supply, thus inevitably dragging us toward a brutal world of famines and violence.95 Among Malthus’ more odious ideas was that social programs are pointless because they enable poor people to have more babies, thus making the problem worse.
Not surprisingly, Malthus’ ideas angered many people in his day and since. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were